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Read an Excerpt From Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim
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Read an Excerpt From Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim
Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, betrayal, and the harsh permanence of the border.
By Isabel J. Kim
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Published on May 14, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim, a science fiction that asks what you’d sacrifice for a different life—publishing with Tor Books on June 2nd.
When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life.How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?
SOYOUNG
“Do you think it’s emotionally equivalent to murder?”
Yujin chokes on his latte. You take a smooth sip of your Americano. In retrospect, that was a morbid thing to say. It doesn’t fit the setting. You’re sitting in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store, waiting for your instance in the cafe near the rotating displays that guard the entrance. The salespeople are loudly promoting dried persimmons in fancy gift boxes (Half off! Today only!). Commuters in nice clothing hurry past, using the food hall as a shortcut to the subway. Tourists examine the stalls and malinger.
The Shinsegae Department Store basement used to be your favorite place in all of Seoul. Your mom always took you through when you visited her at work, and you’d pick out something delicious (twigim, mandu, jun) to augment dinner at home. But these days, the physical reality of the basement always disappoints you. Everything is smaller, shabbier, too loud and not as wondrous. The jun don’t taste the same. They got rid of the ice cream stall you liked. You wonder if your instance will feel the same way, or if the years between visits will preserve some sort of magic when she returns. You kind of hope it will feel perfect for her, because you’d like to experience that perfection again. If and when she agrees to reintegrate. Or else for you, the memory will stay bittersweet and choked forever, because Harabeoji is dead and you’re never going to eat dinner with him again.
You feel regular about that. By regular, you mean very bad. Bad enough that you’re blithely asking Yujin about whether reintegration would be murder. That’s an awful thing to say to Yujin specifically, because Yujin talks about his other self like his instance will save him. But you can’t help yourself.
You want to stop talking about death but it keeps seeping out through the seams. You’re angry about that. Things shouldn’t matter to you so much; Harabeoji’s death shouldn’t be affecting you so greatly. It was a foregone conclusion, and it’s not like your mom or your fiancé or any of your friends or anyone young has died. This wasn’t a surprise death. So you’re in your twenties and your grandfather dies. So you knew it was coming. So you still feel like shit about the whole thing, and worse than shit, you feel guilty, because there’s the relief mingled in with the sadness—the relief of foregone conclusions. He’s dead and gone and you aren’t waiting for the drop anymore. What a terrible grandchild you are! Except, no. You’re allowed to feel however you want. Maybe you shouldn’t even feel bad. You visited him every other week in the house you grew up in, choked with slowly advancing vines. And you’re pretty sure he loved you the best, even if he called Minsoo his favorite, because Minsoo was the firstborn son. That love: another foregone conclusion.
“Murder?” Yujin says, and then in English, “Murder? Like, killing people?”
“Yeah, murder. Emotional murder.”
You’ve been thinking a lot about reintegration and how it relates to death. Ever since you called your instance. But you’re now feeling really awful for bringing this up to Yujin. You know instancing is a sore spot for him. And maybe you’re also a coward, needing moral support for a meeting with your other self. You knew that without a friend’s presence, you probably would’ve let the sick feeling in your stomach win, and you would have let your instance be someone else’s problem. Not yours.
Except, no. You wouldn’t have called your instance if you were a coward, even if you did call her at a terrible time—1 pm in Korea, which was 1 am in New York.
She had picked up with a scratchy, sleep-sodden voice.
“Hello?” she said, in English.
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Sublimation
Isabel J. Kim
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Isabel J. Kim
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“Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, in Korean.
“Yes.” You were surprised that she had an American accent.
“Harabeoji’s dead,” you had said, and there was a thump as she dropped her phone. You told her the bare facts. You didn’t know what else to tell her. You had almost wanted to laugh, during the conversation—her incredulity, contrasted against your own emotionless voice. How absurd. Harabeoji is dead, and he wants you here, even though you’ve never come back to visit. Even though you don’t call him, anymore. Harabeoji’s dead and he knew that I always wanted to know what you know, and I think telling you to return was his idea of a gift.
Your instance had been silent for a long moment. Then she had said she would come for the funeral.
