On behalf of my ministry, thank you for agreeing to this final interview. Please remember, this isn’t an interrogation, or a trial. Your version of the truth is the only one that matters.

Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.

… Good. Ordinarily, I begin by asking prisoners to recall their earliest memories to provide a context for corpocratic historians of the future. Fabricants have no earliest memories, Archivist. One twenty-four-hour cycle in Papa Song’s is indistinguishable from any other.

Then why not describe this “cycle”?

If you wish. A server is woken at hour four-thirty by stimulin in the airflow, then yellow-up in our dormroom. After a minute in the hygiener and steamer, we put on fresh uniforms before filing into the restaurant. Our seer and aides gather us around Papa’s Plinth for Matins, we recite the Six Catechisms, then our beloved Logoman appears and delivers his Sermon. At hour five we man our tellers around the Hub, ready for the elevator to bring the new day’s first consumers. For the following nineteen hours we greet diners, input orders, tray food, vend drinks, upstock condiments, wipe tables, and bin garbage. Vespers follows cleaning, then we imbibe one Soapsac in the dormroom. That is the blueprint of every unvarying day.

You have no rests?

Only purebloods are entitled to “rests,” Archivist. For fabricants, “rests” would be an act of time theft. Until curfew at hour zero, every minute must be devoted to the service and enrichment of Papa Song.

Do servers—unascended servers, I mean—never wonder about life outside your dome, or did you believe your dinery was the whole cosmos?

Oh, our intelligence is not so crude that we cannot conceive of an outside. Remember, at Matins, Papa Song shows us pictures of Xultation and Hawaii, and AdV instreams images of a cosmology beyond our servery. Moreover, we know both diners and the food we serve comes from a place not in the dome. But it is true, we rarely wonder about life on the surface. Additionally, Soap contains amnesiads designed to deaden curiosity.

What about your sense of time? Of the future?

Papa Song announces the passing hours to the diners, so I noticed the time of day, dimly, yes. Also we were aware of passing years by annual stars added to our collars, and by the Star Sermon on New Year’s Matins. We had only one long-term future: Xultation.

Could you describe this annual “Star Sermon” ceremony?

After Matins on First Day, Seer Rhee would pin a star on every server’s collar. The elevator then took those lucky Twelvestarred sisters for conveyance to Papa Song’s Ark. For the xiters, it is a momentous occasion: for the remainder, one of acute envy. Later, we saw smiling Sonmis, Yoonas, Ma-Leu-Das, and Hwa-Soons on 3-D as they embarked for Hawaii, arrived at Xultation, and finally were transformed into consumers with Soulrings. Our x-sisters praised Papa Song’s kindnesses and xhorted us to repay our Investment diligently. We marveled at their boutiques, malls, dineries; jade seas, rose skies, wildflowers; lace, cottages, butterflies; though we could not name these marvels.

I’d like to ask about the infamous Yoona939.

I knew Yoona939 better than any fabricant: some purebloods know more of her neurochemical history than me, but perhaps these individuals will be named later. On my awakening at Papa Song’s, Seer Rhee assigned me to Yoona939’s teller. He believed it was aesthetically pleasing to alternate stemtypes around the Hub. Yoona939 was tenstarred that year. She seemed aloof and sullen, so I regretted not being partnered with another Sonmi. However, by my first tenthday I had come to learn her aloofness was in fact watchfulness. Her sullenness hid a subtle dignity. She decifered the orders of drunk customers, and warned me of Seer Rhee’s ill-tempered inspections. In no small part it is thanks to Yoona939 that I have survived as long as I have.

This “subtle dignity” you mention—was it a result of her ascension?

Postgrad Boom-Sook’s research notes were so sparse I cannot be certain when Yoona939’s ascension was triggered, xactly. However, I believe that ascension merely frees what Soap represses, including the xpression of an innate personality possessed by all fabricants.

Popular wisdom has it that fabricants don’t have personalities.

This fallacy is propagated for the comfort of purebloods.

“Comfort”? How do you mean?

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.

Then I stand corrected. When did Yoona939’s deviances—perhaps I should say singularities—first become apparent to you?

Ah, questions of when are difficult to answer in a world without calendars or real windows, twelve floors underground. Perhaps around month six of my first year, I became aware of Yoona939’s irregular speech.

Irregular?

Firstly, she spoke more: during offpeak moments at our teller; as we cleaned the consumers’ hygieners; even as we imbibed Soap in the dormroom. It amused us, even the stiff Ma-Leu-Das. Secondly, Yoona’s speech grew more complex as the year aged. Orientation teaches us the lexicon we need for our work, but Soap erases xtra words we acquire later. So to our ears, Yoona’s sentences were filled with noises devoid of meaning. She sounded, in a word, pureblood. Thirdly, Yoona took pleasure in humor: she hummed Papa’s Psalm in absurd variations; in our dormroom, when aides were absent, she mimicked pureblood habits like yawning, sneezing, or burping. Humor is the ovum of dissent, and the Juche should fear it.

In my xperience, fabricants have difficulties threading together an original sentence of five words. How could Yoona939—or you, for that matter—acquire verbal dexterity in such a hermetic world, even with a rising IQ?

An ascending fabricant absorbs language, thirstily, in spite of amnesiads. During my ascension, I was often shocked to hear new words fly from my own mouth, gleaned from consumers, Seer Rhee, AdV, and Papa Song himself. A dinery is not a hermetic world: every prison has jailers and walls. Jailers are ducts and walls conduct.

A more metaphysical question … were you happy, back in those days?

Before my ascension, you mean? If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity, I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy, as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity, or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable. I endured drudgery but enjoy it no more than yourself.

Slaves, you say? Even infant consumers know, the very word slave is abolished throughout Nea So Copros!

Corpocracy is built on slavery, whether or not the word is sanctioned. Archivist, I do not wish to offend you, but is your youth dewdrugged or genuine? I am puzzled. Why has my case been assigned to an apparently inxperienced corpocrat?

No offense taken, Sonmi. I am an xpedience—and yes, an undewdrugged xpedience, I am still in my twenties. The xecs at the Ministry of Unanimity insisted that you, as a heretic, had nothing to offer corpocracy’s archives but sedition and blasphemy. Genomicists, for whom you are a holy grail, as you know, pulled levers on the Juche to have Rule 54.iii—the right to archivism—enforced against Unanimity’s wishes, but they hadn’t reckoned on senior archivists watching your trial and judging your case too hazardous to risk their reputations—and pensions—on. Now, I’m only eighth-stratum at my uninfluential ministry, but when I petitioned to orison your testimony, approval was granted before I had the chance to come to my senses. My friends told me I was crazy.

So you are gambling your career on this interview?

… That is the truth of the matter, yes.

Your frankness is refreshing after so much duplicity.

A duplicitous archivist wouldn’t be much use to future historians, in my view. Could you tell me a little more about Seer Rhee? His journal weighed heavily against you at your trial. What manner of seer was he?

Poor Seer Rhee was corp man, to the bone, but long past the age when seers are promoted to power. Like many of this dying corpocracy’s purebloods, he clung to the belief that hard work and a blemishless record were enough to achieve status, so he curfewed many nights in the dinery office to impress the corp hierarchy. In sum: a whipman to his fabricants; a sycofant to his upstrata, and courteous to his cuckolds.

His cuckolds?

Yes. Seer Rhee should be understood in the context of his wife. Mrs. Rhee had sold her child quota early in their marriage, made shrewd investments, and used her husband as a dollar-udder. According to his aides’ gossip, she spent most of our seer’s salary on facescaping. Certainly, her seventy-plus years could pass for thirty. Mrs. Rhee visited the dinery from time to time to inspect the latest male aides, gossip added. Any who spurned her advances could xpect a posting to bleakest Manchuria. But why she never used her apparent corp influence to advance Seer Rhee’s career is a mystery I will not now live to see solved.

Yoona939’s notoriety must have threatened the seer’s “blemishless record” severely, wouldn’t you agree?

Certainly. A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scapegoat. When Seer Rhee noticed Yoona’s deviations from Catechism, he bypassed destarring and requested a corp medic to xamine her for reorientation. This tactical mistake xplains the seer’s lackluster career. Yoona939 performed as genomed, and the visiting medic gave her a clean bill. Seer Rhee was thenceforth unable to discipline Yoona without implying criticism of a senior corp medic.

When did Yoona939 first attempt to make you complicit in her crimes?

I suppose the first time was when she xplained a newfound word, secret, one slow hour at the teller. The idea of knowing information no one else, not even Papa Song, knew was beyond my grasp, so as we lay in our cots my teller-sister promised to show me what she could not xplain.

When I next woke it was not to the glare of yellow-up but to Yoona, shaking me, in the near-dark. Our sisters lay dorming, immobile but for minute spasms. Yoona ordered me, like a seer, to follow her. I protested, I was afraid. She told me not to be, she wished to show me the meaning of secret, and led me into the dome. Its unfamiliar silence fritened me further: its beloved reds and yellows were eerie grays and browns in the curfew lite. Seer Rhee’s office door leaked thin lite. Yoona pushed it open.

Our seer lay slumped on his desk. Drool glued his chin to his sony, his eyelids remmed, and a gurgle was trapped in his throat. Every tenthnite, Yoona told me, he would imbibe Soap and sleep thru to yellow-up. As you know, Soap affects purebloods more powerfully than us, and my sister kicked his unresponding body to prove the point. Yoona found my horror at this blasphemy merely amusing. “Do what you like to him,” I remember her telling me. “He has lived with fabricants for so long he is very nearly one of us.” Then she told me she would show me a greater secret still. Yoona xtracted Rhee’s keys from his pocket and led me to the dome’s north quarter. Between the elevator and the northeast hygiener, she told me to xamine the wall. I saw nothing. “Look again,” Yoona urged, “look properly.” This time I saw a speck, a tiny crack. Yoona inserted a key, and a rectangle in the dome wall swung inward. The dusty darkness gave no clue. Yoona took my hand; I hesitated. If wandering around the dinery during curfew was not a destarrable offense, entering unknown doorways surely was. But my sister’s will was stronger than mine. She pulled me through, shut the door behind us, and whispered, “Now, dear sister Sonmi, you are inside a secret.”

