110- Double fire, double lions

My ministry would xpel me if I were ever Eyed in that untermensch slum. But please describe it for my orison.

Huamdonggil is a noxious maze of low, crooked ramshacks, flophouses, pawnshops, drug bars, and comfort hives, covering perhaps five square miles southeast of Old Seoul Transit Station. Its streets are too narrow for fords to enter; its alleys reek of waste and sewage. ShitCorp goes nowhere near that quarter. Hae-Joo left the ford in a lockup and warned me to keep my head hooded: fabricants stolen here end up in brothels, made servicea- ble after clumsy surgery. Purebloods slumped in doorways, skin enflamed by prolonged xposure to the city's scalding rain. One boy lapped water from a puddle on his hands and knees. "Migrants with enceph or leadlung," Hae-Joo told me. "Hospitals drain their Souls until they've got only enough dollars for a euthanasia jab – or a ride to Huamdonggil. These poor bas- tards made the wrong choice."

I could not understand why migrants fled Production Zones for such a squalid fate. Hae-Joo listed malaria, flooding, drought, rogue crop ge- nomes, parasites, encroaching deadlands, and a natural desire to better the lives of their children. Papa Song Corp, he assured me, seems humane if compared to factories these migrants ran away from. Traffickers promise it rains dollars in the Twelve Cities, and migrants yearn to believe it; the truth never filters back, for traffickers operate only one way. Hae-Joo steered me away from a meowing two-headed rat. "They bite."

I asked why the Juche tolerates this in its second capital.

Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city's unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It mo- tivates the downstrata: "Work, spend, work," say slums like Huamdonggil,

"or you, too, will end your life here." Moreover, entrepreneurs take ad- vantage of the legal vaccuum to erect ghoulish pleasurezones for upstrata bored with more respectable quarters. Huamdonggil can thus pay its way in taxes and bribes. MediCorp opens a weekly clinic for dying untermensch to xchange any healthy body parts they may have for a sac of euthanaze. OrganiCorp has a lucrative contract with the city to send in a daily platoon of immune-genomed fabricants, similar to disastermen, to mop up the dead before the flies hatch. Hae-Joo then told me to stay silent; we had reached our destination.

Which was where xactly?

Xactly, I cannot say: Huamdonggil is not gridnumbered or charted. It was an overhanging mah-jongg house with a high lintel to keep the drainwater out, but I doubt I could identify the building again. Hae-Joo knocked on a reinforced door; an eyehole blinked, bolts unclacked, and a doorman opened up. The doorman's bodyarmor was stained dark and his iron bar le- thal looking; he grunted at us to wait for Ma Arak Na. I wondered if he wore a fabricant's collar under his neckplate.

A smoky corridor bent out of view, walled with paper screens. I heard mah-jongg tiles, smelled feet, watched xotically clad pureblood servers carry trays of drinks. Their hassled xpressions morphed to girly delite eve- ry time they slid open a paper screen. I copied Hae-Joo's xample and re- moved my nikes, dirtied by the Huamdonggil alleyways.

"Well, you wouldn't be here if the news wasn't bad." The speaker ad- dressed us from the ceiling hatch; whether her webbed lips, crescent eyes, and thorny voice were the results of genoming or mutation, I could not guess. Her gem-warted fingers gripped the hatch ridge.

Hae-Joo addressed Ma Arak Na as MAlessio. A cell had turned cancerous, he updated her, Mephi was under arrest, Xi-Li was dumdummed and killed, so yes, the news could hardly be worse.

Ma Arak Na's double tongue uncurled and curled once or twice; she asked how far the cancer had spread. The Unionman replied he was here to answer that very question. The mAlessio of the establishment told us to pro- ceed to the parlor without delay.

A carp, as in the fish. A numinous, pearl-and-tangerine, fungus-blotted, mandarin-whiskered, half-meter-long carp. One lazy slap of its tail pro- pelled the fish toward me. Roots of water lilies parted as it moved. Its an- cient eyes read mine; its lateral fins rippled. The carp sank a few centime- ters to read my collar, and I heard my name spoken by an old man. Hae- Joo was barely visible through the murky underwater air.

"I am sorely thankful to see you alive" – the 3-D's transceived voice was cultured but muffled and splintered – "and truly honored to meet you. I am An-Kor Apis of Union." The fish apologized for the visual dramatics; camouflage was necessary, since Unanimity was combing all transmis- sions.

I responded that I understood.

An-Kor Apis promised I should understand much more very soon and swung toward Hae-Joo. "Commander Im."

Hae-Joo bowed, reporting that he had euthanazed Xi-Li.

The senior Unionman said he already knew, that no anesthetic xisted for Hae-Joo's pain; but that Unanimity had killed Xi-Li, and Hae-Joo had merely spared his brother an ignoble death in a prison cube. Apis then xhorted Hae-Joo to ensure Xi-Li's sacrifice was not in vain. A short brief- ing followed: six cells had been compromised and twelve more fire- breaked. The "good news" was that Boardman Mephi had managed to sui- cide before neuro-torture could began. An-Kor Apis then ordered my com-

panion to xit me from Seoul thru West Gate One, to proceed to the north- ern camp in a convoy, and to reflect well upon what had been advised.

The carp circled, vanishing into the parlor wall before reappearing thru my chest. "You have chosen your friends wisely, Sonmi. Together, we may change corpocratic civilization out of all recognition." He promised we would meet again soon. The sphere then shrank back into the brazier as the parlor restored itself. The carp became a streak of lite, a dot, finally, noth- ing at all.

How was Hae-Joo planning to pass thru a city xit without Souls?

The Soul implanter was ushered in just minutes later. A slite, anonymous- looking man, he xamined Hae-Joo's torn finger with professional disdain. He tweezered the tiny egg from his gelpack, bedded it into fresh tissue, and sprayed cutane over the top. That such an insignificant-looking dot can confer all the rights of consumerdom on its bearers yet condemn the rest of corpocracy to servitude seemed, and seems still, a bizarre obscenity to me. "Your name is Ok-Kyun Pyo," the implanter told Hae-Joo, adding that any sony would download his fictional history.

The implanter turned to me and produced a pair of laser pliers. They would cut steel but not even scratch living tissue, he assured me. First he removed my collar: I heard a click, felt a tickling as it pulled away, then it was in my hands. That felt odd: as if you were to hold your own umbilical cord, Archivist. "Now for the subcutaneous bar code." He swabbed anes- thetic over my throat, warning me this would hurt, but his tool's damper would stop the bar code from xploding on contact with air.

"Ingenious." Hae-Joo peered.