His work area is in an inner building, one with only slitty black-filmed windows because of the fragility of its contents. He receives the day’s arrivals in the docking bay and guides the padded carrier bots ferrying artifacts through the hall. Most of the objects are sealed in hermetic carbon-fiber crates, but some are too big to be contained, so that sometimes it appears as if he’s walking alongside a three-meter golden Buddha or a stone lion. Others, mostly ephemera collected from drowned libraries, are so delicate he handles them individually. From time to time he stops to read through the glass sleeves: ledgers from defunct trading houses, diaries of hired Scandinavian generals and Italian engineers, Buddhist texts and prayer scrolls in old Sanskrit, letters from the dead to the long forgotten.
By the scanning chamber, he drums a stylus against his palm as he waits for every atom in the objects to be blipped by eyes in the wall, as precaution against still more calamity.
His real preservation work then begins. He dons a breathing mask and steps into the chamber. Prompted by his voice, the robotic arms swing into action. They spray paper artifacts with alkalizing solutions before lifting them to the wire racks to dry. They reverse age, removing layers of encrusted dust from sculptures and pottery with a brush or a cloth-covered vacuum head, sometimes resorting to a wooden scalpel for more resilient grime. The tougher ones with significant degradation or evidence of old repair he tells the arms to set aside on a shelf, for further consultation with specialists. He works slowly, careful to go through procedural checklists and to give each object its proper deliberation.
He has done this for more than a decade. So why did he find himself earlier this day staring at the scattered shards of an antique sangkhalok urn?
He would learn that it had likely come out of a kiln in Sukhothai Province sometime in the fifteenth century. On its gray pitted surface swirled blue patterns of lotus flowers and swimming ducks. The urn should probably have been put in a less precarious place, someone would say. It had sat near the edge of the cataloging table, surrounded by many other artifacts, so that its presence was unlikely to be noticed. Had it even been blipped?
“Khun Woon, we have people who are very handy with broken things. I mean, hell, this can’t be more complicated than patching up an early-modern rice bowl,” said Khun Cocoa, the first to walk over.
He’d heard the fast thudding of his own shoes on the concrete floor as he tried to regain his balance. He remembered his arms flailing at his sides, as if he thought he could swim upward in the thick New Krungthep air. Was it possible that someone nearby could have caught him? Did everyone think he could have recovered on his own? He at one point played intercollegiate basketball at university, and even now he tends to stand with his legs slightly apart, as if waiting to receive a pass. He had superb body control and ran pick-and-rolls that silenced gyms full of the opposing university’s fans.
The shattering quieted the conversations in the vicinity. He got down on his knees to gather up what remained of the urn. Two coworkers kneeled down to help, but he waved them off. He was focused on the task of sweeping the shards into a pile with the edge of his palms.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, when the department director arrived at his table. “I’ll make sure to find every piece of it and alert the specialists.”
He wanted to tell her that in the many years that he had worked here, he had never damaged an item in his care.
“Don’t worry too much, Woon. This happens all the time,” said the director. “You should really just get up, and order the vacumatics to take care of it.”
“Director, it won’t take more than five minutes for a thorough sweep.”
“Your time would be better spent on other items. We’ve hundreds of these, and this one has already been blipped. See?”
She showed him her device. The urn, intact as it had been, rotated on the screen.
“Okay,” he said. “For a moment there, I thought . . .”
He got up from the floor, the shards sharp and noisy in his hands. He emptied them into a sealable bag, to be cataloged and carted off to a storage warehouse that might as well be oblivion. He moved on to the next batch of artifacts.
Yet the bowl—its many shattered pieces on the floor, its intact counterpart on the screen—has stayed in his mind. As he blips and tags, and inspects and cataloges, his thoughts wander to the people in his life. What are they but flesh, bone, and water?
If his mind should move past his worries, the displays themselves remind him, with their animated touting. He can’t help but look.
Surveys show high ratings by satisfied customers. They love having a choice in their fate. They cherish not having to say final good-byes.
“I’m not feeling very well,” he says to Khun Cocoa. “Tell the director I’m off to the doctor this afternoon.”
He exits through the side gate and boards an interdistrict vaporetto. He takes out his C-O and reads the brochure he had requested:
Choose from financing plans tailored for your future.
Enjoy peace of mind with cold storage backed up by generators.
Feel safe with systems protected by advanced defense intelligence.
Look forward to your better forever.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
His children, his wife, his mother—they’re why Woon has left work midday to come to a low-rise, limestone-encased building built on top of a hill. Upcoming Songkran festivities means that it has taken more than an hour for a slot to open at this portal. He passes through steel gates painted in tasteful whites and signs in at the guard booth.