A white blade sliced the black: a miraculous moving knife that gave form to the stuffy nothing. I discerned a narrow storeroom, crammed with stacked seats, plastic plants, coats, fans, hats, a burnt-out sun, many umbrellas; Yoona’s face, my hands. My heart beat fast. What is that knife? I asked. “Only lite, from a flashlite,” answered Yoona. I asked, Is lite alive? Yoona answered, “Perhaps lite is life, sister.” A consumer had left the flashlite on a seat in our quarter, she xplained, but instead of giving it to our aide, Yoona had hidden it here. This confession shocked me most of all, in a way.

How so?

Catechism Three teaches that for servers to keep anything denies Papa Song’s love for us and cheats His Investment. I wondered, did Yoona939 still observe any Catechism? But misgivings, though grave, were soon lost in the treasures Yoona showed me there: a box of unpaired earrings, beads, tiaras. The xquisite sensation of dressing in pureblood clothes overcame my fear of being discovered. Greatest of all, however, was a book, a picture book.

Not many of those around these days.

Indeed not. Yoona mistook it for a broken sony which showed the world outside. You must imagine our awe as we looked at the grimy server serving three ugly sisters; seven stunted fabricants carrying bizarre cutlery behind a shining girl; a house built of candy. Castles, mirrors, dragons. Remember, I was ignorant of these words as a server, as I was the majority of words I employ in this Testimony. Yoona told me AdV and 3-D show only a dull portion of the world beyond the elevator: its full xtent encompassed wonders even beyond Xultation. So many strangenesses in one curfew toxed my head. My sister said we must get back to our cots before yellow-up but promised to take me back inside her secret, next time.

How many “next times” were there?

Ten, or fifteen, approx. In time, it was only during these visits to her secret room that Yoona939 became her animated self. Leafing through her book of outside, she voiced doubts that shook even my own love of Papa Song and faith in corpocracy to the core.

What shapes did these doubts take?

Questions: How could Papa Song stand on His Plinth in Chongmyo Plaza Servery and stroll Xultation’s beaches with our Souled sisters simultaneously? Why were fabricants born into debt but purebloods not? Who decided Papa Song’s Investment took twelve years to repay? Why not eleven? Six? One?

How did you respond to such blasphemous hubris?

I begged Yoona to stop, or at least to fake normalcy in the dinery: I was a well-orientated server in those days, you see, not the evildoer, the threat to civilization, I am now. Moreover, I was scared of being destarred for failing to judas Yoona to Seer Rhee. I prayed to Papa Song to heal my friend, but her deviances became more blatant, not less. Yoona watched AdV openly as she wiped tables. Our sisters sensed her crimes and avoided her. One nite, Yoona told me that she wanted to xit the dinery and never come back. She told me I should xit too: that purebloods force fabricants to work in domes so they can enjoy the beautiful places her book showed, her “broken sony,” without sharing them. In response, I recited Catechism Six, I told her I could never commit such a wicked deviance against Papa Song and His Investment. Yoona939 reacted angrily. Yes, Archivist, an angry fabricant. She called me a fool and coward, she said I was no better than those other clones.

Two un-Souled fabricants, fleeing their corp, unaided? Unanimity would round you up in five minutes.

But how could Yoona know that? Her “broken sony” promised a world of lost forests, folded mountains, and labyrinthine hiding places. To mistake a book of fairy tales for Nea So Copros may seem laughable to you, a pureblood, but perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility. Ascension creates a hunger sharp enough to consume the subject’s sanity, in time. In consumers, this state is termed chronic depression. Yoona had sunk to this same condition by my first winter, when diners brushed snow off their nikes and we had to mop the floors regularly. By then she had ceased communicating with me, so her isolation was total.

Are you saying mental illness triggered the Yoona939 Atrocity?

I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.

Would you describe the events of that New Year’s Eve from your vantage point?

I was wiping tables on my quarter’s raised rim, so I had a clear view of the east. Ma-Leu-Da108 and Yoona939 were manning our busy teller. A children’s party was in progress. Balloons, streamers, and hats obscured the area around the elevator. Popsongs and noise of five hundred–plus diners reverbed round the dome. Papa Song was boomeranging 3-D fire-eclairs over the children’s heads: they passed thru their fingers and fluttered back to land on our Logoman’s snaky tongue. I saw Yoona939 leave our teller, the precise moment you understand, and I knew something terrible was going to happen.

She hadn’t told you of her escape plan?

As I said, she had ceased to acknowledge my xistence. But I do not believe she had a plan: I believe she merely “snapped,” in pureblood terms. My sister proceeded, unhurriedly, out of our quarter, toward the elevator. She was timing her approach. The aides were too busy to notice her: Seer Rhee was in his office. Few diners noticed, or looked up from their sonys or AdV, and why should they? When Yoona scooped up a boy in a sailor suit and headed for the elevator, the purebloods who saw merely assumed she was a fabricant maid ordered by her mistress to take her charge home.

Media reported that Yoona939 stole the child to employ as a pureblood shield on the surface.

Media reported the “atrocity” xactly as Unanimity directed. Yoona carried the boy into the elevator because somehow she had learned of that basic precaution corps take: elevators do not function without a Soul onboard. The risk of being noticed aboard an elevator full of consumers was too high, so Yoona believed her best hope lay in borrowing a child and using his Soul to make an otherwise-empty elevator convey her to freedom.

You sound very sure of your thesis.

If my xperiences do not give me the right to be sure, whose do? The events that followed, I need not recount.

Nonetheless, please describe the Yoona939 Atrocity, as you saw it.

Very well. The child’s mother saw her son in Yoona’s arms as the elevator doors closed. She screamed: “A clone’s taken my boy!” A chain reaction of hysteria began. Trays were flung, shakes spilled, sonys dropped. Some diners believed the earthquake cushioning had malfunctioned and dived under the tables. An off-duty enforcer unholstered his colt, waded into the heart of the turmoil, and bellowed for order. He fired a sonicshot, ill-advisedly in a sealed space, causing many to believe terrorists were firing on consumers. I remember seeing Seer Rhee emerge from his office, slip on a spilled drink, and vanish under a swell of customers now stampeding for the elevator. Many were injured in this crush. Aide Cho was yelling into his handsony: I could not hear what. Rumors ricocheted around the dome: a Yoona had kidnapped a boy, no, a baby; no, a pureblood had kidnapped a Yoona; an enforcer had shot a boy; no, a fabricant had hit the seer whose nose was bleeding. All the while, Papa Song surfed noodle waves on His Plinth. Then someone shouted that the elevator was descending, and silence seized the dinery as quickly as panic had less than a minute before. The enforcer shouted for space, crouched, and aimed at the doors. The crush of consumers cleared in an instant. The elevator reached the dinery, and its doors opened.

The boy was quivering, balled into one corner. His sailor suit was no longer white. Perhaps my last memory in the Litehouse will be Yoona939’s body, turned into a pulp of bullet holes.

That image is burned into every pureblood memory, too, Sonmi. When I got home that nite my dormmates were glued to the sony. Half of Nea So Copros’s New Year Festivities were canceled, the other half was decidedly muted. Media alternated footage from the in-dinery nikon with the Chongmyo Plaza public order nikon, showing the passing enforcer neutralize Yoona939. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. We were sure a Union terrorist had facescaped herself to look like a server, for twisted propaganda purposes. When Unanimity confirmed the fabricant was a genuine Yoona … we … I …

You felt the corpocratic world order had changed, irrevocably. You vowed never to trust any fabricant. You knew that Abolitionism was as dangerous and insidious a dogma as Unionism. You supported the resultant Homeland Laws dictated by the Beloved Chairman, wholeheartedly.

All of those, yes. What happened down in your dinery, meanwhile?

Unanimity arrived in force to blip every diner’s Soul and to nikon eyewitnesses’ accounts as the dome was evacuated. We cleaned the dinery and imbibed Soap without Vespers. The following yellow-up, my sisters’ memories of Yoona939’s killing remained largely intact. That Matins, instead of the customary Starring Ceremony, Papa Song delivered His Anti-Union Sermon.

I still find it incredible that a Logoman told his fabricants about Union.

Such was the shock, the panic. Doubtless the Sermon’s primary goal was to show Media that the Papa Song Corp had a damage control strategy in place. Papa Song’s upstrata lexicon that Matins supports this theory. It was quite a performance.

Would you recount what you remember for my orison?

Our Logoman’s head filled half the dome, so we seemed to stand inside his mind. His clownish xpression was heavy with grief and rage, and his clown’s voice rang with despair. The Hwa-Soons trembled, the aides looked awed, and Seer Rhee was pasty and sick. Papa Song told us a gas called evil xists in the world; purebloods called terrorists breathe in this evil, and this gas makes them hate all that is free, orderly, good, and corpocratic; a group of terrorists called Union had caused yesterday’s atrocity by infecting one of our own sisters, Yoona939 of the Chongmyo Plaza Dinery, with evil; instead of judasing Union, Yoona939 had let the evil take her into temptation and deviance; and were it not for the dedication of Unanimity, with whom Papa Song Corp has always fully cooperated, a consumer’s innocent son would now be dead. The boy had survived, but diners’ trust in our beloved corp had been wounded, grievously. The challenge before us, Papa Song concluded, was to work harder than ever to earn back that trust.

Therefore: we must be vigilant against evil, every minute of every day. This new Catechism was more important than all others. If we obeyed, our Papa would love us forever. If we failed to obey, Papa would zerostar us year after year and we would never get to Xultation. Did we understand?

My sisters’ understanding would have been hazy, at best; our Logoman had used many words we did not know. Nevertheless, cries of “Yes, Papa Song!” echoed around the Plinth.

“I cannot hear you!” our Logoman xhorted us.

“Yes, Papa Song!” every server in every dinery in corpocracy shouted, “Yes, Papa Song!”

As I said, quite a performance.

