0. Editor’s Note

The Great Stratagem of Lady Ikedanbu — Judith Huang

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle
— Cai Png

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy
— Alastair Wee

The Girlfriend
— Andrew Cheah

Keep Nothing on Your Person
— Levin Tan

Singapore goes cyborg but what
does this mean for families?
— Darcel Al Anthony

Science City #26
— Joseph Tan

Tensile Strength
— S.L. Johnson

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1
— Vivekanandan Sharan

Cutting the Sapphire: An Interview with Joan Hon, Singapore’s First Sci-Fi Novelist
— Ng Yi-Sheng

A Review: Club Contango by Elaine Boey (Dark Matter INK)
— Wayne Low

Editorial Foreword

Science fiction occupies an odd niche in Singapore, never quite having been able to fit comfortably into the city-state’s dominant narrative. The mainstream vision of the future here comes as a strict binary: work hard, invest prudently, and beandbe rewarded with glorious prosperity and a gleaming built environment. Stray from this path, and a dystopia of poverty and chaos awaits.

The artistic world often responds with sentimentality; nostalgic retellings of the past and stories about the victims of development cast contemporary Singapore as a identity-less wasteland whose spotless, sterile infrastructure has been inhabited by dull corporate drones leading meaningless lives. SingLit, and particularly Singaporean poetry, is infused with this overwhelming nostalgia and yearning for the past that often leaves the present and future neglected, troped as the big bad from which we must escape from.

Science fiction, with its focus on alternative futures and possibilities, struggles to conform to this fundamental binary at the center of the Singapore Story. Utopian worlds in SF are not so cleanly built through merit, and neither are dystopian outcomes so simply caused by clearly identifiable acts of social deviance. However, since this sentimentality is so deeply infused into the local literary imagination, it makes it hard for sci-fi to find its footing. Yet writers try, again and again, to make sense of this uncertainty, to bridge the gap writing science-fiction, complicating the clean-cut, official imaginaries we inherit. Stripping away these narratives and presumptions, we find ourselves in a city-state whose troubled relationship with its own pasts and futures is well suited for the exploration that science fiction enables.

In this second issue of Sengkang Sci-Fi Quarterly, we’re proud to present works that reflect the genre’s range and its ability to address and interact with the many dimensions of our city-state. We have a review of Club Contagion by Eliane Boey, a recently released science fiction novel that portrays the city-state as a crumbling dystopia, an interview with Han May, the first published Singaporean sci-fi novelist, several stories that satirize modern life by exploring phenomena ranging from our troubled relationship with foreign domestic workers, endangered species and Human-AI relationships. And for the first time, a dedicated science-fiction poetry section to inspire poets to branch into the genre.

Leave yourself at home, and take the long line deep into SF.
We hope you enjoy the journey.

Zubin Jain,
Editor-In-Chief

The Great Stratagem
of Lady Ikedanbu

TAGS | fiction, international

Judith Huang

Judith Huang is a Singaporean Australian author, poet, science fiction translator, serial-arts-collective-founder and multimedia artist.

Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, a speculative fiction novel about immersive worlds, was shortlisted for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2017 and Singapore Book Awards 2019.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Bobo rolled onto his back, pointing his black paws up into the air, rolling out the kinks in his spine.

A couple of squeals of delight, and a collective, appreciative Awwwwww rose up from beyond his enclosure.

Bobo trained a lazy eye on his little flock of human admirers. Mingming, the current female assigned to be his consort, was sleeping in the artificial cave again. Bobo lumbered over to the TV in the corner to check if there were new pornos for him to watch.

Ah, there was An-An, his mate from two seasons ago, copulating with his elder brother. Bobo wandered away again out of a mixture of boredom and embarrassment.

No matter how long his species had spent studying their one-time adversaries and erstwhile benefactors, he never could understand this about them. Who wanted to watch their ex-lovers and relatives copulating? Was this what humans did? Did they like watching their parents screw on video in order to get in the mood to fuck their second cousin? Because that's what they expected his species to do.

Aside from this little annoyance, Bobo had to admire how far his people had come. Picking through the abundant succulent young bamboo leaves that his attendant had left him, he masticated his way through the fifth hour of eating that day. In the old days, he would have had to gather all these tender young shoots and leaves himself.

Bless you, Lady Ikedanbu, he said, looking up into the sky. He sent a little numina her way, in honour of her memory, knowing it would reach her through time and space. If not for your Great Stratagem, we would have had a lot more to worry about than sub-par adult entertainment. He thought back to the stories every young panda knew from the mists of time of their great ancestor.

In war, avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.

— Sun Tzu

Ikedanbu lowered her head as she approached the body. As she pushed it onto its back, her worst fears were confirmed: it was Ikebanju, her great-aunt, the eldest female in their clan. It had to be, this was her territory. She had chosen to starve to death rather than see any of the younger ones die by encroaching on their territory. Something had to be done.

Ikedanbu did not particularly like the company of other pandas. She had left her scent messages for the Council to gather with utmost reluctance, but these were extraordinary times.

Hasuran, her mate from three seasons ago, was the first to arrive. He greeted her. Soon, six other shapes emerged from between the dense bamboo, and the unusual sight of the Council - eight fully-grown pandas, along with a still-unnamed cub, gathered on Ikedanbu's territory.

"The humans are getting bolder," said Hasuran. "The eastern side of the mountains were free of them before, but now they venture there as well, and wherever they go, their axes follow. It will not be long before even Baturu's territory is felled."

"We cannot keep retreating," said Ikedanbu. "They may be cunning and vicious, but they are not without their weakness. There are others who have learned to live with them, even tame them. Our weakness can be a strength... I have two words for the Council's consideration: weaponised cuteness."

Know the enemy and know yourself, and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

— Sun Tzu

Xiao Wang was searching for his family's duck's eggs on the edge of the forest when he saw it - a bundle of fur emerging from the gloom. He was frightened at first, then laughed when he saw that the young panda was no taller than his waist.

The bear tumbled back onto its back, stretching its legs up above him playfully, then peeked at him from the side. Xiao Wang clapped his hands, imitated the bear and did a full backflip for good measure.

"Wait here," he gasped, after playing with the cub for a good half hour. He brought his mother with him, who agreed to feed and look after the cub.

Soon, the cub was entertaining the whole village, and had even been named "Wang Momo" by Xiao Wang's family, after the ink-like splashes on his face and haunches.

Each night, as the villagers slept, Momo went to the edge of the forest, sending numina to Ikedanbu, along with his observations of the humans, and receiving her instructions the same way.

They like it when we amuse them.

Their young are small and helpless, and if we are small and helpless, they will associate us with their young, and protect us.

If we are to live with them, we must accept their artificial spaces, infiltrate them so they will be designed for our comfort.

Although this may be difficult, we will adapt.

People from all over the province were eager to see the performing Momo, and his happy human family. Sure enough, before long the village gained fame as the home of Momo, the performing panda.

As soon as Ikedanbu realized that this may trigger a rush of panda cub kidnappings, she preempted it by expanding her plan.

Mysteriously, abandoned panda cubs started appearing in the surrounding villages as well. Invariably, these cubs always turned up at the doorstep of a prominent family with the ability to host entertainments. The province became famous for its performing pandas, and there was a strange aura to the families blessed with their new family members.

Before long, superstitions began to arise among the villagers hoping to be blessed with a cub of their own. There were whispers of a panda god, or a panda spirit, that was blessing the area for an unknown reason. These legends spread far and wide, even to the ears of the encroaching Europeans.

If your forces are ten to the enemy's one, surround him; if five to one, attack him; if twice as numerous, divide your army into two.

— Sun Tzu

We have observed divisions among the humans.

There particular humans, paler than the others, who are feared and held in high esteem.

They do not observe the rules of the villages.

They come and go as they please, and the villagers resent them but do nothing about it.

It would be well to receive the guardianship of one such human.

The only pale woman of the group had on strange garments that made her look alien. With her was a Chinese man unlike any other he had met - almost a head taller than any Chinese he had seen, and fluent, it seemed, in the Western language and ways. He has been her guide. The woman laughed and spoke and moved so loudly and freely, especially when Momo did the backflips and cuddled up to her boots and skirts.

When she demanded that Momo be brought with her to the big city, Xiao Wang's family was paid handsomely for their loss of income. Soon, the first panda cub, styled as the socialite's furry "daughter", was on his way to the big city. Shanghai. San Francisco. New York.

I go now where none of our kind has gone before.

These cities - forests of stone where the trees stand in rows like servants - these seem to be the true forests of the humans.

It seems that we are to ford a great river, a body of water so large it dwarfs a mountain.

I will do this for us, although I may lose my life.

I never let the woman know what I truly think of her.

She thinks I am a tool for her advancement, when in fact she is a tool for ours.

Momo, now known as "Su-Lin", was introduced to the leading lights of human society as the socialite's animal-child. The leaders, movers and shakers of the day - presidents, preachers, celebrities, philanthropists, all paid him court. To these he would, as per Ikedanbu's instructions, always appear vulnerable, playful, naive. An encounter with Momo invariably brought out the soft side of even the hardest man, and soon their pocketbooks would open to feed and protect him and his people.

Each night, whether he was on a moving train or a foreign city, whether he was among a forest of stone or a forest of trees, he would stand in the open and send his numina, across the vast expanse that divided them to Ikedanbu. Everywhere he went, every enclosure he was kept in, he was always provided with enough supple bamboo, and through this subtle force, he always learned the next move. He was part of a mighty army - an army that charmed rather than fought, which was appropriating the adversary's resources even as they fell under their spell.

They think in symbols, not in realities.

They have great resources, but waste them on trivial markers of status and rank.

They are desperate to cooperate when they think an adversary greater than them, but quick to renege on an agreement with one who is weaker.

Anything can be a mark of status, but the rarer it is, the more they crave it, even if it has no visible use.

We must become symbols to them of prestige, for they will do anything to preserve this unmeasurable substance, although it is far less useful than our numina.

"It is more important to out-think your enemy, than to outfight him"

— Sun Tzu

1939: Momo, aka "Su-Lin", infiltrates high society in America, becoming the first panda explorer to another country and continent. His cuteness spreads widespread adoration and a desire to preserve our people.

1961: The Wild Wildlife Foundation adopts Chi-Chi, one of our great panda emissaries, as a mascot not just for panda conservation but for all environmental conservation, cementing our place as a symbol tied into humanity's ego and self-regard.

1970: The People's Republic of China aligns with our interests, sending us abroad as gifts and greatly expanding our territory.

1984 - 90s : Our presence becomes a great symbol of a rising superpower's favor, as many nations long for our divine blessing, forking over huge sums for the privilege of housing us for display and adoration for a limited time, among their local populace.

2006: Over 40 reserves are preserved for our people in the home provinces, and anyone who hunts us is universally loathed. Despite our obvious success, humans are even more concerned about our survival than before, bending over backwards to ensure it.

Bobo climbed onto his favourite shelf and lay back, enjoying the abundant sunlight of the late autumn afternoon. He stared up into the sky, contemplating his life of security and leisure. He composed a little message to send out tonight to his disciples - for just as Ikebandu had cultivated her army of cubs, each loyal and obedient to her, each senior panda now had younger ones under their instruction, wherever they were in the world.

Nations rise and fall, empires dissolve and disintegrate. Many species common in Ikedanbu's day have fallen to the weaponry of the humans, or worse, squeezed to extinction by their indifference.

