David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Hae-Joo had a Unanimityman’s fondness for campus intrigue. I learned how Taemosan was no united organism but a hillock of warring tribes and interest groups, much like the Juche itself. The Unanimity Faculty maintained a despised dominance. “Secrets are magic bullets,” Hae-Joo was fond of saying. But this dominance also xplains why trainee enforcers have few friends outside the faculty. Girls looking for husbands, Hae-Joo admitted, were attracted to his future status, but males of his own age eschewed getting drunk in his company.

Archivist, my appointment in the Litehouse is approaching. Can we segue to my final nite on campus?

Please do .

A keen passion of Hae-Joo’s was disneys, and one perq of Professor Mephi’s mentorship was access to forbidden items in the security archives.

You mean Union samizdat from the Production Zones?

No. I mean a zone even more forbidden, the past, before the Skirmishes. Disneys were called “movies” in those days. Hae-Joo said the ancients had an artistry that 3-D and Corpocracy had long ob-solesced. As the only disneys I had ever seen were Boom-Sook’s pornsplatters, I was obliged to believe him. On sixthmonth’s final ninthnite, Hae-Joo arrived with a key to a disneyarium on campus, xplaining that a pretty Media student was currying favor with him. He spoke in a theatrical whisper. “I’ve got a disc of, seriously, one of the greatest movies ever made by any director, from any age.”

Namely?

A picaresque entitled The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish , made before the foundation of Nea So Copros, in a long-deadlanded province of the European democracy. Have you ever seen film dating from the early twenty-first century, Archivist?

Sweet Corpocracy, no! An eighth-stratum archivist wouldn’t get such security clearance in his wildest dreams! I’d be fired for even applying, and I’m shocked that even a Unanimity postgrad has access to such deviational material .

Is that so? Well, the Juche’s stance on historical discourse is riddled with inconsistencies. On the one hand, if historical discourse were permitted, the downstrata could access a bank of human xperience that would rival, and sometimes contradict, that taught by Media. On the other hand, corpocracy funds your Ministry of Archivism, dedicated to preserving a historical record for future ages.

Yes, but our xistence is kept from the downstrata .

Xcept from those condemned to the Litehouse.

Be that as it may, future ages will still be corpocratic ones. Corpocracy isn’t just another political system that will come and go—corpocracy is the natural order, in harmony with human nature. But we’re digressing. Why had Hae-Joo Im chosen to show you this Ghastly Ordeal ?

Perhaps Professor Mephi had instructed him. Perhaps Hae-Joo Im had no reason xcept a fondness for the disney. Whatever the reason, I was engrossed. The past is a world both indescribably different from and yet subtly similar to Nea So Copros. People sagged and uglified as they aged in those days: no dewdrugs. Elderly purebloods waited to die in prisons for the senile: no fixed-term life spans, no euthanasium. Dollars circulated as little sheets of paper and the only fabricants were sickly livestock. However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.

I can tell how fascinated you were …

Certainly: the vacant disneyarium was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite captured thru a lens when your grandfather’s grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but disneys enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces: Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say. For fifty minutes, for the first time since my ascension, I forgot myself, utterly, ineluctably.

Only fifty minutes?

Hae-Joo’s handsony purred at a key scene, when the film’s eponymous book thief suffered some sort of seizure; his face, contorted above a plate of peas, froze. A panicky voice buzzed from Hae-Joo’s handsony; “It’s Xi-Li! I’m right outside! Let me in! A crisis!” Hae-Joo pressed the remo-key; a wedge of light slid over the empty seats as the disneyarium door opened. A student ran over, his face shiny with sweat, and saluted Hae-Joo. He delivered news that would unravel my life, again. Specifically, forty or fifty enforcers had stormed the Unanimity Faculty, arrested Professor Mephi, and were searching for us. Their orders were to capture Hae-Joo for interrogation and kill me on sight. Campus xits were manned by armed enforcers.

Do you remember your thoughts on hearing that?

No. I think, I did not think. My companion now xuded a grim authority that I realized had always been there. He glanced at his rolex and asked if Mr. Chang had been captured. Xi-Li, the messenger, reported that Mr. Chang was waiting in the basement ford park. The man I had known as Postgrad Hae-Joo Im, backdropped by a dead actor, playing a character scripted over a century ago, turned to me. “Sonmi 451, I am not xactly who I said I am.”

Old Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’, an’ after I’m died, no sayin’ what that fangy devil won’t try an’ do to me … so gimme some mutton an’ I’ll tell you ’bout our first meetin’. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o’ your burnt wafery off’rin’s …

Adam, my bro, an’ Pa’n’me was trekkin’ back from Honokaa Market on miry roads with a busted cart axle in draggly clothesies. Evenin’ catched us up early, so we tented on the southly bank o’ Sloosha’s Crossin’, ’cos Waipio River was furyin’ with days o’ hard rain an’ swollen by a spring tide. Sloosha’s was friendsome ground tho’ marshy, no un lived in the Waipio Valley ’cept for a mil’yun birds, that’s why we din’t camo our tent or pull cart or nothin’. Pa sent me huntin’ for tinder’n’firewood while he’n’Adam tented up.

Now, I’d got diresome hole-spew that day ’cos I’d ate a gammy dog leg in Honokaa, an’ I was squattin’ in a thicket o’ ironwood trees upgulch when sudd’nwise eyes on me, I felt ’em. “Who’s there?” I called, an’ the mufflin’ ferny swallowed my voice.

Oh, a darky spot you’re in, boy , murmed the mufflin’ ferny.

“Name y’self!” shouted I, tho’ not so loud. “I got my blade, I have!”

Right ’bove my head someun whisped, Name y’self, boy, is it Zachry the Brave or Zachry the Cowardy? Up I looked an’ sure ‘nuff there was Old Georgie cross-leggin’ on a rottin’ ironwood tree, a slywise grinnin’ in his hungry eyes.

“I ain’t’fraid o’ you!” I telled him, tho’ tell-it-true my voice was jus’ a duck fart in a hurrycane. Quakin’ inside I was when Old Georgie jumped off his branch an’ then what happened? He dis’peared in a blurry flurryin’, yay, b’hind me. Nothin’ there … ’cept for a plump lardbird snufflyin’ for grubs, jus’ askin’ for a pluckin’n’a spit! Well, I reck’ned Zachry the Brave’d faced down Old Georgie, yay, he’d gone off huntin’ cowardier vic’tries’n me. I wanted to tell Pa’n’Adam ’bout my eerie adventurin’, but a yarnin’ is more delish with broke-de-mouth grinds, so hushly-hushly up I hoicked my leggin’s an’ I crept up on that meatsome feathery buggah … an’ I dived.