Sublimation(99)

She knows now that YJ isn’t going to do anything with the Mitosis information. He’s going to go along with the desires of everyone around him and he’s going to think that this was the right decision. No. That’s cruel. You can’t ask someone to destroy their life because you think it’s ideologically correct. Soyoung does lots of things that she doesn’t believe are ideologically correct: eats factory-farmed meat, throws her recycling in the trash, lies all the time to her friends and family.

YJ shouldn’t have brought up her citizenship status, the fact that she was in the country illegally. That was low.

Soyoung had told YJ that if she was in his position, if she was the one person in the world with the ability to enact change, she would release every single bit of information she had, not on the terms that were dictated to her, but on the terms she chose. She had said it flippantly, but it had been the truth. She realizes now that she had expected YJ to take action. But she’s capable of taking action, too.



* * *



It would have been easier for Eve, had she never eaten the apple.



* * *



So how would she release the data? Soyoung gets up, goes back to the fridge to pull the noodles out. She shouldn’t have put them into the fridge; she’s now in the realm of technical problems, not the sort of fuzzy relationship issues that make her nauseous. She dumps half the noodles into a frying pan.

She would want to disseminate the information as widely and legitimately as possible, in a single burst. She would want backups sent to various individuals and organizations to keep the information from being scrubbed or suppressed. She would send everything to the press—a couple of Rose’s college friends had become journalists. She would upload everything to social media sites and instancing forums. She would send everything to Mitosis’s competitors. She would hire someone to buy a billboard right behind the Mergebreak billboard that hung over the I-95 highway—no, that was silly. But was it? She had never done anything like this before.

The obvious persona for Soyoung to adopt would be that of a Mitosis trial participant, who had infiltrated the system while going through a research study. This had the added benefit of being true. It could be useful to co-opt the name of an existing organization as well—associate herself with Anonymous or something. Borrow some legitimacy. That might be overcomplicating things.

She stirs the noodles.

And what to send? She has verbal confirmation of the IIS’s plans from YJ. She has the USB drive containing all the documentation on how Mitosis works, the research trials, Yujin’s notes. She doesn’t have any written confirmation of the IIS’s plans—a write-up will have to do, and hopefully people don’t think she’s tinfoil-hatting. Getting to the Mitosis terminal could cushion her from being called a conspiracy theorist, but she doesn’t have access to the lab.

Although—getting to the lab wouldn’t be impossible. All she needs to do is to get through the front gate, up the elevator, and into the lab on floor twenty-six. The front gate needs a standard employee keycard. The second, specialized keycard would get her into the elevator that goes to floor twenty-six—the one that she’s seen Gerry use, the one she knows that YJ also has. And on floor twenty-six, there would be a door to the lab, protected by a keypad passcode. But she knows the passcode: It’s the same as the USB, as confirmed by YJ’s offhand comment, weeks ago.

So the only thing she needs are the keycards. But those wouldn’t be hard to get. She just has to get YJ’s wallet. How to get his wallet?

Soyoung pours the noodles into a bowl and picks up her chopsticks.

The easiest way would be to pretend to reconcile, and under the guise of reconciliation, palm the wallet. Pretend to make up, steal the cards while he’s in the bathroom or something.

She sits back down at the kitchen table with her food.

Using YJ’s cards would implicate him. She might cost him his job, and with it his life in America. She wants to keep YJ’s hands clean, but it feels like this is the only path forward. She doesn’t know how to steal Gerry’s card without him noticing, he pays too much attention to her in the lab. And she doesn’t know any other employees. So, YJ’s cards are the only option. Hopefully YJ has the good sense to claim that they had been stolen. It might be enough to give him plausible deniability.

This could all work.

Soyoung eats her noodles. She contemplates the future. She vaguely remembers in Japan or China, that you’re supposed to eat noodles on the New Year because it symbolizes long life.

Soyoung has one crucial psychological advantage over YJ: She has nothing to lose. Soyoung, as she is now, is a temporary amalgamation, prepared for her own unraveling. She has no future, and her component parts hold futures so divorced from her current reality that their fate is an abstract question.

She could do the heist after finishing the research study, after being disentangled. But would her two selves still want to upload everything? She’s thinking about how Soyoung was selfish, how Rose was selfish. She’s thinking about how their combination, her conglomerate self, is selfish. Selfish enough to leave her family without warning, to put off the question of her childhood home’s ownership for months, to lie to her mother, to use her childhood friend for a favor even when it might get him fired.

She can’t wait for the study to finish. But if she got into the lab, she could use the Mitosis gate on herself, after downloading the data from the servers. If she were to separate in that moment, she thinks her future selves would continue the course of action she’s set for them.