David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Hae-Joo hastened to xplain we were not xpecting the full morph, only cosmetic adapts to fool an Eye or a casual glance. He admitted ninety minutes was a ludicrously short time, hence Lady Heem-Young needed the best of the best. The proud facescaper saw his flattery but was not immune. “It is true,” she boasted, “that nobody, nobody , sees the face within the face as I do.” Madam Ovid angled my jaw, saying she could alter my skin, color, hair, lids, and brows. “Eyes we must dye a pureblood color.” Dimples could be punched in, and my cheekbones muted. She promised to make the best of our eighty-nine precious minutes.

So what happened to Madam Ovid’s artistry? You look like a Sonmi fresh from the wombtank .

Unanimity refaced me for my peaktime courtroom appearances. A star actress must look the part. But I assure you, when I xited the Tiger Lily, buzzing with face-ache, not even Seer Rhee would have known me. My ivory irises were hazeled, my eyes lengthened, my follicles ebonized. Consult the kodaks taken at my arrest if you are curious.

Madam Ovid did not say good-bye. Outside, a golden boy with a red balloon waited by the escalator. We followed him to a busy ford park below the galleria. The boy had disappeared, but the balloon was strung on the wiper of a cross-country vehicle. This we drove down Thruway One for the East Gate One.

East Gate One? The Union leader—Apis—had ordered you west .

Yes, but the leader had also suffixed his orders with “reflect well upon what had been advised,” meaning “invert these orders.” Thus, west meant east, north meant south, “travel in a convoy” meant “travel alone.”

That’s a dangerously simple crypto, it seems to me .

Meticulous brains will overlook the simple. As we sped along the thruway, I asked my companion if Hae-Joo Im was a real name or false. The Unionman responded that no names were real for individuals of his calling. The xitway downcurved to the tollgates, and we slowed to a crawl; ahead, each driver in line reached thru the ford window to Eye his Soul. Enforcers were stopping fords for random questioning, worryingly for us. “One in thirty, approx,” Hae-Joo muttered, “pretty long odds.” Our turn at the scanner came. Hae-Joo placed his index on the Eye; a shrill alarm sounded, and the barrier shot down. Fords around us prevented any hope of escape. Hae-Joo hissed at me: “Keep smiling, act vapid!”

An enforcer strode up, jerking his thumb. “Out.”

Hae-Joo obeyed, grinning boyishly.

The enforcer demanded a name and destination.

“Oh, uh, Ok-Kyun Pyo.” Even Hae-Joo’s voice had changed. “Officer. We’re, uh, driving to a motel in an outer conurb.” Hae-Joo glanced around and did a hand gesture whose lewd meaning I had learned from Boom-Sook and his friends. How far was this motel, the enforcer demanded. Didn’t he know it was already past hour twenty-three?

“Motel BangBangYou’reDead, in Yōju.” Hae-Joo adopted an idiotic, conspiratorial tone. “Snug place, reasonable rates, they’d probably let an enforcer sample the facilities gratis. Only thirty minutes in the fast lane, eastbound xit ten.” He promised we could be there before curfew with time to spare.

“What happened to your index finger?”

“Oh, is that why the Eye blinked?” Hae-Joo did a stage groan and rambled; he had cut it destoning a natural avocado at his aunt’s house; blood everywhere, only stoneless avocados for him from now on, nature was more trouble than it was worth.

The enforcer peered into the ford and ordered me to unhood.

I hoped my fear would come over as coyness.

He asked if my boyfriend talked this much all the time.

I nodded, shyly.

Was that why I never spoke?

“Yes, sir,” I said, sure he would recognize me as a Sonmi, “yes, Officer.”

The enforcer told Hae-Joo girls are obedient and demure until they have you married, then they start yacking and never shut up. “Get going,” he said.

Where did you really curfew that nite? Not a seedy motel?