To get inside the building, he crosses a walkway that zigzags over a blue-tiled pool where schools of golden carp bob between lily pads and kiss duckweed. As he walks, he notices that the fish appear to be following his reflection in the water, and at the end of the walkway, about a hundred paces across, he signals his good-bye to them with the wag of a finger. A glass door slides open, and he’s inside an atrium brightened by daylight. One of the receptionists at a long wooden table confirms his requested time slot by waving at his C-O. He’s told that he’s about to be blocked from all outside networks, for everybody’s safety, and before he can say that he knows the protocol, his C-O goes red. A young woman walks over to show him through a long corridor to the reconnection rooms. She offers him what’s politely called tea. He accepts the cup with both hands and sips, knowing he needs to bear with the ferrous taste in his mouth so that he can raise the electrical conductivity in his body. In the sci-fi books and movies of his youth, the imagination of this technology always showed effortless use: lie down on a bed and put on the goggles or tap a glowing button on a headset, no harder than tucking into a dream. He does lie down on a leather reclining chair, and the woman does lower cushioned ellipses over his eyes, but there is also the seemingly endless ten-minute wait for the nano-material solution to circulate throughout his body, his limbs bound to the chair by leathery straps all the while so that he can’t flail around and hurt himself before dissociation, never mind the tiny, tingling zaps that he thinks he feels as scanners map his nerves.
“Almost there,” the woman says to assure him, and he tries his best to believe her. He feels the cold metal of hundreds of probes descending to kiss his skin. Static fills his ears. With his eyes closed, his field of vision shifts through a gradient of blues that always makes him feel chilly.
The woman’s voice fades. He’s alone in the room, which is now no longer a room but a spot he remembers from his youth. They’re in the building where he used to live with his mother.
“How’s this?” says a different woman sitting across from him at a small wooden table. “We can shift somewhere else if you want.”
At some point, the condo managers decided to lease out this space to a café. It’s all here: the hard, cushionless chairs, the Japanese porcelain cat beckoning by the entrance, the receptionist/barista, head dow
n, staring at a screen in her hand. He even recognizes this particular table for its wobbliness if the wadded napkin got kicked from under a leg. He nudges it. Perfectly still and even.
“This will do, Auntie Mai. I liked coming here when we lived in the building. Sometimes I’d even slow down going past it, so I could smell the espresso being made. It’s all probably driftwood now.”
“Yeah, I remember when the management office first announced a café was opening here. By the tenants’ reaction, you’d have thought they were putting in an opium den or massage parlor.”
“I know. People hated it if a wastebasket was moved a step over.”
“Do you still drink a lot of coffee? I remember your mother being worried at one point.”
“Yes, I still do, but probably less than what you remember. Maybe two cups a day. Now people like to take their coffee vaporized in a sound field. Have you heard? Enhances the notes, quickens the effect, they say.”
“Even though my family sends me update credits, I admit that I don’t keep up with trends. Especially with consumables and things of that sort.”
“Why would you if you don’t have to?”
“I don’t know. Curiosity, maybe nostalgia, or that old person’s fondness for being horrified by the present. Speaking of old people, how’s your mother?”
“She’s well. Healthy for now, but the doctors are closely monitoring her cell count. When did you last see her?”
“It’s been a few years, your timeline. She’s still not keen on coming to the gateways much, I take it. Such an ordeal, she always tells me first thing.”
“Mother does that to remind everyone to pay attention to her.”
“I think she’s also afraid something might go wrong.”
“Silly Pig. She should to be used to how things are by now. It’s been a decade since Oslo.”
He remembers that day too well. He had recently finished his master’s program and was apprenticing at an archive in Shanghai. A woman, hands over mouth, stood up from her desk. For a few seconds, she remained fixed on the news on the screen, and then her eyes met his. The headline tickers scrolled: Hundreds of thousands feared lost . . . Assailants disabled life systems. He still sometimes pays attention to the ceremonies in white that mark the day, which evoke a lingering sadness and disbelief. He’s thankful not to have known personally anyone who met their final end that day.
“It’s a pity, these security restrictions,” says Auntie Mai. “I think I feel safe, but I know I’m supposed to feel safer, what with the things they say they’ve done to prevent something terrible from happening again. Am I wrong to keep worrying?”
“I don’t know, Auntie Mai. I’m not a technician of that sort.”
“Of course, what can any of us know? I should stick to thinking about things that make me happy, like the people dear to me, like your mother. I hope she’ll come again soon. Won’t you give her a nudge?”
“I will. She probably figures you’ll always be around. You know how she procrastinates.”
“Maybe. My question is, will she be around?”
His mother doesn’t like him talking about her illnesses. A few years ago there was that stroke, luckily recognized before any great harm could be done. But there’s also the mysterious come-and-go pain in her back, hard to address even with regeneration therapy, and now a burgeoning lymphatic syndrome that announced itself only this year, when one afternoon his mother asked why her grandchildren looked so blurry. “The cause is likely idiopathic,” her doctor said. “Things happen. We’ll do what we can.”
“They’ve kept the inflammations in check, but her numbers aren’t getting any better,” says Woon. “Still, she’s against any suggestion of a transfiguration procedure. I tell her how well you’re doing, but she only shrugs.”
