Sublimation(22)

When Soyoung “Rose” Kang is done making her changes to the file, she will de-instance it, merging the file with the original on the server. The changes slot into the original, and the new copy becomes the official version on the server. The original copy without the changes is overwritten by the instance. Integration of the other into the self.





SOYOUNG


You are standing against the car, peeling your MERGEBREAK off your wrist, and the way you feel is not something you can articulate. It is not something you want to understand.





ROSE


You catch up to your other self. She’s come back to where the car is parked, and she’s leaning against the side, pretending not to wipe her eyes.

She looks askance at you. “What do you want.” A statement. Her voice your voice. Her hurt unlike your hurt. You feel like a stranger all of a sudden, so far removed from the way she sounds, unable to understand the way she feels.

“Are you okay?” you say. Plain banmal.

“The messed-up thing is that it would have been so easy if Harabeoji hadn’t asked,” she says.

“What?”

“If he hadn’t asked me, and made it a whole family thing, and given you the house, then I could have just asked, and it wouldn’t have been a whole string of family stuff. It wouldn’t have had to mean anything,” she says, a flood of words more intense and tangled than you’ve heard from her before. “But he had to go and die, and he had to leave me here with all this shit! And the only reason you’re here is because he’s dead. And I’m—I’m really mad, okay?”

She wipes her eyes again. She looks at you. Your eyes are perfectly level.

“I lied. I always wanted to reintegrate.”

And now you finally recognize the expression in her face. Embarrassment. Shame. Hunger.

“Do you want to be me?” she says.



* * *



The fisherman looking down at his other self, clothes and cold air the only thing between them.



* * *



Your surprise, naked on your face. Her hunger tucked away again behind her blank mask.

“Ah. I guess you didn’t expect me to ask,” she says.

“Why didn’t you forcibly reintegrate me, then?” you ask. She had the opportunities. When you bought her coffee. When you were in the shower, and the MERGEBREAK was sitting on the bathroom counter. Reintegration is about physical contact, not about mutual desire.

“You said it. I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do,” she says, echoing your American accent, your inflected Korean. It sounds strange through her mouth. That must be how it sounds through your mouth. She smiles at you, a sarcastic twist of the lip. “Could I live with myself, if I did that?”

Maybe you should be glad there’s no instance of you that is cruel.



* * *



Instances cannot read each other’s minds.



* * *



“But I want to,” she says again. “I’ve always wanted to know what it was like, to live somewhere else. To have been the one to leave. I wondered about you. When I had to take the CSAT. When I would fight with Mom. When Tae proposed. Did you ever wonder about me?”

You did. You thought about your other self when you picked your college major. When you fought with your mother. When it was Chuseok and you were alone in your dorm room, eating tteok that your mother mailed you.

“I did,” you say.

A part of you wants to know how she loves her fiancé. How she loves her family. How she talks with her-your cousins and how she goes to work in her silver car and how she orders at restaurants in Korean and how she speaks in Korean and dreams in Korean and how she misses Harabeoji as more than a crumpled memory.

“I guess it’s selfish, to want to know two lives,” she says. “But I can’t help what I want.”



* * *



Soyoung’s grandfather always regretted not looking back across the border.



* * *



“I know it’s a lot to ask,” your instance says. “And it was shitty of Harabeoji to ask me, and it would be shitty of me to force you. And it was shitty of him to tell me to reintegrate, and it was shitty of him to give you the house and no instructions, but I think it was shitty of Mom to leave Korea without explaining anything, and it was shitty of you to never get in contact. And I’m telling you that I’m happy here, and I love my fiancé, and I love my family, and I don’t know who you love, but you could love who I love. I could love who you love. If that changes your decision at all. It doesn’t have to be permanent. But I would like to be you.”

Your heart thumping in your chest. Your dry mouth. Your instance standing a scant three feet away, smiling at you. She holds out her hand. Her wrist is empty underneath the slice of her black sleeve.

She’s taken her MERGEBREAK off. But she’s not reaching forward. She’s not a bad person. You know this, because you aren’t a bad person. This is only an invitation.

“So, let me know what you want,” she says.



* * *



The three keystrokes it takes to push a de-instancing request to the server.