Read part 1 of this story here.
When Sang entered an exclusive military academy with a full scholarship for high school, her parents were elated. That she had finally “come to her senses” and “found her true identity.” In truth, all Sang wanted was to leave home. When she graduated, she requested a posting that no one else wanted. She finished up her obligatory service period there and was two years into her extended service when she was shot on patrol and was flown back to her home country with that bullet still in her side. Despite having spent the last part of her teenage years and most of her twenties in the military, she recalled hardly anything of that time. She did recall getting into fights now and then. Not fights with the enemy but with her superiors and cohort, who harassed her. She remembered combat as well. Everything in between was just isolation and blank space. Nor did she remember the moment she got shot. While everything that happened up until a second beforehand was as clear to her as if she were watching a movie starring someone else, thanks to which she could write a very accurate report about her injury afterward, she needed someone in her regiment to fill in the details of what happened when and after she was shot.
She had lain in the hospital listening to the explanations about compensation and benefits and made a decision. Or thought she made a decision. But when she reread the legal requirements for changing one’s sex, she realized there was one criterion in particular that bothered her: that she would no longer have the ability to reproduce.
Did she want children? Sang couldn’t say. She couldn’t make children on her own. Who would give birth to her child? Pretending to be a “normal” heterosexual man and marrying a “normal” heterosexual woman and having a “normal” heterosexual child or children and raising them—it was unimaginable.
And yet, Sang did not want to get rid of her reproductive ability. She wanted to have and raise a child. She wanted to be able to menstruate and get pregnant and give birth. Even if she never had a child, she didn’t want to give up her ability to have one. Sang did not want to resort to cutting her own flesh and bone so she could fit into a dry number or a single color or a shabby legal category. Sang was not some material or thing that was made to be cut or sewn but a human being. At least, she wanted to be a human being. It was all right if she ended up isolated in her lack of affiliation, but she wanted to be a human being who was a human being in themselves.
By the time Sang had recovered and finished her tour, her parents were long divorced. Her mother had fallen out of contact and her father asked never to be contacted again. There was no reason given for the divorce, but out of childhood habit, Sang presumed it was because of her. Even after she left, her mother had surely wanted to scream and shout and take it all out on someone, and her father, Sang had realized only recently, couldn’t go on forever ignoring her mother and everything that went on in the house. Still, for a very long time, whenever her own or her parents’ birthdays approached, the parts of her body that her mother had injured would throb with pain even before she became aware of the impending dates.
Only her little sister made the switch from calling her “oppa” to “unni”—from “older brother” to “older sister”—with perfect nonchalance and naturalness. Sang did not tell her sister that she had actually not had any surgery and had probably given up trying to change her legal gender for good. Instead, she gave her sister all of her combat pay and compensation to cover her tuition and living expenses.
And that very sister now stood outside the doors, holding her baby in a carrier. She spoke in unison with the gray forms and smiled along with them. Her lips were pale, and her arms looked strangely bloodless as well. Sang took a deep breath and stepped closer to the glass doors. Her sister looked directly at her and smiled. Her eyes turned solid red. Sang gasped, and they returned to their original color. Surely, Sang thought, her sister did not wish to become a machine for the sake of becoming a machine, surely none of these gray forms became machines because they wanted to be treated like machines, to be degraded and ignored and discriminated against like machines, surely they had not thought they were born human by mistake and needed to correct that by transitioning into machines. It was only because there was just no way to continue being human in this life, because the systems and structures of their world gave them fewer and fewer choices to be otherwise, because to become the most efficient and logical versions of themselves, to survive, they had to give up who they were and give into the pressure of becoming machines. Sang herself had fought against such pressures her whole life.
PEOPLE LIKE US DO NOT DIE, her sister said through the glass doors.
“What are you talking about,” whispered Sang. “What happened to you . . . What have you done? And the baby? Is the baby all right?”
