Sublimation(32)

But there’s a chance that she looks back and there the new instance of Soyoung-Rose would be, twenty-nine years old and unable to leave. A second instantiation, this time the instancing would be with the full continuity of consciousness. She would still be Soyoung. She would still be Rose. Every commingled part of her would continue to exist. Her memory would continue in duplicate. There’s no guarantee she would be the division of her consciousness that gets to leave.

Soyoung takes a right, instead, to the train line that will take her to Taehyung’s work dinner. She doesn’t have either Rose’s or Soyoung’s passport on her, anyway.



* * *



In the versions of the story where Telemachus doesn’t instance, the singularity of his person is contrasted against Odysseus’s doubled self. Implicit in this translation is the idea that Telemachus is a superior version of his father because of the way he is able to hold the single goal and single home in his head. Odysseus, filled with ambiguity, leaves his weakness in his palace to go fight a war.





YJ


Call me when you wake up, you text your other self, poking at your phone with numb fingers. You had been shivering by the time you re-entered the building, after you had walked back down with Drew to the conference room. Drew immediately began packing up his laptop, his extra screen, his wireless mouse.

“I’ve got to catch a flight. You’ll get an email packet,” Drew said. “And Stacey will get you all signed up. If you’ve got any other questions, give me a call. I’ll be back in the States in a few months. But nothing for you to do now, really. You got any questions?”

You had a lot of questions.

“Where are you going?”

“London office, and then Paris, and then Berlin.”

“That’s a lot of travel.”

He shrugged, slid his MacBook into a protective sleeve. “I don’t like to stay in one place too long, you know? Too much baggage. The longer you stay in one place, the more likely you are to create an instance when you leave it. They’ve done studies on it.”

You didn’t ask him if he has an instance, or multiple instances, whether there were versions of him all around the globe that he didn’t acknowledge. Drew took his phone out of his pocket and powered it back on. While the screen blinked to life, he flashed an absent smile at you.

“But seriously. You’ll be great,” he said. “I have absolute faith in your abilities.”

And then he left. And you picked up your phone and typed the message to your other self in the two minutes between Drew leaving and Stacey knocking on the door.

“Facilities will be boxing up your old office, moving you up a floor. We can just get your paperwork signed, unless you’ve got another meeting now? Congrats on the promotion, YJ.”

You wanted to tell her that you need a minute. You needed to press your forehead against the cool glass of the window of your office (now your old office) and think about the situation.

The situation is: You’ve been promoted, and Megan’s quit, so you’re the new Megan. Megan had been Mitosis, and now it would be your job to oversee Mitosis. Mitosis was the Condensco-Mergebreak project, and apparently the sole reason for the merger.

“We need a new face for the project,” Drew had said. “Just someone to carry this over the finish line. I’d take it over, but I hate press. And Megan recommended you.”

“Why not Megan?”

“Megan wasn’t interested.”

And you didn’t ask: What did not interested mean? Was Megan leaving voluntarily? Why did Megan recommend you? You had heard of Mitosis, only in the sense that it was something that Megan complained about once in a while, and had meetings on her calendar labeled PROJECT MITOSIS SPONSOR DISCUSSIONS. Had Megan already left? Was it appropriate to go ask if she was still in the building? What were the optics of pushing out a woman and replacing her with an Asian man? What was the purpose of this?

“You can say no,” Drew had said. “But let me know now. No harm, no foul.”

Well, no. You couldn’t say no. That was obvious.

“I’d love to be a part of this,” you had said. And Drew had looked supremely pleased, and you had smiled and tried to make it look natural.

Then he dropped the bombshell: “Mitosis is our new reintegration-reversal product. It rewinds time.”

Drew must be insane. Drew had watched too much Doctor Who. Drew had taken the Marvel Cinematic Universe too seriously. Drew’s smile didn’t fade.

“Are we talking time travel?”

Drew laughed.

“No, no. Got you good, though. That’s just the marketing. Reintegration-reversal. It separates the memories and segregates the reintegrated individual,” he had said. “Only works for the first six months after reintegration, though—though they’re working on it. You came out of R&D, right?”

“No, business development.”

“My bad, right. Well, either way, we’ll roll out your new appointment with the press release—so sorry about how fast this is moving. We can’t afford to delay the soft launch any longer, we’re pretty sure someone talked to a TechCrunch reporter, or someone at the Verge. But after this weekend, everything will be out in the open. No more top-secret. For now, go introduce yourself to the guys who work on twenty-six. Don’t worry about the tech, yet, all that’s been done for months. Just concentrate on the optics.”