Cloud Atlas (26 page)

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. Yoona
939 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 Yoona
939 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-Da
108 and Yoona
939 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 Yoona
939 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 Yoona
939 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 Yoona
939 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 Yoona
939’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 Yoona
939. 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 …