You said in your trial that Yoona939 couldn’t have been a Union member. Do you still maintain that position?

Yes. How and when could Union recruit her? Why would a Unionman risk the xposure? Of what worth was a genomed server to a terrorist ring?

I’m puzzled. If amnesiads in Soap “nullify” memory, how come you can recall the events of that time with such precision and clarity?

Because my own ascension had already begun. Even to a thoroughbred imbecile like Boom-Sook, the degradation of Yoona939’s neurochemical stability was obvious, so another guinea pig was being prepared. The amnesiads in my Soapsac were reduced, accordingly, and ascension catalysts instreamed.

So … after the Sermon, New Year’s Day was business as usual?

Business, yes; usual, no. The Starring Ceremony was perfunctory. Two Twelvestarreds were escorted into the elevator by Aide Ahn. These were replaced by two Kyelims. Yoona939 was replaced by a new Yoona. Seer Rhee inserted our new stars into our collars in grave silence; applause was deemed inappropriate. Soon after, Media streamed in, flashing nikons and besieging the office. Our seer could get them out only by first letting them nikon the new Yoona lying in the elevator with a 939 sticker on her collar, covered in tomato sauce. Later, Unanimity medics xamined each of us in turn. I was fritened of incriminating myself, but only my birthmark provoked any passing comment.

Your birthmark? I didn’t know fabricants have birthmarks.

We do not, so mine always caused me embarrassment in the steamer. Ma-Leu-Da108 called it “Sonmi451’s stain.”

Would you show it to my orison, just as a curio?

If you wish. Here, between my collarbone and shoulder blade.

Xtraordinary. It looks like a comet, don’t you think?

Hae-Joo Im made xactly the same remark, curiously.

Huh, well, coincidences happen. Did Seer Rhee retain his position?

Yes, but it brought the unlucky man little solace. He reminded his corp xecs how he had “smelled deviance” on Yoona939 months before, thus passing blame to the medic who xamined her. Chongmyo Plaza profits soon returned to average levels: purebloods have short memories where their stomachs are concerned. Kyelim689 and Kyelim889 were a further attraction: as a newly created stemtype, they drew queues of fabricant spotters.

And it was around this time that you grew aware of your own ascension?

Correct. You wish me to describe the xperience? It mirrored Yoona939’s, I now recognize. Firstly, a voice spoke in my head. It alarmed me greatly, until I learned that no one else could hear this voice, known to purebloods as “sentience.” Secondly, my language evolved: for xample, if I meant to say good, my mouth substituted a finer-tuned word such as favorable, pleasing, or correct. In a climate when purebloods thruout the Twelve Cities were reporting fabricant deviations at the rate of thousands a week, this was a dangerous development, and I sought to curtail it. Thirdly, my curiosity about all things grew acute: the “hunger” Yoona939 had spoken of. I eavesdropped diners’ sonys, AdV, Boardmen’s speeches, anything, to learn. I, too, yearned to see where the elevator led. Nor did the fact that two fabricants, working side by side on the same teller in the same dinery, both xperienced these radical mental changes evade me. Lastly, my sense of alienation grew. Amongst my sisters I alone understood our xistence’s futility and drudgery. I even woke during curfew, but never entered the secret room, or even dared move until yellow-up. Yoona’s doubts about Papa Song haunted me. Ah, I envied my uncritical, unthinking sisters.

But most of all, I was afraid.

How long did you have to endure that state?

Some months. Until the ninthnite of the last week of fourth-month, specifically. I woke during curfew to a faint sound of breaking glass. My sisters were all dorming: only Seer Rhee was in the dome at such an hour. Time passed. Curiosity defeated my fear, finally, and I opened the dormroom door. Across the dome, our seer’s office was open. Rhee lay in lamplite, face flat against the floor, his chair upended. I crossed the dinery. Blood leaked from his eyes and nostrils, and a used Soapsac was crumpled on the desk. Seer did not have the color of the living.

Rhee was dead? An overdose?

Whatever the official verdict, the office stunk of Soap soporifix. A server usually imbibes three milligrams: Rhee appeared to have taken a quarter-liter sac, so suicide seems a reasonable conclusion. I faced a grand quandary. If I sonyd for a medic, perhaps I could save my seer’s life, but how to xplain my intervention? Healthy fabricants, as you know, never wake during curfew. Bleak as the life of an ascending fabricant was, the prospect of reorientation was bleaker.

You said you envied your unthinking, untroubled sisters.

That is not quite the same as wishing to be one. I returned to my cot.

That decision didn’t cause you any guilt, later?

Not much: Rhee’s decision was his own. But I had a foreboding that the nite’s events were not yet over, and sure enough, when yellow-up came, my sisters stayed in their cots. The air carried no scent of stimulin, and no aide had reported for work. I discerned the sound of a sony being used. Wondering if Seer Rhee had somehow recovered, I left the dormroom and looked into the dome.

A man in a dark suit sat there. He had tubed himself a coffee and watched me watching him across the dinery. He spoke, finally. “Good morning, Sonmi451. I hope you’re feeling better today than Seer Rhee.”

He sounds like an enforcer.

The man introduced himself as Chang, a chauffeur. I apologized: I did not know the word. A chauffeur, the soft-spoken visitor xplained, drives fords for xecs and Boardmen but sometimes serves as a messenger, too. He, Mr. Chang, had a message for me, Sonmi451, from his own seer. This message was in fact a choice. I could leave the dinery now and repay my Investment outside, or else stay where I was, wait for Unanimity and their DNA sniffers to come and investigate the death of Seer Rhee, and be xposed as a Union spy.

Not much of a choice.

No. I had no possessions to pack or farewells to make. In the elevator, Mr. Chang pressed a panel. As the doors closed on my old life, my only life, I could not begin to imagine what waited above me.

My torso squashed my suddenly feeble legs: I was supported by Mr. Chang, who said every inside fabricant xperiences the same nausea, the first time. Yoona939 must have dropped the boy as she underwent the same mechanical ascension in that same elevator. To dam the unpleasantness, I found myself recalling scenes from Yoona’s broken sony: the cobweb streams, gnarled towers, the unnamed wonders. As the elevator slowed, my torso seemed to rise, disorientingly. Mr. Chang announced, “Ground level,” and the doors opened on outside.

I almost envy you. Please, describe xactly what you saw.

Chongmyo Plaza, predawn. Cold! I had never known cold. How vast it seemed, yet the plaza cannot be more than five hundred meters across. Around the feet of the Beloved Chairman, consumers hurried; walkway sweepers droned; taxis buzzed riders; inching fords fumed; crawling trashtrucks churned; thruways, eight lanes wide, lined by sunpoles; ducts rumbling underfoot; neonized logos blaring; sirens, engines, circuitry, new lite of new intensities at new angles.

It must have been overwhelming.

Even the smells were new, after the dinery’s scented airflow. Kimchi, fordfumes, sewage. A running consumer missed me by a centimeter, shouted, “Watch where you’re standin’, you democratin’ clone!” and was gone. My hair stirred in the breath of a giant, invisible fan, and Mr. Chang xplained how the streets funnel the morning wind to high speeds. He steered me across the walkway to a mirrored ford. Three young men admiring the vehicle disappeared as we approached, and the rear door hissed open. The chauffeur ushered me inside and closed the door. I crouched. A bearded passenger slouched in the roomy interior, working on his sony. He xuded authority. Mr. Chang sat in front, and the ford edged into the traffic: I saw Papa Song’s golden arches recede into a hundred other corp logos, and a new city of symbols slid by, most entirely new. When the ford braked, I lost my balance, and the bearded man mumbled that no one would object if I sat down. I apologized for not knowing the right Catechism here and intoned, “My collar is Sonmi451,” as taught in Orientation. The passenger just rubbed his red eyes and asked Mr. Chang for a weather report. I do not recall what the chauffeur said, only that the fordjams were bad, and the bearded man looking at his rolex and cursing the slowness.

Didn’t you ask where you were being taken?

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? Remember, Archivist, I had never seen an xterior, nor xperienced conveyance: yet there I was, thruwaying Nea So Copros’s second biggest conurb. I was less a cross-zone tourist, more a time traveler from a past century.

The ford cleared the urban canopy near Moon Tower, and I saw my first dawn over the Kangwon-Do Mountains. I cannot describe what I felt. The Immanent Chairman’s one true sun, its molten lite, petro-clouds, His dome of sky. To my further astonishment, the bearded passenger was dozing. Why did the entire conurb not grind to a halt and give praise in the face of such ineluctable beauty?

What else caught your eye?

Oh, the greenness of green: back under the canopy, our ford slowed by a dew garden between squattened buildings. Feathery, fronded, moss drenched, green. In the dinery, the sole samples of green were chlorophyll squares and diners’ clothes, so I assumed it was a precious, rare substance. Therefore, the dew garden and its rainbows sleeving along the fordway astounded me. East, dormblocks lined the thruway, each adorned by the corpocratic flag, until the waysides fell away and we passed over a wide, winding, ordure-brown strip empty of fords. I summoned up courage to ask Mr. Chang what it might be. The passenger answered: “Han River. Sōngsu Bridge.”

I could only ask, what were these things?

“Water, a thruway of water.” Tiredness and disappointment flattened his voice. “Oh, notch up another wasted early morning, Chang.” I was confused by the difference between water in the dinery and the river’s sludge. Mr. Chang indicated the low peak ahead. “Mount Taemosan, Sonmi. Your new home.”

So you were taken to the University straight from Papa Song’s?

To reduce xperimental contamination, yes. The road upzigged thru woodland. Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me. Soon we arrived on the plateau campus. Cuboid buildings clustered: young purebloods paced narrow walkways where litter drifted and lichen yeasted. The ford coasted to a halt under a rain-stained, sun-cracked overhang. Mr. Chang led me into a lobby, leaving the bearded passenger to doze in the ford. Mount Taemosan’s high air tasted clean, but the lobby was grimed and unlit.

