Sublimation(76)
“I took a look at the files he sent, already,” Soyoung admits.
“Were they private?”
“Well, in my defense, he sent them through me.”
They’re reaching a harder part of the trail now, a great mass of hardscrabble stone, the reason that a lot of people turn back before getting to the summit. It’s a morass of jutting edges, squeezed out by tectonic activity.
“Do you want me to go first?”
“No. But take my bag. It’s got my laptop in there.”
“Why’d you bring your—oh, to show me.”
Soyoung steps onto the first piece of shale. Going up almost feels like climbing a jungle gym, or doing an easy bouldering course.
She wishes that all her problems were like this pile of rocks. There is nothing to feel about this pile of rocks. There is nothing to imagine about this pile of rocks. There are no decisions to make about this pile of rocks, no complicated emotions, no ownership and what to do with it, no stepping through and experiencing the physical-mental tangle. Just one step, then another. Sweat drips down her neck. She can hear birds calling, responding. The sun is in her eyes, she squints. Her palms scrape against the rock, again and again. She wipes her forehead with the bandana wrapped around her wrist. And then they’re at the top.
* * *
How does Eve feel about eating the apple? Here was the boundary between Eve’s mind and her heart. Here was the boundary between her body and the rest of the world. And here was the boundary between good and evil. Here was everything she should do. Here was everything forbidden. She chews, she swallows, and her first thought is to hand the fruit to Adam.
* * *
“It’s going to be hell getting down,” YJ says, breathlessly.
Soyoung sits gratefully on a rock. “The loop back is easier, according to the reviews.”
“Hikes have reviews online now? Damn.”
“Everything has reviews,” Soyoung says. “The Mitosis machine? People are going to leave reviews.”
“‘Two stars. My instancing led to my husband having to choose between my selves, and he said that he didn’t want either of them.’”
“Don’t joke about that. Taehyung might—”
“Sorry. Do you love him?”
Soyoung frowns at him. YJ looks almost startled to have asked that question. His surprise always makes him look younger.
“Not like we are now,” Soyoung says. “I don’t think I can, like this. Even if I instanced a second time. It would still be…”
How to say that she doesn’t understand where love, liking, attraction, where all of that lives in the body. How she’s stripped the familiarity from Taehyung and Soyoung’s relationship, and now her conglomerate self wonders whether the past was the only thing keeping the relationship solvent. How it makes her wonder, sometimes, if shared history is the single thing that keeps her relationships threaded. She’s here, after all, because Yujin and Soyoung grew up together.
She looks back at the landscape in front of her. The first tint of yellow is curling across the farthest mountain. The river is a fat silver snake. On the other bank, there’s all the little houses and the black curve of the freeway.
“Most relationships survive post-reintegration,” YJ says. “That’s statistically proven.”
“I think we’re far enough away,” Soyoung says. She doesn’t want to talk about her relationship with Taehyung. YJ hands her the backpack, and she unzips it and pulls out the laptop. She initiates the boot sequence, plugs the USB drive in. Shows YJ the contents of the file.
“The password for the USB is 876212.”
“Megan made the password the floor keycode, cute.”
Soyoung clicks open the text file. Up pops a no-frills textbox and Yujin’s blunt Korean. She hands the screen to YJ. She watches his face as he reads. It’s a long letter.
“This is the text file that Yujin included, addressed to you. I read the message, sorry. And I looked through everything.”
She wasn’t sorry. It had been a long, late night, that had culminated in bad sleep. There was a part of her that hoped YJ would glance over everything and say it was all information he already knew. In some ways, she would have preferred a problem that was dead and buried.
“You said that earlier.”
“I just still feel a little bad about it.”
“Mm,” YJ says. Soyoung stands and walks around so that she can see the screen. He’s closed Yujin’s message and opened up the first actual file. A report to Megan Taylor and Drew Thorsson—she’s pretty sure that’s YJ’s boss—detailing the status of the technology that would underpin the Mitosis machine, about how it could be installed in a freestanding device with a greater working field radius as opposed to needing the near-skin contact.
“Give me a minute,” he says.
“You don’t have to look at this now. I’m giving you the USB drive.”
“Just give me a minute, please.”
He’s biting his lip. He looks very out of place, sitting on the jagged rocks in hiking boots and a T-shirt that says MERGEBREAK-CITIBANK 5K across his chest, swiping furiously across the touchpad. She glances down the mountain. This far up, it feels like the rest of the world is very far away.