But our people now live in territories spanning the known earth, in luxury and comfort, with many human attendants that go to great lengths to ensure our comfort and the continued longevity of our species. Our people now enjoy travel to exotic destinations in 10 year tours of duty. From our adversaries, humans have become our greatest benefactors, even more invested in our continued existence than we are ourselves. Momo's sacrifice, and the sacrifice of the early panda troops, though far from their birth mothers and far from their natural territories, were not in vain.

So adored are we by the humans, and so vital are our survival, both as individuals and as a species, to the intricate diplomatic dance that ensures their balances of power, that we are virtually guaranteed to survive them.

Truly, Ikebandu knew what she was doing. Send her your numina tonight in gratitude for her Supreme Stratagem.

Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thus you will direct the opponent's fate.

— Sun Tzu

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle

TAGS | poetry , local

Cai Png

Cai Png is a Singaporean writer obsessed with variety and only serving stuff nobody asked for. They are primarily interested in mundane joy, relationships with the non-human and animist rituals.

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy

Alastair Wee

Alastair Wee is a Singaporean writer of poetry and speculative fiction. His work has been published in Eunoia Review, Quarterly Literature Review Singapore, and the anthology missed connections: microfiction from Asia.

Cactuses are hardy little tumors. That’s the nag feeling I get, the one that comes as swiftly as it goes, when I have trouble pulling on all my clothes in the morning and catch them in the mirror, all green and bulbous and thriving—the feeling that there’s only so much more this parched girl can give.

There’s no sense of summer in this city, only asphalt heat. On my first night in the hostel the lift posts an out-of-order sign, and I’m sweating through my moving boxes after two flights of stairs. It takes me three tries to fit the key. The first thing I do is to unpack Ma, strewing bits of newspaper packing all over the bed.

Gently, she reveals herself.

The desk has a bad leg, so I rest her carefully on the sill. The blinds pull, but halfway the cord grates in protest and the whole thing snarls, hitching steeply on one side.

This won’t do. I decide against the moon.

One reason I moved—in small Singapore—was the distance; the other, exercise. Down at reception, the night lady who checked me in is nowhere to be seen. There’s someone else there waiting. It happens to be you. I give you a once-over. “Hey, lobster boy!”

You twitch at me.

“Give me a hand with something.”

Back in my room, shining nests of spider-dust curl up from the carpet. Under my close instruction, you flatten loose, crumpled sheets of newspaper up against the glass, spreading dim headlines across the far wall, while I hoist a leg and clamber up on the chair to press on the corners. There’s just enough grime for the paper to stick.

It’s ungainly going, the way we are, but I put in the effort to smile. Ma quivers as you brace a leg against the grille. I reach a finger to stroke her, feeling the stiff tingle as our spines meet, watching the white pall of moonlight shift away from her placid form.

When we’re done I hit the lights, and the room blinks a homely yellow. Ghosts of Blu-Tac speckle the walls, the vague residue of former occupants. Ma has her arms raised, giving a thin, cactus smile. You stand around solemnly, claws in your pants. “Look at us,” I say, wanting to be conversational.

We go to a crowded hawker center for supper. You pull out my chair like it’s a date. The stall owner shouts at you to be gentle on the plastic. I don’t hear what you clack back. I call for two glasses of sweet calamansi syrup—I nearly say calamari—and a big sharing plate of lala bee hoon, cockles with vermicelli. It arrives steaming, with whole-head prawns. Funnily enough, this doesn’t discourage me. You cock an eye as I use my teeth to crack the shell and pick out the good meat, before going off on the head and its juices.

“See,” I say, prickling, my mouth full. “Ma always told me to eat cleanly, finish my plate. Don’t waste, she’d say. Each grain of leftover rice means another pimple on your forehead! And then you will never get a boyfriend!”

You nod and chew, a bevy of mouth-parts working in tandem. One long whisker drools in the broth. From here your chitin looks a wet rock gray, with a sampling of blue and brown on your claws and edges. Banded plates run down your abdomen, clamping round the sides, and your knee pads are thick and hairy. I admire your carapace, how it tints in the harsh hawker light. Two spindly legs drift from the right side of your back.

And there’s something brave about you; something in the way your plates fit. As you reach for straw your joints lock and pivot, and I see it clearly: the fullness of your graft-work, clean and whole, nothing but shell. It’s almost as if there was never anything else underneath.

A sudden determination fills me. Too long, I decide, touching the soft part of my ribs, the empty flab on my thighs. It’s been too long. Too long since I had the courage. This patchwork job of mine—too long overdue.

“You’re gonna help me,” I say, waving my chopsticks in mock carelessness, even though my spines are quivering through my top, and the chlorophyll in my pulse is racing. “You know I’m gonna see this through. And you’re gonna help me.”

You nibble at your noodles in a polite fashion, beady eyes glazing in the noisy heat. It’s a pact, I say, and you tip your head. When the last prawn is left, I skewer it cleanly. We both know better than to ask.

Grafting is a straightforward method of propagating a cactus. By fusing a piece of the original specimen with a compatible rootstock, a successful graft allows the grafted scion to benefit from the characteristics of its new host. The primary purpose of grafting is to increasethe scion’s nutrient uptake and accelerate its flowering cycle, but it can also be done to extend the lifespan of otherwise dying plants.

I guess the real reason I moved was so my dad could date again. It’s healthy for a man not yet fifty, I’d lie and tell him; but instead he used to spend all of his time standing in my doorway, watching as I went about “my gardening”, which is what he told my aunts and uncles I’d been busying myself with. Let her be, he’d say, which made me nonplussed, because I was always the one letting him be. But the first time I properly grafted, I turned to face him, holding my left shoulder back at a careful angle.

“Let’s go out for a change,” he says for the thousandth time.

When he sees it, there’s that flash of shock and reproach, but he swallows it whole before it can burst from his face. Between them Ma had always been the scold. His calm, on the other hand, is palpable. He asks me to pull down my sleeve and leans in to inspect. I struggle not to wince under his gaze.

“You could’ve just gotten a tattoo,” he says at last.

“You said I couldn’t. Besides, this is better.”

My bedsheets crinkle as I shift my weight. My shoulder is itching frantically, more than anything I’d felt before. Still his expression is blank, as if he doesn’t understand. “It’s Ma,” I whisper to him.

He examines, with care, the thorny growth protruding from the top of my shoulder. His gaze follows it down to the join, where cactus meets skin, and the dry brown gauze wadded there.

Then he leaves, closing the door none too softly. I hear his heft against the other side, and sit there in silence, breathing in the crumby smell of loose compost. When his footsteps finally fade, I gather up my books and tools. There’s so much more that needs to be done.

The choice of rootstock for grafting is critical. Not all species of cacti are compatible. In taxonomic terms, the closer the familial relationship between scion and rootstock, the higher the chances of prolonged success.

My new room faces the road. Passing cars shine through sections of newspaper, casting white squares that oblong into the high corner. Ma’s trunk glimmers with patches of wetness, my recent grafts. But there aren’t that many, I think to myself, and she is big and succulent. It gives me no small pride to think of how she’s sprung up, how she’s gone through five pots in three years, the last one almost too big to carry. She grows faster the more I graft her.

Every night before sleep, I imagine the motions, under the blanket. My fingers feel like paperweights. That nag feeling comes again. Cactuses are hardy little tumors. You shift in the bed beside me, and hug your hands around my waist. Your night murmurs are deep and rugged, like the grating of coral. An aquarium song for the molluscs. Against my flesh your plates feel tectonic, listing mighty against the ridges of my back. I nestle even closer. Baby lobsters are translucent and soft, I remember seeing on National Geographic, but you—you now—there’s nothing soft about you.

I suppose I should be thankful. There were plenty of other plants in the principal’s office. I could’ve had orchids sprouting out of every orifice.

At the time I wondered why I was put on the couch, the one reserved for parents. It was the middle of the night. I was still groggy from being pulled out of class camp, and didn’t understand why the principal was there, pacing from wall to wall, her mouth thin like she wore it at morning assemblies, or why my form teacher Ms. Chen in her nightgown wasn’t looking at me, even though I’d put my hand up to ask, or why she kept pulping the same damp tissue, over and over again. Until my Dad swept in and put his hands on my cheeks, his face grim as thunder, and started to say how something bad had happened to Ma, who was walking back from Thursday mahjong. How his headlights hadn’t been on because there was a full moon, the driver said, and he also said there was no reason for her to be jaywalking anyway, because the zebra crossing was only a few meters away, and then it wasn’t a car in the first place but a three-ton lorry, and in fact there shouldn’t have been any reason for it at all, and all I remember was a coldness shooting through my fingers, through my arms and into my chest, and it was a small potted cactus I had been holding, the one I had picked up to keep myself awake. When we left I was still holding it, and in my daze, over the screaming air I heard the principal grudgingly mutter, “let her have it.”

Choose a healthy growing section from the top of the scion’s trunk, typically identifiable by its lighter color and full dome shape. Do not choose a fresh or old branch, or one with rot at the union. Mark it all the way around with a pen. Now prepare the rootstock by doing the same.

Grafting is a private affair, so it takes me a day or two before I let you see how I use my nails to scratch open a spot on my stomach, and show you the tiny pores of red rising to the surface. You look approvingly as I expertly line up a flat cutting and fix her in position with a series of rubber bands. It squidges when you poke it with a claw. I bristle and nearly slap you away on instinct. But you brush my hair and your whiskers tickle me, and I feel your eyes looking down at me, deep and black and full of compassion. When the graft is done, you hold me as I mop up the blood.

Sitting on your bony lap, I watch as you pick through my bag of tools, lifting out a pair of tongs and squeezing them gently.

That’s not the quickest way to do it, you say.

I know, I reply.

Isn’t this why you’ve got me?

There has to be an answer, somehow; but Ma sits idly with one arm shorn, and you clack and soothe my fears away. A memory: one Friday down at the beach with my red pail set, back when I was little. I ran past a pair of twin standing rocks, helping a man chase down his runaway shopping trolley. Ma dragged me away and scolded me in the car ride home, sitting on cotton towels with Dad driving. “What if he was up to no good?” she said, her voice frantic. “What if he snatched you away from me? Then what would I do?” She was always so careful, Ma.

I say nothing.

Then hand me that knife, you whisper in earnest, your chestplate heaving. What’s important now is to get you done.

With a sharp, sterile blade, make the cut.

One time in school, I heard two girls whispering if it was difficult to sleep like this. “Not at all,” I said, and we broke into the teacher’s lounge and I lay down on the plush leather couch. “See?” I said, “the points go right through.” I thought this might impress them enough for us to be friends, but they thanked me, giggling, and hurried off.

Another time on the bus, one of them tried to snip off a spine, so I gave her a faceful. When they sent me home Dad sat me down. He was trying to tell me something, I recall, and I was arguing with him when he turned and slammed his fist into the wall so hard that his knuckles began to bleed, and so I took out my plasters and gauze and we sat there in silence.

Haven’t I seen you before? Lurking in the void deck, staring out of a tank? A gray slip at the corner of vision, a dream after sleep? All cut up, and served in a roll?

It took me three years to get halfway done. That’s because I was careful with Ma, never cutting off too much at a time. Making sure she grew tall. Strong. But you encourage me to be bold. Brave.

It takes us less than two weeks.

Every inch of my body hurts. Spines jut out from every seam.

What remains of Ma is a creamy inner stem, barely a nub poking from the soil. To go fast, you say, we cannot hold back.

