Sublimation(36)

And it’ll be easier. Reintegrated instances are generally subsumed into their state of original origin, not their naturalized countries. She’s ethnically Korean. She won’t have to climb through bureaucratic hoops, she won’t have to justify her citizenship, she won’t get kicked down to a visa. She won’t have to break up her impending marriage, she won’t have to make her family unhappy, and it might not be the decision that makes her happy, or what she wants, but how can anyone ever know what will make them happy? You can’t always know what you want. All you can do sometimes is pick a direction and run. She’ll be satisfied in her concrete choices. Soyoung was unhappy to begin with, anyway. And Rose was an emotionless freak. There is no perfect world. There is no return to the imperfect world as it was before.

“Remind me to call the embassy on Monday,” Soyoung says.

“Sure.”

They work together for the next few hours. They construct an absurd number of cardboard boxes. They get all the photographs off the wall. They go through Harabeoji’s kitchen drawers. They clean up the spare rooms, which had been emptied years ago. One of these used to be Soyoung’s bedroom, and she tries not to feel strange about how it’s being used for storage. She leans on Rose’s memory—tries to remember her teenage bedroom as the room in Fort Lee that she had decorated with boy band posters, not the room here, which had been decorated with different boy band posters. It fails. She feels strange. She pushes through it.

They tentatively open the door to Harabeoji’s bedroom, which neither of them had ever been in before. There’s pills on the nightstand, and the room smells a little like old man, but not in a bad way. Just in a lived-in way. There’s a faded, framed photograph of all the kids, sitting on a windowsill. Minsoo and Soyoung box up the pills, the photograph, some of the other things that look valuable or important. They empty drawers. They open cupboards. They examine photo albums and creased, expensive hanboks. They put everything in cardboard.

The sun is high in the sky by the time they’ve gotten to a good stopping point. She stretches. Her forearms are sore.

“Let’s get delivery jjajangmeon,” Minsoo suggests. “I feel like we earned it.”

Soyoung nods, and Minsoo walks over to the fridge where the magnet with the delivery number is written. They could use an app. But this is the place they’ve been ordering from for a decade. Soyoung lies on the couch.

“Get tangsooyook, too!”

“Okay!”

She feels around for the remote to Harabeoji’s ancient television. She clicks it on. SBS. The daily international news is playing. She closes her eyes. Like this, with the TV playing in the background while she lies on the couch, it could be ten years ago for Soyoung, twenty years ago for Soyoung-and-Rose. Maybe when she opens her eyes again she’ll be a kid and everything in the intervening time will have been a strange dream. When she opens her eyes, it’ll be her mom waking her up to go upstairs and sleep in her bed. She needs to figure out what to do with the house.

The television announcer speaks in bitten-off formal syllables. Behind her, Minsoo’s stumbling through ordering, changing his mind three times mid-order. She grins a little, because it’s funny. When Minsoo’s an old man, he’s still going to be the same kid who cried after she threw his toy out the window.

The language coming from the television swaps to English. Soyoung opens her eyes and turns her head. It’s a prerecorded press conference in some anonymous conference room, with cameras popping every few seconds, making it hard to get a good look at the people inside. There’s a smiling white guy and a big screen next to him.

“We are so delighted to be here with you today—”

The audio from the recording quiets. Subtitles roll. The Korean newscaster speaks over it.

“In business news, Mergebreak announced the development of their first new product since their inception—”

Soyoung sits up. On the screen, a man in a black jacket (who has now been identified as DREW THORRSON) gestures at the screen, which begins to play. The newscast cuts to a clean version of the smaller screen, and the prerecorded animated trailer begins to play.

A little purple stick figure waves and walks through a gate, splitting into red and blue versions of the purple original. They both wave at each other, and run off the screen in opposite directions. The word MITOSIS scrolls across in a slick, futuristic font.

As it plays, the newscaster continues speaking. In a precise, neutral tone, he explains that the new service will allow for reintegrated instances to reverse the process of reintegration, separating themselves back into the component parts with separate memories. He announces that the new service is being announced in the wake of Mergebreak’s merger with Condensco. He announces that this is a revolutionary product which can unwind a reintegration within six months of the event.

The animation spirals into charts and figures. Into global instancing statistics, into the average amount of travel done by the average first-world individual, into the wry admittance that Mergebreak has never been able to solve the 5 percent failure rate. But they’re in the last stages of being able to reverse it. Expect public availability next year, likely partnered with local governments and travel authorities. The rising hope in Soyoung’s chest immediately crushed. A year. She can’t wait a year.

Cut back to Drew, in the conference room. He’s still smiling. The screen behind him is still playing something after the animation.