We paused at the foot of a double-helix staircase. This is an old-style elevator, Mr. Chang xplained. “The university xercises students’ bodies as well as their minds.” So I battled gravity for the first time, step by step, grasping the handrail. Two students descended the down-helix, laughing at my clumsiness. One commented, “That specimen won’t be making a bid for freedom anytime soon.” Mr. Chang warned me not to look over my shoulder; I did so, foolishly, and vertigo tipped me over. Had my guide not caught me, I would have fallen.

It took several minutes to ascend to the sixth floor, the topmost. Here, a slitted corridor ended at a door, slitely ajar, name-plated BOOM-SOOK KIM. Mr. Chang knocked, but no answer came.

“Wait in here for Mr. Kim,” the chauffeur told me. “Obey him as a seer.” I entered and turned to ask Mr. Chang what work I should do, but the chauffeur had gone. I was quite alone for the first time in my life.

What did you think of your new quarters?

Dirty. Our dinery, you see, was always spotless: the Catechisms preach cleanliness. Boom-Sook Kim’s lab was, in contrast, a long gallery, rancid with pureblood male odor. Bins overflowed; a crossbow target hung by the door; the walls were lined with lab benches, buried desks, obsolete sonys, and sagging bookshelves. A framed kodak of a smiling boy and a dead, bloodied snow leopard hung over the only desk to show evidence of use. A filthy window overlooked a neglected courtyard where a mottled figure stood on a Plinth. I wondered if he was my new Logoman, but he never stirred.

In a cramped anteroom I found a cot, a hygiener, and a sort of portable steam cleaner. When was I to use it? What Catechisms governed my life in this place? A fly buzzed lazy figures of eight. So ignorant was I of outside, I even wondered if the fly might be an aide and introduced myself to it.

Had you never seen insects before?

Only rogue-gened roaches and dead ones: Papa Song’s aircon inflows insecticide, so if any enter via the elevator, they die, instantly. The fly hit the window, over and over. I did not then know windows open; indeed, I did not know what a window was.

Then I heard off-key singing; a popsong about Phnom Penh Girls. Moments later a student in beach shorts, sandals, and silk weighed down by shoulder bags, kickboxed the door open. Upon seeing me he groaned, “What in the name of Holy Corpocracy are you doing here?”

I bared my collar. “Sonmi451, sir. Papa Song’s server from—”

“Shut up, shut up, I know what you are!” The young man had a froggish mouth and the hurt eyes then in vogue. “But you’re not supposed to be here until fifthday! If those registry dildos xpect me to cancel a five-star Taiwanese conference just because they can’t read calendars, well, sorry, they can suck maggots in an ebola pit. I only came in to pick up my worksony and discs. I’m not babysitting any xperimental clone still in uniform when I could be sinning myself sticky in Taipei.”

The fly hit the window again; the student picked up a pamphlet and pushed past me. The whack made me jump. He inspected the smear with a laugh of triumph. “Let that be a warning to you! Nobody double-crosses Boom-Sook Kim! Now. Don’t touch anything, don’t go anywhere. Soap’s in the boxfridge—thank Chairman they delivered your feed early. I’ll be back late on sixthday. If I don’t leave for the aeroport now I’ll miss my flite.” He went, then reappeared in the doorway. “You can talk, can’t you?”

I nodded.

“Thank Chairman! Fact—for every moronity, there’s ten registry clone-bones somewhere committing it as we speak.”

What … were you supposed to do for the next three days?

Xcept watch the rolex hand erode the hours, I had no idea. It was no major hardship: servers are genomed for grueling nineteen-hour workdays. I passed idle hours wondering if Mrs. Rhee was a grieving widow or a glad one. Would Aide Ahn or Aide Cho be promoted to Chongmyo Plaza seer? Already, the dinery seemed impossibly distant. From the courtyard I heard pins and needles of sound, from shrubs mobbing the Plinth. Thus I first encountered birds. An aero overflew, and many hundreds of swallows poured upstream. For whom did they sing? Their Logoman? The Beloved Chairman?

The sky curfewed, and the room darkened for my first nite on the surface. I felt lonely, but nothing worse. Windows across the courtyard yellowed-up, showing labs like Boom-Sook’s, housing young purebloods; neater offices, occupied by professors; busy corridors, vacant ones. I did not see a single fabricant.

At midnite I felt toxed and imbibed a sac of Soap, lay in the cot, and wished Yoona939 was there to make sense of the day’s legion mysteries.

Did your second day outside provide any answers?

Some: but yet more surprises. The first stood across the anteroom from my cot as I awoke. A pylonic man, over three meters tall and dressed in an orange zipsuit, was studying the bookshelves. His face, neck, and hands were scalded red, burnt black, and patched pale, but he did not seem to suffer pain. His collar confirmed he was a fabricant, but I could not guess his stemtype: lips genomed out, ears protected by hornvalves, and a voice deeper than any I heard before or since. “No stimulin here. You wake when you wake. Especially if your postgrad is as lazy as Boom-Sook Kim. Xec postgrads are the worst. They have their asses wiped for them. From kindergarten to euthanasium.” With a giant, two-thumbed hand, he indicated a blue zipsuit half the size of his. “For you, little sister.” As I changed from my Papa Song’s uniform into my new garment, I asked if he had been sent by a seer. “No seers, either,” said the burnt giant. “Your postgrad and mine are friends. Boom-Sook called yesterday. Complained about your unxpected delivery. I wished to visit you pre-curfew. But Genome Surgery postgrads work late. Unlike slackers here in Psychogenomics. I’m Wing027. Let’s find out why you’re here.”

Wing027 sat on Boom-Sook’s desk and switched on the sony, ignoring my protests that my postgrad had forbidden me to touch it. Wing clicked the screenboard; Yoona939 appeared. Wing trailed his finger along the rows of words. “Let’s pray to the Immanent Chairman … Boom-Sook doesn’t make that error again …”

I asked Wing, could he read?

Wing said if a randomly assembled pureblood can read, a well-designed fabricant should learn with ease. Soon a Sonmi appeared on the sony: my collar, 451, circled her neck. “Here,” said Wing and read, slowly; In-Dormroom Cerebral Upsizing the Service Fabricant: A Feasibility Case Study on Sonmí-451 by Boom-Sook Kim. “Why,” Wing muttered, “is a no-brainer xec postgrad aiming so high?”

What sort of fabricant was Wing-027? A militiaman?

No, a disasterman. He boasted he could operate in deadlands so infected or radioactive that purebloods perish there like bacteria in bleach; that his brain had only minor genomic refinements; and that disastermen’s basic orientation provides a more thoro education than most pureblood universities. Finally, he bared his hideously burnt forearm: “Show me a pureblood who could stand this! My postgrad’s Ph.D. is tissue flameproofing.”

Wing027’s xplanation of deadlands appalled me, but the disasterman anticipated their approach with relish. The day when all Nea So Copros is deadlanded, he told me, will be the day fabricants become the new purebloods. This sounded deviant, and besides, if these deadlands were so widespread in the world, I asked, why had I not seen them from the ford? Wing027 asked me how big I believed the world to be. I was unsure but said I had been driven all the way from Chongmyo Plaza to this mountain, so I must have seen most of it, surely.

The giant told me to follow, but I hesitated: Boom-Sook had ordered me not to leave the room. Wing027 warned me, “Sonmi451, you must create Catechisms of your own,” and slung me over his shoulder, carried me along the slitted corridor, around a tite corner, and up a dusty spiral staircase, where he fisted open a rusty door. Morning sunlite blinded, brisk winds slapped, and airgrit stung my face. The disasterman set me down.

On the roof of the Psychogenomics Faculty, I gripped the railing and gasped; six levels down was a cactus garden, birds hunting insects in the needles; further down the mountain, a ford park, half full; further, a sports track, circummed by a regiment of students; below that, a consumer plaza; beyond that, woods, sloping down to the spilled, charred-and-neon conurb, hi-rises, dormblocks, the Han River, finally mountains lining the aeroscored sunrise. “A big view,” I remember Wing’s soft, burnt voice. “But held against the whole world, Sonmi451, all you see is a chip of stone.”

My mind fumbled with such enormity and dropped it; how could I understand such a limitless world?

Wing replied, I needed intelligence; ascension would provide this. I needed time; Boom-Sook Kim’s idleness would give me time. However, I also needed knowledge.

I asked, How is knowledge found?

“You must learn how to read, little sister,” said Wing027.

So Wing-027, not Hae-Joo Im or Boardman Mephi, mentored you first?

That is not true, strictly. Our second meeting was our final one. The disasterman returned to Boom-Sook’s lab an hour before curfew to give me an “unlost” sony, preloaded with every autodidact module in upstrata corpocracy schooling. He showed me its operation, then warned me never to let a pureblood catch me gathering knowledge, for the sight scares them, and there is nothing a scared pureblood will not do.

By Boom-Sook’s return from Taiwan on sixthday I had mastered the sony’s usage and graduated from virtual elementary school. By sixthmonth I completed xec secondary school. You look skeptical, Archivist, but remember what I said about ascendants’ hunger for information. We are only what we know, and I wished to be much more than I was, sorely.

I didn’t mean to look skeptical, Sonmi. Your mind, speech, your … self, show your dedication to learning. What confuses me is, why did Boom-Sook Kim give you so much time to study? An xec heir, surely, was no covert Abolitionist? What about his Ph.D. xperiments on you?

Boom-Sook Kim’s concerns were not his Ph.D. but drinking, gambling, and his crossbow. His father was an xec at Kwangju Genomics lobbying for a boardmanship on the Juche until his son made such an influential enemy. With such an upstrata father, study was a mere formality.

But how was Boom-Sook planning to graduate?

By paying an academic agent to collate his thesis from the agent’s own sources. A common practice. The ascension neurochemicals were preformulated for him, with yields and conclusions. Boom-Sook himself could not have identified the biomolecular properties of toothpaste. In nine months, my xperimental duties never xceeded cleaning his lab and preparing his tea. Fresh data might cloud those he had bought and risk xposing him as a fraud, you see. So during my postgrad’s long absences, I could study without risk of discovery.

