Cloud Atlas

reinforced door; an eyehole blinked, bolts unclacked, and a doorman opened up. The doorman’s bodyarmor was stained dark and his iron bar lethal looking; he grunted at us to wait for Ma Arak Na. I wondered if he wore a fabricant’s collar under his neckplate.

A smoky corridor bent out of view, walled with paper screens. I heard mah-jongg tiles, smelled feet, watched xotically clad pureblood servers carry trays of drinks. Their hassled xpressions morphed to girly delite every time they slid open a paper screen. I copied Hae-Joo’s xample and removed my nikes, dirtied by the Huamdonggil alleyways.

“Well, you wouldn’t be here if the news wasn’t bad.” The speaker addressed us from the ceiling hatch; whether her webbed lips, crescent eyes, and thorny voice were the results of genoming or mutation, I could not guess. Her gem-warted fingers gripped the hatch ridge.

Hae-Joo addressed Ma Arak Na as Madam. A cell had turned cancerous, he updated her, Mephi was under arrest, Xi-Li was dumdummed and killed, so yes, the news could hardly be worse.

Ma Arak Na’s double tongue uncurled and curled once or twice; she asked how far the cancer had spread. The Unionman replied he was here to answer that very question. The madam of the establishment told us to proceed to the parlor without delay.

The parlor?

A gaproom behind a roaring kitchen and a false wall, lit by a weak solar. A cup of ruby lime waited on the rim of a cast-iron brazier that surely predated the building if not the city. We sat on well-worn floor cushions. Hae- Joo sipped the drink and told me to unhood. The planked ceiling thumped and creaked, a hatch flipped open, and Ma Arak Na’s face appeared. She xpressed no surprise at seeing me, a Sonmi. Next, the ancient brazier hummed with xtremely modern circuitry. A sphere of dark sheen and refracted silence xpanded until it filled the parlor, aquifying the kitchen noises. Lastly, a piebald light above the brazier morphed into a carp.

A carp?

A carp, as in the fish. A numinous, pearl-and-tangerine, fungus-blotted, mandarin-whiskered, half-meter-long carp. One lazy slap of its tail propelled the fish toward me. Roots of water lilies parted as it moved. Its ancient eyes read mine; its lateral fins rippled. The carp sank a few centimeters to read my collar, and I heard my name spoken by an old man. Hae-Joo was barely visible through the murky underwater air.

“I am sorely thankful to see you alive”—the 3-D’s transceived voice was cultured but muffled and splintered—“and truly honored to meet you. I am An-Kor Apis of Union.” The fish apologized for the visual dramatics; camouflage was necessary, since Unanimity was combing all transmissions.

I responded that I understood.

An-Kor Apis promised I should understand much more very soon and swung toward Hae-Joo. “Commander Im.”

Hae-Joo bowed, reporting that he had euthanazed Xi-Li.

The senior Unionman said he already knew, that no anesthetic xisted for Hae-Joo’s pain; but that Unanimity had killed Xi-Li, and Hae-Joo had merely spared his brother an ignoble death in a prison cube. Apis then xhorted Hae-Joo to ensure Xi-Li’s sacrifice was not in vain. A short briefing followed: six cells had been compromised and twelve more firebreaked. The “good news” was that Boardman Mephi had managed to suicide before neuro-torture could began. An-Kor Apis then ordered my companion to xit me from Seoul thru West Gate One, to proceed to the northern camp in a convoy, and to reflect well upon what had been advised.

The carp circled, vanishing into the parlor wall before reappearing thru my chest. “You have chosen your friends wisely, Sonmi. Together, we may change corpocratic civilization out of all recognition.” He promised we would meet again soon. The sphere then shrank back into the brazier as the parlor restored itself. The carp became a streak of lite, a dot, finally, nothing at all.

How was Hae-Joo planning to pass thru a city xit without Souls?