No. We xited the overway at xit two, then forked onto an unlit country lane. A dike of thorned pines hid an industrial field of a hundred-plus units. So close to curfew, our ford was the only vehicle in motion. We parked and crossed a windy forecourt to a concrete bloc signed HYDRA NURSERY CORP. Hae-Joo’s Soul blinked the rollerdoor open.

Inside was not a horticulture unit but a redlit ark, roofing giant tanks. The air was uncomfortably warm and moist. The tangled, stringy broth I saw through the tanks’ viewing windows concealed their contents, for a moment. Then individual limbs and hands came into focus, nascent, identical faces.

Wombtanks?

Yes. We were in a genomics unit. I watched the clusters of embryo fabricants suspended in uterine gel; I was witnessing my own origin, remember. Some slept, some sucked thumbs, some scurried a hand or foot as if digging or running. I asked Hae-Joo, had I been cultivated in that place? Hae-Joo said no, Papa Song’s nursery in Kwangju is five times bigger. The embryos I was looking at had been designed to labor in uranium tunnels under the Yellow Sea. Their saucerlike eyes were genomed for darkness. In fact, they go insane if xposed to brite unfiltered daylite.

The heat soon had Hae-Joo shiny with sweat. “You must need Soap, Sonmi. Our penthouse is this way.”

A penthouse? In a fabricant nursery?

The Unionman was fond of irony. Our “penthouse” was a niteman’s sparse room, a concrete-walled space containing only a water shower, a single cot, a desk, a stack of chairs, a choked aircon, and a broken ping-pong table. Fat pipes throbbed hot across the ceiling. A sonypanel monitored the wombtanks, and a window overlooked the nursery. Hae-Joo suggested I take a shower now as he could not guarantee one tomorrow nite. He strung up a tarp for privacy and built a bed from chairs for himself while I washed my body. A sac of Soap was waiting on the cot with a set of new clothes.

You didn’t feel vulnerable, sleeping in the middle of nowhere without even knowing Hae-Joo Im’s true name?

I was too toxed. Fabricants stay awake for over twenty hours thanks to Soap, then we drop.

When I woke a few hours later, Hae-Joo was snoring on his cloak. I studied a scab of clotted blood on his cheek, scratched as we fled Taemosan. Pureblood skin is so delicate compared to ours. His eyeballs gyred behind their lids; nothing else in the room moved. He may have said Xi-Li’s name, or perhaps it was just noise. I wondered which “I” he was when he dreamed. Then I blinked my Soul on Hae-Joo’s handsony to learn about my own alias, Yun-Ah Yoo. I was a student genomicist, born Secondmonth 30th in Naju during the Year of the Horse. Father was a Papa Song’s aide; Mother a housewife; no siblings … the data onscrolled for tens of pages, hundreds. The curfew faded away. Hae-Joo woke, massaging his temples. “Ok-Kyun Pyo would love a strong cup of starbuck.”

I decided the time had come to ask the question that had seized me in the disneyarium. Why had Union paid such a crippling price to protect one xperimental fabricant?

“Ah.” Hae-Joo mumbled and picked sleep from his eyes. “Long answer, long journey.”

More evasion?

No. He answered as we drove deeper into the country. I shall précis it for your orison, Archivist. Nea So Copros is poisoning itself to death. Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless, its air toxloaded, its food supplies riddled with rogue genes. The downstrata cannot buy drugs to counter these privations. Melanoma and malaria belts advance northward at forty kilometers per year. Those Production Zones of Africa and Indonesia that supply Consumer Zones are now 60-plus percent uninhabitable. Corpocracy’s legitimacy, its wealth, is drying up. The Juche’s rounds of new Enrichment Statutes are sticking band-aids on hemorrhages and amputations. Corpocracy’s only strategy is that long favored by bankrupt ideologies: denial. Downstrata purebloods fall into untermensch sinks. Xecs merely watch, parroting Catechism Seven: “A Soul’s value is the dollars therein.”