Extract from: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, (London: Sceptre, 2014)
Brief Summary: Cloud Atlas follows the stories of several inter-connected characters from completely disparate backgrounds, eras and countries. We follow an attorney stranded on an island in the South Pacific in themid 1800s to a futuristic dystopian Korea where human fabricants serve a disturbingly consumerist society. This extract follows Sonmi, a fabricant (synthetic human) created to work at a fast-food restaurant who has ‘ascended’(gained more knowledge than she should be capable of) as a result of an experiment. She is being interviewed by an individual called the Archivist before her execution.
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, deadlandartifacts, 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-Joogenomed 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.