The Perfect Sail
— by I-Hyeong Yun, translated by Elisa Sinn and Justin Howe —
“You’re dying,” the stranger told Chang. “To tell you the truth, you have less than a week left to live. I advise you to hasten your decision. If you remain here, you will surely dissolve into nothingness.” Suddenly, her Lu plummeted earthward at frightening speed.
Chang sat, stupefied. The stars and clouds howled as they zoomed beyond the Lu’s faceted eyes. The sky burst open, and the earth rose from the split. They spun as they fell. Again the sky, again the earth, then trees, rocks, and the horizon, one after another, leaping forward and falling back. The Lu’s inner skin tightened across Chang’s chest, and her disheveled hair danced before her eyes. The world’s broken pieces tumbled downward, but they were not beautiful. Not beautiful at all.
Chang managed to recover herself and, stifling a scream, focused her trust in her Lu. Fly, Lu! Fly!
The world rolled violently one last time and then stopped. Chang felt nauseous. When she opened her eyes, everything was calm. Lu’s compound eyes broke the night into hundreds of interlocking hexagons and their wings flapped a slow steady rhythm. A sound so familiar she wouldn’t have noticed it in ordinary times. Chang shifted within the inner skin. Her Lu hovered a mere kruho1 above the ground.
Is this how one’s supposed to feel at the revelation of their death? It’s like my body’s become a hard heavy lump that won’t stop falling and falling. Chang covered her face in her hands, her skin slick with perspiration. She’d never lost her trust in the air like that. And without focus and belief, her Lu couldn’t even move their wings, let alone fly.
The stranger had resembled a human but was most definitely not a Roo like her. They’d stood about two ruhos tall, and had a semitransparent body that shone like thawed moonlight. They’d spoken without moving their lips, in a voice so peculiar Chang found it impossible to describe. She didn’t want to admit it, but the stranger’s words had shaken her to the core.
How do I die?
But Chang hadn’t asked the question. For a Roo, death was everywhere. She might be swept away by the wind or caught by an insect and torn to pieces. A human might step on her and she’d be destroyed without even a chance to feel the pain. The stranger with its radiating body had seemed like a divine messenger. But this death sentence from an unknown god had overwhelmed her. Losing control of her Lu in the air and crashing was not a death Chang had imagined. If I die, will Lu die as well? All they had to do was spread their wings toward the sun to sustain themselves. It was Chang’s trust that made them move.
Hovering in midair, she scanned the cream-colored bark-like lining of Lu’s interior. She centered herself and focused her trust. Lu, let’s go back. Lu’s compound eyes relaxed and showed a path stretching before them into the sky. A path created by Chang’s trust. Lu flapped their wings and launched into a smooth glide.
* * *
Chang Yeon reclined on a wine-colored armchair and looked around the room. It was more a cozy den than a CEO’s office. A red carpet covered the floor, embroidered with golden Arabic patterns, and cedar bookshelves lined three of the room’s four walls. Energetic footsteps passed in the hall beyond. Even though it was Friday night and her company had just finished one project, the place still bustled like a giant organism that refused to rest. Chang Yeon had asked her secretary to hold all her calls. She smiled with renewed satisfaction. How wonderful it was to have everything move as you commanded? But of course, there was that latest version of herself in that offshoot world far, far away. I wonder why she hesitates, Chang Yeon thought. Her eyes fixed on her hands and she sighed at their sudden unfamiliarity. Was her pale, weak skin actually wilting by the hour, or was she just imagining it?
“She has until tomorrow to decide, but it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” the sailor said in its calm machine voice. “We should have a backup plan prepared since we can’t bring her here against her will. This version may not be our only chance. Although it’s rare, there have been cases when a more suitable version turned up on the morning of the scheduled tuning. Our broadband sail is still ongoing, moving as fast as possible.”
Sailors were not human, but rather beings capable of going against time, jumping the boundaries between dimensions, and sailing through the countless myriad of offshoot worlds. This meant they could go on the perfect sail, or, more precisely, sail to serve their human clients’ yearnings for perfection. The membranes separating offshoot worlds didn’t permit organisms to pass from one to the next, but sailors faced no such obstacles. Their bodies were made of a special alloy that could slip between dimensions.
The sailor exuded a sense of determination not to disappoint a premium client. I waited too long, Chang Yeon thought. Her most recent tuning had been seven years ago. Since then she had requested sails from time to time, but without any real desire. Until now. In two days, she’d turn fifty years old and even in this world of abundance and endless possibilities, it was impossible to avoid the natural order of aging and death. A tuning would therefore be a perfect birthday gift for herself. Her fiftieth tuning for her fiftieth birthday, and to make it happen she’d started the search a year in advance.
Inevitably, the tuning would be rushed. According to the sailor, every human being had a unique “self-structure,” like a single set of fingerprints shared across all of a person’s versions. This self-structure was the backbone of one’s self, all the fundamental elements that existed apart from those created by random chance.
