Sublimation(65)
The laboratory is plain, white walls and white linoleum flooring, surrounded at all ends by some sort of machinery. There are workbenches and a computing terminal that looks a little more robust than Rose would expect to see in a corporate building. The place looks more similar to a university mechanical engineering lab than anything else. In the middle of the room, there are two steel bars in the floor, set at an interval that almost creates a doorway. The Mitosis gate. It’s less intimidating than Soyoung had been led to believe. In the video that YJ had shown her, there had been a mind-bending light effect that buzzed between the gate, which the person would walk through and be separated. On camera, the field that it projected between the steel bars was a glowing white spliced through with jittery black, almost like a luminous, glitchy barcode scanner. In the footage, the machine looked unreal. It looked like old-school special effects. Here, there was no visible effect on the surrounding world. But it hadn’t yet been turned on.
Gerry walks over to the computer terminal and rummages around in a cupboard before pulling out a video camera and pressing a few buttons before sitting down. He gestures at the second chair.
“Intake,” he says.
Soyoung sits down at the desk. She tucks her hair behind her ear. She’s thinking about the Korean passport hidden in her sock drawer.
“I didn’t know there would be video recording. I thought all the data was being anonymized?”
“It’s just this and the exit interview,” Gerry says. “The rest of it is just readings.”
She bites her lip.
“This won’t be shared with anyone, right?”
He shakes his head.
“All the video content is stored in a secure server disconnected from the larger network and only accessible through physical upload and download. All the written documentation is stored in the archive here, and not uploaded anywhere. Unless we get sued, nobody but the research team is looking at it.”
“How likely is that? The suing, I mean.”
“I mean, likely never? But hey, by the time it gets to that, we’ll all have bigger problems. If everything got out, haha, wow. Wow.”
Soyoung looks away and up to the dead black camera eye, past to the rest of the room and the Mitosis machine sitting inert in the center. She wonders if the device had been designed to evoke the metal detectors and full body scanners that were placed in every airport, ship port, and some train stations. It probably wasn’t purposeful—there were only so many ways to create a machine shaped like a gate.
Gerry coughs. She looks back at him.
“If you’re uncomfortable—hey, I don’t know your situation but we’ve worked with a lot of undocumented im—”
The way it felt, sitting across from her mother in the restaurant. Not being able to look at Taehyung in the car as they spoke. Walking through her grandfather’s bedroom and feeling like it was a place devoid of any color. The reintegration, how it felt to swallow all of her other self’s memories. Sitting next to YJ and making choices with her mouth that neither of her past selves would have understood. She wants all of this to be a bad dream.
“No, it’s fine. You can record me.”
* * *
On the screen, an Asian woman blinks and then smiles at the camera. She’s wearing a dark shirt and minimal makeup. Behind her, there are two steel bars bolted into the floor.
“My name is Soyoung Rose Kang. I reintegrated recently after instancing when I was ten, moving from Korea to the United States. I reintegrated accidentally when one of my instances forgot to wear her MERGEBREAK, and my instances physically touched.”
She smiles a little wider. She looks away from the camera.
“I’m excited for the opportunity to be separated. I plan on going back to my lives as soon as I am separate.”
She doesn’t look uncomfortable.
* * *
Gerry looks up from the terminal.
“Okay. Machine’s on, sensors calibrated. Ready?”
“Yes.”
She glances at the two metal bars behind her. There was no effect other than that the indicator light at the bottom of both bars began to flash red. The visual strangenesses that were captured on camera were invisible to the naked eye.
“Don’t walk through until I give you the signal. You might experience some dizziness or disorientation afterward, but it should pass quickly. If you need to sit down, let me know. There’s a few readings we need to take.”
“Like giving blood.”
Gerry laughs. “Yeah! Mental blood. Take off your MERGEBREAK, also?”
Soyoung pulls back the black cuff on her wrist. The rubberized fabric sticks to her wrist before peeling back. It doesn’t exactly hurt.
“I don’t know why I’m still wearing it,” she says, inanely. “I’ve always wondered. How do they work, anyway?”
Gerry nods, the same way you’d nod when an idiot student asked a surprisingly good question. She appreciates that he doesn’t call out how she’s stalling for time.
“The cuff disrupts a charge between the two individuals, preventing the morphic fields from recognizing each as the same material—it’s waveform collapse prevention. You might want to talk to one of the other technicians, though. I’m originally from the Condensco team, never actually worked on it.”