Cloud Atlas

Picking up where the story left off in Chapter 5, the Archivist asks Sonmi what Hae-Joo’s real identity was. Sonmi continues her story. Hae-Joo is part of the Union. He says Sonmi will have to trust him if she wants to stay alive, and Sonmi agrees to trust him. They go down to Chang, who drives them off in a plain car. As they go through a tunnel, Hae-Joo cuts into his finger and takes out a little metallic egg called his Soul. He tells Sonmi to also get rid of the Soul that the university gave her so that no one can track them.

Enforcers chase Chang’s car, and after a disorienting journey, Sonmi and Hae-Joo make it to a Union stronghold. Chang disappears, and Hae-Joo takes Sonmi to a poor neighborhood that is full of disease. Sonmi wonders why such a place exists in a great capital, but Hae-Joo explains that all cities need a place for “human waste” and that the upper classes benefit from having a place to enjoy illegal pleasures and to harvest healthy organs from the dying.

Hae-Joo takes Sonmi to the house of Ma Arak Na and gives her the bad news about Mephi’s arrest. They communicate with the distant An-Kor Apis, who is also part of the Union. An-Kor Apis explains that other cells of the Union have also been compromised. Mephi managed to die by suicide before interrogation could begin. Apis orders them to journey across the city for Union business.

In order to travel around the city, Hae-Joo needs a new Soul, so an implanter comes and gives him a new little egg with a new fictional identity. The implanter then performs an operation on Sonmi’s collar to remove her own identity and give her a human Soul. Next, they take Sonmi to someone who can give her a new face to make her look like a pureblood. In the present, the Archivist asks why Sonmi currently looks like a standard fabricant Sonmi, and she replies that the government restored her old face for the court proceedings.

Sonmi continues her story. She and Hae-Joo take off to complete An-Kor Apis’s orders. Along the way, Sonmi asks if Hae-Joo’s name is really Hae-Joo, and he replies that no one in his profession has a real name. A guard at a checkpoint stops them and asks about Hae-Joo’s finger. Hae-Joo replies that he cut it trying to slice an avocado. The guard lets them pass, and they keep driving. To avoid curfew that night, Hae-Joo and Sonmi spend the night in the spare room of a genomics unit, where “wombtanks” of new fabricants incubate. It’s the type of place where Sonmi herself was created.

The next morning, Sonmi asks Hae-Joo why the Union wants to protect her so much. Hae-Joo says it’s complicated. Basically, the corpocracy is killing itself by poisoning the land. Though the poor are dying first, eventually the wealthy will die too. The corpocracy’s plan is simply to deny that anything is wrong, hoping to replace the fast-dying lower classes with fabricants and eventually stabilize things. The Union, on the other hand, wants to put a stop to the corpocracy through revolution by ascending six million fabricants.

Although the corpocracy is powerful, it relies on fabricant labor and would crumble if the six million fabricants ascended. Sonmi provides proof that ascension is possible and could act as an ambassador between the Union and newly ascended fabricants.

Sonmi and Hae-Joo continue their journey. They leave the wombtanks and make it out of the city to some mountains, where they leave the car to hike. Sonmi is fascinated by her first hike and notices a giant cross-legged figure carved out of rock who has a face that reminds her of Timothy Cavendish. They make their way to an old abbey that houses a colony of purebloods who have abandoned city life. An old woman greets them. She is the Abbess of the Mountains.

The purebloods in the abbey all come from different backgrounds and have learned how to live off the land away from the corpocracy, like the nuns that lived in the area for centuries before them. The Union provides the people with technology in exchange for being able to use the colony as a safe house. When Sonmi wakes up the next morning, the Abbess of the Mountains greets her and tells her about the colony. She explains that the giant carved stone man is Siddhartha, a man from the past who believed that people could overcome pain and be reincarnated in better forms in future lives. Sonmi wishes she can be reincarnated in the Abbess’s colony someday.

Soon, Hae-Joo and Sonmi must leave the colony. As they do, the Abbess of the Mountains whispers in Sonmi’s ear that she’ll ask Siddhartha to grant Sonmi’s wish. While Hae-Joo and Sonmi are out hiking, they see a car that looks too expensive to be so far out in the woods, driving over a suspension bridge. A man steps out of the car and takes out a cage that holds a 30-centimeter-tall woman, grabs her by the hair, then throws her off the bridge into the rocks below. The woman was a fabricant living doll.

