Sublimation(55)

As you should have expected, the Mitosis project didn’t just revolve around the single reintegration-reversal product. There were other technologies being tested under the project’s umbrella, even though they were seemingly unrelated to the core Mitosis product. There were studies on miniaturization technologies, tests on novel polymers. Studies into the wavelengths of the harmonic resonances and how they affected the body. Yet, every person talked about their part of the project in a one-track silo. There was no cross-pollination between them.

This was a little odd—Mergebreak was an established tech company. Condensco had been a relatively mature start-up. You had floated around this space for long enough to know that the culture here was inherently collaborative. Once you were on the same team within the same superstructure, you’d end up discussing the project—at happy hours, during coffee breaks, while you were going for a quick walk around the office to clear your head. At the levels people were at here, there was no turning off their brains. But there was no reference to each other’s projects. No word on how their silos were related. Your best guess was that this was related to the fact that the project was still tightly under wraps while Mergebreak tried to preserve their advantage in the market.

That wouldn’t have surprised you—Mergebreak had one of the largest private repositories of instancing research, second to the instanCenter at Stanford. But the MERGEBREAK, and the principles behind the MERGEBREAK and the causal principles behind reintegration and instantiation were common knowledge by now. Instancing was about desire—psychology. Reintegration is about physical reality—physics. With reintegration, the current research indicates that on the operative level the truth of physical reality overwrites the subjective experiences of the instanced individuals. The metaphor that is used in all the textbooks is that each instance is a waveform that collapses into each other through a pure failure mode in a particular harmonic resonance frequency.

The MERGEBREAK worked by disrupting the resonance through a series of proprietary technologies that reverberate through a mirrored novel polymer that the cuff is made out of, which is powered by microcharges harnessed from the user’s latent bioelectricity. Paired MERGEBREAK bands effectively prevented the two instances, on a material level, from recognizing each other as the same object in space.

It’s the killer app. Variants of MERGEBREAK have included discreet jewelry, scarves, a couple of exploratory attempts at belts. Research had shown that MERGEBREAKs were partially effective through their psychological effect, which compounded the resonance disruption: a more visible MERGEBREAK had a lower failure rate. Belts were too inconspicuous, unless they were ugly (according to focus groups). There were ancillary technologies, as well: trackers that both instances could wear to see each other’s GPS location (banned in several countries), discreet buttons that would tell someone whether their instance was in range. But Mergebreak never managed to make anything that prevented instancing in the first place, or something that could definitively tell if a person would instance, prior to the event itself. That would have been useful, just speaking from experience. And sure, Mitosis was a revolutionary new product. But it also had a smaller market than MERGEBREAK did. The marketing revolved around the LAST 5 PERCENT.

It was unclear how the company was going to make a profit on this. They might sell access to Mitosis like insurance. Or it would be marketed as a psychological security thing to help sell more MERGEBREAKs. Except that MERGEBREAKs sold regardless, because anyone who needed a MERGEBREAK would buy a MERGEBREAK. So who was Mitosis for? Were the edge-case scenarios worth the development budget? Your mind wandered to the babies who were born with esoteric genetic defects that needed gene therapy, which no drug company was interested in developing a treatment for because it would be prohibitively expensive and there was no market other than a few sick kids. Mitosis was like that. Who needed to be unwound? Soyoung Kang. Just a few regretful adults. It was a niche product. It didn’t make sense to develop, other than as foundational research that might eventually lead to something more interesting.

But that was all upstream musing from your actual search. There wasn’t much on the public network, just a lot of redirects to things like “see file-number-whatever in restricted network,” or “trial complete.” And most of the clinical trials had been finished, since the product had been announced as human-safe. But there were still some research studies that seemed like they were recruiting test subjects, and maybe one of them would do the job. Hypothetically. If you still wanted to help Soyoung.

So you were going down, after hours, to twenty-six, just to to look around a little. You thought that going late might prevent any discussion of what you were checking on. Not that it was suspicious. Going down there was within the purview of your job. You were just self-conscious.

Finally, the corridor empties. You get up. You flash your keycard at the elevator before proceeding down the dark hallway. The overhead lights flicker on as you activate the motion sensors. You don’t shiver—you’ve been at the office late enough times that you’ve gotten over your fear response at the emptiness. You don’t think about Doug—you hated that urban legend. There are no cameras on twenty-six. The research inside is so proprietary that cameras were deemed a security risk. Only about ten employees have access, and most of them are Condensco hires.

You punch in the door code to the laboratory and go in. Manila envelopes in boxes, machines in bubble wrap. Unplugged monitors, machinery that was still branded with Condensco. Sharpie-markered masking tape. Soldering irons. Boxes of MERGEBREAKS in various colors and in various states of construction.