Sublimation(80)

“Just here? At the beginning of the trail?”

“Yeah, this is fine. Can you get some of the, like … landscape behind me in the frame? So I’m sort of silhouetted there.”

“Sure,” YJ says, and takes a few steps back. “My shadow’s going to be in the frame. Is that okay?”

“It’s fine,” she says. She doesn’t tell him that his shadow in the frame is actually preferable. That for Rose’s friends, this implies a date, a good excuse for being busy. It’s a paper trail. YJ takes the photo. She has to keep from laughing: He takes photos like a Korean ahjusshi, knees bent.

“Okay,” he says, handing her the phone. She scrolls through. She looks happy in the photos. Uncomplicated. She looks like Rose, she guesses, from the color palette of her clothing, from the wide smile. She sends the good ones to her phone, posts them.

“Thank you,” she says to YJ. She hands him his phone back. She smiles.

“If it makes you feel better, I’m pretty sure Soyoung would have overwritten Rose in a heartbeat. So.”



* * *



This is a state of affairs that can only exist until God arrives in the garden.





YUJIN


Your phone vibrates while you’re at work, and you scramble to grab it. One of your coworkers glances at you. The other is asleep. You pick up your phone and make a sort of apologetic face at them. It’s two in the afternoon, and you’re just back from lunch at the office cafeteria.

“Hey, it’s late,” you say to Soyoung. It’s still novel to be getting phone calls from Soyoung. You mostly just texted her, or got food together.

“Sorry, were you busy?”

“I’m at work,” you say. “I can talk.”

“I just wanted to let you know that I got the care package, thanks. And I shared it with your instance.”

“Nice. Thanks.”

“Cool,” she says. You can hear her breath. She hesitates like she wants to say something else.

“Oh, that’s it?” you say, tilting your tone teasing. You wonder for a second, if she looked through the files, but you’ve known her for most of your life. She’s never deliberately unkind, and you’re doing her a favor, with the Mitosis thing. She probably hasn’t opened the USB drive. She wouldn’t mention it over the phone.

“Yeah, that’s it,” she says, not meanly. “I just wanted you to know.”

“Things are okay, then?”

“Things are okay,” she says. “It’s going to be fine, I think. Thanks for passing on—yeah.”

“Sure,” you say.

She takes another breath.

“Would you have chosen to instance, if you could have? Like if you could press a button and decide to never have instanced. Would you have instanced?”

“No,” you say, easily.

“Oh,” she says.

“Why?”

“Just thinking,” she says. “That wasn’t the answer I was expecting. I don’t know why.”





YJ


You take a shower when you get home. Then you go for a long walk, even though your legs are still sore. You want to think and pacing around your apartment doesn’t particularly appeal. You want to call Yujin about this. You don’t like that he’s a crutch for your thinking. You rely on him too much sometimes, outsourcing your decision-making to him. But there’s no decisions here, just—you keep thinking about it. How the ability to completely prevent instancings, cause instancings, rewind people, force them back together—how all of this would combine.

Let’s say Mitosis, in its full capacity, gets widespread adoption. Let’s say it starts being offered at the airport. You could see this being a service that people buy as they travel: a conscious instancing, or a conscious lack of instantiation. You could see this changing the face of travel, at first at the upper echelons of society, then eventually trickling downward, until the only people who ever have to worry about organic, uncertain instancing are migrants, refugees, and illegal immigrants. You see the shape of the future changing, the same way it changed when the first commercial steamship set sail. You see Mergebreak having a stranglehold monopoly on the market. You see your stock options skyrocketing.

And knock-on effects. Let’s say everyone knows about it now. Instancing is psychological. Instancing relies on the knowledge that you’re never going to return, that you don’t want to return. Can you truly know that, in a world with Mitosis? This decouples the action from the emotion. You don’t know how this would change things, in the long term. Only that things would change.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


It’s raining heavily when she gets to the building, one of those summer storms that like to sweep in and sweep out. New York doesn’t get them as bad as Korea does, usually—she remembers through Soyoung’s memories, through Rose’s filmy childhood remembrances, how the monsoons would pour and then suddenly stop.

Soyoung tracks water into the Mergebreak building. She takes the elevator up and goes through reception. Gerry nods at her. He’s standing with a clipboard, talking to a man wearing a blue beanie.

“Almost done,” Gerry says.

“Sure,” Soyoung replies, and smiles when the man glances at her. He doesn’t smile back.