No. He answered as we drove deeper into the country. I shall precis 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.”
But what would be the logic in allowing downstrata purebloods to .?.?. end in places like Huamdonggil? As a class? What could replace their labor?
Us. Fabricants. We cost almost nothing to manufacture and have no awkward hankerings for a better, freer life. We conveniently xpire after forty-eight hours without a specialized Soap and so cannot run away. We are perfect organic machinery. Do you still maintain there are no slaves in Nea So Copros?
And how did Union aim to xtract these .?.?. alleged “ills” of our state?
Revolution.
But as the Boardman’s anthem says, Nea So Copros is the world’s only rising sun! Pre-Skirmish East Asia was the same chaos of sickly democracies, democidal autocracies, and rampant deadlands that the rest of the world still is! If the Juche had not unified and cordonized the region, we would have backslid to barbarism with the rest of the globe! How can
All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility.
Well, you seem to have embraced Union propaganda wholeheartedly, Sonmi~451.
And I might observe that you have embraced corpocracy propaganda wholeheartedly, Archivist.
Did your new friends mention xactly
Yes. By engineering the simultaneous ascension of 6 million fabricants.
Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.
How could Union possibly achieve this “simultaneous ascension”?
The battlefield, you see, is neuromolecular. A few hundred Unionmen in wombtank and Soap plants could trigger these vast numbers of ascensions by adding Suleiman’s catalyst into key streams.
What damage could even 10 million—say—ascended fabricants inflict on the most stable state pyramid in the history of civilization?
Who would work factory lines? Process sewage? Feed fish farms? Xtract oil and coal? Stoke reactors? Construct buildings? Serve in dineries? Xtinguish fires? Man the cordon? Fill exxon tanks? Lift, dig, pull, push? Sow, harvest? Now do you begin to see? Purebloods no longer possess these core skills upon which our corpocracy, or any society, rests. The real question is, what damage could 6 million ascensions
Unanimity would maintain order. Enforcers aren’t all Union agents.
Even Yoona~939 chose death over slavery.
And your role in this .?.?. proposed rebellion?
My first role was to provide proof that Suleiman’s ascension catalyst worked. This I had done, and still do, simply by not degenerating. The requisite neurochemicals were being synthesized in underground factories thruout the Twelve Cities.
“Your second role,” Hae-Joo informed me that morning, “would be ambassadorial.” General Apis wished me to act as an interlocutor between Union and the ascending fabricants. To help mobilize them as revolutionaries.
How did you feel about being a figurehead for terrorists?
Trepidation: I was not genomed to alter history, I told my fellow fugitive. Hae-Joo countered that no revolutionary ever was. All Union was asking for now, he urged, was that I did not reject Apis’s proposal out of hand.
Weren’t you curious about Union’s blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?
You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”
We’re circling a contentious core, Sonmi. Let’s return to your journey.
We reached Suanbo Plain around hour eleven, via minor routes. Cropdusters strewed clouds of saffron fertilizer, blanking the horizons. Xposure to EyeSats worried Hae-Joo, so we took a Timber-Corp plantation track. It had rained during the nite, so pools bogged the dirt track and progress was slow, but we saw no other vehicle. The Norfolk pine-rubberwood hybrids were planted in rank and file and created the illusion that trees were marching past our ford in a billion-strong regiment. I got out only once, when Hae-Joo refilled the exxon tank from a can. The plain had been brite, but inside the plantation even noon was dank, hushed dusk. The sole sound was a sterile wind swishing blunted needles. The trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds, so the stagnant air stunk of insecticide.
The forest left as abruptly as it had arrived, and the topography grew hillier. We traveled east, the Woraksan Range to our south and Ch’ungju Lake spreading north. The lake water stunk of effluent from its salmon net ponds. Crosswater hills displayed mighty corp logos. A malachite statue of Prophet Malthus surveyed a dust bowl. Our track underpassed the Ch’ungju-Taegu-Pusan xpress-way Hae-Joo said we could be in Pusan within two hours if he dared join it, but a slow crawl thru backcountry was safer. Our pot-holed but Eyeless road switchbacked up into the Sobaeksan Mountains.
Hae-Joo Im wasn’t trying to get to Pusan in one day?
No. At approx hour seventeen, he hid the ford in an abandoned lumberyard, and we struck out on foot. My first mountain hike fascinated me as much as my first drive thru Seoul. Limestone bulges oozed lichen; fir saplings and mountain ash grew from clefts; clouds scrolled; the breeze was fragrant with natural pollen; once genomed moths spun around our heads, electronlike. Their wings’ logos had mutated over generations into a chance syllabary: a small victory of nature over corpocracy On an xposed rock shelf, Hae-Joo pointed across a gulf. “See him?”
Who? I saw only a rock face.
Keep looking, he said, and from the mountainside emerged the carved features of a cross-legged giant. One slender hand was raised in a gesture of grace. Weaponry and elements had strafed, ravaged, and cracked his features, but his outline was discernible if you knew where to look. I said the giant reminded me of Timothy Cavendish, making Hae-Joo Im smile for the first time in a long while. He said the giant was a deity that offered