You scratch the black cuff on your wrist. The raised letters MERGEBREAK are cool and rubberized against your fingers. Yujin had bought it for you with his instance’s employee discount. The matching cuff for your instance is in your purse.
“Sorry,” you say to Yujin. “I don’t mean that. I guess I’m just nervous about meeting her? I don’t know. You should go, she texted me she was on the subway. I bet she’ll be here any minute.”
“You sure you don’t want me to stick around?” Yujin says, leaning forward.
With his hair in his eyes, Yujin looks like your memory of him from high school, when you were just childhood friends who had fallen out of touch, when he was just another one of the boys in the uniform shirt and slacks and you were one of the girls with the regulation haircuts. You had only become close again after Yujin had instanced, after he had called you from the airport because you were the one person his age who had an instance. And now you vet his girlfriends and he shows you about how to download movies illegally and you have both forgiven each other for what you did when you were seventeen.
It hadn’t been anything so bad—Yujin had asked you out and you had said no.
“I’m sure.”
“Because I can stay, for moral support. I can make intimidating faces in the background. Or I can be super friendly so she-you likes you more. Whatever you need.”
You shake your head. When you had instanced, you had gone home and then gone to school and you had marveled at the way that nothing in anyone’s life had changed, how they didn’t know that anything was wrong. This is how you feel now.
“It’s family stuff,” you say, handing Yujin your empty cup so he can toss it on his way out. “And I don’t want to scare her.”
You know that’s a foregone conclusion. Of course you’re going to scare her. She’s you. And you’re scared. You’re sick to your stomach with want. You need her to love you so bad it hurts. Because then you get to be her. Then she gets to be you.
* * *
An instance is a duplicate self cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern American vocabulary. To become an instance is to “instantiate”; in the present tense, “instancing.”
The oldest reference to instances is a line in Hammurabi’s Code translated as the foreign brother-self will receive no inheritance.
Different cultures refer to instances with a Technicolor diversity: the sibling-self, the changeling, the one-who-does-not-return. The first requirement for instancing is a settled culture, and traditionally instances appear specifically in seafaring societies. In many civilizations the ocean formed an organic division between the familiar and the foreign.
The second requirement is intent. Sailors throughout history are recorded as having sailed from their home ports without instancing for decades, until one morning they board their ship and look back to see their instance standing at the docks. Something must have shifted in their heart, some secret admittance that their leave-taking is permanent, that their families have become foreign to them.
There is a folktale that is repeated in Japan, Korea, and coastal China, of a fisherman who is coaxed into following a water spirit into an undersea court, where he drinks and dances with the beautiful merfolk. But the night grows long, so the fisherman asks the water spirit to take him back to his home. The spirit warns him that time flows differently underwater, but the fisherman repeats that he wants to go home.
The spirit nods and sadly takes the fisherman back to the shore. When the fisherman’s feet touch dry land, he ages thirty years instantly. When he walks into his house, he finds himself already inside, asleep with his wife.
A border is an artificial thing with practical consequences: the severing of the self from the self.
ROSE
You’re trying to find your instance in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store. You hadn’t managed to sleep during the flight, which had been all rollercoaster turbulence and recycled air. But now, fresh out of the airport and cleared through customs, you’re wired from sleep deprivation and strangely delighted by all the people running around and the coordinated chaos of the food hall, so foreign to you now. They don’t make food halls like this in New York. The closest you go to regularly might be Eataly. And all your memories of Shinsegae are two feet lower, from the perspective of a child. You want to go look around. You want to buy an ice cream. You don’t want to go looking for your instance.
Once you see your instance, all of this will become real again. The good feelings will start to sit wrong in your chest and you’ll have to act like you’ve flown in for a funeral, because your grandfather is dead.
You do feel sad about it. Abstractly. It’s the hollow grief of losing something you already assumed had dissipated into the past. Your instance had dredged up a whole dead history with her phone call in the middle of the night, waking you from a deep sleep.
“Hello?” you had said, accented with slumber.
“Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean.
“Yes.” The only people who still call you Soyoung are family. Everyone else calls you Rose.