The man comes over to Hae-Joo and Sonmi and complains about how he had to buy the living doll for his daughter because all her friends had one. But the doll went out of fashion and official disposal is expensive, so the man decided to just throw it off the bridge. His wife is with him, waiting by the car. He talks with Hae-Joo about golf, and Hae-Joo pretends to be enthusiastic. Sonmi considers the man a murderer, albeit one too shallow to even realize it.

By nightfall, Sonmi and Hae-Joo reach their destination, Pusan. Pusan has a reputation as the place where Seoul executives come to fulfill their vices. Hae-Joo meets up with a woman he knows who runs a flophouse and provides them with a run-down room for a couple nights. After taking care of some errands that night, the next morning Hae-Joo takes Sonmi to the window and makes her close her eyes. When she opens them, the sees the ocean way in the distance for the first time.

Hae-Joo brings out a contraband transceiver to communicate with An-Kor Apis. Apis says it’s time to teach Sonmi a few things, so she can decide on her own if she wants to keep going. Apis disconnects, and Hae-Joo says they’re going to Papa Song’s Golden Ark, which Sonmi recognizes as the place fabricants go to be exulted after 12 Starring Ceremonies. They go into the city, disguising themselves as maintenance people, and manage to infiltrate the Ark (which is supposedly a ship set to sail to Hawaii) without much difficulty, since few people have any desire to enter the Ark illegally.

Hae-Joo and Sonmi make it to a chamber that is full of fabricants in turnstiles, including Sonmis, Yoonas, and other models that Sonmi recognizes. They sing the psalm of Papa Song as they prepare to be “exulted” and taken to Hawaii. But when Hae-Joo and Sonmi enter the next room, everything is quiet. Three aids greet fabricants, who entered the room one by one. A helmet descends on the fabricants and kills them with a bolt. It’s a slaughterhouse, and in the next room, workers butcher the remains of the fabricants. These remains become new biomatter for wombtanks, Soap, and even sometimes Papa Song’s food.

In the present, the Archivist interrupts to say that what Sonmi describes is too evil to be possible. Sonmi asks the Archivist if he’s ever seen a fabricant retirement village in person. There should be whole cities full of retired fabricants, based on how many get created. The Archivist protests that fabricants have rights, and Sonmi herself saw fabricants in an ark headed toward Hawaii at Papa Song’s, but Sonmi says those images are computer-generated. The Archivist doesn’t back down but suggests Sonmi should continue her story from where she left off.

Sonmi continues her story. In the Ark, Sonmi watches the slaughter of fabricants for what feels like a long time. Even after she and Hae-Joo get back to the flophouse, the images continue to haunt her. At the flophouse, Sonmi and Hae-Joo have sex. Afterward, Hae-Joo examines Sonmi’s comet birthmark. In the morning, Sonmi deicides they must destroy all the slaughterships. Consumers need to learn that fabricants are purebloods, even if they’re grown in a wombtank, and if this doesn’t work, then fabricants need to fight with the Union against the consumers. Sonmi proposes creating a Catechism to teach newly ascended fabricants about their rights. This eventually becomes a work called Declarations, which features prominently in Sonmi’s trial.

Sonmi writes Declarations outside Pusan. Over the course of three weeks. The very afternoon she completes it, she gets captured. When she goes out for a walk, enforcers suddenly pop out and surround her. Sonmi expected the raid. As she tells the Archivist in the present, she feels that this event, like the other events she’s confessed to the Archivist, beginning at Papa Song’s, was scripted and that all the major people in her story like Hae-Joo and Mephi were following the script. She brings up plot holes, like how Wing~027 seemed just as stably ascended as she was, implying that she was not as unique as the Union said.

Sonmi believes the Union is real, but instead of encouraging revolution, its real purpose is to give the corpocracy a defined enemy. Her whole trial and the events leading up to it were one flashy show to discredit Abolitionism. The Archivist asks why Sonmi cooperated with Hae-Joo if she suspected he was betraying her. She says she wanted to get her Declarations out anyway, and that she hopes the wide spread of her Declarations will lead to a better future, even if schoolchildren learn that her Catechism is “evil.” As her last request, Sonmi asks the Archivist to let her download the end of a movie she started watching long ago.