Sublimation(49)

“Are you done?”

You sigh. You’re sweating a little, at the temples. “Yeah. I’m done.”

“I told you to start the appli—”

“It wouldn’t have been as stro—”

“Okay, but you procrasti—”

“I’m doing my best, okay,” you snap. “Maybe I was wrong. But we talked about it. This is the best chance we have for the application going through with everything we talked about.”

“Fine,” he says. “Sure. Yeah. No. I know.”

“Why does it matter to you that I help Soyoung?”

He’s silent for a moment.

“It matters because she’s my closest friend,” he says. “Because it’ll give her back her life. Lives. And it’s an easy thing to give her. I think you’re overstating the danger.”

“I don’t know Soyoung. Do you trust her? To be able to keep things secret, to not talk about what’s going on. Like—how can I know I can trust her?”

“I trust her, and you trust me,” Yujin says.

He doesn’t ask it like a question. He says it like a fact.

“Soyoung’s not the sort of person who would try and ruin your life. Besides, we have—what’s the word for when you have the ability to stop someone? Because you know something about them? So they can’t tell on you?”

“Blackmail.”

“Yeah, blackmail. You can blackmail her. Ah, this sounds bad, but she’s not supposed to be in the States. She didn’t register with—you know. They don’t know she reintegrated.”

“She’s here illegally,” you say.

“Yeah,” Yujin says. “Maybe don’t say that out loud.”



* * *



Citizenship is a piece of paper. It is a few lines of code, a single variable hosted on a computer somewhere. Without citizenship, without borders, some experts have argued, instances would not exist. Other experts argue that borders are the natural shape of the world. The line between the sea and the sand. The curving bend of a river between two cliffs. The imperceptible line dividing the ground from the sky. These natural-border arguments are sometimes a dog-whistle for more specific prejudices, followed by the argument that people weren’t meant to leave their original homes. But more often, it’s part of an argument for an environmental studies department to get more funding. Artificial or not, the knowledge of existing borders delineates the world. They are a social technology that creates emotional reality, that creates a physical reality.



* * *



You had just assumed that everything was aboveboard, last night, that everything was clean-legal, Soyoung’s paperwork neat-and-tidy. This feels like—border crossing, illegal immigration, coyotes, crossing the Darién Gap, this feels like the world that other people live in that you read about on the front page of Reddit, in interviews in the New York Times, articles shared by your more conscientious friends. It alludes to a part of reality that you don’t think about that much, despite your immigration status. That’s a world completely divorced from yours.

Yujin breaks your concentration.

“Hey, you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll talk to her, if you think it’s best to say no,” he says, conciliatory. “Save you an awkward conversation. I should have told you first. It just felt—”

“Yeah,” you say. “I get it.”

If one of your friends was in the country illegally, you wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it over the phone, either.

“Yeah,” he says. “Listen, it’s late. I’m going hang up, okay?”

“Sure. ’Night.”

He hangs up. You wipe imaginary dirt from your hands. You decide: First you are going to clean up your apartment. Then you’ll clean up the rest of your life. You’ll figure out how to handle Soyoung. You’ll take a look at the trials for her. And then you’ll use your best judgment and decide what to do.

This would be a much easier decision if you didn’t actually want to help her, but you do.



* * *



During the first six months after you instanced, you and your other self got really into League of Legends. It was sort of embarrassing. It was all late nights and early mornings, ruined sleep schedules, you and your other self playing a game that you thought you were too old for.

It’s not a good game. Or it is, it’s very compelling, but it’s not a good game. It takes too much time. It’s addictive. You knew that playing together was a bad habit, it was narcissistic, it was navel-gazey and both of you had other things to be doing. The thing was, playing a real-time video game with someone with exactly the same brain you possessed was incredible. You didn’t have to speak to talk about strategy. There was perfect alignment in what you were thinking. You started winning and made a little bit of money. You started thinking about esports.

You had long conversations while you played. You talked about why there weren’t more people who tried to optimize for efficiency with their instances, about how your various classes were going, about the bureaucracy each of you was trying to navigate. You talked about whether you would keep sharing a personal email account, whether it was better for Mom and Dad to be talking to both or one of you. You talked about your future.