“Harabeoji’s dead,” your instance said. You had dropped the phone in shock.
You hadn’t heard from Harabeoji in a decade. For a while there were phone calls on your birthday. He would say happy birthday, and you would say thank you. He would ask how’s school, and you would say it’s okay. Then you would ask how is other Soyoung? because you remembered the photograph of the little girl on the other side of the immigration checkpoint, wearing your clothes and your face and your memories.
Your instance.
Your-her grandfather would say she’s fine! She and her mother are doing fine. Her mother. Your other mother. The instance of your own mother standing next to you and pretending not to listen to your conversation.
Okay, you would say. Harabeoji never told you anything interesting about the other Soyoung. You eventually stopped asking, because you had home-work, field hockey practice, college applications.
This is what you remembered, when your instance told you that Harabeoji was dead. His silence about her. As if her existence was anathema to yours.
You picked your phone back up again and listened to your instance. She spoke to you in complete banmal, no formal suffixes for her other self. Grandfather’s dead. He wanted to see you before he died, but he died before we could ask you. Yes, we saw it coming.
You don’t have to come to the funeral, but he said he wanted you here.
Your instance said nothing about what she wanted, or why she was the one calling instead of an aunt or a cousin or your mother’s instance. She said nothing about how she felt about Harabeoji’s death, but you could guess her emotions based on the first ten years of being the same person. Maybe her sadness was like a foreign shore, which was how your sadness felt. You couldn’t imagine how she felt about talking to you.
“Okay,” you told your instance in the dark warmth of your bedroom. “I’ll be there when I can.”
You arranged plane tickets. You arranged time off from work. You arranged for your best friend to cat-sit. And now you’re in Seoul, in a basement ripped from your memories, and you wish you were a tourist instead.
But, well. The phone calls. You owe your grandfather… something. Maybe not what you’re giving him now. You should have owed him your presence when you were alive. But he had your instance, and your mother’s instance. He had your aunts and your uncles and cousins and the ghost of your grandmother, and you and your mom had been the only two people in the family to ever conclusively instance.
You have always comforted yourself about the distance from your Korean family by considering yourself something of a vestigial limb.
* * *
The distance between you and your instance is manufactured, not inherent. You know this. Your instance knows this. You both share in the creation of the space between the two of you, between yourself and your mother, between yourself and her-your Korean aunts and uncles, between her and her mother, between your mother and her mother. The only thing not your fault is the relationship between your mother and your-her grandfather.
Your instance and her mother get Korea, your-her aunts and uncles, your-her grandfather. They get the physical presence. They get Chuseok. They get your-her grandmother’s grave. They get stationery stores and Emart and clean public transit, they get the ahjumma selling ginkgo nuts and roasted chestnuts at the foot of the hiking trails.
You and your mother get America.
You could call this a fair trade. You could call this the inherent outcome of your mother’s feud with your grandfather, a wound not your own, which you never completely probed. You could have researched your instance—you know her name, her birthday, her school history until you left the country. You could have easily contacted her through your aunts. But you didn’t.
It’s not like you have anything against instances in the abstract. Your best friend from high school instanced nearly five years ago after transferring to the German branch of her company. She hadn’t expected to instantiate, but Clarissa’s heart apparently thought her future lay across the Atlantic.
You love both Clarissas. The last time the two of you spoke, German Clarissa told you she was planning on returning to America.
“It’s been fun,” she said to you. “But I’m ready to return. I think I want to reintegrate. Don’t tell Clarissa, yet.”
“She doesn’t know?” you said, cradling the phone between your shoulder and ear as you rinsed dishes in your sink.
“No,” German Clarissa said. “I haven’t told her, it’s not like we’re psychic.”
“You could extend your visa.”
“I have to declare that I want citizenship with the embassy, then. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot. But. I don’t know.”
You had hmm-ed encouragingly. This hadn’t been anything you had expected from Clarissa. You had assumed that she would naturalize because she had instanced. You had assumed she would seek citizenship overseas just from the blunt fact of her cleaving. But you supposed that she might have changed her mind, that the intervening years had made her feel differently. You guessed people could change.
