David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Some months. Until the ninthnite of the last week of fourth-month, specifically. I woke during curfew to a faint sound of breaking glass. My sisters were all dorming: only Seer Rhee was in the dome at such an hour. Time passed. Curiosity defeated my fear, finally, and I opened the dormroom door. Across the dome, our seer’s office was open. Rhee lay in lamplite, face flat against the floor, his chair upended. I crossed the dinery. Blood leaked from his eyes and nostrils, and a used Soapsac was crumpled on the desk. Seer did not have the color of the living.

Rhee was dead? An overdose?

Whatever the official verdict, the office stunk of Soap soporifix. A server usually imbibes three milligrams: Rhee appeared to have taken a quarter-liter sac, so suicide seems a reasonable conclusion. I faced a grand quandary. If I sonyd for a medic, perhaps I could save my seer’s life, but how to xplain my intervention? Healthy fabricants, as you know, never wake during curfew. Bleak as the life of an ascending fabricant was, the prospect of reorientation was bleaker.

You said you envied your unthinking, untroubled sisters .

That is not quite the same as wishing to be one. I returned to my cot.

That decision didn’t cause you any guilt, later?

Not much: Rhee’s decision was his own. But I had a foreboding that the nite’s events were not yet over, and sure enough, when yellow-up came, my sisters stayed in their cots. The air carried no scent of stimulin, and no aide had reported for work. I discerned the sound of a sony being used. Wondering if Seer Rhee had somehow recovered, I left the dormroom and looked into the dome.

A man in a dark suit sat there. He had tubed himself a coffee and watched me watching him across the dinery. He spoke, finally. “Good morning, Sonmi 451. I hope you’re feeling better today than Seer Rhee.”

He sounds like an enforcer .

The man introduced himself as Chang, a chauffeur. I apologized: I did not know the word. A chauffeur, the soft-spoken visitor xplained, drives fords for xecs and Boardmen but sometimes serves as a messenger, too. He, Mr. Chang, had a message for me, Sonmi 451, from his own seer. This message was in fact a choice. I could leave the dinery now and repay my Investment outside, or else stay where I was, wait for Unanimity and their DNA sniffers to come and investigate the death of Seer Rhee, and be xposed as a Union spy.

Not much of a choice .

No. I had no possessions to pack or farewells to make. In the elevator, Mr. Chang pressed a panel. As the doors closed on my old life, my only life, I could not begin to imagine what waited above me.

My torso squashed my suddenly feeble legs: I was supported by Mr. Chang, who said every inside fabricant xperiences the same nausea, the first time. Yoona 939 must have dropped the boy as she underwent the same mechanical ascension in that same elevator. To dam the unpleasantness, I found myself recalling scenes from Yoona’s broken sony: the cobweb streams, gnarled towers, the unnamed wonders. As the elevator slowed, my torso seemed to rise, disorientingly. Mr. Chang announced, “Ground level,” and the doors opened on outside.

I almost envy you. Please, describe xactly what you saw .

Chongmyo Plaza, predawn. Cold! I had never known cold. How vast it seemed, yet the plaza cannot be more than five hundred meters across. Around the feet of the Beloved Chairman, consumers hurried; walkway sweepers droned; taxis buzzed riders; inching fords fumed; crawling trashtrucks churned; thruways, eight lanes wide, lined by sunpoles; ducts rumbling underfoot; neonized logos blaring; sirens, engines, circuitry, new lite of new intensities at new angles.

It must have been overwhelming .

Even the smells were new, after the dinery’s scented airflow. Kimchi, fordfumes, sewage. A running consumer missed me by a centimeter, shouted, “Watch where you’re standin’, you democratin’ clone!” and was gone. My hair stirred in the breath of a giant, invisible fan, and Mr. Chang xplained how the streets funnel the morning wind to high speeds. He steered me across the walkway to a mirrored ford. Three young men admiring the vehicle disappeared as we approached, and the rear door hissed open. The chauffeur ushered me inside and closed the door. I crouched. A bearded passenger slouched in the roomy interior, working on his sony. He xuded authority. Mr. Chang sat in front, and the ford edged into the traffic: I saw Papa Song’s golden arches recede into a hundred other corp logos, and a new city of symbols slid by, most entirely new. When the ford braked, I lost my balance, and the bearded man mumbled that no one would object if I sat down. I apologized for not knowing the right Catechism here and intoned, “My collar is Sonmi 451,” as taught in Orientation. The passenger just rubbed his red eyes and asked Mr. Chang for a weather report. I do not recall what the chauffeur said, only that the fordjams were bad, and the bearded man looking at his rolex and cursing the slowness.

Didn’t you ask where you were being taken?

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? Remember, Archivist, I had never seen an xterior, nor xperienced conveyance: yet there I was, thruwaying Nea So Copros’s second biggest conurb. I was less a cross-zone tourist, more a time traveler from a past century.

The ford cleared the urban canopy near Moon Tower, and I saw my first dawn over the Kangwon-Do Mountains. I cannot describe what I felt. The Immanent Chairman’s one true sun, its molten lite, petro-clouds, His dome of sky. To my further astonishment, the bearded passenger was dozing. Why did the entire conurb not grind to a halt and give praise in the face of such ineluctable beauty?

What else caught your eye?

Oh, the greenness of green: back under the canopy, our ford slowed by a dew garden between squattened buildings. Feathery, fronded, moss drenched, green. In the dinery, the sole samples of green were chlorophyll squares and diners’ clothes, so I assumed it was a precious, rare substance. Therefore, the dew garden and its rainbows sleeving along the fordway astounded me. East, dormblocks lined the thruway, each adorned by the corpocratic flag, until the waysides fell away and we passed over a wide, winding, ordure-brown strip empty of fords. I summoned up courage to ask Mr. Chang what it might be. The passenger answered: “Han River. Sōngsu Bridge.”

I could only ask, what were these things?

“Water, a thruway of water.” Tiredness and disappointment flattened his voice. “Oh, notch up another wasted early morning, Chang.” I was confused by the difference between water in the dinery and the river’s sludge. Mr. Chang indicated the low peak ahead. “Mount Taemosan, Sonmi. Your new home.”

So you were taken to the University straight from Papa Song’s?

To reduce xperimental contamination, yes. The road upzigged thru woodland. Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me. Soon we arrived on the plateau campus. Cuboid buildings clustered: young purebloods paced narrow walkways where litter drifted and lichen yeasted. The ford coasted to a halt under a rain-stained, sun-cracked overhang. Mr. Chang led me into a lobby, leaving the bearded passenger to doze in the ford. Mount Taemosan’s high air tasted clean, but the lobby was grimed and unlit.