Chang Yeon was lucky. She’d been born with a distinctive self-structure. Not so for most others, whose self-structure signatures were too weak to be detected in the system. Still, Chang Yeon had only been able to find her own versions because each of them was dying. Scientists had discovered that brains secreted a special substance about two to three weeks prior to their deaths, regardless of whether or not the person knew their death was imminent. This substance sharpened one’s self-structure in a way that made it easily detectable. Each time the sailor had found a version on the eve of death, it had forwarded the personal data to Chang Yeon. Chang Yeon barely read the reports. She figured human lives were the same everywhere, and didn’t give much thought to her other versions as long as they happened to be human.
From an early age Chang Yeon had seen how money shaped the world. While her peers had fussed over celebrities, she’d observed her parents’ social group and appraised their economic power. Her father used to say she had the instincts of a businessperson. But the first boy she’d dated had treated her like an empty-headed doll, born with a silver spoon in her mouth. He’d avoided all meaningful conversation with her, and Chang Yeon had never gotten over the humiliation.
She’d been thirty when she first learned about tuning. Since then her life had expanded like a magic ball absorbing everything in its path. Without the large inheritance her parents had left her, she couldn’t have afforded the tremendous cost tuning required. No doubt wealth was important, yet after each tuning, her wealth had felt less important to her.
Not only did people love and admire the furniture her company produced, but she managed to run the company debt-free in forty-eight countries around the world. What few people knew was that Chang Yeon designed nearly every piece of furniture herself. By a stroke of luck, her first integrated version had possessed a genius level intelligence. Her fourth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth versions had each brought along their creativity,
brilliant logical thinking, and keen aesthetic sense. Now she was no longer just an effective administrator, but someone who understood a worksite’s rhythms, capable of providing the exact thing others required.
Once she’d stabilized her company’s expansion, Chang Yeon had turned her attention to developing those intellectual aspects she believed herself lacking, such as a knowledge of history, philosophy, and psychology. All those things she’d so reluctantly memorized in school had come together organically to form a coherent picture in her head. Her thirty-first had shown her how time with a good book was better than watching her investments double. Her forty-third, forty-fifth, and forty-eighth selves all took pleasure in writing, but it was her forty-ninth’s literary skills that had made bestsellers of her three essay collections.
Every version added some new talent. From cooking and calligraphy to more subtle aspects such as a fondness for the outdoors or a knack for parallel parking. On their own these mundane skills would’ve been overpowered by each individual version’s numerous flaws. Only together in Chang Yeon could they achieve such an unbelievable synergy.
Not everyone who tuned was so lucky. Some clients only seemed capable of integrating the worst from themselves and sued the agency despite the exemption clause in their contracts. Not so for Chang Yeon, who may well have been born for tuning. Her versions’ psychological and personality flaws simply disappeared before the many strengths of her integrated selves.
People praised Chang Yeon’s life as perfect, believing it impossible that anything could be lacking. She had more money than she could spend; her fame was just widespread enough to be pleasing without being inconvenient. Academia lavished her with praise, and young people loved her furniture more than they did their video games. Even her husband was perfect. At first, she’d feared that he might disappear, and she would find someone else lying next to her in the morning after tuning. But the sailor assured her the fundamental elements wouldn’t change, and to her relief, her husband continued to exist after every tuning. He was exactly the kind of companion Chang Yeon needed, the single unchanging element in a life where she could change anything she desired. Most importantly, he wasn’t intimidated by his successful wife and didn’t try to reinforce his ego in perverse ways. If soulmates really existed, then for Chang Yeon her soulmate was her husband.
Of course she had taken other lovers, all young and attractive, but none of them had managed to break apart her marriage. An actor anxious about not being as successful as he would’ve wanted, a purehearted but penniless college student, a drop-dead gorgeous delivery guy with no willpower to break free from his dead-end routine, and a talented funk musician who’d been unable to overcome his addiction to drugs . . . usually she’d chosen someone with a critical part of themselves missing. And after every tuning they disappeared as though they’d never existed. These partings sometimes left a hole in her heart, but they were mostly flings, and always a new irresistible lover just as attractive as the one before appeared in no time.
Even with all of this, Chang Yeon was not content. Her life was grand and rich, fun but exhausting, tiring but exhilarating. And yet, it wasn’t perfect. Endless possibilities lined up before her, each one waiting to be explored. She was already fifty years old, and she still hoped to achieve so much more. Time passed so fast it sickened Chang Yeon.
“What reasons can there be for her to say no?” she asked the sailor. “I’m honestly curious. Didn’t you say she would die sometime next week?”
“Yes, at 10:41 PM on Wednesday next week to be precise.”
The sailor’s near instant response chilled Chang Yeon. The sailor knew the past, the present, and the future, not only in this world but throughout all the offshoot worlds where Chang Yeon existed. And not once had it ever been wrong.
The sailor told her everything except one thing: the future that she, her most perfect self—“the most integrateable” in tuning terms—faced in this world. The service contract forbade the sailor to tell her that information no matter how anxious she became.