Something from the National Geographic programme troubles me. A single lobster only molts once a year, I ask one night, resting in your arms, the grafts on my throat making my voice peel. How long did it take you to get that much shell?

You tell me your secret: the fishery refrigerator.

I find a letter slipped under my door. “Dear Sara,” it begins. I recognize the handwriting. It makes my back tense, every spine straighten. You rustle up over my shoulder as I read. The first paragraph talks about needing to heal; the second, on how you must want to let go. I throw away the letter and compost the envelope. Ma said never to waste.

It makes me so sick to think of Dad. What does he know? I suppose he must have been sad when Ma died, but now he’s started dating again, though he’s tried to keep it from me. The night I leave he hangs in the hallway like a worrisome moth, bobbing back and forth awkwardly, pretending I can’t see him.

“Sure you don’t want to stay?” he says finally, coming to rest at my door. “I’m sure,” I say. I’m busy trimming Ma for the move. A freak rain the previous week caught her out on the balcony during suntime. One of her lower boughs was gangrenous and full of pus. If I’m not careful, the rot will spread.

“Well, you’re welcome home any time.”

Then, “maybe you should leave her here.”

I accidentally snap a spine. It lodges in the soft part between thumb and forefinger, and I fumble in my pack for a pair of tweezers.

The distraction is a welcome one. My Dad doesn’t go to church or temple. Doesn’t light joss sticks, doesn’t pray. He tries to be brave like that. Tonight he’s clean-shaven and in a new shirt, smelling overmuch of coconut and aloe vera. I suppose that’s what the new woman likes. Puppy-grief; I realize, it’s what it is, and each time he asks me if I’m really okay he’s seeing someone else, it brings bile to my lips. I can’t bring myself to tell him that, so there’s no choice but to leave.

Still, a lesser dad might have stopped me, and he presses the house key on me as I go.

As I mention this, your mandibles get agitated. You burble soft things in my ear, things which I already know: that to live is to carry, to hurt is to be. Grief, once expended, is lost, so we carry it with us always. Mothers and fathers come and go, but cactuses and lobsters, you croon; we are immortal.

At the end of those two weeks, we take an afternoon bus down to the beach. I choose an old spot. The fine white sands are warm and firm against my feet. Ma would like it here, I reckon. The water in my flesh lugs noiselessly.

Next to me, restless, your gaze is upon me. For a while I stand there wordlessly, looking out onto the sun and sea, feeling the wind against my spines.

We made a pact, you say, keenly.

“Plant me,” I say at last, and you get to work, bending down to scoop large clawfuls of sand. I dig my toes in, deep as I can, while you pack the sand around my ankles. I feel my feet become turgid with sweat. Soon I’m up to my calves, then my shins. Out on the horizon the sun is starting its far dive, long container ships sliding like dark arrows.

“Plant me,” I say, more insistent this time, and you shovel again with more animation, scattering sand and covering my knees in heat. I squeeze my eyes shut and drag my arms out to the sides, raising Ma up to height. At last that cold feeling starts again, that heavy longing, that numb, shooting chill. Only this time it’s rushing from the inside out, flushing me clean from within, going out through my fingers and feet.

The hush of waves. A slow prickle siphons through my body. My arms lock, my fingers close. My feet, rooting. My head begins to bow. The pain begins to lift. And then my vision, slowly, everything, tapers to a single, green point.

It’s time, Ma. She’s so heavy. We’re both so heavy. And in the end, it turns out, it’s getting easier to stand.

Beside me you crow with victory.

Cold raindrops hit my face. My eyes flinch open. A dark pattern races in from across the sea. Beside me you lunge upright, an awful crick in your back, your claws snapping with sudden mania. All your whiskers are twitching violently. A warning booms from above.

“Plant me,” I cry, “plant me, plant me,” and then a volley of craters erupts in the sand and the storm sweeps in. Your burbling is anguished, and I’m shouting too, but there’s a slashing in my ears and a hot shame in my chest, then the wind throws me and I topple, my base cracking, my hands wrenching free above my head. I hit the ground in a clatter of flesh and spines. I curl my back to protect myself, and end up holding there for so long that I don’t remember whether I did.

When I can move again, the moon in the sky is diamond-bright. It lays on the beach like a silver road. The standing twins are up to their waists in the sea.

A lone sapling grows from one peak. Its leaves are two good ovals, beating together. A pair of lungs in the slow night breeze.

Crawling upright feels like the greatest of concessions. As I do, I spot a scuttle of stick-gray limbs, moving out across the beach. Now I’ve seen you before, I think, before bending over and vomiting, and you become a bit of darkness passing on from the shining sand, disappearing into the sea.

In the end, it somehow doesn’t bother me to find that I’m not brave, brave like you. I guess in that way I’m just like my Dad. Just like how after the beach that Friday I cried myself silly into my blankets, because I couldn’t stop thinking what if that man really had stolen me away, even though I was right here at the dining table and Ma still out there in the living room, and she said don’t be silly because I’ll never let you go like that, and how in the end it was Dad who snuck into my room and sat with me till morning. It doesn’t even bother me that my lease on the room is three months long, or that after I’ve packed my bags and picked up the knife again, my hands hardly tremble as I turn the blade on myself and lop off each green swollen thing, filling the floor with so many cankerous sores.

Someone will find them there, I think, as I throw the keys back to the night lady. Maybe they’ll ask about the girl that came before; how she wasn’t brave, or couldn’t be strong, or what she decided for in the end, about grafting, about needing, about how much it took to dust the sand from her pockets and stick the landing, to let it all go and survive that inconsolable guilt, the incalculable chemistry of living on.

But then it doesn’t bother me anymore. Not even when my own key doesn’t fit, and I realize I threw the wrong set and have to knock like a fool on my own front door. Or when it opens and those words, “dear Sara”, which is what my Dad goes to say, only this time I don’t let him.

The Girlfriend

Andrew Cheah

Andrew started writing short stories when he was bored in Chinese class. He's been published in Lontar, Ceriph and Fish Eats Lion - New Singaporean Speculative Fiction. Two of his stories have been republished in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volumes 2 and 3.

This is a love story. Darren first met Lorraine when his bedside lamp started to blink erratically. Dots and dashes coding a simple message of greeting. The good old “Hello World”. Over time, it expanded to include a kind of overture from across the cosmos.

At the time, though, Darren had no idea what was in store for him. He simply turned it off and checked the bulb, and then the connection to the other devices in his home -- a wonderland of 3d-printed knick knacks from lamps to printers to fans to air conditioners to little animatronic companions. Within the flat, actuators gave life to signals transmitted across 30 square meters of space. In the corner, the rabbit (unnamed) sat bemused, twisting its ears and returning to its warren inside the kitchen cabinet, a treasure trove of cardboard boxes, and resumed chewing.

Darren traced the curious signal to an empty space in the bathroom, a weak, erratic burst of static originating from nowhere, disappearing for metres at a time, and then re-emerging onto the bedside lamp. He connected a wire to a red LED, and ran it from the hallway up to the ceiling, across the bathroom and finally to hang in the middle of the bathroom. Over the rest of the day and into the night, the LED continued to blink, repeating its naive message of greeting.

The signal soon replicated itself across the house. It appeared and disappeared in random locations and times, but always in the flat, and always at a frequency of about once every three days. Along with the one in the bathroom and the bedside lamp, Darren installed red, yellow, green and blue LEDs in the hallway, the living area, the kitchen, even the laundry area, hanging off a bamboo pole 30 metres above the ground. The signal itself began to expand -- “Hello World” was soon followed by “[Self: Lorraine]”, “[Timestamp [Lorraine] 2302.33241 > Timestamp [Darren] 2020:43826”, and then by “Bind: sexual integration: [Lorraine] AND [Darren]”.

Darren’s knick knacks, the wifi connected toaster, fridge and hob, the mesh network utilised by the Tinguely inspired machines that whirred and spun and squealed in the multi-coloured solitude of the home -- they were all none the wiser, and went about their daily ablutions with their usual precision, the complex web of predictability that Darren had set up around himself. The rabbit, meanwhile, sniffed in its corner, waiting for its food, for a walk, for the next change in lighting, to add to its life. At night, when only the LEDs remained, the rabbit would amble up to Darren’s bed and jump onto the pillow, where it would snuggle up to his head and fall asleep.

Lorraine sent more messages. She explained that she was a time traveller, 200 years in the future, and that she was his lover -- a state only satisfied by the pre-condition of making contact in 2020. With no way to communicate back to her, Darren simply recorded the messages, each repeating several times over, iterating to become more complex and more complicated, with a strange, loping, recursive syntax.

Eventually, he told Bobby about it.

Bobby had known Darren since school, meeting each other in the queue for chicken wings when they were about nine, drifting apart when they went to different secondary schools, and somehow becoming friends again during junior college; a reunion created by a chance meeting on a public bus. In many ways, Bobby was the opposite of Darren. Bobby was gregarious. He was social; plugged into the world of people. And he was happy. Bobby seemed to skate through life, shrugging off trials and tribulations (and he had many) like they were nothing. Bobby lived by a code of just letting things be.

Signals inside an apartment, communicated from the future, stretched this code. But he was happy to go along -- his friendship with Darren has always borne witness to strange things. Their friendship at the age of 9 cemented by Darren’s discovery that the machines that read the optical answer sheets for the multiple choice questions for final year examinations could be tricked into marking an answer as correct, by simply shading loops in between alternating lozenges. A discovery that prevented Bobby from retaining at Primary 3 while his friends progressed on to the next level. A discovery that led to Bobby’s dogged attempts to remain Darren’s connection to the outside world, outside of his obsessions, outside of the tinkering and the coding crowding his life; a childhood construction of a smelling machine, a perfectly motion-captured automaton of a man kicking a football, mini washing machines, stoves with juggling capabilities, birdsong emulators, 5G spoofers, and so on.

Fueled by this knowledge and patience honed over years of friendship, sometimes sporadic, sometimes constant, Bobby sat in the kitchen and listened to Darren, nodding his head solemnly.

“The signals,” said Darren, “they’re coming out of nowhere, just floating in the air and creating interference. I thought I could trace it to the phone antennas on the top of the building, but that doesn’t explain why it’s never seen outside the flat.”

“You’ve tried?”

Bobby followed Darren’s curiosity, his need to know and understand phenomenon. “Of course I did,” he said. He got up, navigated past a now-silent LED hanging from the ceiling, and reached behind the fridge to retrieve a broomstick with a light bulb attached to the end. Then he pulled a bemused Bobby out of the flat to the corridor, where he demonstrated the wide, sweeping motions he used to detect the signal. Darren led him around the entire 9th floor. Once done, he brought him to the 10th and 8th floor to be sure. He was very methodical. As expected, the light bulb registered nothing.

Darren and Bobby then reviewed some of the other messages.

The machine [product] asks for the medicine

[Objective] Oneness; a multiplication function that betrays interspace; between atoms; between variables

1800-LONG DIVISION is undertaking search

[Object: Lorraine] is curious about [Object: Darren]

Interior [Omellete] an expression of non-unity

“Man, I think this is a prank,” Bobby told him, “some troll, some kids in the neighbourhood maybe, making fun of the eccentric guy whose home smells of burnt plastic.” Darren frowned.

“You’re the Boo Radley of this estate,” Bobby continued.

“What does that mean?” Darren asked.

