Next ninthnite, a young Unanimity postgrad named Hae-Joo Im elevatored to my apartment. Addressing me as Miss Sonmi, he xplained that Professor Mephi had asked him to “come and cheer you up.” Professor Mephi held the power of life and death over his future, he said, so here he was. “That was a joke,” he added, edgily, then he asked if I remembered him.
I did. His black hair was crewcut maroon now, and his eyebrows on-offed where they had been unadorned; but I recognized Boom-Sook’s x-classmate who had brought the news of Wing~027’s death at the hands of Min-Sic. My visitor looked around my living space, enviously. “Well, this beats Boom-Sook Kim’s poky nest, doesn’t it? Big enough to swallow my family’s entire apartment.”
I agreed, the apartment was very spacious indeed. A silence inflated. Hae-Joo Im offered to stay inside the elevator until I wanted him to leave. Once again, I apologized for my lack of social grace and invited him in.
He took his nikes off, saying “No,
Yes, I said and asked why I made him nervous.
I looked like any Sonmi in any old dinery, he answered, but when I opened my mouth I became a doctor of philosophy. The postgrad sat cross-legged on the chaise longue and swung, wonderingly, passing his hand through the magnetic field. He confessed, “A little voice in my head is saying, ‘Remember, this girl—woman, I mean—I mean, person—is a landmark in the history of science. The first stable ascendee! Ascendant, rather. Watch what you say, Im! Make it profound!’ That’s why I’m just, uh, spouting rubbishy nothings.”
I assured him I felt more like a specimen than like a landmark.
Hae-Joo shrugged and told me the professor had said I could use a nite out downtown, and he waved a Soulring. “Unanimity xpenses! Sky’s the limit. So what’s your idea of fun?”
I had no idea of fun.
Well, Hae-Joo probed, what did I do to relax?
I play Go against my sony, I said.
“To
The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve?
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
“Sweet Corpocracy”—Hae-Joo Im puffed—“let’s go downtown and spend some dollars.”
Didn’t he irritate you a little?
Initially, he irritated me a lot, but I reminded myself that he was Professor Mephi’s prescription for my malaise. Also, Hae-Joo had paid me the compliment of referring to me as a “person.” I asked him what he normally did on ninthnites, when not coerced into looking after prize specimens.
He told me with a diplomatic lowered smile how men of Mephi’s stratum never coerce, only imply. He might go to a dinery or bar with classmates or, if he lucked out, go clubbing with a girl. I was not a classmate and not xactly a girl, so he suggested a galleria, to “sample the fruits of Nea So Copros.”
Would he not be embarrassed, I asked, to be seen with a Sonmi? I could wear a hat and wraparounds.
Hae-Joo Im instead proposed a stick-on wizardly beard and a pair of reindeer antlers. I apologized: I had none. The young man smiled, apologized for another stupid joke, and told me to wear whatever I felt comfortable in, assuring me that I would blend in much better downtown than in a lecture hall. A taxi was downstairs, and he would wait for me in the lobby.
Were you nervous about leaving Taemosan?
Slitely, yes. Hae-Joo distracted me by siteseeing talk. He directed the taxi via the Memorial to the Fallen Plutocrats, around Kyong-bokkung Palace, down the Avenue of Nine Thousand AdVs. The driver was a pureblood Indian with a sharp nose for fat fares from xpense accounts. “An ideal nite for Moon Tower, sir,” he happened to mention. “Very clear.” Hae-Joo agreed on the spot. The helter-way ascended the gigantic pyramid, high, high, high above the canopies, above everything xcept the corp monoliths. Have you been up Moon Tower by nite, Archivist?
No, not even by day. We citizens leave the Tower for the tourists, mostly.
You should go. From the 234th story, the conurb was a carpet of xenon and neon and motion and carbdiox and canopies. But for the glass dome, Hae-Joo told me, the wind at this altitude would fling us into orbit, like satellites. He indicated various humpbacks and landmarks: some I had heard of or seen on 3-D, some not. Chongmyo Plaza was hidden behind a monolith, but its dayblue stadium was visible. SeedCorp was the lunar sponsor that nite. The immense lunar projector on far-off Fuji beamed AdV after AdV onto the moon’s face: tomatoes big as babies, creamy cauliflower cubes, holeless lotus roots. Speech bubbles ballooned from Seed-Corp’s logoman’s juicy mouth, guaranteeing that his products were 100 percent genomically modified.
Descending, the elderly taxi driver spoke of his boyhood in a distant conurb called Mumbai, now deadlanded, when the moon was always naked. Hae-Joo said an AdVless moon would freak him out.
Which galleria did you go to?
Wangshimni Orchard: what an encyclopedia of consumables! For hours, I pointed at items for Hae-Joo to identify: bronze masks, instant bird’s nest soup, fabricant toys, golden suzukis, air filters, acidproof skeins, oraculars of the Beloved Chairman and statuettes of the Immanent Chairman, jewel-powder perfumes, pearlsilk scarves, realtime maps, deadland artifacts, programmable violins. A pharmacy: packets of pills for cancer, aids, alzheimers, lead-tox; for corpulence, anorexia, baldness, hairiness, exuberance, glumness, dewdrugs, drugs for overindulgence in dewdrugs. Hour twenty-one chimed, yet we had not advanced beyond a single precinct. How the consumers seethed to buy, buy, buy! Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.
Hae-Joo led me to a stylish cafe platform where he bought a styro of starbuck for himself and an aqua for me. He xplained that under the Enrichment Statutes, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime. I knew this already but did not interrupt. He said his mum feels intimidated by modern gallerias, so Hae-Joo usually works through the quota.
I asked him to tell me how it feels to be in a family.
The postgrad smiled and frowned at the same time. “A necessary drag,” he confided. “Mum’s hobby is collecting minor ailments and drugs to cure them. Dad works at the Ministry of Statistics and sleeps in front of 3-D with his head in a bucket.” Both parents were random conceptions, he confessed, who sold a second child quota to get Hae-Joo genomed properly. This let him aim for his cherished career: to be a Unanimityman had been his ambition since the disneys of his boyhood. Kicking down doors for money looked like a fine life.
His parents must love him very much to make such a sacrifice, I noted. Hae-Joo replied that their pension will come out of his salary. Then he asked, had it not been a seismic shock to be uprooted from Papa Song’s and transplanted into Boom-Sook’s lab? Didn’t I miss the world I had been genomed for? I answered, fabricants are oriented not to miss things.
He probed: Had I not ascended above my orientation?
I said I would have to think about it.
Did you xperience any negative reactions from consumers in the galleria? As a Sonmi outside Papa Song’s, I mean.
No. Many other fabricants were there: porters, domestics, and cleaners, so I did not stand out so much. Then, when Hae-Joo went to the hygiener, a ruby-freckled woman with a teenage complexion but telltale older eyes apologized for disturbing me. “Look, I’m a media fashion scout,” she said, “call me Lily. I’ve been spying on you!” And she giggled. “But that’s what a woman of your flair, your
I was very confused.