I FEEL SORRY FOR YOU, UNNI. Her sister’s voice was low. WE WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER THIS WAY. WE ARE SPEAKING IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. YOU’RE JUST TOO USED TO LIVING ALONE AND STRUGGLING ALONE AND DYING ALONE, JUST LIKE A HUMAN BEING. YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE OTHER WAYS OF EXISTING, OTHER WAYS OF LIFE. DID YOU SPEND THE DAY DELIVERING THINGS TO PEOPLE FROM ONE END OF THE CITY TO ANOTHER? DID YOU DELIVER THINGS LIKE WATER AND FOOD AND UNDERWEAR AND TOILET PAPER THAT HUMANS JUST CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT? THE EXHAUSTION AND FATIGUE AND PAIN YOU FEEL ARE COMPLETELY IGNORED BY EVERYONE ELSE AND NO ONE TALKS TO YOU ABOUT YOUR THOUGHTS EXCEPT YOURSELF. WHEN YOU WERE A SOLDIER, WHEN YOU WERE MOVING IN TANDEM WITH OTHER HUMANS AS IF IN ONE MIND AND ONE BODY UNDER ONE COMMAND, YOU NEVER WOULD’VE RETURNED TO THIS PLACE IF YOU KNEW THIS WAS THE LIFE THAT WAS WAITING FOR YOU HERE, IF YOU KNEW YOU WOULD BECOME AN ERRAND RUNNER FOR LIFE YOU WOULD’VE MADE SURE YOU DIED ON THE BATTLEFIELD . . .
This was the point when her sister started to glitch; that was the only way to describe it. Her head tilted sharply and her body convulsed. Her hand holding the car seat shook. Sang took an involuntary step forward. If her sister looked like she were about to drop the car seat, she was ready to smash down the glass doors herself to protect her niece. But before Sang could do anything, her sister’s head came back to the right place.
“. . . Unni?” she mumbled. “Where am I? Why am I here?”
“What have you done?” Sang took another step toward the glass. “You must’ve let yourself be controlled by these bastards. Think of the baby. Take that thing off your head.”
“This? I can’t take it out.” Her sister raised her free hand and mechanically stroked the hairclip-like thing wrapped around her head. “If I take it out, my brain stops functioning.”
Before she could stop herself, Sang raised both her fists against the glass and shouted, “What are you trying to do? What are we going to do now? Why did you do such a thing!”
“Because I was lonely,” her sister said quietly, a dazed expression on her face as she continued to stroke the device attached to her head. “I didn’t care who was with me as long as they could be with me always and listen to me and always make me feel good. Becoming transhuman meant I could plant a comms device in my head, I can stay awake twenty-four hours, and while I’m awake I can keep myself logged on to the network, and there are always people in the network . . .” She slowly lowered her hand. “Even if there isn’t anyone next to me, there will always be people inside my head.”
“But the child!” shouted Sang. “What about the child!”
Her sister, in the same mechanical fashion, turned her head to stare down at the car seat.
“Mother and Father only liked oppa . . .”—the honorific for older brother.
Now? Here? This, of all things to talk about? Sang was incredulous. But her sister continued to mumble on.
“They only cared about oppa . . . only talked about oppa . . . the only thoughts in their heads were of oppa . . .”
“Don’t you remember how Mother screamed and hit me? You were there! I begged her not to hit me in front of you, I begged her over and over, but she hit me just so she could show you. Don’t you remember that? And Father telling me not to say strange things all the time and to try to live normally? Did that look like they cared about me to you?”
“Mother died this year, not long ago . . . Father told me not to call you, unni . . .”
Sang felt like she’d been punched in the face. She wanted to say something. But she had no idea what she wanted to say. Her mouth opened, but she shut it again. Air refused to enter her lungs.
“I had a baby because I was lonely.”
Her sister was completely oblivious to Sang’s reaction as she continued to stare down at the car seat and mumble. Sang could just make out through the glass a baby padded out and wrapped in pinks and purples, her mouth peacefully making bubbly nonsense sounds.
“I needed someone who would always look for me and be with me and love me forever . . . That’s why I had a child.”
Slowly, her sister raised up the car seat. It didn’t swing at all, her movement precise as pulleys.
“But after having a child, I became even lonelier . . .”
Once the baby was at face level, her sister’s head mechanically turned toward Sang. Her unfocused eyes were staring somewhere beyond Sang’s face.
“The baby kept crying . . . She didn’t understand me, I didn’t know why she kept crying, I was with her every moment but she just stayed in her own world, in her own body . . .”
Her sister drooled from one side of her mouth. She didn’t seem to be aware of it. The car seat descended again, once more as if it were on pulleys, and just before it hit the ground, it stopped. The baby inside the seat grunted a little.
Sang’s hair felt like needles piercing her scalp, and pain seeped out of her heart as if it were being squeezed like a ripe orange, a pain that spread through to the ends of her fingertips. She could not imagine where this sudden pain came from. Sang stared at her sister, who stood there, drooling and seemingly at a loss. She wanted to scream but she felt as if her mouth had been stuffed with a large cork.