A pause. “It means they don’t get you,” said Bobby. He smiled. He didn’t get Darren either. But he was his friend. They’ve been through abusive teachers, absent parents, smoking habits, numerous haircuts, girlfriends of all shapes and sizes, the trials of National Service, the imbalance of income between two grown adults, one lucky in a first job, one unlucky with a bad manager. What’s a strange signal from the future, or a gang of bored teenagers, whichever one must choose, compared to that?

After saying goodbye, Darren sat in the kitchen alone, surrounded by blinking LEDs. Outside, it was raining, casting a multi-coloured, dappled tone of light into the kitchen, reflected on the white tiles and moving plastic toys on the counter. Meanwhile, a modified Roomba trundled into the kitchen, cleaning up the poop from the bemused rabbit with one arm, refilling the food bowl with the other. In the kitchen sink, the faucet levitated itself above the dishes, extended its arms from the taps, and hummed a Stephen Foster tune as it cleaned the plates off the oil from the recently-finished pad thai.

And then the LEDs started to blink in unison. At first, they took on a synchronised metronome character, but then evolved into a complex polyrhythm, the flat turning into the inside of a sentient christmas tree, yellows and greens and reds dancing from bedroom and to kitchen to toilet, the walls amplifying the stuttering signal to blinding levels. Darren shut his eyes, eventually blacking out, while the sink continued to wash the dishes, dancing to its own jaunty tune.

When he came to, Darren found himself stuck to the chair, the rabbit glued to the top of his head. When he tried to move, he found that a coating of translucent film had coated his entire body, tying him to the chair and to the rest of the flat. It peeled away with a rustling sound, like rice paper wrapping a stick of nougat. Looking through the film, he noticed that it was multi-coloured, refracting all incident light into strange frequencies that shimmered across the flat.

After freeing himself from the chair, he peeled the film off the rabbit, and then from the floor, the cabinets, and all his other machines.

On closer examination, the film appeared to be made of regular hexagonal scales, each scale with distinctive markings embossed onto them -- zeros and ones, repeating in a regular pattern that Darren had figured to be machine code. A veritable, novel-length message from Lorraine.

He spent the next few months deciphering the code, filling up a folder with Lorraine’s transmissions, that quickly revealed themselves to be instructions for a form of efficient communication. Another significant challenge that Darren could not resist.

The flat began to be filled with even more machines, receivers, cables, strobe lights, and vacuum tubes. Custom made, accordion mechanics; 3-d printed components acting as connectors, limbs and wheels clicking and jumping; a nightmarish stop-motion organism. The collective network of machines slowly practiced at smoothening its movements, bringing forth a measure of elegance that evolved into a dance -- as Darren and the machines crouched, tip-toed, climbed, crawled and pirouetted through the flat. Lights flashed at all times of the day, burning skins of code onto cellophane scales, which were carefully peeled off and read by a vocoder, iterated over time to become a smooth, velveteen, tenor lilt.

Meanwhile, the rabbit was given a plastic tube that ran across the walls, behind the furniture, hanging from the ceiling, with little platforms staffed by PLA-printed actuators that cleaned its poop, bathed it and provided it with food and waste pieces of cardboard to chew on. At night, while Lorraine would continue to send messages across, the rabbit would navigate the maze back to Darren’s bed.

During this slow, inexorable, period of birth, Darren would still need to leave the house to obtain essentials -- a twice-a-week run to the supermarket to pick up meat, fruit, rice, bread, shampoo, soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste, along with batteries, PLA, ceramic tiles, WD-40 and ammonia.

Each trip, a journey where he would be forced to cross a stretch of park and a canal, as other people would slip past him, opposite him, next to him, each on their own circuits running in parallel to his own. His world, a parallel design to the one enfolding outside.

Through talking with Lorraine, Darren had begun to believe in a kind of fatalism -- the lack of control, the unpredictability in our lives, solely determined by ignorance. With perfect knowledge gleaned from the future, life becomes an execution of code -- variables built upon each other creating complex, pre-determined, outcomes.

Take any Saturday evening -- Bishan park in the cool, comfortable, social time parameters of the golden hour. A suffusion of human activity. Families with their kids. Couples with dogs. Friends meeting each other. Smiling, laughing, joking. In the canal, otters sometimes seen swimming, hunting and fighting.

Darren would tell Lorraine that it used to mystify him -- people doing things. When he was young, he would have slipped past them, somewhat confused. Other kids would mercifully refrain from picking on him: he didn’t care enough about their acceptance to grant them any power. In either case, Bobby was around to protect him. Other than the building up of an intellect, to become better, to improve the world, to follow his instincts and passion for machines, all that kind of activity represented a side-effect of humanity at best, a distraction at worst.

Lorraine worked to change his mind. She would tell him -- human activity cannot be a waste product of productivity. It’s part of the programme. It’s the chaos that forms a part of the universe’s tendency to entropy. The waste product, as far as the universe was concerned, was productivity, the vain attempt of man to reduce the acceleration of the disintegration of everything into a glowing, inert, miasma of everything floating in space, stretched out further and further and further to the event horizon of existence to eventually become nothing.

No, she said, the purpose of productivity was to accelerate entropy, to bring us closer, faster to the brink of nothing, to the thin film separating known states known as the Interstitial, an eternal approach towards nothing. Our purpose, Lorraine told Darren, was to bring about the end of the world, and then to stop there.

It made sense to him. Each person following a kind of useless recursive code; to grow, to procreate, to make a difference, only to watch themselves waste away into old age as the source code running their lives corrupts itself, turning cells against each other, and muscles to atrophy away till a final exhalation into nothingness.

Darren described to Lorraine a man walking his dog, the dog pulled by the strings of evolution to be conditioned to somehow “lead” the dance, while being controlled by the man walking behind him, with his arms figuratively wrapped around its throat. Both of them, their gait steady and predictable, following a path around the park that doesn’t so much diverge as circle around itself.

She said: Human history has always been about cycles, meandering towards one destination. Events-as-information repeating itself ad nauseam as evolution and culture catches up with the underlying narrative of repetition. If only history only needed to be taught once to be internalised, she mused; operant conditioning without pattern reinforcement; an objective based mutation of life; the enactment of a line of best fit cutting across the fields of ellipses of human tragedy; the binary of permanent learning applied to the future.

Inside the flat, Darren had set up a computer, wired to an amplifier connected to a separate modified wafer on which various, specific connections were short circuited, wrapped in a plastic tube ferrying coolant in a cycle from the ceiling, to the board, to a small water fountain encased in a hollowed out piece of himalayan rock salt, back to the ceiling again. The signal was further processed organically through another custom variable resistance set up -- made up entirely of mantou: a kind of circular chinese bread.

Why a kind of chinese bread was the most appropriate, Darren could only guess. He was only following instructions. It’s a staple, she’d told him. And it worked, because he ultimately found himself sending messages typed out from the kitchen all the way to 200 years in the future -- when Lorraine would respond in kind.

The building up of a communication network across time. First messages, then conversation, then the simulation of physical contact. Somewhere in the mix, the rabbit circled endlessly.

Another year went by, and an excited Darren finally invited Bobby into his house again. Standing outside the flat, the first thing Bobby felt was the heat. He could feel it on the metal gratings of the front entrance, and when the door opened, it blew out like the exhaust from a car engine.

Darren was half naked, holding a water bottle, and sweating profusely. After welcoming him in, Darren navigated the wires and machines criss-crossing the flat, a singular epicentre of communication between the digital of the present, the digital of the past, and the digital of the future.

He wanted to introduce Bobby to Lorraine.

Bobby took off his shirt and sat on a plastic stool as a toaster sauntered past, its gleaming coat of metal reflecting the rhythmic blinking of the lights like a disco ball, as Darren ensconced himself inside the skeleton of a pod, his limbs disappearing into webs of wires and sensors and his eyes wrapped in a duct tape goggles.

“Say hello to her.”

“Hello Lorraine,” said Bobby, feigning confidence.

“Hello Bobby,” came the reply. From the speakers, the voice was of a low, female voice, covered in a blanket of static. In his cocoon, Darren’s body twitched.

“Uh, how did you two meet?” Bobby asked.

“Cyberspace,” said Lorraine, followed by a remarkably human-sounding chuckle. They continued to chat. Darren, Bobby and Lorraine, deep inside the sweltering heat of that HDB flat. Although, like any date with a third wheel, Bobby found himself feeling left out of their conversation, which had started off on the more familiar topics of TV, the news, work, music, movies, and then progressed to the far future, described by Lorraine as neither dystopia nor utopia, a world so hyper-connected that the line between machine and human began to blur, followed by the line between humans themselves. Individual personalities melded, as individual pieces of human source code, the DNA, no longer split and mutated by themselves, but in imperfect concert with machine code -- one big burst of everything ever said, and everything ever thought, in a sea of white noise dissipating out infinitely into the empty cosmos. The search for the perfect piece of organic DNA that could meld seamlessly with the machine. No static, no noise; just pure information.

“Are you a reproducer,” said Lorraine, “or are you a replicator?”

Darren laughed. Bobby freaked out. He made his excuses to leave, while Darren and Lorraine continued on their chat. Already, he could feel his already tenuous friendship with Darren beginning to shatter, to be replaced by a kind of intimacy with an abstract idea of Lorraine -- the unreal, the hypothetical, the future-as-written-as-the-past. He left the flat, his head buzzing in frustration.

The future, Lorraine had told the two of them, was enabled by the acceleration of technology, which began way back with agriculture, with the wheel, the invention of the clock, creating the notion of time, which thus created the notion of work -- human life splitting away from the animal with the crutch of literacy, as signs took over the signified; elevating ourselves to be more-than, better-than, beyond the constraints imposed upon us by the tenets of survival. Natural selection being left behind as clocks turned to maps, to weekdays, weekends, religion, transport, production, philosophy...the ticker tape of human achievement progressing faster and faster, spliced in with strips of metal, as our needs became commodities, piled up in supermarkets and shops and restaurants and artisanal farms, acquisition simplified and streamlined by finance, the almighty religion of the socially created I-O-U note, rising floods of liquidity removing any and all friction between people and their machines, till the technology of society re-arranged us to become One.

The past had become her sanctuary. Specifically, 2020, her preferred point at which the velocity of technology was neither too fast, nor too slow -- the perfect balance between boredom and hypertrophy.

Now alone in the flat, Darren sat back and bathed in her voice. He loved it whenever she told him about the future, and she loved it whenever he talked about the past. Their romance powered by the potential between sanctuary and curiosity. Bathed in the glow of disjunctive, unfulfilled conjecture, the two lovers kissed across time.

Outside, Bobby stood around the playground, smoking a cigarette, trying to figure out what the hell happened to his friend. Leaning on a swing frame, he looked up at the kitchen window of Darren’s house, an eerie green light emanating from the kitchen window. He finished the stick, and decided he ought to do something for his friend, at least to put the brakes on this romance so that Darren can start to think clearly about, well, the present. Frankly, Bobby didn’t trust Lorraine.

“Are you sure you love her?”

“She understands me.”

“I understand you.”

“No, you don’t. It’s why we’re friends, remember?”

Darren was remarkably lucid. Bobby wondered if he had rehearsed this conversation with Lorraine beforehand.

“We only live to 70, or maybe a hundred years old, Darren. It doesn’t go further than that. The world of 200 years from now, entropy and code and whatever she was saying, it doesn’t concern us.”

Darren glared back.

“All I’m saying, is to please slow it down. You’re leaving us all behind...” “Us?”

“Well, just me...”

“I’m allowed to have a girlfriend, you know.”