Wasn’t Boom-Sook Kim’s tutor aware of this outrageous plagiarism?

Professors who value tenure do not muckrake the sons of future Juche Boardmen.

Did Boom-Sook never even talk to you … interact with you, in any way?

He addressed me like purebloods speak to a cat. It amused him to pose me questions he fancied were incomprehensible. “Hey, 451, is it worth azuring my teeth, d’you reckon, or is sapphire just a passing fad this season?” He did not xpect cogent answers: I did not disabuse his xpectations. My reply became so habitual, Boom-Sook nicknamed me I-Do-Not-Know-Sir451.

So for nine months nobody observed your skyrocketing sentience?

So I believed. Boom-Sook Kim’s only regular visitors were Min-Sic and Fang. Fang’s real name was never used in my hearing. They bragged about their new suzukis and played poker, and paid no attention to fabricants outside Huamdonggil comfort hives. Gil-Su Noon, Boom-Sook’s neighbor, a downstrata postgrad on scholarship aid, banged on the wall to complain about the noise from time to time, but the three xecs banged back louder. I saw him only once or twice.

What is “poker”?

A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars. Fang won thousands of credits from Boom-Sook and Min-Sic’s Souls during their poker sessions. Other times, the three students indulged in drugs, often Soap. On these occasions Boom-Sook told me to get out: when toxed, he complained, clones disturbed him. I would go to the faculty roof, sit in the water tank’s shade, and watch swifts hunt giant gnats until dark, when I knew the three postgrads would be gone. Boom-Sook never bothered to lock his lab, you see.

Why was it that you never met Wing027 again?

One humid afternoon, three weeks after my arrival at Taemosan, a knock on the door distracted Boom-Sook from his facescaper catalog. Unxpected visitors were rare, as I have said. Boom-Sook said, “Enter!” and hid his catalog under Practical Genomics. My postgrad rarely glanced at his texts, unlike me.

A wiry student poked the door open with his toe. “Boom-Boom,” he called my postgrad. Boom-Sook sprang to attention, sat down, then slouched. “Hey, Hae-Joo”—he faked a casual manner—”what’s up?”

The visitor was just passing to say hi, he claimed, but he accepted the offered chair. I learned Hae-Joo Im was Boom-Sook’s x-classmate but had been head-hunted by Taemosan’s Unanimity faculty. Boom-Sook told me to prepare tea while they discussed topics of no importance. As I served the drink, Hae-Joo Im mentioned, “You’ll know about your friend Min-Sic’s appalling afternoon by now?”

Boom-Sook denied Min-Sic was a “friend,” necessarily, then asked why his afternoon was appalling. “His specimen, Wing027, was burnt to bacon.” Min-Sic had mistaken a minus for a plus on the label of a bottle of petro-alkali. My own postgrad smirked, giggled, snorted “Hysterical!” and laughed. Hae-Joo then did an unusual action; he looked at me.

Why is that unusual?

Purebloods see us often but look at us rarely. Much later, Hae-Joo admitted he was curious about my response. Boom-Sook noticed nothing; he speculated about compensation claims by the corp sponsoring Min-Sic’s research. In his own, solo research, Boom-Sook gloated, no one cared if an xperimental fabricant or two “got dropped” along the path of scientific enlitenment.

Did you feel … well, what did you feel? Resentment? Grief?

Fury. I retreated to the anteroom because something about Hae-Joo Im made me cautious, but I had never felt such fury. Yoona939 was worth twenty Boom-Sooks, and Wing027 worth twenty Min-Sics, by any measure. Because of an xec’s carelessness, my only friend on Mount Taemosan was dead, and Boom-Sook viewed this murder as humorous. But fury forges will. That day was the first step to my Declarations, to this prison cube, and to the Litehouse in a few hours.

What happened to you over summer recess?

Boom-Sook should have deposited me in a holding dormroom, but my postgrad was so eager to go hunt fabricant elk on Hokkaido in Eastern Korea that he forgot to do so, or assumed a lesser strata drone would do it for him.

So one summer morning, I woke in a wholly deserted building. No echoes from well-trafficked corridors, no time bell, no announcements; even aircons were turned off. From the roof, the conurb fumed and trafficked as usual, and swarming aeros left vapor streaks across the sky, but the campus was empty of students. Its ford parks were semivacant. Builders were resurfacing the oval square in the hot sun. I checked the sony’s calendar and learned today was the beginning of recess. I bolted the lab’s door and hid myself in the anteroom.

So you never set foot outside Boom-Sook’s lab in five weeks? Not once?

Not once. I dreaded separation from my sony, you see. A security guard tested the lab door every ninthnite. Sometimes I heard Gil-Su Noon in the adjacent lab. Otherwise, nothing. I kept the blind lowered and the solars off at nite. I had enough Soap to last the duration.

But that’s fifty days of unbroken solitary confinement!

Fifty glorious days, Archivist. My mind traveled the length, breadth, and depth of our culture. I devoured the twelve seminals: Jong Il’s Seven Dialects; Prime Chairman’s Founding of Nea So Copros; Admiral Yeng’s History of the Skirmishes; you know the list. Indices in an uncensored Commentaries led me to pre-Skirmish thinkers. The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley; and Washington’s Satires on Democracy.

And you were still Boom-Sook’s thesis specimen—putatively—when he returned for the second semester?

Yes. My first autumn arrived. I made a secret collection of the flame-colored leaves that drifted on the faculty roof. Autumn itself aged, and my leaves lost their colors. Nites became icy; then even daylite hours frosted up. Boom-Sook dozed on the heated ondul most afternoons, watching 3-D. He had lost a lot of dollars in dubious investments over the summer, and since his father was refusing to pay his debts, my postgrad was prone to fits of temper. My only defense against these tantrums was to act void.

Did it snow?

Ah, yes, snow. The first snows fell very late last year, not until twelfth-month. I sensed it before I woke in the semidark. Snowflakes haloed the New Year fairies decorating the courtyard windows: entrancing, Archivist, entrancing. Undergrowth beneath the neglected statue in the courtyard drooped under the weight of snow, and the statue itself assumed a comic majesty. I could watch the snow fall from my previous prison cube, and I miss it here. Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace.

You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi.

Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.

So it must be around now that Dr. Mephi enters the story?

Yes, Sextet Eve. It was snowing that nite, too. Boom-Sook, Min-Sic, and Fang burst in at hour twenty approx, tox-flushed, ice on their nikes. I was in the anteroom and barely had time to hide my sony: I remember I was reading Plato’s Republic. Boom-Sook wore a mortarboard hat, and Min-Sic hugged a basket of mint-scented orchids as big as himself. He threw them at me, saying, “Petals for Spoony, Sponny, Sonmi, whatever its name is …”

Fang rifled the cupboard where Boom-Sook kept his soju and tossed three bottles over his shoulder, complaining that the brands were all dog piss. Min-Sic caught two, but a third smashed on the floor, triggering relapses of laughter. “Clean it up, Cind’rella!” Boom-Sook clapped his hands at me, then pacified Fang by saying he’d open a bottle of the best stuff since Sextet Recess came only once a year.

By the time I had swept up every glass shard, Min-Sic had found a pornslash disney on 3-D. They watched it with xpert relish, bickering over its merits and realism, and drinking the fine soju. Their drunkenness had a recklessness that nite, especially Fang’s. I retreated to the anteroom, from where I heard Gil-Su Noon at the lab door, asking the revelers to be quieter. I spied. Min-Sic mocked Gil-Su’s glasses, asking why his family couldn’t find the dollars to correct his myopia. Boom-Sook told Gil-Su to crawl up his own cock if he wanted peace and quiet when the civilized world was celebrating Sextet. When he had stopped laughing, Fang spoke about getting his father to order a tax inspection on the Noon clan. Gil-Su Noon fumed in the doorway until the three xecs pelted him away with plums and further derision.

Fang seems to have been the ringleader.

He was, yes. He chiseled open the fault lines in the others’ personalities. Doubtless he is currently practicing law in one of the Twelve Capitals with great success. That nite he focused on riling Boom-Sook, by wagging the soju bottle at the kodak of the dead snow leopard and asking how dopey the prey were genomed down for the tourists. Boom-Sook’s pride was inflamed. The only animals he hunted, he retorted, were those with viciousness genomed up. He and his brother had stalked the snow leopard for hours in Kathmandu Valley before the cornered animal leapt for his brother’s throat. Boom-Sook had a single shot. The bolt entered the beast’s eye in midair. Hearing this, Fang and Min-Sic faked awe for a moment, then collapsed in raucous laughter. Min-Sic thumped the floor, saying, “You are so full of shit, Kim!” Fang peered closer at the kodak and remarked that it was poorly dijied.

Boom-Sook inked a face on a synthetic melon, solemnly wrote “Fang” on its brow, and balanced the fruit on a stack of journals by the door. He took his crossbow from his desk, walked to the far-end window, and took aim.

Fang protested: “No-no-no-no-no-no-no!” and objected that a melon would not rip the marksman’s throat out if he missed. There was no pressure to make a clean hit. Fang then beckoned me over to stand by the door.

I saw his intention, but Fang interrupted my appeal, warning that if I did not obey him, he would put Min-Sic in charge of my Soap. Min-Sic’s grin wilted. Fang sank his nails into my arm, led me over, put the mortarboard hat on my head, and placed the melon on the hat. “So, Boom-Sook,” he teased, “reckon you’re such a hot-shit marksman now?”

Boom-Sook’s relationship with Fang was based on rivalry and loathing. He raised his crossbow. I asked my postgrad to please stop. Boom-Sook ordered me not to move a muscle.

The bolt’s steel tip glinted. Dying in one of these boys’ dares would be futile and stupid, but fabricants cannot dictate even the terms of their deaths. A twang and an airwhoosh later, the crossbolt crisped into melon pulp. The fruit rolled off the hat. Min-Sic applauded warmly, hoping to thaw the situation. I was awash with relief.