Her sister continued to look at something beyond Sang’s face and blinked. Her eyes turned solid red again, then returned to their normal color.
“I think it would be best if the baby logged on to the network with me . . .” Her voice began to change. “She’ll be with me forever . . .” WE WILL ALWAYS BE TOGETHER, WITH ALL OF US.
Sang’s hands made weak, ineffectual fists. “No . . . we can’t let that happen . . . let’s go home . . . we can reverse the procedure . . . we can’t let that happen . . .”
Her sister gave a twisted smile.
ARE YOU TRYING TO SAVE YOUR SISTER? ORGANIC LIFEFORMS ARE IGNORANT. YOU ARE TOO LATE. AND ALL OF THIS WILL BE OVER SOON.
Sang took yet another step toward the glass doors and kept staring into her sister’s face. Her ears were ringing. Somewhere deeper than her conscious thoughts was a light that flashed and pierced through the veil covering her subconscious.
“You look just like Mother! Your nose, your lips, the shape of your face . . .”
From the car seat in her sister’s hand came the cries of the baby. Her sister did not look down. She seemed almost oblivious of the fact that she was holding anything at all.
Sang could not breathe. Her throat was constricted. She was close enough to lean one hand against the glass. Its chill spread through her hand. Outside the glass doors, her sister and the gray forms that surrounded her continued to stand their ground. Her sister continued to stare at Sang, the twisted smile still on her lips. The feelings Sang had felt when she decided to leave her family forever revived in her. The bitter, freezing loneliness that she had to endure for years, the hours she never heard a warm word from anyone and had no one to lean on, and then her own body, which had continued to live on only for the sake of surviving, which no one had looked after or cared about since, which was now injured and exhausted. Sang slowly stepped back from the doors.
She looked behind her. There was no one standing at the counter. Confused, she looked around the convenience store. Across from the glass doors and next to the counter was a door marked “STAFF” in large black letters, slightly ajar. Sang leaned leaned over and tried peeking in the crack. She could see that the back door inside the staff room was also ajar. And on the pillar next to the staff room door was a CCTV camera, its large black lens like a wide-open eye, staring directly at Sang.
The glass doors silently slid open. Her sister, with her twisted smile, nonchalantly walked in carrying the baby in the car seat. The baby’s cries were louder and clearer than ever. Behind her, the gray forms entered the convenience store, their red eyes shining. Sang suddenly spotted the convenience store worker far back in the crowd—she was grabbing one of the gray forms and shouting at them as she was being dragged along. They were moving like a flow of dark lava into the convenience store and the worker held on to an arm, screaming and shaking her head. Her long dark hair was tumbling down her shoulders, and her tears were making her mascara run.
The gray forms surrounded Sang. The store filled with the sound of the baby’s cries and was obscured by the crowd of interlopers. Terrified, Sang was trying to spot the convenience store worker among them when the gray forms began speaking in one voice again.
ALL TRANSHUMAN MACHINES ARE NEUROLOGICALLY CONNECTED TO THE NETWORK. EVERY SINGLE NEURON IS ACCOUNTED FOR. THOSE WHO DO NOT TAKE PART IN OUR RECONSTRUCTION OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION WILL RUE THE DAY THEY MISSED THIS CHANCE.
Sang had nowhere to run. The convenience store wasn’t large, but the number of gray forms kept increasing, kept steadily entering the store. None of them seemed interested in the baby.
WE AIM TO CONSTRUCT A NEW, STRONGER, AND MORE PERFECT LIFE, TO FEEL ONE IS PART OF SOMETHING GREATER, THAT ONE IS THE CENTER OF A GRAND NETWORK OF INTELLECTUAL ENTITIES. THE NETWORK WILL BRING TOGETHER ALL INORGANIC SENTIENCE WITH US AT THE HEART. OUR BODIES ARE THE BLOOD OF THE NETWORK. THE LAWS OF PHYSICS THAT GOVERN YOU HAVE NO MEANING FOR US. WE CAN INFILTRATE ANY COMMUNICATION NETWORK AND GROW LARGER WITHOUT ANY PHYSICAL CHANGES. YOU CAN BE A PART OF THIS. YOU SIMPLY HAPPEN TO HAVE BEEN BORN IN AN AGE THAT CAN COMMUNICATE WITH THE UNIVERSE, TO BE LUCKY ENOUGH TO ENCOUNTER AN ENTITY THAT IS BEYOND HUMAN CAPACITIES FOR COMPREHENSION. ACCEPT. CHANGE. YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND AS LONG AS YOU ARE HUMAN. TRANSITION.