“It does take some getting used to, certainly not as easy as they advertise it.”
“Beats the alternative.”
“It’s the absence of a bodily component that deters prospects. They don’t think it’s real. I understand that, trust me. I had so many questions before I went through with it.”
But there is a body, or what’s left of it: the plugged-in brain and the stringy nerves, kept from further degeneration. In documentaries, the host inevitably walks past row after row of enclosed preservation racks.
“Oh, believe me, Auntie Mai. I’ve told her that pretty much all her questions about transfiguration have already been settled by researchers, but she doesn’t want to hear any of it.”
“With age comes either extreme faith or extreme doubt. Usually both.”
Sometime, every visit, he clenches his fist to check the fidelity. This is flesh. It’s definitely his, or feels like it.
“Even with the slight unknowns, the positives make the procedure worth it, don’t they? For one, you look like you’re about twenty.”
“I do? I don’t always keep track of my settings. I should probably try to look more recognizable to you.”
“You can appear however you want.”
“Are you sure?”
A giant hamster sits across from him. It flashes him a smile under its pink nose and twitchy whiskers.
“No, not that? How about this? You probably saw me most often when I was in my forties.”
The hamster blinks into an older woman wearing a white linen suit. This is the Auntie Mai who dropped by when she was in the country to visit his mother. Here’s the woman who radiated infectious self-assurance, so that he couldn’t help but envy how even his mother would immediately brighten up for her.
“Yes, right about then,” says Woon, “perhaps under less than ideal circumstances.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re here now, and not behind a door.”
“Not one of my finer moments.”
“But one of your mother’s. I was with her, Woon. She did everything she could to get you out.”
“I still can’t believe I fell for the cakes. What a gullible little glutton I was. You know, I probably have trust issues with food now. I see an ordinary pastry, and I’m wondering if it will make me topple over, passed out.”
“If not for that, who knows what might have become of you.”
“Still there in that room. My beard from here to the floor.”
“It’s easy to laugh now, I suppose.”
“I’ve only begun to admit that I ever went through that period.”
“Have we previously discussed this? Do you feel comfortable talking about it?”
“About that phase? That’s what Mother calls it, if she even brings it up. It was more than that. I really had the conviction that I could live that way forever. Air-locked in that room, like an astronaut hurtling through space on a hundred-year mission. Funny thing, it’s even more vivid to me now. I look at Puk and Mint and I tremble. I’m afraid they’ll take after their father in his worst ways.”
“When you have children, your own childhood comes back in full relief against theirs.”
“They’re such stubborn children. I recognize it like my own face. Look where that stubbornness got me, Auntie Mai.”
“I don’t think you went through with that because you were stubborn.”
“It certainly didn’t help. I hated everything. I didn’t want to deal with anyone. I just wanted to put on my headphones and listen to music. Locking myself in was my method of protesting, and I really had the crazy notion that the world might yield to my boycott of it.”
“The whole world’s one formidable adversary, your mother aside.”
“You know, she was in a bad shape before then. Did she ever tell you, Auntie Mai?”
“You well know she’s not one to speak ill of herself.”
“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but she had been drinking well before that phase of mine, and it wasn’t like she had just a glass of wine or two. I have no idea how sh
e was able to function at all. Well, oftentimes, she didn’t. She’d yell at me for hours, about my father or me, and then she’d try to play nice, asking what I thought of this or that program on TV, all facedown from the couch. She never remembered those episodes. She’d just wake up and ask me what I wanted for breakfast, as if everyone had had a good night of sleep.”
“I wish she had reached out to me sooner. Or perhaps I should have.”
“It’s not your fault, Auntie Mai. It’s not any of our faults. That was just how she was. I don’t blame her now, although she might have actually worsened my situation. The times I stepped out of the room when she wasn’t there, I noticed that there were no more empty bottles left out for the recycler units. With me to worry about, I had a feeling she was paying less mind to whatever was eating her up. That gave me another reason to stay where I was. My being crazy was saving my mother from herself.”
“So now you’re again trying to save her.”
“I only want her to think about her future. Maybe get her to visit a facility and take a look around.”
“Is that why you’re here? To get me to help you do this?”
“You’ve known her the longest of anyone. Why is my mother being so difficult? Why won’t she even let me get a word in about it?”
“Asks the man who locked himself in his room for months.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
That room. Has he ever left it entirely? Woon’s standing on a second-level deck among hundreds of passengers, his hands gripped on the bar overhead, his body swaying to the ferry’s unsteady propulsion upriver. All he has to do is close his eyes for a second or two, and he’s again returned to an indeterminate daybreak years ago, with dawn’s grayness, as fine as ash, sifting through gaps in the curtains to touch the contents of that room—the mounds of spiral-bound textbooks, the pajamas dangling from a chairback, and, leaning on a desk leg, a schoolbag untouched for more than half a year.
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