Psalm, over and over; background hydraulics underbassed that sickening melody. But how jubilant they sounded! Their Investment was paid off. The voyage to Hawaii was under way, and their new life on Xultation would shortly begin.
You sound as if you still envy them.
Watching them from the hangway, I envied their certainty about the future. After about a minute, an aide at the head of the line ushered the next server through golden arches and the sisters clapped. The lucky Twelvestarred waved back at her friends, then passed thru the arch to be shown to her luxury cabin we had all seen on 3-D. The turnstiles rotated the fabricants one space forward. After watching this process several times, Hae-Joo tapped my foot and signaled for me to crawl along the hangway, thru the flap, into the next chamber.
Weren’t you in danger of being seen?
No. Brite droplites underswung our hangway, so from the noisy holding pen floor, several meters below, we were invisible. Anyway, we were not intruders but technics conducting maintenance work. The next chamber was in fact a small room, no bigger than this prison cube. The singing and din was damped out; its quiet was eerie. A plastic chair stood on a dais; above this chair, suspended from a ceiling monorail, hung a bulky helmet mechanism. Three smiling aides dressed in Papa Song scarlet guided the server onto the chair. One aide xplained that the helmet would remove her collar, as promised by Papa Song in Matins over the years. “Thank you, Aide,” burbled the xcited server. “Oh, thank you!”
The helmet was fitted over the Sonmi’s head and neck. It was at this moment I noticed the odd number of doors into the cell.
“Odd” in what way?
There was only one door: the entrance from the holding pen. How had all the previous servers left? A sharp “clack” from the helmet refocused my attention on the dais below. The server’s head slumped unnaturally. I could see her eyeballs roll back and the cabled spine connecting the helmet mechanism to the monorail stiffen. To my horror, the helmet rose, the server sat upright, then was lifted off her feet into the air. Her corpse seemed to dance a little; her smile of anticipation frozen in death tautened as her facial skin took some of the load. Below, meanwhile, one worker hoovered bloodloss from the plastic chair and another wiped it clean. The monorailed helmet conveyored its cargo parallel to our hangway, through a flap, and disappeared into the next chamber. A new helmet lowered itself over the plastic stool, where the three aides were already seating the next xcited server.
Hae-Joo whispered in my ear. “Those ones you can’t save, Sonmi. They were doomed when they boarded.” In fact, I thought, they were doomed from their wombtanks.
Another helmet clacked its bolt home. This server was a Yoona.
You understand, I have no words for my emotions at that time.
Finally, I managed to obey Hae-Joo and crawl along the hangway thru a soundlock into the next chamber. Here, the helmets conveyed the cadavers into a vast violet-lit vault; the space must have accounted for a quarter of Papa Song’s Ark’s volume. As we entered, the celsius fell sharply and a roar of machines burst our ears. A slaughterhouse production line lay below us, manned by figures wielding scissors, sword saws, and various tools of cutting, stripping, and grinding. The workers were bloodsoaked, from head to toe. I should properly call those workers butchers: they snipped off collars, stripped clothes, shaved follicles, peeled skin, offcut hands and legs, sliced off meat, spooned organs .?.?. drains hoovered the blood .?.?. The noise, you can imagine, Archivist, was deafening.
But .?.?. why would—What would the purpose be of such .?.?. carnage?
The economics of corpocracy. The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied biomatter, for wombtanks, but most of all, for Soap. What cheaper way to supply this protein than by recycling fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally, leftover “reclaimed proteins” are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers in the corp’s dineries all over Nea So Copros. It is a perfect food cycle.
What you describe is beyond the .?.?. conceivable, Sonmi~451. Murdering fabricants to supply dineries with food and Soap .?.?. no. The charge is preposterous, no, it’s unconscionable, no, it’s blasphemy! As an Archivist I can’t deny that you saw what you believe you saw, but as a consumer of the corpocracy, I am impelled to say, what you saw must,
Business is business.
You’ve described not “business” but .?.?. industrialized evil!
You underestimate humanity’s ability to bring such evil into being. Consider. You have seen the 3-Ds, but have you visited a fabricant retirement village, personally? I shall take your silence as a no. Do you know anyone who has visited one, personally? Again, no. Then where do fabricants go after retirement? Not just servers, the hundreds of thousands of fabricants who end their serviceable lives every year. There should be cities full of them by now. But where are these cities?
No crime of such magnitude could take root in Nea So Copros. Even fabricants have carefully defined rights, guaranteed by the Chairman!
Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth
But what about the 3-Ds of Xultation and such? You saw them in the Papa Song’s at Chongmyo Plaza yourself. There’s your proof.
Xultation is a sony-generated simulacrum dijied in Neo Edo. It does not xist in the real Hawaii, or anywhere. Indeed, during my final weeks at Papa Song’s, it seemed that scenes of Xultation repeated themselves. The same Hwa-Soon ran down the same sandy path to the same rock pool. My unascended sisters did not notice, and I doubted myself at the time, but now I had my xplanation.
Your Testimony must stand as you speak it, despite my protests. I—we must progress.?.?.?. How long did you watch this slaughter?
I cannot recall, accurately. Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour. I remember Hae-Joo leading me thru the dining area, numbly. Purebloods played cards, ate noodles, smoked, worked at sonys, joked, engaged in ordinary life. How could they know what happened in the underbelly and just .?.?. sit there, indifferent? As if it were not living fabricants being processed but pickled sardines? Why did their consciences not scream for this obscenity to end? The bearded security guard winked, saying, “Come back soon, honeysuckle.”
In the metro back to the flophouse, as the commuters swayed, I “saw” cadavers on the monorail. Ascending the stairwell, I “saw” them hoisted aloft the xecution room. In his room, Hae-Joo did not switch on the solar; he just raised the shutter a few centimeters to let the lites of Pusan dilute the darkness and poured himself a glass of
I alone, of all my sisters, had seen the true Xultation and lived.
Our sex was joyless, graceless, and necessarily improvised, but it was an act of the living. Stars of sweat on Hae-Joo’s back were his gift to me, and I harvested them on my tongue. After, the young man smoked a nervy marlboro in silence and studied my birthmark, curiously. He fell asleep on my arm, squashing it. I did not wake him; the pain turned to numbness, the numbness to pins and needles, then I squirmed out from under him. I spread a blanket over Hae-Joo; purebloods catch rogue colds in all weathers. The city readied itself for curfew. Its smeary
