Sublimation(89)

You stare at her. She’s asking you to be a whistleblower.

“I want you to take his toy away from him,” Megan says. “And in return, I’ll put in a heavy recommendation for a second promotion for you. You get his job. Mergebreak is fully in bed with the IIS now, and I’m the IIS liaison.”

“Why after the rollout?”

“Because—well, this is my project now.”

You want her to emit more than the lightest, mildly sheepish tone of embarrassment. You feel that she should feel a greater hypocrisy. To turn around from decrying Mitosis to quietly administering a program that would deploy it, secretly, without the public knowing. You wanted her to be better than the average person, if she had the ability to change lives. You dislike how even if Mitosis is a technology with global, far-reaching implications, it feels like it’s a pissing match between two people.

And more than that, you dislike how you don’t disagree with how Megan is handling things. You don’t know that you would be handling it differently.

“Why me?”

“Who else?” Megan says. “Take some time. Think about it. Then come back and talk to me, okay?”

You look away from the diorama, the silver fish, the sharklike predators.

“I—thanks. I will. I should go find my girlfriend.”

“She seems nice,” Megan says.

“She’s—I’m very grateful to her,” you say. You don’t know that you’d call Soyoung nice.



* * *



If Adam and Eve had simply practiced lying to each other, rather than first attempting to lie to their omniscient deity, then they might never have had to leave paradise. Or they should have eaten the fruit from both trees. Or they should have been different people, in a different creation myth.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


Soyoung had followed the signs that took her around the space center and into the hall containing the history of instantiation. It was set up as a timeline, with artifacts, reproductions, screens playing looping videos. Instancing has been with us since our earliest beginnings, the sans-serif wall text declares. The exhibit runs through instancing as documented in prehistoric and ancient civilizations, through early history, through the modern era. It touches upon the experiments conducted by the Axis and Allied powers during World War Two, the experiments done during the Cold War in the U.S.S.R. and by the CIA, the university-based studies done during the seventies, ending with the development of the MERGEBREAK and leaving on a note of optimism toward new innovations. The exhibit is only mildly sanitized. It acknowledges that until the current day, most instancing research was produced under wartime conditions, and in many cases on political prisoners.

It’s not a bad exhibit. When she comes out the other side there’s a staircase that leads back to the Peoples halls, the ones that have little dioramas and exhibits of all the various non-western cultures. She walks through them, passing people holding little drinks and looking at the various dioramas. She’s always felt a little weird that those exist. She remembers Rose coming here in high school, with her friends who were a grab bag of different ethnicities, looking at the strange little exhibits where their cultures were pinned on display. Indian subcontinent. Africa. Pacific Islander. East Asia. It had been fun—but in retrospect, it was strange that these existed. Soyoung shivers and takes the stairs down and finds herself in a hall full of birds. In the half-light, it’s ominous. Her phone rings. She picks up.

“Where are you?” YJ asks.

“The room filled with birds,” she says.

“Is it quiet?”

“No one’s really in here. It’s a little creepy.”

“Okay. Gonna come meet you. Stay there.”

Soyoung puts her phone away. She sits down on one of the benches.



* * *



There has never been a documented case of a bird, or any other animal, instancing.



* * *



YJ comes from the opposite direction she had walked in, his quick footsteps echoing on the floor. Soyoung turns toward him. He sits down next to her.

“They have a Korean diorama, in the Asian section. With all the old Korean stuff,” he says.

“I saw that back in high school. It’s still up?” Soyoung says.

“It’s still up.”

He’s silent for a moment, looking at his hands. Soyoung can see little beads of sweat at the nape of his neck, as if YJ’s run a long way. He’s nervous. She’s surprised. The conversation had seemed congenial when she left.

She’s about to ask him what’s going on, when he tells her, “Megan told me everything. IIS is going to deploy Mitosis at the border, before it’s public.”

“Mitosis,” Soyoung said. “Like—with all it can do.”

“Everything. For border control. To prevent people from instancing, when they cross. Probably situational. And then they’re going to start selling to other countries, when they get the OK from the IIS.”

Soyoung imagines the gate installed at Incheon, at JFK. She’s imagining a world where the application to instance is done ahead of time, where it gets processed through churning bureaucracy, the decision made by some faceless government official. The idea of it is deeply distasteful in her mouth.