Sublimation(77)

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If Eve has the apple, and tells Adam that this will ruin his life but he will learn everything God knows, does he still take it? Or is it kinder to never tell and hand it to him, so he bites guilelessly? Or is it kindest to never hand him the apple at all.





YJ


There’s sweat cooling down your back, and you feel the slightest red sting of a sunburn on the bridge of your nose. You’ve never used a laptop on the top of a mountain before, and it’s a hot weight in your lap that you’re trying your best not to get sweat or sunscreen on. But mostly you’re preoccupied by reading, and your body feels like a piece of meat that you’re trapped within, while your mind feels like it’s submerged in a vat of electrified water.



* * *



The knowledge of instancing wasn’t the only thing packaged in the forbidden fruit. There was the capability of understanding distance, of understanding that there was a difference between God and people, people and animals, that it was terrible to be naked, that there were things to be done to mitigate their nakedness, that it was possible to lie to each other and to God, that there were things in this world that were simple and that there were things in the world that were complicated.



* * *



The first file is a long letter from your instance. Not a letter. A set of bullet points and paragraphs and references to various files, beginning with him telling you, So your old boss visited me … and you have the sense that the document would seem scattered and disjointed to anyone in the universe except for you. For you, the stream of consciousness reads like a clear and flowing river. Item the first, the fact that behind Mitosis, there is a singular, underpinning principle which completely controls instancing. Item the second, this “control” rested not just in being able to disentangle reintegrated instances, but in being able to prevent instances from separating in the first place. A Mitosis gate could be placed at a border and the person crossing could be sure they wouldn’t instance. Conversely, two instances, brought within the field of a Mitosis gate, would find themselves inexorably drawn to one another and coalesced, agonizingly, back into a single person. An instance brought into the proximity of a properly calibrated Mitosis gate would find themselves lying on the ground, in pain. It was a weapon. It was a tool. It was the death of instancing as a phenomenon, if it was deployed globally.

Item the third: The gate could be further fine-tuned. It could knit instances together, without the previous necessary skin contact—as long as they were within the radius of the gate. And further, it could provide specific blends of the instances: 20 percent foreign, 80 percent domestic. Or a complete replacement. Overwriting one instance entirely with the other.

Your thoughts turn directly to Yujin. You think about completely overwriting him. You think about keeping a few of his memories—the good things, the things you miss about Korea, the skills he’s acquired over the last ten years, but leaving the bulk mostly yourself. You shiver.

“Are you cold?”

Soyoung’s sitting near you. She’s not looking at your computer. You wonder how she felt, reading this section. If she had the same thoughts you had, whether she looked back at the moment that she reintegrated and thought about how her previous selves would have chosen to lever the proportions in their favor. You think about Yujin, typing this document. You know he must have thought about it.

“Just felt weird, for a moment.”

You keep reading. The Mitosis gates could be linked together. You could create a fence with them. You could bisect a room with them. You could create an artificial border in any space. With the Mitosis gate, you could remotely control the process of instancing and reintegration without any physical touch, any underlying personal intention.

This was revolutionary. It was the biggest leap forward in instancing technology since the MERGEBREAK had been developed. It was the biggest leap forward in human technological development since fire, since the printing press, since the jet plane. It could eradicate instancing. It could force every single person crossing a border to instance. It could completely delete an instance’s memories upon reintegration—would that be murder? You couldn’t think of a business reason that this information hadn’t been released at the same time that the original reintegration plans had been announced to the public, unless they were trying to sell the product in stages with higher price points.

Or if the IIS was involved, because the technology was too dangerous. During your meeting with Megan, she had asked you about your instance. She had mentioned that the IIS had oversight. That strange conversation you had with Yujin means he must have seen the documentation that Megan had sent to him, by then. Megan must have expected you to have seen the contents of the USB file before talking with her, or she had been probing to see if you knew what she was talking about.

What could you do with this information? Were you supposed to use it, somehow, to undermine Drew? You could see a path clearly for that: You would bring this information to the public and let everyone know that it had been Drew that had suppressed it. Was that what Megan wanted you to do? No, that couldn’t be it. If the IIS was suppressing this information because of how deeply world-shaking it was, then Megan wouldn’t take kindly to you blowing the lid. But how were they expecting to keep this a secret, for long? Eventually someone would do the equivalent of jailbreaking a machine. Or a technician would blow the whistle.