However, Fang sniffed, “You hardly need laser guidance to hit a huge great melon. Anyway, look”—he held the melon’s remains—”you only just clipped it. Surely a mango is a worthier target for a hunter of your stature.”

Boom-Sook held out his crossbow to Fang, daring him to match his own skill: hit the mango from fifteen paces.

“Done.” Fang took the crossbow. I protested, despairingly, but Boom-Sook told me to shut up. He drew an eye on the mango. Fang counted his paces and loaded the bolt. Min-Sic warned his friends that the paperwork on a dead xperimental specimen was hell. They ignored him. Fang aimed for a long time. His hand trembled, slitely. Suddenly, the mango exploded and juiced the walls. My doubt that my ordeal was over was well founded. Fang blew on the crossbow. “Melon at thirty paces, mango at fifteen. I’ll raise you a … plum, at ten.” He noted a plum was still bigger than a snow leopard’s eye, but added that if Boom-Sook wanted to admit he was indeed, as Min-Sic had said, full of shit and decline the challenge, they would consider the sorry chapter closed, for a whole ten minutes. Boom-Sook just balanced the plum on my head, gravely, and ordered me to hold very, very still. He counted his ten steps, turned, loaded, and took aim. I guessed I had a 50 percent chance of being dead in fifteen seconds. Gil-Su banged on the door again. Go away, I thought at him, No distractions now …

Boom-Sook’s jaw twitched as he cranked back the bow. The banging on the door grew more insistent, just centimeters from my head. Fang blasted obscenities about Gil-Su’s genitals and his mother. Boom-Sook’s knuckles whitened on his crossbow.

My head was whipcracked around: pain sank teeth into my ear. I was aware of the door flying open behind me, then of xpressions of doom on my tormentors’ faces. Lastly, I noticed an older man in the doorway, snow in his beard, out of breath, and thunderously angry.

Boardman Mephi?

Yes, but let us be thoro: Unanimity Professor, architect of the Merican Boat-People Solution, holder of a Nea So Copros Medal for Eminence, monographist on Tu Fu and Li Po; Juche Boardman Aloi Mephi. I paid him little notice at that time, however. Liquid trickled down my neck and spine. When I dabbed my ear, pain seemed to electrocute the left side of my body. My fingers came away shiny and scarlet.

Boom-Sook’s voice wobbled: “Boardman, we—” No help was offered from Fang or Min-Sic. The Boardman pressed a crisp silk handkerchief against my ear, and told me to keep the pressure steady. He took a handsony from an inner pocket. “Mr. Chang?” he spoke into it. “First aid. Hurry, please.” Now I recognized the sleepy passenger who had accompanied me from Chongmyo Plaza eight months before.

Next, my rescuer stared at the postgrads: they dared not meet his gaze. “Well, gentlemen, we have made a very ominous start to the Year of the Snake.” Min-Sic and Fang would be notified by the disciplinary board of major debits, he promised, and dismissed them. Both bowed and hurried out. Min-Sic left his cloak steaming on the ondul but did not return. Boom-Sook looked inconsolable. Boardman Mephi let the postgrad suffer for some seconds before asking, “Are you planning to shoot at me with that thing, too?”

Boom-Sook Kim dropped the crossbow as if it were superheated. The Boardman looked around the messy lab, sniffing at the neck of the soju bottle. The octopoid rapine on 3-D distracted him. Boom-Sook fumbled with the remo, dropped it, picked it up, pressed stop, aimed it the right way, pressed stop. Boardman Mephi spoke, finally. He was now ready to hear Boom-Sook’s xplanation of why he was using his faculty’s xperimental fabricant for crossbow practice.

Yes, I’m curious to hear that, too.

Boom-Sook tried everything: he was inxcusably drunk for Sextet Eve; he had misprioritized, ignored stress symptoms, chosen friends unwisely, gotten overzealous while disciplining his specimen; it was all Fang’s fault. Then even he realized he had better shut up and wait for the ax to fall.

Mr. Chang arrived with a medicube, sprayed my ear, dabbed coag, applied a patch, and gave me my first friendly words since Wing027. Boom-Sook asked if my ear would heal. Boardman Mephi’s abrupt answer was that it was none of Boom-Sook’s business as his doctorate was terminated. The x-postgrad blanked and whitened as he saw his future slide downstrata.

Mr. Chang held my hand and informed me my earlobe was torn off but promised a medic would replace it in the morning. I was too afraid of Boom-Sook’s recriminations to worry about my ear, but Mr. Chang added we would now leave with Boardman Mephi for my new quarters.

That must have been very welcome news.

Yes, xcept for the loss of my sony. How could I bring that along? No feasible plan came to mind. I just nodded, hoping I could retrieve it during Sextet Recess. The spiral stairs took up my attention; descents are more hazardous than ascents. In the lobby, Mr. Chang produced a hooded cloak for me and a pair of icenikes. The boardman complimented Mr. Chang on the latter’s choice of zebraskin design. Mr. Chang answered, zebra skin was de rigueur in Lhasa’s chicest streets this season.

What reason did the Boardman give for your timely rescue?

None, as yet. He told me I was being transferred to the Unanimity Faculty on the western lip of campus and apologized for letting “those three toxed xec tapeworms” play games with my life. The weather had prevented a timelier intervention. I forget what well-oriented, humble reply I gave.

The campus cloisters were festive with Sextet Eve crowds. Mr. Chang taught me to shuffle thru granular ice to gain traction. Snowflakes settled on my eyelashes and nostrils. Snowball fights ceasefired as Professor Mephi approached; combatants bowed. The sense of anonymity afforded by my hood was delicious. Passing thru cloisters, I heard music. Not AdV or popsong but naked, echoing waves of music. “A choir,” Boardman Mephi told me. “Corpocratic sapiens can be callous, petty, and malign,” he said, “but higher things, too, thank Chairman.” We listened for a minute. Looking up, I felt as if I was rushing upward.

Two enforcers guarding the Unanimity Faculty saluted and took our damp cloaks. This building’s interior was as opulent as the Psychogenomics Faculty had been spartan. Carpeted corridors were lined with Iljongian mirrors, urns of the Kings of Scilla, 3-Ds of Unanimity notables. The elevator had a chandelier; its voice recited corpocratic Catechisms, but Boardman Mephi told it to shut up, and to my surprise, it did. Once again, Mr. Chang held me steady as the elevator sped, then slowed.

We xited into a spacious, sunken apartment from an upstrata lifestyle AdV. A 3-D fire danced in the central hearth, surrounded by hovering maglev furniture. Glass walls afforded a dizzying view of the conurb by nite, obscured by the haze-brite snowfall. Paintings took up the inner walls. I asked Mephi if this was his office.

“My office is one story up,” he replied. “These are your quarters.”

Before I could even xpress surprise, Mr. Chang suggested I invite my distinguished guest to sit down. I begged Boardman Mephi’s pardon: I had never had a guest before, and my manners lacked polish.

The maglev sofa swung under the distinguished man’s weight. His daughter-in-law, he said, had redesigned my quarters with me in mind. The Rothko canvases, she hoped, I would find meditative. “Molecule-true original originals,” he assured me. “I approved. Rothko paints how the blind see.”

A bewildering evening—crossbolts one moment, art history the next …

Certainly. Next, the professor apologized for failing to recognize the xtent of my ascension on our first meeting. “I assumed you were yet another semi-ascended xperiment, doomed to mental disintegration in a week or two. If memory serves, I even dozed off—Mr. Chang, did I? The truth now.” From his post by the elevator, Mr. Chang recalled that his master had rested his eyes during the journey. Boardman Mephi smiled at his chauffeur’s tact. “You’re more than likely wondering what you did to bring yourself to my attention, Sonmi451.”

His question was a handshake: Come out, I know you’re in there. Or, I feared, a trap. Still with a server’s wariness of acting too pureblood, I feigned polite incomprehension. Mephi’s xpression of complicity told me he understood. Taemosan University, he said, generates 2 million–plus library download requests per semester. The vast majority are course texts and related articles; the remainder relate to anything from real estate to stock prices, sportsfords to steinways, yoga to caged birds. “The point is, Sonmi, it takes a reader of truly eclectic habits for my friends the librarians to bother alerting me.” The professor switched on his handsony and read from my own list of download requests. Sixthmonth 18th, Epic of Gilgamesh; Seventhmonth 2nd, Ireneo Funes’s Remembrances; Ninthmonth 1st, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Mephi, bathed in mauve sonyglow, looked proud. “Here we go … Tenthmonth 11th, a brazen-as-you-please cross-search for references to that cancer in our beloved body corpocratic, Union! Speaking as a Unanimityman, such a—could I call it ‘lust’?—for creeds of other worlds alerts us to the presence of an inner émigré. It is idiomatic in my field that such émigrés make the finest Unanimity agents. I knew we had to meet.” He then xplained how he had identified the sony’s inquisitive owner as Nun Hel-Kwon, a geothermist from blizzard-prone Onsōng … who had died two winters before in a skiing accident. Boardman Mephi assigned a gifted graduate the old-fashioned detective’s task of tracing the thief. E-wave surveillance located the sony in Boom-Sook Kim’s lab. Imagining Boom-Sook reading Wittgenstein defied all credulity, however, so Mephi’s trusted student had implanted a microeye in every sony in the room during curfew six weeks ago. “Next day, we found our dissident-manqué was no pureblood but, apparently, science’s first stabilized ascendant and sister-server of the notorious Yoona939. My work, Sonmi451, can be taxing and hazardous, but dull? Never!”

Denial was plainly pointless.

Indeed: Boardman Mephi was no Seer Rhee. In a way, my discovery was a relief. Many criminals say the same. I sat and listened to his account of the interdepartmental squabbles that broke out when he reported his findings. Old-school corpocrats wanted me euthanized as a deviant; psychogenomicists wanted me to undergo cerebral vivisection; marketing wanted to go public and claim me as Taemosan University’s own xperimental breakthru.

Obviously, none of them got their way.

No. Unanimity won a stopgap compromise: I could continue studying in my illusory free will until a consensus of opinion could be reached. Boom-Sook’s crossbow, however, forced Unanimity’s hand.