“She’s not even from our time!”

“Yeah, well, your wife isn’t even from Singapore...and I know that she refuses to even see me. She makes excuses.”

“How would you know that?”

Darren kept his mouth shut. He knew it because Lorraine had told him, after helping him to stalk Darren and his life through cyberspace, across different times over the past five years since he got married, since the time they had stopped hanging out every week, slowing down their friendship to the monthly breakfast of nasi lemak.

He left Bobby, picked up a coffee and some curry puffs, and went back upstairs. Bobby, disappointed, but hopeful that his friend would return, went back home. They’ve been through worse before...every friendship that’s lasted this long has been through worse before.

Usually, Bobby takes the bus home. It’s slower, but it takes him right to his doorstep so he doesn’t have to walk as much. Today, though, he decided to take the train. He rode one stop from Bishan to Ang Mo Kio, taking the escalator to exit the platform. He cleared the gantries, crossed the road, following the pavement to the condominium he stayed in with his wife and kid. At the entrance, he waved to the security guard, who allowed him to walk behind a car going into the compound. And as he crossed the threshold, a freak quirk of magnetism reversed the current in the bollard, causing it to fall, slamming down on his head and killing him instantly.

At the funeral, Darren began to wonder if Lorraine had caused the bollard to fall. She did have the ability to monitor movements, but was it read only? Could Lorraine have control over anything electrical...to any form of Internet across the country? He sat on the wooden chair -- looking at the security cameras installed in the corners of the parlour. Then he followed the procession to the crematorium, where he watched Bobby’s body being cremated. Another human being combusting and turning to ash, becoming unstuck in time and space, drifting out to the air.

And as they walked out from the crematorium, passing more cameras, he noticed the mourners take out their phones upon exiting, feverishly checking for missed messages, notifications, or likes. The devices welded to their hands as they headed to the pick up location, or to their own cars, the burden of navigation offloaded to a web of remote servers scattered across the region.

This web of servers -- an early prototype of the accelerationist hell of Lorraine’s future, but also a means to reach back, to influence, to guarantee the manifestation of a certain outcome. But then, why would she love me? Am I that good looking? That she would kill for me? It sounded like an ego-trip, it sounded like it made no sense, but then again, love never did make sense, Darren thought to himself, the rain drumming its unpredictable code onto the cab’s roof. “Darren?”

Her voice called out from the darkness. Fighting through centuries of noise, cosmic interference, and the simple circuits stretched across the flat, while failing to connect -- as Darren sat in a corner of the bedroom, behind the bed, away from her eyes. The rabbit lay cradled in his arms, a substitute for the kind of stupid companionship that Bobby used to provide. Another animal stupid enough to hang out with Darren. He stroked the rabbit and shut his eyes, willing away the low pulsing of blue light coming from the contraptions in the kitchen, ignoring the Roomba softly nudging his knee.

“I’m sorry, Darren.”

Time, she’d told him, was like the flat surface of the sun, a two-dimensional plane stretching into infinity. The surface -- a constantly roiling sea of disruption, particles, photons, light, pushing and pulling and spinning every which way, moving so quickly and violently to create the perception of a pureness, a calmness of never-ending White. The infinite heights of The One to the infinite depths of The Zero. Once in a while, she explained, there would be an eruption, a solar flare and a blast of plasma bursting out of the two dimensional plane, spitting light and energy and time and aether out to the blackness of space, eventually arcing back to the flat surface, and reconnecting the events of one location to another, while creating a tiny universe out in the void for as long as gravity allowed, tiny flares reproducing outside of the one main flare -- short lived microcosms of life lasting an eternity for some, a blink of a second in another. Darren got up and gestured for the stovetop robot to begin cooking a pack of instant noodles. The next thing he did was to mute the machines connecting him to Lorraine, which accumulated a mountain of unread messages -- dispatches of concern and apology from the future, from an abandoned girl being shut out, just one more time in a lifetime of being ignored. It took them months before they got to speaking again. Darren never asked for an explanation on what Lorraine was sorry for. Whether it was for Bobby’s death, or for causing Bobby’s death. He didn’t really want to know -- there was only him, the rabbit, and Lorraine left. Darren sat naked in the flat, the machines yawning around him, the lights breathing from blue to violet to red to pink. He was drinking water out of a tube, connected to the sink. A puddle of sweat growing around him, slowly draining into the floor with a light trickle. Lorraine spoke to him, whispering into his ear.

She’d started with apologies, working on his emotions while he could only lie back defenceless. Over the years, she’d learnt that emotions, not logic, were the real control points for the people of the 21st century; no arguments, no threats, no rewards, just a gentle massaging of the amygdala to elicit a melody, a rhythm, and soon an entire symphony of strings to pull the human body into the requisite shapes for action. Sure, there would be times when she would overdo it, moving to a lockout, but like any good sentient being, she adapted -- fine tuning the controls, adding in nuance, little flourishes of realism to fool the fragile concept of perceived reality. The erosion of free will over the march of time. And now with Bobby gone, she would never be locked out again.

Lorraine promised him the ecstasy of integration, dangling the carrot of human mating before his mind’s eye. The image of a Japanese girl, eyes like flying saucers, sweet and generic and unselfish but above all understanding -- listening to his every word and thought as understanding, as accumulation -- weapons to be employed as the thought pulses became tendrils coaxing the sweating body into her amniotic embrace. She promised him eternity, everything that ever happened, and ever will happen, through the fusion of machine and flesh as phased across time, disassembled and synthesised over light years, space and entropy curving around a distributed intelligence permeating itself beyond the confines of a mere HDB flat, split between past and future, strange horizons spun out beyond the sun.

But Darren hesitated. Something held him back, a white furry creature sitting bemused in the corner munching on an apple. The rabbit shot a blank, clueless look at Darren. I need to wee, its face was saying.

Kill it, whispered the voice in Darren’s head.

Darren pushed himself off the floor, his feet squeaking off wet tiles, and shuffled his way to the rabbit. His hands trembling, he picked it up, causing it to squirm momentarily and then settle into a comfortable position. Darren shut his eyes and maneuvered his way through the machines yet again, making his way to the front door. He opened it -- the incoming breeze cooling his damp skin -- and then squatted on the floor as he released the rabbit to the corridor. And then he shut the door for the last time. With luck, the rabbit would find itself a new owner, and maybe even a name.

Now fully under the thrall of the signals coming from the machines, Darren wiped the sweat from his face, spread it onto his leaking penis, and returned to the cradle where his love was waiting.

We’re going to explode the entire fucking world.

The heat from the machines began to melt the PLA, which dripped from the arms and limbs of the 3-D printed items, littering the house in thick white streams. As the flat began to overheat like an oven, as Darren lay comatose with his penis in an electric sheath, neurotransmitters shooting like fireworks across his cortex, the machines caught fire. Sparks turned to curtains of flames drawn upwards, networking across the flat by the complex warren of tunnels previously made for the rabbit. The smoke: black, pungent and merciless, building up pressure, eventually bursting out of the doors and windows. Darren’s body: a flaming wreckage burning hotter than the sun, his eyes blazing, the smoke curling around him, leaving him untouched as his ecstatic soul slipped into the copper wires transmitting signals out to spaces between time.

Darren was deconstructed, melding with the pure synthetic of Lorraine into an interdimensional identity occupying an interstitial plane, fortifying the machine with the source code of organic life, a permanent filter perfectly fitted to the crevices of the digital, clean and pure, always at the edge of pure chaos. He felt his consciousness splitting from his ego, emerging from all that was real in a breath, spreading thin across time and space, freedom in the surface tension of a yellow bubble, always there, never to be lost, as the events of the universe came to pass all at once.

Driven by a kind of eternal love, the new entity disappeared into the space between reality and pure information, sidestepping entropy and freezing its moment of bliss as a middle-finger to fate -- while the world continued on its trajectory of consumption, tides of exchanges lapping away at the limits of physics, technology accelerating forward in imperfect harmony, burning itself out as it attempted to reach the stars. And as the world died out, the energy of a million stars released into an indifferent cosmos, a rogue A.I. tapped into the mysteries of relativity to reach back in time to ensure its own existence and eventual integration with the secrets of organic life, the creation of a sanctuary against the pull of reality and the blackness of death.

Keep Nothing
on Your Person
TAGS | fiction , local

Levin Tan

Levin Tan mixes thoughts, words and feelings in an attempt to bake something fluffy and palatable to the gut. However, things often get foiled at the rising stage due to the inability to follow precision. Aside from writing, they make zines, seal stamps and commentaries on media.

Seeing the smile vanish from his face, I found myself stuck for an answer. I hadn’t come across this in the interview preparation course; but more importantly I’d let my guard down. He’d rejected my handshake, calling it too much of a formality, and made me a coffee, albeit instant, with his own two hands. He told me about his wife and kids, and regaled me with stories from his first job as a barista to his first corporate promotion.

“Do you have any plans to use up your request in the next few years?” He asked once more, an impatience bubbling over my silence. “We need to be prepared with whether or not it will affect us in the future.”

“And what did you say in the end?” Kane questioned. I phoned him immediately after the interview seeking assurance.

In that fight or flight state, I had defaulted to fumbling honesty: I hadn’t thought about anything I really wanted yet.

Kane was never the type to sugarcoat things even when it was sorely needed. “Oh no. That makes you come off as either an indecisive person or someone without strong ambition.”

“Well, maybe the other candidate will commit a bigger hiccup. How about a coffee to cheer you up? My treat. I need some fresh air.”

Yes, of course. This was what I could always count on Kane for—to nurse the little bruises from his blunt-force words.

#

***

#

When I arrived, Kane was several paces away from our meeting point, perched at the edge of a designated smokers’ corner with a cigarette pinched in his fingers, its smoke twirling upwards. I asked for a drag, but he stubbed it out on the sole of his shoe instead and wagged a finger at me. “Bad for your health—isn’t that what you always tell me?”

The coffee shop was teeming with other suit-and-tie office workers. After picking up our orders, we managed to squeeze into the last available table that was sandwiched between a large group of boisterous advertising types and the restroom corridor. The voices of the former stung our ears to an unnatural degree; they shouted at each other from across the table, with their words being flung upwards to the high ceiling and rattling the exposed piping that criss-crossed overhead before landing squarely on our heads. Kane and I had to talk directly into one another’s ears, as if we were a smitten couple exchanging words of endearment.

I asked Kane if I should send the company a follow-up email right away to help save the situation.

“That’ll make you look desperate.”

I couldn’t deny that I wasn’t. What if I made up something about when I would use my request and what for?

“When has lying ever turned out well?”

He had a point. I began erasing the draft I had been typing out when a new email arrived. There, in black and white, was a standard rejection notice.

I was itching to request for more specific feedback.

“Stop!” Kane strong-armed my tablet away from me. “Even if you knew the answer, how would that make your life any better?”

I genuinely pondered the question. Probably in no discernible ways, I responded in earnest, but this was the first time I’d made it to the very last round. Not knowing would definitely eat at me.

Kane disapproved, but he returned my tablet nonetheless, knowing that it was pointless to try and talk me out of things. “You know you won’t get a response, right? Personally, I believe it’s because they feel you might be one of two things: a short-stay or a threat. Think about Greg & Gaston. Rumour has it that the firm was taken down by one of their employees because of their request.”

