Sublimation(115)

“But I don’t think we’re going to see each other again, after this.”

Yujin wants to say, “Of course we will.”

He wants to say, “Despite how you nearly destroyed my entire life, I am so glad to have known you.”

He wants to say, “I love you.”

“Okay,” Yujin says. “Okay. Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Soyoung says. She looks around the room. She adjusts her jacket a little. She walks over to Yujin and cups his face in her hands and gives him a long, lingering kiss. Then she draws back.

“I’m going now,” Soyoung says. “Despite everything, I really loved getting the chance to know you. All versions of you. Fifteen minutes. Remember.”

And then she’s gone.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


She takes the elevator down. She’s got a flight to schedule. She’s got to grab her luggage from her apartment. She should be thinking about the logistics of the data leak. She should be thinking about getting through customs. She should be thinking about how Dr. Crouton is going to cope with a fourteen-hour flight, and how maybe she should just let Clarissa take him. She should be thinking about how this is going to be her last time back in the United States for a long time, and she should call Rose’s mother and tell her that she loves her. She should be thinking about how to break the news to Tae, about breaking their engagement. She should be thinking about hiring a lawyer.

But she’s thinking about gardens. She’s walking into the cool Manhattan night, and she’s thinking about how nice it will be, to walk through the gate to her grandfather’s house, when she gets back to Seoul.





YJ-YUJIN


Yujin sits in the middle of the lab. He’s set a timer on his phone: fifteen minutes. He feels the adrenaline leeching out of his pores. He’s thinking about futures. He’s thinking about the feeling of Soyoung’s lips against his. He’s thinking about the fact that Yujin is supposed to go back to Korea, and came over yesterday on a tourist visa. He’s thinking about how he’s going to have to go to the airport and separate again, sending a version of himself back so that he doesn’t have to explain what happened with Yujin.

He stares at the Mitosis machine. It would be nice if he could use it instead of instancing again. But he can’t use the machine here. It would be obvious if anyone ever looks at the security camera footage of the lobby—one man enters, two identical men leave. And they will be looking at the security camera footage. After Soyoung releases everything, Yujin knows that there will be a granular postmortem of every angle of footage the security cameras were able to capture.

The artificial calm on the quiet laboratory will be shattered. Soon, he’ll have to walk back into the real world, and there’ll be a lot of chaos, despite what Soyoung said, what he had agreed to. There’s going to be a whole circus of internal and external investigations, and while Yujin can see the path through, where he ends up okay, his innocence is only earned by pinning everything on the nameless spy. Despite what Soyoung suggested, despite how Yujin’s going to try and give her a head start, he doesn’t see how she stays nameless for long.

He wonders how the future will treat her. How it would be hard for her in the coming months. She would be facing all of this alone. All she has is information, and the hope that someone will listen. There is a part of him that wishes he could have gone with her. A part of him that wishes that when she said let me go he could have said let me come with you.

Now, he wishes that he had said that to her.

He blinks. He rubs his eyes. The cold white steel of the Mitosis machine leaves a luminous afterimage on the back of his eyelids. It would have made certain things easier, if he had gone with her. His defection would add institutional weight to her cause, if she wanted to take that route. But it would have made certain other things harder, as well. Without him working from within, there will be no visibility into how Mergebreak and the IIS will spin this. He could soften the search for her, from inside the machine. Misdirect them. Lie about her.

He wishes he had an instance he could send with her. It’s not what she would want, though.

Yujin checks his phone. He’s been sitting there for ten minutes. He stands up. He folds the shock blanket up and puts it in his pocket. He grabs a microfiber cloth from a workbench and starts wiping down the terminal. He bets that Soyoung didn’t think about fingerprints, unless she wiped them away while he was knocked out. If so, he’s just being condescending. He thinks for a moment, and then brings the cloth over to the gate and begins to wipe down its thin frame. Just in case.

The gate is made of two stainless steel poles that have a join in the middle. They’re built slimly enough to be concealed in a larger structure, and he has to be careful while polishing the seams. He pauses at the join. The gate is easily disassembled. It could be hidden up a pair of pants, or against a person’s back, with enough tape. He puts the microfiber cloth down. He goes back to the terminal and studies it. The control panel is attached to a pedestal. Unscrewed, it would be smaller than his torso.

He could take the Mitosis gate. He could bring it to Soyoung. If she had the prototype, no one could deny her claim. And he could separate himself. He could let her separate him. She wouldn’t want him to come with her, like this, but maybe there is a part of him that she would want to keep. Give each self the parts of him that she needs. Maybe she’d like to have the part of him that knows about the inner workings of Mergebreak. Maybe she’d like to have the part of him that loves her. Or maybe he should stop assuming what she’s going to want. Assuming what people want is what caused him to end up here in the first place.