Sublimation(79)

* * *



They walk down the mountain. It’s much easier than the walk up. Near the last fork in the road, YJ stops. He looks at her. His face is serious, intense.

“This changes—I can’t help thinking. What if this had existed when we had been younger?”

“Mitosis, you mean.”

“The full abilities of it, yeah. Imagine if you could have chosen to instance, when leaving Korea.”

He’s saying you, but Soyoung doesn’t think he’s talking about her. He’s talking about himself and Yujin.

“Let’s say they installed a Mitosis machine at Incheon Airport. Would you have chosen to instance?”

“I—I don’t know,” YJ says.

Soyoung wonders what he’s thinking about. How his thoughts must have shifted to interiority. When she had read the papers, she had immediately thought about how her life could have been different if her younger self hadn’t instanced, or if there had been some sort of device pressing her back together before she ever even knew she had been separated. She had sat at her kitchen table eating the entire two bags of honey things and thought about a singular future.

Assume she didn’t instance. That she could have decided not to instance—would she have done it? She was a kid. Would her mom have told her to do something, either instance or not? Probably. Would she have followed her mom’s directions? Yes, because she loved her mother. So then, would her mom have chosen not to instance, when she had left Korea? Would she still have argued with her grandfather? If her grandfather could have chosen whether to instance or not, in what capacity does he cross the semi-stabilized Korean border? How does anyone cross a border? Who gets to choose whether to instance, then? Do parents get to decide for children? Do these get default-placed at every train and airport terminal? Does everyone choose a door to go through: instance, or not? How do you know what you want, if the decision can be made for you?

“Do you think instancing is a good thing?” she says. That’s not a question that made sense, before now. Instancing is a fact. It’s how the world is. Like gravity and stars and needing to sleep. Except that it’s not. The universe is filled with dark matter, embryos can be frozen for decades, planes can fly through the air unassisted. Two steel bars can shape your future.

“If this stuff—if there’s a choice. Like, okay. Let’s say you get to choose. Do you want you and Yujin to exist?”



* * *



This is a thought that was only possible to conceptualize after eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Is it good to exist? Is it better to have been created, in any form? Is it right for a third party to create a person out of your rib?



* * *



He looks away.

“The first thing I thought of, when I read what Mitosis could do, was that I would want Yujin’s memories, but only the good ones. The useful ones. Overwrite the rest of him with me. I bet he thought the same thing. No—I know he did. And he knows that when I read it, I’ll know he did. So, I don’t know. Would you have instanced?”

Soyoung shrugs.

“Me now? I want to say no. But I don’t know. I liked the idea of leaving. But I wanted to stay, a little. Not enough to stay for real. I knew I was going. I was a kid. I don’t know if a kid should be deciding all that. Like, instancing is about—”

“—desire,” YJ says.

“I was going to say knowing,” Soyoung says. “Like, knowing that you’re not going back. That this is permanent. Do you get to know that, as a kid? I guess I wonder, is it good if you don’t ever have to ask yourself that question?”

YJ’s quiet.

“Yeah, I don’t know, either,” Soyoung says. “Sorry. I guess I’ve just been thinking about this a lot. And you’re the—well. The recipient of this message.”

Soyoung doesn’t tell him that she’s copied the USB drive onto her personal computer. She doesn’t have any plans to do anything with it.

“You didn’t talk about it with Yujin?”

“Are you going to? It doesn’t seem like something for over the phone.”

“No,” YJ says. “And I haven’t told him about. Um. Us, either.”

There is no us, Soyoung almost says. But that would be mean. And there is sort of an us, in a way.



* * *



The acquisition of shared knowledge creates delineation. Adam and Eve against God. Adam and Eve as hiding their sin. Adam and Eve discussing how to proceed, now that they know things, now that they are aware that there are things that they don’t know.



* * *



It’s late afternoon by the time they reach the bottom of the trail. The shadows have grown long. They spent the rest of the walk talking about inconsequential things: their plans for next weekend, the scenery around them, and how beautiful it is, about the latest television show that’s plastered all over the billboards in Times Square, and how neither of them think it’s going to be any good.

The sweat is cooling on Soyoung’s skin. She looks around. It’s golden hour. The light streams through the branches. They’re back where they started. She turns to YJ.

“Do you mind taking a photo of me?”

He looks surprised, but takes out his phone.