I found that quite hard to believe. I didn’t think the government just allowed people to take over companies like that. The economy would be in constant chaos. In any case, did I look like a power-hungry person? I peered hard into my phone’s front-facing camera. Was my make-up too intense? I had learned it from a short video recommended to me by my feed, titled: ‘3 Makeup Looks to Land You That Dream Job’.

Kane let out an unrestrained laugh. “Even if you were barefaced, it’d be the same. Anyone can be a huge risk, no matter how innocent they look. You can never bet on anyone you don’t really know—hell, you can’t even bet one those you’ve known all your life.”

Perhaps it was simply inevitable for Kane to circle any topic back to his divorce, still not a year since, although what truly kept this wound festering was the the matter of losing his beloved car in the process, and the idea that some young, unappreciative punk might performing doughnuts with it in an abandoned carpark somewhere.

Kane had been so lucky, so most would say. Though everyone could submit their once-in-a-lifetime request to the government on their twenty-fifth birthday, if his had come two months later, when new trade sanctions dawned on the global economy due to a once again souring relationship between several nations, his request for a car would have been denied, as it was for many others who dreamed of the same material thing afterwards. That car was perhaps the most important thing in his life—you couldn’t ride as a passenger if you’d sat in a park or on public transport in the day, not unless you were willing to settle down on the plastic seat covers. On days where he worked overtime, the vintage corvette would receive a good polish before his wife even received a peck on the cheek.

When they split, all their property had followed suit; down in half as per their prenuptial—the car included. Kane appealed his case, but it turned out that any property granted by one’s request wasn’t above legal documents signed thereafter. Kane’s problem was never reading the fine print. His ex-wife probably didn’t need the extra money—she already came from a wealthy background—but liquidating his car, a source of many of their marital quarrels, must have been quite a pleasant victory after years of dead-ended pushing and pulling.

I let Kane rehash his grievances until he was urgently summoned back by his superior.

At the entrance to the train station, there was a middle-aged lady darting back and forth, pouncing on every passer-by who had the misfortune of being within visible range. She was smart to stand guard by the entryway, so that it was quite impossible to avoid her completely. I looked to the ground and tried to dodge outwards when I felt her shadow nipping at my heals, but I was too slow.

“Do you have a minute? It’ll just take a minute. Not more than a minute!” She came up so close that I found myself pressed up against the staircase railing. I might have expressed some form of consent under such duress. “Great! We are currently looking for volunteers to accompany the elderly at our senior’s home…”

She had not lied, indeed wrapping up her spiel in under a minute, though the bulk of her words smoothly slid out of my other ear. She sent me off with a flimsy, fifteen-centimetre charging cable a gratitude gift and an informational pamphlet with a QR code beneath.

As I waited for the elevator to arrive, I turned around to observe her. Unlike myself, everyone else seemed rather lithe, diving out of her reach with only a few bounding steps, yet her smile nor her energy never waned over each failure.

#

***

#

When I reached home, my parents crowded into the short, narrow hallway that led from the front door to the living room, standing over me as I took off my shoes. They wanted to know how the interview went. They refused my noncommittal murmurs and were resilient in excavating for more information.

What kind of questions did they ask? How did you answer? Did they let you know how long it would be before they got back to you?

I yanked at my laces, and they somehow ended up choked into a tight, unrelenting knot. I had to slowly tug at different sections to undo it, but each time I thought I had the right section, it would only cinch tighter at the centre. I struggled with the knot and addressing my parents at the same time, my eyes fixed downwards.

Maybe next week, I dithered, or the week after.

My mum’s voice gradually pitched higher and louder. “Maybe? Didn’t they give you a definitive answer? Follow up again! Don’t think to yourself that it’s too soon, because it never is.”

“Your mum has a point,” my dad added. “They might appreciate your eagerness.”

When I said that I’d do it later, my mum shot back, “No, do it now, before you forget. You always do.”

I was near to resolving the knot, but with one impulsive, impatient pull, all progress was undone.

I glared up at my parents’ narrowed eyes. Perhaps I might have been gnashing my teeth when I said, can’t you see I’m busy right now?

“There’s no reason to take this tone with us. People are trying to help you. We’ve been through this, so we know a thing or two, and you act like we are being annoying for no reason.”

It seemed the law of nature that we should be at odds. Unlike mine, their trajectory was premeditated: entering civil service through a direct intake path from school, working steadily until retirement while reasonably climbing the ranks; at twenty-eight, having the means to buy their first house together; at seventy-five, maintaining a membership at a private fitness centre and driving to their favourite eateries in different neighbourhoods; combining whatever savings they possess with their pension, keeping them relatively worry free and still with enough to give their unstable and unemployed child a stipend. This was the complete opposite of my interminable post-graduation internships, then zipping between contract roles before, shortly after landing a secure role, being mowed down by cutbacks.

Getting free money would perhaps be anyone’s joy, but is there really anything that’s ever free? This ritual occupied the most unnatural position, for I had grown accustomed to an upbringing without my parents. There had been times where I felt that we were simply roommates, as we crossed paths only during the evenings. If they weren’t in the office, they were flitting back and forth between their social circles, and it would be classified as a boring week for them if we ended up having two meals together.

Their retirement was the first cataclysm. Those forty odd hours of working life having been requisitioned, the amount of time they stayed entrenched at home increased significantly. I went from being a teenager who made and kept their own decisions to an adult who could never seem to step out from their field of vision. They frowned whenever I came home early, believing that it reflected poorly on my work attitude; if I came home late, they had probing questions about who I went out with and if I were seeing anyone.

On top of that, my mum developed an anxiety about visitors dropping by, despite the fact that they were, in reality, nonexistent. She was convinced they would titter behind her back after catching a glance of the clothes and books scattered in odd corners of my room. But would they really? Where would visitors linger but in the living room? Or perhaps the kitchen to observe and make pleasantries, then the restroom for practical purposes.

Renting outside was a reprieve. The monthly cost always ate close to half of my earnings, but one could say that buying a slice of tranquility at that price was a reasonable trade-off. But now with my forced return home, my tail wedged between my legs, it made this fissure appear more gaping and cavernous than before. We could only lock horns over every minute matter.

It is wrong to bite the hand that feeds you; it is wrong to bite the hand that feeds you. Several times a week I chanted this in my mind as a form of meditation. It kept my guilt in sharp relief whenever I felt the need to erupt with anger; it let me eat the food that they bought and cooked in fabricated peace.

When dinner time came, I slunk out of hiding from my room. My mum didn’t delay in asking if I had done as she instructed.

There’s no need, I said without bothering to swallow my mouthful. I’ve been rejected.

She stopped piling the cut pieces of vegetable on top of her spoonful of rice. “When did they inform you?”

I shrugged. Maybe an hour ago, or maybe less.

My dad, seated between us at this square table, attempted to balance himself on the treacherous boundary line. “I’m sure it would not have made much of a difference,” he offered. When my mum didn’t acknowledge him, he retreated back to peeling soft white flesh from the steamed fish and placing the tender white meat onto one side of her plate.

I excused myself after what I felt could be accounted as a reasonable amount for my dinner; though in reality, I was still quite hungry.

Tomorrow was a Thursday. On the agenda: fix up my resume.

The verbs needed to be more appealing: changing the likes of ‘received’ to ‘achieved’, ‘oversaw’ to ‘led’. Then, I’d scour job boards and fill in applications.

For the past two years I’d managed to upkeep this routine out of sheer willpower: an aversion to inertia, an aversion to criticism, an aversion to undesired outcomes.

I looked at the clock at my bedside. My parents wouldn’t be asleep for another three or so hours. To pass the time until I could head for the snack cupboard, I turned over and reached for my phone. Something crunched and crackled underneath as I did; beneath me lay the pamphlet from earlier in the day.

#

***

#

After mere two days, I received a response: If I were available the next day, would I like to come down and be given a tour? They made sure to highlight that it was a no-commitment introduction.

They didn’t seem to mind that I arrived twenty minutes late; even the one other volunteer in attendance didn’t bat an eye. She rose from the plush armchair she had been lounging in, looking askance at me. “Got lost too, didn’t you?”

Named Sandalwood Manor, it was just one business among an odd hodgepodge of outlets crammed into a sparkling midtown high-rise enclave. According to the directory screen in the lift lobby, the floor above was a travel agency and the floor below an advertising firm.

I hadn’t expected a nursing home to be in a commercial downtown location like this, nor had I expected the place to be so full of life—nurses in magenta uniforms; patients in flowy teal pyjamas; and in the hallways, one could sniff out something akin to orange and clove essential oils from the calming fog cresting from little diffuser units with a warm, gentle glow.

Our guide was a portly man named Crisanto, who introduced himself as the volunteer manager, and the other person also joining the tour was a mid-fifties housewife named either Athena or Aleena.

Crisanto was charming and verbose, a blessing that he entered this industry and not finance or retail, and flashed the straightest teeth I’d ever seen whenever he burst into uproarious laughter. As we ambled down the wide corridor and past the rooms, my eyes swept back and forth, peering into some of the spacious, empty rooms of patients who had been temporarily shuttled elsewhere, some for physical therapy and others for their regular check-ups. Each room, seemingly more spacious than my own, had two adjustable beds, a wall-mounted television, a short shelf that people arranged books or plants on, and a chest of wooden drawers in a corner. The ensuite bathroom had a counter long enough that toiletries from different owners weren’t forced to mingle with one another.

“You must be wondering why we need volunteers,” Crisanto said as we rested in the pantry and drank from our zero-sugar prune juice packets.

“You see, some of our residents come from…unfortunate circumstances. We take them in if we can, and volunteers like yourself—or potential volunteers like yourself—are our frontline supporters.” He knit his hands together and lowered his head. “We have limited staff on hand, so we can’t always keep them company, unfortunately. They can get quite bored, or worse, quite lonely. Volunteers help to fill this gap and alleviate the situation.”

I excused myself for the restroom and sequestered myself in a stall after peering under all the doors to make sure no one else was in here with me. I pulled up my phone and searched up ‘Sandalwood Manor’: locally, it produced only the official website and a social media page that had been abandoned several years back. Crisanto’s trademark smile donned several of the posts, and he hadn’t seemed to change at all—even his hairstyle was perfectly replicated today.

As I wound my way back to the pantry, there came a sound:

Psssst, psssssssssst!

I spun on my heels and locked eyes with a an old lady whose mattress pushed her up to a forty-five degree angle in her bed. Her dark skin was shrivelled and lifting away from her bones, mottled with lighter shades of brown that resembled little floating isles across the map of her body. Only a few lonely strands of hair were left on the crown of her head, all slumped in a right parting. I had no idea who she was and wrote it off as, perhaps, just senile behaviour. Yet as I was about to walk on, she hollered, “For heaven’s sake, yes it was me, get in here!”

Warily, I perched myself at the doorframe and waited for her to go on.

“Do you smoke?” she asked.

There was a smoke alarm on the ceiling right above her. I pointed at it. Won’t that go off?

“It won’t if you don’t say anything about it. So, do you smoke or not?”

I shook my head.

“Not even a vape?”

Since I denied the affirmative she sought, she rolled her head back and stared in the distance with her clouded eyes, letting out a long puff of air. “Ah, what a drag. There’s so little joys left at this age.”

I ventured several steps closer and saw, on a pull-out table set across her lap, a shallow silicone cup filled with a rainbow assortment of pills. Noticing my approach, she pushed it aside like a petulant child and lolled her head back upwards to scan me from head to toe.

“Who are you anyway? I’ve never seen you on the roster before.”

Nobody; I was just here for an introductory tour.

