Sublimation(47)

The second delineation is whether the man instances, when he decides to cross the water.



* * *



They get a second round of drinks before getting fries from the Belgian place with a thousand different sauces. YJ brings over two cones of fries and two little sauce cones. He sits across from her. Steeples his hands. Moves them back. Makes a sort of aborted, slow-motion clapping gesture that smashes his hands together, before gesturing at her. His hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat.

“So, what’s he told you?”

“That you want to reintegrate. That you’re eventually applying for citizenship and you’ve got an H-1B1, but you’ve put off really pushing forward the process for green card stuff until you’re in a good place to get dual citizenship. Is that right?”

“Yes,” YJ says. “Why’d he tell you everything?”

“We’re friends. He—he didn’t tell you about this? He came to me after you instanced. Since I was the only person he knew who had an instance.”

YJ frowns at her. Underneath the lights, he looks older. Soyoung supposes they are, that there’s a long divide between the kids they used to be and the grown-ups they are now.

“What’s the difference between going through all this trouble with Mitosis and just instancing for a second time? Did you instance a second time? I’d assume you’d instance if you hit any sort of border. I’m kind of surprised you’re in New York at all.”

She eats a French fry.

“It’s not clean,” she says. “I want the sort of clean, perfect separation like we can pretend that these last months never happened, with all my memories sectioned off into the right person who needs them. I didn’t know how important memory was, to how you moved through the world, how you felt about the people around you. How you move forward in life. Rose and Soyoung … they weren’t aligned, and it is very hard to be a singular person when you—well. Have you ever gotten everything you wanted and then realized it wasn’t what you wanted at all?”

“No,” he says.

“Yeah, well. It’s like that. If I instance again, without Mitosis … I think I change. I don’t think I go back to either Soyoung’s or Rose’s life, like I am now. And they had been—not happy. But they hadn’t wanted to change how they felt about the world. They wanted things to stay the same. But it happened. And I want it to not have happened.”

She puts her head on the table. She looks out at YJ through half-lidded eyes. He’s a blurry shadow against the fluorescent light. He could be anyone, like this.

“So it’s bad, and I shouldn’t reintegrate,” YJ says, and he says it like a joke, in the same cadence that his instance would, if he were afraid.

“No,” she says. “It just—it depends on what you want. What do you want, out of reintegration?”

“I want—” he says, before looking down. “I guess I want to preserve as many options as possible. I want to have as much freedom as possible.”

“But why do you want this, specifically?”

He frowns. He gestures with a French fry.

“So. It’s like—I want to remember being home. Living at home. And Yujin wants to remember ten years of being here. And Yujin wants to skip military service, if he can. And I can’t go back without potentially getting flagged for my own military service. Or becoming him and having to do his—ours? And—this way we get everything. All of it.”

Soyoung nods. “Yujin wants your life. He wants your life like Soyoung wanted Rose’s life.”

“Yeah. And I want his. So.”

“What do you want about it?”

“It’s—I don’t know. Seoul’s home. And—you know, just, I guess I miss it. I think the worst future I can imagine is that I’m like … you know those old guys who instanced when they were young, because it was just way harder to go between countries, who instance a second time when they’re older when they go back to Korea? Yeah. That. I’m trying to avoid that. You know?”

“Yeah,” Soyoung says again. She looks at the storefront. There’s a couple of college students buying French fries. They look young and giggly and as if nothing bad has ever happened to them. Soyoung had more fun in college than Rose did, she remembers. She looks back at YJ.

“The other thing that happened, is my grandfather left me his house, in Korea. He gave me an ultimatum about it. The house was sort of a bribe. He wanted my instances to reintegrate.”

“Huh,” YJ says.

Soyoung wanted to reintegrate, too, she doesn’t say.

“I reintegrated a month ago, give or take. A little more. And I saw you on TV, when they introduced Mitosis. I can’t wait for the official release. The timeline doesn’t work out. Six months, right?”

“I get it,” YJ says.

He drums his fingers against the table.

“I should probably say no,” YJ admits. “But I want to say yes. So, I’m saying maybe. I’m saying I’ll look into this for you. Is … that okay?”

It felt like a smaller favor, when she wasn’t sitting in front of him, asking. When he wasn’t flesh and blood and he was just the concept of Yujin’s instance, rather than the reality of him.