Of the forty-nine selves Chang Yeon had integrated so far, not one had rejected the offer. The sailor displayed so much sincerity that they could hardly refuse. At the same time it frightened them just the right amount. Most of all, the sailor visited the versions over and over until they agreed. The sailor was not allowed to reveal exactly when, where, and how they were going to die unless they specifically asked. But the sailor told Chang Yeon that they always, eventually, asked. When they asked, they were answered, and then they asked again. By the time they got around to asking that question, though, there usually wasn’t enough time left for extended contemplation. Emotionally-inclined versions became furious, sneered, threatened, ran away, cried, refused to speak, and became angry again, but in the end, they all got desperate. The process was shorter for less emotional versions, but even for them, the final step they reached was always desperation. Until this version. She had but this one chance not only to avoid death and eternal annihilation, but to survive and live a much better life. Why, then, wasn’t she seizing it?
“It wasn’t a definite no,” the sailor said. “She seems to be hesitating. I don’t exactly know why. But we’ll find out soon since she only has until tomorrow to make her decision.”
To die. A version closes their eyes one last time surrounded by loved ones in a familiar world. And then, nothing. Forever.
To live. A version must leave their world before their last breath. As they pass between worlds, their body dissolves and disappears. Their personality and talents are transmitted unaltered to the designated world. Their memory? It varied from person to person.
Chang Yeon had once asked the sailor, “How come I can’t remember things I did in the other worlds? How come I can’t remember anything at all?”
The sailor had replied, “That depends on what the versions expect from their next life. The amount of memory transferred is inversely proportional to the level of expectation one has for their new life. Your versions mostly admired the life you have in this world. Probably they hoped to forget their regrets and their unsatisfactory lives and wished to start fresh. In that case, their memories would’ve taken another form once transferred. In your case, they manifested in the form of “talents”. Suddenly you’d have a strong urge to learn a new language, right? Or out of the blue you needed to read books on social sciences, politics, philosophy, and so on even though you’d always considered them too difficult to read. Those interests were very likely what the selves had wanted transferred.”
It wasn’t hard for Chang Yeon to understand their admiration. Her life was definitely the opposite of shabby or insignificant. Still, she couldn’t help but imagine the funerals of those she’d integrated. First, their families would have reported them missing, and then, after many years when all hope of finding them had evaporated, their empty coffins would have been cremated. All for the sake of her perfect self. She could imagine the devastated families watching the coffins enter the furnace.
What if the situation were reversed and the sailor told her she was dying and proposed moving on to another world, a better world? If somewhere out there, there existed another version of herself that would continue on in a more perfect form? She was glad a better version had not materialized, at least not yet. But she didn’t think it would be an easy decision for her. Yes, she was being purely emotional. But it felt like she’d be betraying her husband, her friends, and all the others who cared about her. Suddenly, Chang Yeon wondered how likely it would be for her to choose to remain in this world and face her death.
“Maybe,” she said, “it’s because of someone important, like her family or lover?”
“She has no family. Although there is one who could be described as a friend and a lover, but their relationship is not like anything of this world. As I’ve said, this version is somewhat different.”
“That version—What was it called? How small did you say?”
“It’s the Roo tribe. The size var
ies by individual, but generally they are about three millimeters to one centimeter tall. Your version—her name is Chang by the way—is precisely 5.6 millimeters tall. To be able to communicate with her, I had to take a special form. They are hard to see with human eyes. But their smallness also gives them an advantage. They can move extremely quickly. They fly in an object called a Lu that can travel three to four kilometers per second.”
This distressed Chang Yeon. Though she knew there were many unknown offshoot worlds, she never thought she would come across a version of herself that was not human. Certainly not one smaller than her thumb and able to fly around in some strange, superfast aircraft.
* * *
On the way home, Chang circled over a small harborside city. She’d packed a day’s food a few hours ago, and it would be hours until the afternoon when the sun was best for Lu’s wings to photosynthesize. Chang considered returning home, but instead chose to keep on flying.
Then the harsh night wind slapped at Lu’s wings, and Chang descended to the small fishing boats anchored below. Through Lu’s senses the smell, chill, and roar of the sea surged over her. The ropes holding down the boats thrashed, while the boats themselves creaked and groaned as if they cursed sky and water. If she allowed Lu their full speed, they could easily fly across half the continent and return before the sun was high. But Chang slowed and spiraled downward until it was too dangerous to descend any further. The spray from the waves barely missed them before collapsing back on to the ocean’s surface. This is insane, Chang thought. She wouldn’t have done anything like this on a normal day. She felt daunted, but not solely from fear.
The world she saw through Lu’s eyes was a vast network of hexagons. They spread in all directions with no visible end. The only time Chang could discern anything was when they flew slowly. But when she accelerated, the world shattered with a boom into particles smaller than dust. Hahnoe, her closest friend, claimed the particles moved “imperfectly.” According to his logic, large things were “perfect” and small things were not. Chang always thought this an absurdly simplistic view, but had never said so to Hahnoe.
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