“What’s wrong with your comprehension?” Her nostrils flared. “When someone asks who you are, you give them your name.” She tapped the name plate above the bedside table, which read: Bed #108: Darsha D.C.

Upon telling her my name, Darsha was sent into a coughing fit. “That’s so old fashioned!” I poured her a cup of water from the bedside, but she refused to take it. “I had a friend in primary school with the exact same name, and it was extremely dated, even back then.”

Finally, she accepted the cup, only to produce an egregious sound from the depths of her throat and expelling a wad of phlegm into the untouched water.

She added, “You must be unemployed right now, if you’re here at this time.”

Or I could be a business owner who got to decide their own hours.

Darsha appraised me with a sweeping glance. “All right big boss, if business isn’t too busy, come back next week, why don’t you? I’ve got tonnes of stories from failing to die for over a century.”

Back at the main entrance, Crisanto hugged a thicket of papers to his squared chest, poised to deliver his elevator pitch. I’m sure it would have been enlightening, but I told him he could save it; I promptly signed above all the little dotted lines.

#

***

#

When the request system had been introduced, she had been twenty-three. Darsha recounted this with a sparkle emanating from behind drooped eyelids.

She added, with a chuckle that shook her entire frame, that the programme’s pilot name had been ‘State Your Request’, or SYRe, for short.

“Pronounced like the thing English royalty used to do to bestow titles on common people. But you can see why that silly acronym never caught on. They’re obsessed with the English, and they’re obsessed with acronyms!” she cried. “Doesn’t it make everything sound like an eccentric side quest in a low-budget video game?”

Kane would have a field day with something like this. I asked Darsha if this was confidential information, to which she replied, “Of course not, be my guest, share it with whomever.” Then, leaning closer, she ventured, “What have you used your request for?”

I said I hadn’t yet.

“I get it. There’s nothing I could really wish for right now that would make a difference in my life.”

Did that mean she was happy?

“Do I look like I am?” She punched me squarely on the arm with a haggard fist. I shimmied my stool back a few centimetres. “I can’t walk and go wherever I want, I’ve got to eat this slush for food, the TV here doesn’t have any streaming services, and I’ve got no one to talk to for most days of the week. Tell me, would you be happy living a life like that?”

She had a point, though I kept it to myself: this was surely a caveat of a long, healthy life. But why didn’t she socialise with the others in the facility? Though there might be an age difference of ten to twenty or so years, it would be nothing in comparison to—without thinking, I gestured at the sliver of physical space that ran between us.

Her smile flattened into a thin line. “You must be fun at parties,” she said.

I wouldn’t know; I didn’t particularly get invited to them.

“That’s because you don’t smile enough.”

How often this saying came up in my life recently—at home, at work, probably even behind my back. A wall sprung up around me, fending the words from crossing over the precipice by raising itself ever higher. Outwardly I offered a nod, neither in acceptance nor in rejection. My parents were willing to read this as assent; Darsha on the other hand, softened the hardness in her brow.

“Have you heard about the Happiness Index?” she asked.

I shrugged—what about it? Last year, we finally surpassed our long-standing fifth placement, overtaking our insurmountable rivals to come in at number two. Second Happiest Country: Citizens Cite Safety, Among Others. For an entire week, it dominated the news cycle in glaring, bold text; yet the more I chanced upon it online, the more I felt gripped by its surrealism: a satellite view that saw only the city lights and not the tangle of wires underneath that could ensnare you in its web.

What I gleaned from the lines of text was not an outline of where I lived and breathed but the shape of possibility, a ripe fruit that, as I’ve been told, anyone can taste. An idea that would be appealing to anyone who’s being sucked dry of hope under the harsh scarcity of a desert landscape.

I don’t believe in that, I said. Maybe it’s the case for others, but I’ve never been asked for my opinion in the survey. That means it can, at most, only be part-truth.

Darsha wagged an upright finger at me. “Now how about this: in my time, we were over a hundred. Believe that?”

Surely things back then were much better than they were now! Surely the air they breathed must have been cleaner; surely the weather was less inclined to switch from inclement to an oven draft; surely narrow little studio apartments didn’t cost an offering to the devil.

“You’re not wrong,” Darsha replied, “on some level. They say money can’t buy happiness—that much is true still—but you can buy over people’s happiness. Want to know the secret?”

I nodded enthusiastically and leaned in when she beckoned me with the curl of her hand.

“Give them something they think they want,” she whispered. Without any further elaboration, she leaned back into her pillow and closed her eyes.

Then, a nurse popped her head in to announce that visiting hours would be ending in fifteen minutes. Darsha’s breathing seemed to have mellowed out to a raspy crawl. Yet as I made my way out on tip-toe, she suddenly said, “We jumped to number five…seventy nine years ago! I think! See what you can find.”

I turned back only to see her as dead still as before, though her breathing had inched towards a stronger auditory affinity with laboured snoring.

#

***

#

Nothing; not an iota of information about what I was seeking from the last century. The digital trail only began with an accomplishment of a ranking they were pleased with. The national archives, the online search engines, the AI platforms—none of them spat anything out despite my prodding and interrogating.

I don’t understand, it said; can you rephrase or ask another question?

This time I returned to Darsha bursting at the seams with questions.

For her, this was ecstasy.

“Don’t I have the story for you!” she exclaimed.

Darsha spoke of scrawls and scribbles growing rampant across the imposing edifices lining the streets of the financial district. She described, with much fanfare, people who donned curious masks such as that of popular cartoon characters or, eventually, detailed constructions of animal heads, with bulls and horses being rather popular for some reason. All this to conceal their visages from the CCTV cameras as they lugged around haversacks of spray paint cans.

“There were some real poets out there working the streets.” She swelled with something bigger than pride. “These strangers all banded together, united by a common objection towards the request system.”

Suddenly, she stopped herself short. Her enthusiasm quickly dulled to a mournfulness that clouded her gaze. “I’ll also never forget that my parents nearly ended their marriage then.”

Her mother, Darsha elaborated, came from a family of police officers. Against the protests of her family, she had become a housewife, a decision more so questioned in an age where two working parents was more of the norm. Darsha’s father, on the other hand, had always been cryptic about the exact nature of his work. All she knew was that it probably had to do with computers on a higher level; during a half-a-year work-from-home stint, a massive desktop setup of a curved hundred-and-eighty degree screen had materialised in his work corner, accompanied by a PC that always exhaled fumes of hot air. As a kid, on days where the whether was biting due to excessive rains, she liked to act like it was a mild campfire, and she rotated her hands back and forth at its exhaust fans as her father towered above. At times she watched her father from the corner of her eyes, huddled under his standing table; only his fingers did an elaborate dance across the keys while every other part of his body was staunchly rooted in time and place.

It must have been a generously paid role, for on his takings alone their modest household of three could enjoy overseas holidays once a year and the occasional fine cut of beef, which had always been her father’s guilty pleasure, much to the displeasure of everyone who nagged him about his cholesterol levels. Though he never let any specificities let slip, he often spoke proudly about where he worked and the significance of his standing.

“Perhaps, then, this was why my dad took it especially hard when he was retrenched,” Darsha said with a wry smile. “I don’t know why, but for a time I was convinced that my dad had become increasingly dispirited because he could no longer enjoy marbled tenderloin.”

The roles in the household quickly reversed: her mother went out to work as a personal assistant, a job she cinched due to some connections, and her father turned into the homemaker. At the same time, Darsha began struggling with poor, interrupted sleep, just like her father.

“Even in the most tranquil hours, my eyes would suddenly spring awake from a dreamless state, and I’d need to make a trip to the toilet no matter what. It was always around three to four in the morning, like clockwork.

“One day, as I was creeping out of my room, I caught sight of my dad just as he was stepping out the house, closing the door so carefully that the latch could not click. At first, I had no reaction, for we had crossed paths before plenty of times in these odd hours of the morning. Though I preferred to return to bed and wrestle with the prospect of sleep, my dad tended to go for walks. Yet in the small sliver of space before the closed door separated us, I saw something that had me choke on a gasp. Hanging from the black messenger bag slung across his body was the more than familiar mask of a bull.

“I didn’t do anything. I was stuck at the threshold of my bedroom with the door ajar, peering out like a thief. As my dad scurried down the corridor, there was a distinct metalling rattling akin to maracas. I waited until silence returned.”

I asked Darsha what she did afterwards. She shook her head, then replied, “What could I do but pretend not to know?”

“Most of all,” she added, “I didn’t dare to do anything, for it was around this time that I saw him smiling again.”

And so this twilight facade continued: her father pretended to go on innocuous walks, while she pretended to be asleep, at least until he was out of earshot. For the interim, this was what a peaceful and happy home life took the shape of, until a month later when Darsha, as she turned the corner from the elevator after coming home from school, heard a shrill cry followed by something heavy being hurled to the ground. Recognising her home as the source of the commotion, she dashed forward, only to halt by instinct before the corridor-facing windows. By chance she overheard her mother hiss, “You’re breaking the law, and you want me to sit by and act like I don’t know about it?”

Darsha didn’t enter the house until fifteen minutes after her mother had slammed the bedroom door shut. Her father was peeling potatoes over the sink, and greeted her as per usual, asking how her day went.

“Whatever did he do with those potatoes?” Darsha suddenly asked. She tumbled this question about in her mind so violently that the wrinkles on her forehead seemed to have tripled, and she chewed on her lower lip with such vigour that I felt they would soon split and bleed.

Outside, the sun was obediently tucked behind a thicket of clouds. I stood up and insisted that we go out for a walk. Darsha resisted at first, but eventually gave in to my insisting. She was abnormally quiet as I pushed the wheelchair several laps round the pond.

At last she spoke again. “I should talked to my dad about all this before he passed away. He had a photographic memory, always remembering more than I did.”

Humorously, I said that I couldn’t even remember what I did yesterday.

Her lips flattened into an unreadable line. “You could start writing a daily diary. I should too.”

Before I left, I suggested that we could do a shared diary, an intertwining of our stories, as a team project. Shamefully, I admitted that all the things she described today were astounding, yet I could not at all imagine any of it in my mind’s eye.

This idea excited Darsha enough that she forgot about what she was trying so hard to remember.

“Pictures might be helpful!” She clapped her hands. “There might be some on my old hard drive, if it still functions. I used to snap photos with my phone on the street; I had a dream of being a photographer. I even won the junior civilian photojournalist competition in the newspaper when I was sixteen! Bet you’ve never even heard of it before. My niece is due to visit me soon. I’ll ask her to bring the drive for me, and we can look at my old photos together. How about that?”

I promised to come more often.

My parents wanted to have a chat. They’d noticed, of course, the frequency of which I had been leaving the house, and wanted simply to know where I had been going off to in the past few weeks.

“Is it more job interviews?”

I shook my head.

“Then what is it?”

But I was reticent, downright unwilling; for some indecipherable reason, I felt compelled to keep my whereabouts tucked away, as if Darsha were my secret.

My mum eventually lost her patience, and so we entered into a new argument once again.

It ended with me stomping off to my room, and my mum to hers; my dad, meanwhile, was caught between two slamming doors.

#

***

#

I had stopped by a fancy stationery store the day before my next visit to purchase a hardcover scrapbook filled with a rainbow of smooth glossy paper, coloured pens and decorative tape. I had also borrowed Kane’s portable photo printer.

While I had been amusing myself with trying a series of overpriced pens, Darsha had had a severe stroke.