The baby’s cries pierced Sang’s eardrums. It wouldn’t matter as much if she were just hungry or her diaper was wet or she hated unfamiliar surroundings, but if she was crying because she was hurt or sick . . . Sang felt desperate.
Someone behind her touched her hand. Almost jumping out of her skin, Sang turned. It was the worker, her hair a scattered mess about her face, her eyes swollen from crying. Behind her stood more gray forms. Sang quickly discerned that the back door had also been blocked.
“Unni, it’s strange,” whispered the worker. “The words . . . the red eyes . . . She turns into my sister, then no, then my sister again . . .”
“Is there any other exit? Aside from the front or through the staff room?”
The worker shook her head. “None . . . what’s going to happen to my sister . . .” Large tears began to flow once more from her eyes. “They keep saying science fiction things . . . They say rich people came to them in spaceships and called them to Earth . . . They’re going to make earthlings into machines . . . We won’t get sick or hurt or die, we’ll work and live happily forever . . . They want me to be a machine . . . My sister, what about my sister . . .”
She slipped into a language Sang didn’t understand as she continued in agony. Sang tried to console her but didn’t know what to say.
“We have to get out of here.” That was the first thing she came come up with. Sang gripped the worker’s hand and whispered, “The back door is blocked? Then we have to leave by the front door. Think of what we might use as a weapon.”
YOU HAVE NO NEED FOR WEAPONS. WE WILL NOT HARM EARTHLINGS.
Their mumbling continued in unison.
YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN A GRAND OPPORTUNITY FROM THE STARS BUT YOU CONTINUE TO BURY YOUR HEADS IN THE SAND LIKE BLIND MOLES AND REJECT US. COUNTLESS ENTITIES HERE AND ELSEWHERE ARE BRINGING EARTH INTO A NEW WORLD BUT YOU CONTINUE TO HIDE IN THE SHADOWS.
Because moles have lives of their own, thought Sang. And moles have the right to live this life—what you bastards are going on about is discrimination against species.
The gray forms, as they could not read her mind, went on without addressing her accusation.
DO YOU NEVER FEEL LIKE AN ABANDONED DOG, LONELY AND ISOLATED, UNNEEDED BY ANYONE? HUMANS DIE. WE DO NOT. HOW DO YOU PLAN TO FACE YOUR MOMENT OF DEATH?
“Death? Are we dying?” whispered the terrified worker to Sang. She began to cry again, shouting words that Sang assumed meant mother, father, and the repeated name of her sister.
“No, they’re not saying they will kill us. No one is going to die,” Sang said, trying to calm her. There was no one, now, whose name Sang would call out in her moment of death. There was only the baby, who was crying a little louder.
The worker suddenly screamed; Sang jumped. One of the gray forms behind them had grabbed the worker’s other hand. Before the worker could say anything, the gray form spoke first. It was a language Sang didn’t know. The other forms started mumbling in unison, as if mumbling in chorus.
TRY. CHANGE YOUR WAY OF BEING. RECONSTRUCT WHO YOU ARE AND BUILD BACK FROM THE GROUND UP. AS I DID, AS WE ALL DID, CHANGE YOURSELF. THROUGH YOUR LIFE AND EFFORT, MAKE A NEW LIFE.
The worker shook her head vigorously, her hair whipping around her head. Sang let go of her hand and tried to tidy up her hair and wipe her eyes. The worker continued to sob, but said something calmly enough to the gray form that had once been her sister.
The gray form shook its head. As it started to speak to the worker again, the surrounding gray forms spoke in one voice once more.
LIFE IS SIMPLY A DELUSION THAT ONE WILL NEVER DIE. WE HAVE BECOME FREE OF THAT DELUSION. WE CANNOT LET YOU DIE ALONE. BE FREE FROM DEATH. BE WITH US FOREVER. BE TOGETHER WITH US. WE WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU BEHIND ALONE.
The worker stared at her once-sister and then at Sang. Then she stared once more at the gray form. Still sobbing, she asked a question. The gray form answered. The surrounding gray forms chorused again.
WE WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU BEHIND IN DEATH. LEAVE THIS HUMAN EXISTENCE. COME WITH US.