“That’s kind of a big thing. Reintegration. We don’t know anyone who’s reintegrated, right?”
“It’s not a big thing in the States, yeah. People usually just… leave. And it’s going to be a pain in the ass, dealing with the embassy. That’s why I want to talk to her first.”
“Sure. Hey, it’ll be nice to see you again.”
“What are you talking about?” Clarissa said. “You see me all the time. You guys get brunch like, every Sunday.”
* * *
An instancing captures a static moment. A feeling in a specific time and place. The heart at the moment of stepping over a border. The mind when it knows it is leaving. A life is made of many static moments. What’s felt when walking up to the tarmac is a different thing from what is felt sitting in a park two weeks later. What’s felt when crossing a river with your belongings held above your head is a different thing from what is felt in the detention facility. What’s felt when your mother tells you that you’re leaving and puts you in your best coat is different from what you feel when you are twenty years older, sitting on the plane, returning. The only constant is that what people want will change, and the administrative state is there to log the outcomes.
Normally, American instances travel outbound on their original’s passport and are required to log themselves at the nearest American embassy. America considers an instance as a whole and complete person, as mandated in the nation’s founding documents. But if a person’s instance wants to stay in the new country, that’s a different question. The human heart wants what it wants. But a government is made of many human hearts.
* * *
You catch sight of your instance sitting alone at a table, typing on her phone. For a moment, it’s like looking at a stranger, just the slick black hair and pale hands of any East Asian woman. Then she looks up and you know the shape of her naked surprise, the curve of her lip and the arch of her eyebrows. Here is your sister-self, your shadow-could-have-been, the woman you are in another country. Here she is, looking you over with your eyes in her face, though the lines in her face are not the lines in your face, yet you could have been her: Twenty years wind back to when one of you stepped onto the plane and the other stayed.
She smiles at you. She stands up and waves. You hurry over. You don’t shake hands. You don’t bow. She has a black band on her right wrist, like a broad watch strap with no watch.
“Did you get here okay?” your instance asks in Korean.
“Pretty well,” you respond in kind. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“Of course. We’re family.”
“Are we?” you ask, and she laughs, and you laugh. It feels something like release.
“Let me get you a coffee or something,” you say. “What do you want?”
“You don’t have to.”
“No, I’m putting you through enough trouble,” you say. Your instance’s face twitches a bit at that, the same way you smile when something is funny but not happy.You can read her thoughts in that instant: It’ll make her feel better to buy me a coffee, I want a coffee and she wants to buy me a coffee, let’s skip the posturing, I know that she knows that I know.
“Black Americano, if you don’t mind,” she says. You nod to hide your surprise. You’re a caramel macchiato–type girl. You’ve always taken your coffee sweetened, with cream.
* * *
Here is the second half of the sailor’s folktale:
The sailor returns home and finds his instance asleep in bed with his wife. He looks down at their bodies. The slow rise and fall of his instance’s chest. The way his instance’s arm curls sweetly around his wife’s waist. He forgets the endless beautiful night he spent in the underwater court and remembers only that thirty years of his life have been erased.
A great and terrible anger rises in him. How dare his other self be content. How dare his other self have three decades with his wife.
He picks up his instance’s knife from where it hangs on the wall. He kneels above his other self.
He plunges the knife into his other self’s breast.
His instance wakes in a great gasp. He claws at the air. He screams. His wife, waking, beats at the sailor’s chest. Husband! she shouts. The sailor’s instance grasps at his jacket, at his sleeves. The sailor holds the knife down.
His instance tears the wet fabric. He manages to grab the sailor’s bare wrist.
And suddenly there is a single man lying there, bleeding from his breast wound, his own hand holding the knife in place. The sailor and his instance having merged, falling into a single self like a collapsing waveform.
In some versions of the story, the sailor survives his self-inflicted wounds. In others, he doesn’t.
The message remains the same in either version of the story: Intention does not matter in homecoming. There is no requirement of desire to return for reintegration. What matters is the physical action, the touch of skin against skin.
Excerpted from Sublimation, copyright © 2026 by Isabel J. Kim.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Sublimation</i> by Isabel J. Kim appeared first on Reactor.
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