And what did Boardman Mephi intend to do with you now?

Frame a new compromise between those interests competing for a slice of me, then enforce it. Billions of research dollars had been spent in corp labs, unsuccessfully, to achieve what, simply, I was, what I am: a stable, ascended fabricant. To keep the genomicists happy, an array of vetted scientists would conduct cross-disciplinary tests on me. Mephi, dipping his hands into the heart of the 3-D flames, promised these tests would not be onerous or painful, or xceed three hours per day, five days out of ten. To win over the Taemosan Board, research access would be auctioned: I would raise big dollars for my masters.

Did Sonmi451’s interests enter this simultaneous equation?

To a degree, yes: Taemosan University would enroll me as a foundation student. I would also have a Soul implanted in my collar so I could come and go on campus as I pleased. Boardman Mephi even promised to mentor me when he was on campus. He withdrew his hand from the fire and inspected his fingers. “All lite, no heat. Youngsters nowadays wouldn’t know a real flame if their nikes were set alite.” He told me to call him Professor instead of Sir.

One thing I can’t work out. If Boom-Sook Kim was such a buffoon, how had he attained this holy grail of psychogenomics—stable ascension?

Later, I asked Hae-Joo Im the same question. His xplanation ran: Boom-Sook’s thesis jockey sourced his supply of psychogenomics theses from an obscure tech institute in Baikal. The original author of my x-postgrad’s work was a production zone immigrant named Yusouf Suleiman. Xtremists were killing genomicists in Siberia at that time, and Suleiman and three of his professors were blown up by a car bomb. Baikal being Baikal, Suleiman’s research languished in obscurity for ten years until it was sold on. The agent liaised with contacts at Papa Song Corp to instream Suleiman’s ascension neuro-formula to our Soap. Yoona939 was the prime specimen; I was a modified backup. If all that sounds unlikely, Hae-Joo added, I should remember that most of science’s holy grails are discovered by accident, in unxpected places.

And all the while Boom-Sook Kim was blissfully unaware of the furor his plagiarized Ph.D. was causing?

Only an obdurate fool who never squeezed a pipette could remain unaware, but yes, Boom-Sook Kim was such a fool. Maybe that, too, was no accident.

How did you find your new regime in the Unanimity Faculty? How was it as a fabricant, actually attending lectures?

As I was moved on Sextet Eve, I had six quiet days before the new regime began in earnest. I walked around the icy campus only once: I am genomed to be comfortable in hot eateries, and xposure to the Han Valley winter on Mount Taemosan burned my skin and lungs. On New Year’s Day I awoke from curfew to discover two gifts: the battered old sony Wing027 had given me and a star for my collar, my third. I thought of my sisters, my x-sisters, thruout Nea So Copros enjoying Starring Ceremonies. I wondered if I would one day depart for Xultation, my Investment repaid. How I wished Yoona939 could attend my first lecture on secondday with me. I still miss her.

What was your first lecture?

Swanti’s Biomathematics; however, its real lesson was humiliation. I walked to the lecture hall across dirty slush, hooded and unnoticed. But when I took off my cloak in the corridor, my Sonmi features provoked surprise, then unease. In the lecture hall, my entry detonated resentful silence.

It didn’t last. “Oy!” a boy yelled. “One hot ginseng, two dog-burgers!” and the entire theater laughed. I am not genomed to blush, but my pulse rose. I took a seat in the second row, occupied by girls. Their leader had emeralded teeth. “This is our row,” she said. “Go to the back. You stink of mayo.” I obeyed, meekly. A paper dart hit my face. “We don’t vend burgers in your dinery, fabricant,” someone called, “why’re you taking up space in our lecture?” I was about to leave when spidery Dr. Chu’an tripped onto the stage and dropped her notes. I did my best to concentrate on the lecture that followed, but after a while, Dr. Chu’an’s eyes roamed her audience, saw me; she stopped midsentence. The audience, laughing, realized why. Dr. Chu’an forced herself to continue. I forced myself to stay but lacked the courage to ask questions at the end. Outside I endured a barrage of aggressive snideries.

Did Professor Mephi know about the students’ unfriendliness?

I think so. At our seminar, the professor asked if my lecture had been fruitful; I chose the word informative and asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, “What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?”

I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy.

Mephi seemed delited. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror.”

I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.

Mephi replied, “History suggests, not until they are made to.”

When, I asked, would that happen?

The professor spun his antique globe and answered merely: “Dr. Chu’an’s lecture continues tomorrow.”

It must have taken courage to return.

Not really: an enforcer escorted me, so at least no one flung insults at me. The enforcer addressed the second row of girls with courteous malice. “This is our row. Go to the back.” The girls melted away, but I felt no triumph. It was the girls’ fear of Unanimity, not their acceptance of me, that prevailed. Dr. Chu’an was so flustered by the enforcer that she mumbled her entire lecture without once looking at her audience. Prejudice is permafrost.

Did you brave any more lectures?

One, on Lööw’s Fundaments. By request I went unescorted, preferring insults to xternal armor. I arrived early, took a side seat, and kept a visor on as the lecture hall filled. I was recognized nonetheless. The students regarded me with mistrust, but no paper missiles were launched. Two boys in front turned around: they had honest faces and rural accents. One asked if I really was some sort of artificial genius.

Genius is not a word to bandy so casually, I suggested.

Hearing a server talk made the pair marvel. “It must be hell,” said the second, “to have an intelligent mind trapped in a body genomed for service.”

I had grown as attached to my body as he had to his, I responded.

The lecture proceeded without event, but when I left the hall, a small riot of questions, miked walkmans, and flash nikons was waiting for me. Which Papa Song’s had I come from? Who had enrolled me at Taemosan? Were there more of me? What were my views on the Yoona939 Atrocity? How many weeks did I have before my ascension degenerated? Was I an Abolitionist? What was my favorite color? Did I have a boyfriend?

Media? On a corpocratic campus?

No, but Media had offered rewards for features on the Sonmi of Taemosan. I hooded and tried to elbow my way back to the Unanimity Faculty, but the crush was so thick, my visor was knocked off and I was floored and badly bruised before two plainclothes enforcers could xtricate me. Boardman Mephi met me in the Unanimity lobby and escorted me back to my quarters, muttering that I was too valuable to xpose myself to the prurient mob. He rotated his rainstone ring vigorously: a habit when tense. We agreed, from then on my lectures should be dijied to my sony.

What about the xperiments you were obliged to undergo?

Ah, yes, a daily reminder of my true status. They depressed my spirits. What was knowledge for, I would ask myself, if I could not use it to better my xistence? How would I fit in on Xultation nine years and nine stars later with my superior knowledge? Could amnesiads erase the knowledge I had acquired? Did I want that to happen? Would I be happier? Fourthmonth arrived, bringing my first anniversary as a specimen freak on Taemosan, but spring did not bring me the gladness it brings the world. My curiosity is dying, I told Professor Mephi one pleasant day, during a seminar on Thomas Paine. I remember the sounds of a baseball game drifting thru his open window. My mentor said we had to identify the source of this malady, and urgently. I said something about reading not being knowledge, about knowledge without xperience being food without sustenance.

“You need to get out more,” remarked the professor.

Out where? Out to lectures? Out on the campus? Outings?

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 Wing027’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, I apologize for my lack of social grace. I talk too much when I get nervous, and say stupid things. Here I go again. Can I try out your maglev chaise longue?”

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 relax?” he responded, incredulous. “Who wins, you or the sony?”

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 Kyōng-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 café 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 prescience, my dear, must xpect.”

I was very confused.

She said I was the first consumer she’d seen to facescape fully like a well-known service fabricant. Lesser strata, she confided, may call my fashion statement brave, or even antistrata, but she called it genius. She asked if I would like to model for “an abhorrently chic 3-D magazine.” I’d be paid stratospherically, she assured me: my boyfriend’s friends would crawl with jealousy. And for us women, she added, jealousy in our men is as good as dollars in the Soul.

I declined, thanking her and adding that fabricants do not have boyfriends. The mediawoman pretended to laugh at my imagined joke and xamined every contour on my face. She begged to know which facescaper had done me. “A craftsman like this, I have got to meet. Such a miniaturist!”

After my wombtank and orientation, I said, my life had been spent behind a counter at Papa Song’s, and so I had never met my facescaper.

Now the fashion editor’s laugh was droll but vexed.

So she couldn’t believe you weren’t a pureblood?

She gave me her card and urged me to reconsider, warning that opportunities like her do not happen ten days a week.

When the taxi dropped me at Unanimity, Hae-Joo Im asked me to use his given name from then on. “Mr. Im” made him feel like he was in a seminar. Lastly, he asked if I might be free next ninthday. I did not want him to spend his valuable time on a professorial obligation, I said, but Hae-Joo insisted he had enjoyed my company. I said, well, then, I accept.

So the xcursion helped dislodge your … sense of ennui?

In a way, yes. It helped me understand how one’s environment is a key to one’s identity, but that my environment, Papa Song’s, was a lost key. I found myself wishing to revisit my x-dinery under Chongmyo Plaza. I could not fully xplain why, but an impulse can be both vaguely understood and strong.

It could hardly be wise for an ascended server to visit a dinery?

I do not claim it was wise, only necessary. Hae-Joo also worried that it might “unearth buried things.” I responded that I had buried too much of myself, so the postgrad agreed to accompany me, on condition that I went disguised as a consumer. The following ninthnite he showed me how to upswirl my hair and apply cosmetics. A silk neck scarf hid my collar, and in the elevator down to the taxi he fitted dark ambers on my face.

On a busy fourthmonth evening, Chongmyo Plaza was not the litter-swarming wind tunnel I remembered from my release: it was a kaleidoscope of AdVs, consumers, xecs, and popsongs. Beloved Chairman’s monumental statue surveyed his swarming peoples with an xpression wise and benign. From the Plaza’s southeast rim, Papa Song’s arches drew into focus. Hae-Joo held my hand and reminded me we could turn back at any time. As we got in line for the elevator, he slipped a Soulring onto my finger.