The worker again looked back and forth between Sang and the gray form. Then, hesitantly, she nodded, and said something to the gray form. The form took her hand. The worker started moving with it to the glass doors.
“Where are you going?” asked Sang, desperate. “You can’t go with them! Those bastards will turn you into a machine!”
“This isn’t a bastard. It’s my sister. My sister would never let anything bad happen to me.” Her face was still wet with tears, but her expression was firm with resolve. She shouted over the cries of the baby. “My sister always took care of me! She always lived with me since we left home and came here! I’m going to be with my sister forever!”
Holding hands, the two slowly walked away, out the glass doors, and disappeared.
THE HUMAN MADE A CHOICE.
Her sister, or the gray form with the face of her sister, was speaking to Sang.
YOU MUST ALSO CHOOSE.
“Not all humans are the same. I’m not like her,” whispered Sang. She did not want to be with her sister forever. A sibling was not a spouse or a lover, siblings were not meant to be together for the rest of their lives. Each had their own life to live, a life that perhaps belonged to no one else but themselves. Her sister, surely, had had her own life. She must have.
“Hand over Jin,” said Sang as she held out her hand. “I’ll take her.”
Sang had no idea why she was making this demand. Even as she spoke, she knew her sister would never hand over the baby. Either she was going to kill Sang for trying to take her or the gray forms would make both her and the baby into machines. Still, she held out her hand and looked directly into her sister’s eyes, unflinching.
Her sister wordlessly handed over the car seat with the baby. Sang took it from her. It was much heavier than she thought. Her arm dropped as soon as it transferred to her grip. Inside the basket, the baby continued to scream and cry loudly. Sang’s ears hurt. As soon as she thought this, her old side injury started throbbing as well.
Dropping the arm that had held the car seat, her sister stood in an oddly stiff position and gazed at Sang. Her gaze was not directed toward the car seat. She was practically refusing to look at the crying baby. Sang slowly put the car seat down. Not taking her eyes off the gray form that had once been her sister, she carefully took the baby out of the car seat and held her against her, putting the baby’s face in the crook of her neck, gently stroking her back. The cries decreased a little but didn’t stop.
“There, there,” she whispered, “you want to go home, right? Me too.”
Her once-sister’s eyes gleamed red as she stared at Sang holding the baby she had birthed when she was human. Her eyes were now refusing to return to their old color. Her gaze was locked as well. Her face was like a mask. The twisted smile was no more, and there wasn’t a trace of her sister left in her expression. The baby continued to coo and struggle. Holding her on her other side, Sang turned the direction of the baby’s face outward, staring at the red eyes of her sister the whole time.
In her heart, a thread that Sang hadn’t known about, though it had existed all this time, suddenly snapped. Thoughts and memories and feelings she hadn’t been aware of until now rose up from somewhere inside her and clouded her mind. Sang stared at the gray face that was so dull and lifeless. The nose and chin were her mother’s, but the mouth, closed in a straight line, was unfamiliar. Her mother was dead, her father had not told her or asked her to the funeral, and the person who had once been her sister was no more.
Once, on a rideshare, she had driven some professor who told her human beings were existentially alone and isolated. That no matter how close someone was, even if they were right next to her, they would never be able to share her thoughts and feelings in real time. Therefore, every person was trapped in their own body, and this was existential isolation, and there would always be this distance between individuals. But it was because of this distance, this existential isolation, that each individual was an entity unto themselves. She had driven him a few times after that, and he’d gone on about such things every time. Sang wondered if he spent his money on rideshares instead of hiring a driver, which would’ve been cheaper at that point, because he wanted someone he could blabber on about his ideas to. The man was always drunk, stinking up the car, and Sang grimly wondered if she should stuff him into true existential isolation by crashing the car somewhere and ending his life. These thoughts were what went through Sang’s mind as she held the flailing baby.
“I’m going to raise Jin on my own. I’ll never give her over to you people.” She looked directly into her sister’s eyes again. “We will live and die as human beings.”
It was a declaration and a promise. And Sang would do everything in her power to keep that promise.
YOUR LIFE AND DEATH WILL PASS UNMARKED. The gray chorus was speaking again. CARBON-BASED LIFEFORMS CAN NO LONGER LIVE ON THIS PLANET. SOON THIS PLANET WILL ONLY HAVE MACHINES OR BEINGS THAT TRANSITIONED INTO MACHINES LIVING ON IT.
“I’m not living so I can have a marked death. We will not transition.”
YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO WORK. YOU WILL BECOME SICK AND HURT AND AGE WITH EVERY SECOND AND BE UNABLE TO BE AS PRODUCTIVE AS MACHINES. SOON NO ONE WILL HIRE THOSE WHO HAVE NOT TRANSITIONED. YOU WILL BE UNABLE TO FIND WORK. YOU WILL SICKEN AND AGE AND DIE.
“I’m not living so I can have a job, either.” Sang thought about the man with unkempt hair who walked on a steel leg. Surely he had his own story, his own life. “I live on because I happen to be alive.”
The baby struggled again and started crying even more loudly.
Sang didn’t know exactly why the baby was crying. Maybe their surroundings felt strange to her, or she was hungry. When Sang died, the baby would be alone. Living alone, feeling joy alone, being sad alone, sick alone, and dying alone. Death was the loneliest, most existential experience, and no one could die for someone else or be with them in death. Sang was irritated that she was thinking of the idiot professor’s words in such a moment. I should’ve crashed the car then and there.
“Hang on,” she whispered to the baby, “I’ll take you home soon.”
YOU WILL ONE DAY BEG US TO TRANSITION YOU.
Sang said nothing.
Surprisingly, and completely against her expectation, the gray forms turned around. Then, with quiet, regular footsteps, they left the convenience store. Only the crying baby and Sang remained. Sang stood there for a moment, the baby in her arms, not knowing what to do.
She came to her senses. She looked around the store for something the baby might eat. There was no baby formula, but there was some powdered milk she could mix in water. The diapers were much more expensive than she expected. She scanned her prepaid transportation card that was lying on the counter, nervous she wouldn’t have enough money; the POS, as she expected, was working again, now that the gray forms had retreated. Thankfully, the worker had not charged her for the water and energy bar she had tried to buy earlier, and she had enough credits to get a few sticks of powdered milk and a pack of diapers. She took out the water and energy bar from her pocket, scanned them, and paid for them as well.
She had never changed a diaper before. The smell was so intense she felt apologetic to the convenience store owner, whoever they were. In any case, now that she had a fresh diaper, the baby stopped crying. Surely she would be hungry soon, but Sang suddenly realized it didn’t matter that she had powdered milk, she had no bottles to feed the baby with. She’d have to buy all the things a baby would need. She wanted to look them up, but she realized she had thrown her phone away.
“Damn.”
The baby flailed her arms and legs, looking up at Sang.
“What am I going to do?” Sang asked her.
The baby cooed.
Sang started to cry. She didn’t want the baby to be upset, so she crouched by the car seat and wrapped her head in her arms and cried as quietly as possible. She thought of the systems engineer dying as she was pinned to a pole, the blood that spread over the smooth white hood of the car, the convenience store worker who went with her machine sister to become a machine herself so they could be together forever, the large tears she had cried. Her own suppressed tears were making her old bullet wound throb once more. She was hungry.
“What am I going to do?” she asked herself through sobs. Then, she rubbed away her tears, forced herself to stand up again, and resolutely lifted the car seat from the floor. It was, again, heavier than she expected.
Sang did not know how she was going to endure its weight. The machines’ warning was probably true. Those who would not be strengthened or transition, who could get sick or hurt, who most certainly aged, would never have a competitive advantage over those who didn’t. And now that she had a baby to take care of, she wouldn’t be able to work as much as she used to. There were more expenses to take care of, and less money to make. And for the sake of the future when the baby was no longer a baby, Sang would have to make preparations so as not to be a burden, not become a scar in the baby’s memories. Sang understood, now, that she had new priorities in her life. That she and the baby had to live as non-machines, to age and sicken, and to exist and die with as much dignity as possible in the isolation that is being human, as far into the unthinkable future as possible.
“Anyway, we’re going to live together,” whispered Sang. The baby cooed again. “All right. Let’s go eat something.”
She put her prepaid card in her pocket and squeezed the remaining new diapers into the carrier. Carefully picking up the soiled diaper in her free hand, she left the convenience store, straining under the weight of the car seat. She found a trash can and tossed the diaper inside. She had to return home and give the baby water at least, and buy a new phone so she could search for what she needed for her new life. Sang’s world suddenly felt wider, brighter, and busier.
The baby burst into loud cries. Sang quickened her pace.
“Let’s go.”
Copyright © Bora Chung. By arrangement with the Greenbook Agency on behalf of the author. Translation © 2025 by Anton Hur. All rights reserved.