The Soul implanter was ushered in just minutes later. A slite, anonymous-looking man, he xamined Hae- Joo’s torn finger with professional disdain. He tweezered the tiny egg from his gelpack, bedded it into fresh tissue, and sprayed cutane over the top. That such an insignificant-looking dot can confer all the rights of consumerdom on its bearers yet condemn the rest of corpocracy to servitude seemed, and seems still, a bizarre obscenity to me. “Your name is Ok-Kyun Pyo,” the implanter told Hae-Joo, adding that any sony would download his fictional history.

The implanter turned to me and produced a pair of laser pliers. They would cut steel but not even scratch living tissue, he assured me. First he removed my collar: I heard a click, felt a tickling as it pulled away, then it was in my hands. That felt odd: as if you were to hold your own umbilical cord, Archivist. “Now for the subcutaneous bar code.” He swabbed anesthetic over my throat, warning me this would hurt, but his tool’s damper would stop the bar code from xploding on contact with air.

“Ingenious.” Hae-Joo peered.

“Of course it’s ingenious,” retorted the implanter. “I designed it myself. Sickening thing is, I can’t patent it.” He had Hae-Joo stand ready with a cloth; a jagged pain tore my throat. As Hae-Joo stanched the bleeding, the implanter showed me the old identity of Sonmi~451, a microchip in a pair of tweezers. He would dispose of it himself, he promised, carefully. He sprayed healant over my wound and applied a skin-tone dressing. “And now,” he continued, “a crime so novel it doesn’t even have a name. The Souling of a fabricant. How is my genius rewarded? A fanfare? A nobel and a university sinecure?”

“A paragraph in the history of the struggle against corpocracy,” said Hae-Joo.

“Wow, thanks, brother,” replied the implanter. “A whole paragraph.” This surgery was swift also. The man laid my right palm on a cloth, sprayed coag and anesthetic onto my index fingerpad, made an incision less than a centimeter, inserted a Soul, and applied cutane. This time his cynicism betrayed a core of sincerity. “May your Soul bring you fortune in your promised land, Sister Yun-Ah Yoo.”

I thanked him. I had all but forgotten Ma Arak Na watching from her ceiling hatch, but now she spoke. “Sister Yoo best get a new face for her new Soul, or some awkward questions’ll crop up between here and the promised land.”

So I suppose your next destination was the facescaper?

It was. The doorman escorted us as far as T’oegyero Street, Huamdonggil’s boundary with its nearest semirespectable neighborhood. We metroed to a once fashionable galleria in Shinch’on and escalatored up thru chiming chandeliers. They took us to a warrenlike precinct on canopy level, frequented only by consumers quite sure of their destination. Twists and turns were lined with discreet entrances and cryptic nameplates; down a dead end, a tiger lily bloomed in a niche by a plain door. “Don’t speak,” Hae-Joo warned me, “this woman’s prickles need cosseting.” He rang the bell.

The tiger lily striped brite; it asked us what we wanted.

Hae-Joo said we had an appointment with Madam Ovid.

The flower flexed to peer at us and told us to wait.

The door slid open. “I am Madam Ovid,” announced a bone-white pureblood. Dewdrugs had frozen her harsh beauty in its mid-twenties, long ago; her voice was a buzz saw. “You have no appointment, whoever you are. This is an upstrata establishment. My biocosmeticians accept only recommendations. Try a ‘maskgrafter’ on one of the lower floors.”

The door shut in our faces.

Hae-Joo cleared his throat and spoke into the tiger lily. “Kindly inform the estimable Madam Ovid that Lady Heem-Young sends her earnest, cordial regards.”

A pause ensued. The tiger lily blushed and asked if we had traveled far.

Hae-Joo completed the code. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

The door opened, but Madam Ovid’s disdain remained. “Who can argue with Lady Heem-Young?” She ordered us to follow, no dawdling. After a minute of curtained corridors tiled with lite-and-sound absorbers, a silent male assistant joined us from thin air, and a door opened into a briter studio. Our voices returned. Tools of the facescaper’s trade gleamed in the sterile solar. Madam Ovid asked me to unhood. Like Madam Ma Arak Na, she did not evince surprise; I doubt a lady of her stratum had ever set foot in a Papa Song dinery. Madam Ovid asked how