In case you got separated?

For good luck, I thought: Hae-Joo had a superstitious streak. As the elevator descended, I grew very nervous. Suddenly, the doors were opening and hungry consumers riptided me into the dinery. As I was jostled, I was stunned at how misleading my memories of the place had been.

In what ways?

That spacious dome was so poky. Its glorious reds and yellows, so stark and vulgar. The wholesome air I remembered: now its greasy stench gagged me. After the silence on Taemosan, the dinery noise was like never-ending gunfire. Papa Song stood on His Plinth, greeting us. I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry: surely my Logoman would condemn his prodigal daughter.

No. He winked at us, tugged himself skyward by his own nikestraps, sneezed, oopsied, and plummeted down to His Plinth. Children screamed with laughter. I realized, Papa Song was just a trick of lites. How had an inane hologram once inspired such awe in me?

Hae-Joo went to find a table while I circummed the Hub. My sisters smiled under sugary toplites. How unflaggingly they worked! Here were Yoonas, here was Ma-Leu-Da108, her collar now boasting eleven stars. At my old counter on west was a fresh-faced Sonmi. Here was Kyelim889, Yoona’s replacement. I got in line at her teller, my nervousness growing acute as my turn approached. “Hi! Kyelim889 at your service! Mouthwatering, magical, Papa Song’s! Yes, madam? Your pleasure today?”

I asked her if she knew me.

Kyelim889 smiled xtra to dilute her confusion.

I asked if she remembered Sonmi451, a server who worked beside her, who disappeared one morning.

A blank smile: the verb remember is outside servers’ lexicons. “Hi! Kyelim889 at your service! Mouthwatering, magical, Papa Song’s! Your pleasure today?”

I asked, Are you happy, Kyelim889?

Enthusiasm lit her smile as she nodded. Happy is a word in the Second Catechism: “Proviso I obey the Catechisms, Papa Song loves me; proviso Papa Song loves me, I am happy.”

A cruel compulsion brushed me. I asked the Kyelim, didn’t she want to live how purebloods live? Sit at dinery tables instead of wiping them?

Kyelim889 wanted so badly to please, telling me, “Servers eat Soap!”

Yes, I persisted, but didn’t she want to see Outside?

She said, Servers don’t go Outside until Twelvestarred.

A consumer girl with zinc-ringlets and plectrum nails jabbed me. “If you’ve got to taunt dumb fabricants, do it on firstday mornings. I need to get to the gallerias this side of curfew, okay?”

Hastily, I ordered rosejuice and sharkgums from Kyelim889. I wished Hae-Joo was still with me. I was jumpy in case the Soulring malfunctioned and xposed me. The device worked, but my questions had marked me as a troublemaker. “Democratize your own fabricants!” A man glowered as I pushed by with my tray. “A bolitionist.” Other purebloods in the line glanced at me, worried, as if I carried a disease.

Hae-Joo had found a free table in my old quarter. How many tens of thousands of times had I wiped this surface? Hae-Joo asked, gently, if I had discovered anything valuable.

I whispered, “We are just slaves here for twelve years.”

The Unanimity postgrad just scratched his ear and checked no one was eavesdropping: but his xpression told me he agreed. He sipped his rosejuice. We watched AdV for ten minutes, not speaking: a Juche Boardman was shown opening a newer, safer, nuclear reactor, grinning as if his strata depended on it. Kyelim889 cleared the table next to us; she had already forgotten me. My IQ may be higher, but she looked more content than I felt.

So your visit to Papa Song’s was an … anticlimax? Did you find the “key” to your ascended self?

Perhaps it was anticlimactic, yes. If there was a key, it was only that no key xisted. In Papa Song’s I had been a slave; at Taemosan I was a more privileged slave. One more thing occurred, however, as we headed back to the elevator. I recognized Mrs. Rhee, working at her sony. I spoke her name out loud.

The immaculately dewdrugged woman smiled up with puzzled, luscious, remodeled lips. “I was Mrs. Rhee, but I’m Mrs. Ahn now. My late husband drowned in a sea-fishing accident last year.”

I said that was just awful.

Mrs. Ahn dabbed her eye with her sleeve and asked if I had known her late husband well. Lying is harder than purebloods make it look, and Mrs. Ahn repeated her question.

“My wife was a qualities standardizer for the Corp before our marriage,” Hae-Joo xplained hastily, putting his hand on my shoulder and adding that Chongmyo Plaza was in her area and that Seer Rhee had been an xemplary corp man. Mrs. Ahn’s suspicions were aroused, however, and she asked xactly when that might have been. Now I knew what to say. “When his chief aide was a consumer named Cho.”

Her smile changed its hue. “Ah, yes, Aide Cho. Sent north, somewhere, I believe, to learn about team spirit.”

Hae-Joo took my arm, saying, “Well, ‘All for Papa Song, Papa Song for All.’ The gallerias beckon, darling. Mrs. Ahn is obviously a woman with no time to fritter.”

Later, back in my quiet apartment, Hae-Joo paid me this compliment. “If I had ascended from server to prodigy in twelve straight months, my current address wouldn’t be a guest quarter in the Unanimity Faculty: I would be in a psych ward somewhere, seriously. These … xistential qualms you suffer, they just mean you’re truly human.”

I asked how I might remedy them.

“You don’t remedy them. You live thru them.”

We played Go until curfew. Hae-Joo won the first game. I, the second.

How many of these xcursions took place?

Every ninthnite until Corpocracy Day. Familiarity bred esteem for Hae-Joo, and soon I shared Boardman Mephi’s high opinion of him. The professor never probed about our outings during our seminars; his protégé probably filed reports, but Mephi wished me to have at least the illusion of a private life. Board business demanded more of his time, and I saw him less regularly. The morning tests continued: a procession of courteous but unmemorable scientists.

Hae-Joo had a Unanimityman’s fondness for campus intrigue. I learned how Taemosan was no united organism but a hillock of warring tribes and interest groups, much like the Juche itself. The Unanimity Faculty maintained a despised dominance. “Secrets are magic bullets,” Hae-Joo was fond of saying. But this dominance also xplains why trainee enforcers have few friends outside the faculty. Girls looking for husbands, Hae-Joo admitted, were attracted to his future status, but males of his own age eschewed getting drunk in his company.

Archivist, my appointment in the Litehouse is approaching. Can we segue to my final nite on campus?

Please do.

A keen passion of Hae-Joo’s was disneys, and one perq of Professor Mephi’s mentorship was access to forbidden items in the security archives.

You mean Union samizdat from the Production Zones?

No. I mean a zone even more forbidden, the past, before the Skirmishes. Disneys were called “movies” in those days. Hae-Joo said the ancients had an artistry that 3-D and Corpocracy had long ob-solesced. As the only disneys I had ever seen were Boom-Sook’s pornsplatters, I was obliged to believe him. On sixthmonth’s final ninthnite, Hae-Joo arrived with a key to a disneyarium on campus, xplaining that a pretty Media student was currying favor with him. He spoke in a theatrical whisper. “I’ve got a disc of, seriously, one of the greatest movies ever made by any director, from any age.”

Namely?

A picaresque entitled The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, made before the foundation of Nea So Copros, in a long-deadlanded province of the European democracy. Have you ever seen film dating from the early twenty-first century, Archivist?

Sweet Corpocracy, no! An eighth-stratum archivist wouldn’t get such security clearance in his wildest dreams! I’d be fired for even applying, and I’m shocked that even a Unanimity postgrad has access to such deviational material.

Is that so? Well, the Juche’s stance on historical discourse is riddled with inconsistencies. On the one hand, if historical discourse were permitted, the downstrata could access a bank of human xperience that would rival, and sometimes contradict, that taught by Media. On the other hand, corpocracy funds your Ministry of Archivism, dedicated to preserving a historical record for future ages.

Yes, but our xistence is kept from the downstrata.

Xcept from those condemned to the Litehouse.

Be that as it may, future ages will still be corpocratic ones. Corpocracy isn’t just another political system that will come and go—corpocracy is the natural order, in harmony with human nature. But we’re digressing. Why had Hae-Joo Im chosen to show you this Ghastly Ordeal?

Perhaps Professor Mephi had instructed him. Perhaps Hae-Joo Im had no reason xcept a fondness for the disney. Whatever the reason, I was engrossed. The past is a world both indescribably different from and yet subtly similar to Nea So Copros. People sagged and uglified as they aged in those days: no dewdrugs. Elderly purebloods waited to die in prisons for the senile: no fixed-term life spans, no euthanasium. Dollars circulated as little sheets of paper and the only fabricants were sickly livestock. However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.

I can tell how fascinated you were …

Certainly: the vacant disneyarium was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite captured thru a lens when your grandfather’s grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but disneys enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces: Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say. For fifty minutes, for the first time since my ascension, I forgot myself, utterly, ineluctably.

Only fifty minutes?

Hae-Joo’s handsony purred at a key scene, when the film’s eponymous book thief suffered some sort of seizure; his face, contorted above a plate of peas, froze. A panicky voice buzzed from Hae-Joo’s handsony; “It’s Xi-Li! I’m right outside! Let me in! A crisis!” Hae-Joo pressed the remo-key; a wedge of light slid over the empty seats as the disneyarium door opened. A student ran over, his face shiny with sweat, and saluted Hae-Joo. He delivered news that would unravel my life, again. Specifically, forty or fifty enforcers had stormed the Unanimity Faculty, arrested Professor Mephi, and were searching for us. Their orders were to capture Hae-Joo for interrogation and kill me on sight. Campus xits were manned by armed enforcers.

Do you remember your thoughts on hearing that?

No. I think, I did not think. My companion now xuded a grim authority that I realized had always been there. He glanced at his rolex and asked if Mr. Chang had been captured. Xi-Li, the messenger, reported that Mr. Chang was waiting in the basement ford park. The man I had known as Postgrad Hae-Joo Im, backdropped by a dead actor, playing a character scripted over a century ago, turned to me. “Sonmi451, I am not xactly who I said I am.”