Sublimation(68)

You had gotten the science degree, and YJ had gotten the business one. You had agreed on this to maximize your abilities later, after you reintegrated. And you ended up in STEM and he ended up in econ because an American business school would be a better line item on a résumé than a Korean one. You had transferred to KAIST, because you had wanted to get out of Seoul for a bit and it was a good school for STEM. But you had screwed up your interviews, after. Now you work at a small biotech company. You like your job, mostly, although it’s not what you thought you would be doing as a kid. YJ did better: first consulting, then Mergebreak. You’re on parallel tracks. If you reintegrate, then you’ll be able to list all your experience on a single combined résumé.

But for now: You know you understand more than he does, and the more you read, the more you were compelled to distill it down for him, in case he missed the specifics: Mitosis didn’t solely contain the ability to disentangle and separate instances, portioning their memories out into the preexisting people. Mitosis was a singular technological breakthrough that effectively controlled the entire instantiation process. The combination of instances. The prevention of their separation. The forced reintegration. Even more technical: the fine-tuned combinations of instances, down to the percentages of the individuals. You could walk through a Mitosis field and become 70 percent your foreign self, 30 percent your domestic self. You could pull the trigger on a Mitosis machine that was placed at a border crossing and stop a person from instancing. You could turn any person into two versions of themselves, as long as they walked through the field that was created by the gate. Any and every Mitosis machine inherently held these capabilities. These were all derivatives of the same principles.

With Mitosis as it had been marketed, it effectively made reintegration obsolete. With Mitosis as it actually existed, it made natural instancing obsolete.



* * *



Imagine a world without instances. A world where leaving is perfect absence, where there is no ghost left behind. Imagine never knowing the parallel, leaving the past in the past, a world where desire doesn’t matter, where there is no blunt knowledge of the implicit truth of the human heart. Imagine a world where leaving is a single choice, where there is the kind blindness of never knowing and the cruel promise that you will stay singular.



* * *



You’re ashamed to admit it: Your first thought was, I could overwrite YJ. The same type of thought as when you saw a high building and thought reflexively about throwing someone off, or the part of your brain that imagined slapping ice cream out of a child’s hands. You had looked at the technology and thought: Here’s how I could become him. You had quashed that thought as quickly as possible.

Rubbing your eyes now, your back sore from slouching over your computer, you know that you had to get the information to YJ, if he doesn’t have it. You had to make sure he understood what was going on. You finish writing. You save your file. You unplug the USB drive from your computer. You wonder why your instance wasn’t told about any of this. Why this information hasn’t been released publicly. It’s revolutionary stuff. Maybe that’s why.

You stretch. You put on your jacket and grab a lighter from the side table. You jam your feet into your slides. You skip the elevator and walk down the clinically lit stairwell, the fluorescent lights and concrete only broken by the occasional cobweb. It feels like you’re descending down a great well. Then you push the exterior door open, and you’re outside. You think about going to buy yourself a canned coffee or an ice cream bar. You think about stealing a car from the garage and going on a joyride.

You take your phone out. You call YJ. Over data, with video. It takes a few seconds, but the call connects, his face on the screen, identical to your face except for all the things that are different. He’s lying on his couch. He must be home early from work. Or working from home. In the scant patch of the floor visible on his screen, you see dirty socks, a candy wrapper. He yawns.

“Yeah?” he says.

“You free now? Anyone over?”

He gestures at the rest of his off-screen apartment.

“What’s up? Everything good with Mom and Dad?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” you say. Why’s he so nervous? He’s chewing on the inside of his lip. What does he have to be nervous about, right now? You have things to be nervous about. You’re going to give him something to be very nervous about, you think.

You take your packet of cigarettes from where it lives in your pocket and light one.

“Hey, put that out.”

“It’s not your body,” you say to him. You take a long breath. He almost makes an expression with his face, like he’s embarrassed but trying to hide it. You make sort of a gesture with your body like you want him to continue. He looks away.

“How’s the job going?” you say.

“It’s just a lot of pressure.”

“Can’t talk about it or won’t talk about it?”

He smiles, just a bit.

“Can’t.”

“I get that. Blink twice if it’s your new boss breathing down your neck that’s got you down. The guy who’s traveling all the time. What’s his name?”

“Drew’s fine. Just kind of scattered.”

“Better or worse than your old boss?” you say. “Megan, right? You end up talking with her about things?”