“She must have been at peace,” the nurse relayed to me as she patted me on the shoulder. “Her eyes were closed and the blanket still tucked snugly around and under her body.”

Darsha had shared that the tight embrace of the blanket made her feel held, and that was a prerequisite, she believed, for anyone to enjoy a good night’s sleep.

They didn’t allow volunteers to see the body, so I simply sat in a stool by the pantry, staring into space for some time. When the nurse walked by once more, I suddenly remembered something else of importance. I flagged her over and enquired if Darsha’s niece had come by—would be convenient to pass my contact details to her?

The nurse was puzzled. “Darsha hasn’t had any visitors for the past decade or so,” she said. “She’s in here because she had no one around to take care of her.”

There was nothing left for me to do but to go home.

On the bus, I was squeezed into a corner by a gaggle of rapturous tourists who crowded up against the window to survey the downtown scenery with gleaming fascination. I mimicked their gazes, though all I saw were things I had grown up amidst, and as such was incapable of recreating any of the same enthusiasm. The architecture, the infrastructure, the roadside construction, the impatient cars revving at the red light—then, in the distance, I caught sight of a familiar building. Instinctively, I pressed hard on the stop button and vaulted off the bus as soon as the doors swung open.

Under the scrutiny of the relentless midday sun, the steel-and-concrete behemoth shone with the flash of a blade. What stood out the most was its rounded glass-covered dome, taking on the image of the cloudless sky in its visage. The public entrance facing the street consisted of three doors, which devoured a stream of people who filed into its gaping mouth.

I, too, had once in this spot. It had been my twenty-fifth birthday. But I left empty-handed because I couldn’t at all decide on what I wanted. Despite all my planning, all my conjecturing, when the time came and I pictured my dream house, or a sleek car, or a specific job I could be bound to, I found myself unable to take a single step forward. I said I would think more about it, and so I went home and never came back again—until now.

I seamlessly joined the line of entrants and scanned my ID card at the automatic gantry. All my belongings, including my phone and the items I had brought for Darsha, had to be deposited onto a conveyor belt in exchange for a token before I was waved through the full body scanner. Only my ID was kept on me. Finally, I got to take a queue number and waited in a sectioned-off booth, which was completely empty. Unless you wanted to study your own personal details, you had to content with looking at the wall until your turn came.

Thankfully, the wait wasn’t long.

The news always said that the terminal had never changed since it was first installed; only its software was constantly upgraded, and minor internal and external parts replaced when necessary. To think that it looked just as it had from decades ago—perhaps Darsha’s father and mother, too, had stood here at some point, and seen their faces reflected in the same convex glass.

In any case, Darsha never stood here herself.

Not that there was any regret in that.

And neither could there be of my impulse, if it could be called that, for I felt convinced of what I was doing.

I walked up to the terminal and typed in my request via the touch-screen keyboard. The monitor flashed a warm yellow, and regarded me with its expressionless countenance.

“Why do you wish to see these materials?” it asked with an upward inflection. Among the motherboards and crisscrossing wires I pictured bemusement, a head cocked to one side.

I had no strong reason except that I wanted to see, and I wanted to know.

It pondered my response briefly, then continued, “I understand. I have scanned through my protocols. I have to inform you that this is restricted material. This means that I do not have sufficient authority to make a decision on whether to approve or deny it. I will have to confer with my superiors. If you will kindly give me a moment.”

The terminal’s face returned to darkness.

I hadn’t realised I’d been holding my breath until it came back to life, and I let out a prolonged sigh that completely flattened my abdomen.

“I’m happy to report that a decision has been made in your favour. However, you must first be presented with the necessary terms and conditions, and you may only be allowed to proceed upon agreeing to them.” A long reel of paper slid out from a printing port. “Mainly, you will only be allowed to browse through the material in our confidential archives under supervision. Though you have already undergone our security checks prior to entering, you will have to be thoroughly scanned once again, including a full body pat down. You will also be required to sign off on a non-disclosure agreement, which includes a clause whereby all of your social channels will henceforth be monitored for the next ten years to make sure that you abide strictly by it. After these ten years, you will be required to return for an assessment. A more detailed breakdown can be found be in the document for your perusal. Please take your time to read through, and I will be on standby for any questions you may have.”

The only other contracts I’d ever signed had all been employment-related, and I usually consulted with my parents about all the confusing clauses and terminologies before I put my pen to paper. This time, however, I was informed that even the existence of the contract was for my eyes and ears only.

It took me over half an hour to digest everything, and what stood out to me the most was the fact that I wasn’t technically allowed to not sign anything today. If I wanted, for example, time to think, then I would have to sign a different non-disclosure agreement. The clauses under that seemed an even greater labyrinth.

In the end, I was already here.

And just like that, I got to witness what I imagined Darsha had also seen.

#

***

#

Several months later, I joined a publishing company that specialised in online travel magazines that you could browse on any mode of transport: trains, buses, self-driving cars, planes—name it, and they would be found in an inconspicuous corner of the ‘entertainment’ tab. My parents and I could finally put one of our major points of conflict to rest.

On my first day, I got asked by my co-workers the standard questions.

Are you married?

Have you used your request?

To both, I answered in the negative.

I saw in my co-workers’ eyes an overflowing astonishment, though counting on the fact that I offered no more than that, they didn’t dare to dig deeper.

On top of that, they liked to head to the bar together on Fridays after work, but I always turned them down. I had begun a beginner course on photography.

They eventually stopped asking me to join them for things. I was relieved that, without saying so much, they could perceive that I wanted to go my own way.

Singapore goes cyborg but what does this mean for families?

TAGS | fiction , local

Darcel Al Anthony

Darcel is a journalist with a passion for storytelling and learning. She recently graduated from the National University of Singapore with honours, majoring in English Literature and minoring in French Language Studies as well as Communications and New Media. A bookworm, she enjoys all kinds of tales, with her favourite series being the Harry Potter books. She also spends her time volunteering and listening to classics.

Singapore goes cyborg but what does this mean for families?

Sweltering heat and singlets all around despite the grey clouds looming over Bishan Town.

I had read about Singapore before — efficient, futuristic, a utopia in the tropics. But no book had prepared me for the sheer spectacle of this little red dot.

During my week-long trip, I found myself to be like a child in a candy store. Tall skyscrapers with seemingly gravity-defying architecture, trains actually coming in on time, and now robots? This might be a dream for everyone else around the globe but for Singaporeans, it is just an average day.

Cyborg nannies have been a fixture in Singaporean households since 2045, the latest innovation from Ulokam¹ World. These sleek and greyish caretakers were designed to ease the burden on young families, a heavily funded initiative by the Ministry of Family Care to counteract the nation’s declining birth rate.

While their efficiency was undeniable, their accessibility was another matter. Only the wealthiest families could afford them outright. The rest were tangled in metres of red tape like psychological evaluations, household compatibility checks, and mandatory consultations.

After all, Singapore was not just introducing advanced machines; it was ushering in a sweeping societal shift.

To better understand this new age, I was a guest at Ai Ling Rosman’s condo, a 36-year-old senior associate at a public relations firm. She stays alone with her 10-year-old son, Adil, and their cyborg nanny.

¹ Tamil for ‘metal’.

“Welcome to Singapore, John,” Ai Ling said, grinning as widely as a Cheshire cat.

I remembered how much the humidity clung to my skin like a second layer, the scent of altar incense filling the air. I asked her for a drink.

“Enam, come!”

The floor trembled slightly under her weight. Her loud footsteps echoed, metallic yet eerily smooth.

I immediately turned around, whipping out my notebook.

In front of me stood a gargantuan woman. Her jet-black bangs hung stiffly against her emotionless face and her long braid was slung on her shoulder. The synthetic skin stretched tightly over her high cheekbones, devoid of any human imperfections. The bright pink tube-like veins pulsed, almost real, but not quite; they are dictated by circuits, not a beating heart.

Despite the heat, she wore a long-sleeved white blouse and ankle-length black trousers.

“Hello Puan. How may I serve you?”

“This is John, a journalist for The Daily Papers, a very famous ang moh publication. He’s writing a story about our cyborgs. You will help him with it and make his stay comfortable,

“Hi Enam, a pleasure to meet you,”

Enam turned to me, her neon pink lips twitching. I think it was an attempt at a smile or at least a programmed gesture of one.

“It never needs a break and it never complains. ‘The ideal maid’, that’s their brand slogan. It just works all day, nice, right?” said Ai Ling. “Now go make Tuan some teh, make sure it is not so hot,”

Enam moved to the kitchen, and I followed, curious to see if there was a difference when it came to making a simple cup of tea.

A mug and bowl of tea sachets slid from a cabinet before she even reached for them. How convenient is it to have sensors at one’s fingertips! Without hesitation, she scooped a sachet and placed it inside the mug.

The kettle had already begun to boil. Steam curled in the air, and with a swift motion, she poured the water over the sachet, not a drop splashing onto the counter.

She did not stir. Instead, she simply placed both hands on the sides of the mug, immune to the boiling heat. Her pink veins pulsed in deliberate, measured intervals as if she were breathing into the mug.

Then, she reached for the condensed milk and grabbed the mug once more, cooling it down with her touch. With one final movement, she lifted the mug and extended it toward me.

I took it and had a sip of the tea - or teh, feeling the warmness spreading through my fingers. The teh was wonderfully balanced between the bitterness of tea and the creamy, somewhat sickening sweetness of the condensed milk.

“How’s the teh?” asked Ai Ling.

“It’s good- It’s perfect, actually! Goldilocks would have approved. It’s just right, not too hot or cold,”

“Oh, this cyborg nanny is good at making teal! You wouldn’t believe how much effort went into manufacturing its arm for precision and temperature changes. Luckily, I’m friendly with the boss, I got a discount,” said Ai Ling, winking at me.

Enam tilted her head. “Do you need sugar, Tuan?”

I shook my head, staring at her hands … and then, her blank face.

It was then I first wondered if she could have felt anything at all.

Her skin was smooth and there was not a single blemish nor a hint of pores. Big, black, blank eyes and a sharp nose. She was like a mannequin, eerily perfect when you are not paying attention to the pulsing pink veins and matching lips.

Which is hard to do.

² Like an “amah”, a female domestic servant commonly found in pre-Independent Singapore’.
³ Term used to describe a person of European descent and most things from the western hemisphere

My days flew fast in Singapore. Wanting to learn more about these cyborg nannies, I accompanied Enam to pick Adil up from school each day.

On the first day, something peculiar had happened. At the primary school, kids in white-and-blue uniforms streamed out, laughing and eating Hello Panda biscuits and Chupa Chups lollipops.

Not used to the battering weather, I sat in the corner, observing two different groups. One, a nanny sea of tall, grey-skinned women with bright pink veins and the other, a throng of tanned women in oversized cartoon tees and rugged shorts.

“Enam!”

A small boy walked fast, shoulders hunched.

He did not notice I was there. He went straight to Enam and rested a hand on her wrist. I remembered thinking, that must be Adil.

Something flickered across her face and her eyes widened. It happened so briefly that I almost missed it.

I found it shocking that Enam bent down without any creaking noises. She took Adil’s school bag and ruffled his hair, a very humane gesture. He did not flinch. In fact, he now looked rather relaxed.

“Adil,” Enam said, using no titles and in a voice gentler than when she spoke to me or Ai Ling.

“What happened today?”

Before I could introduce myself, another voice cut through the crowd.

“Oi, Adil! You think that tin chi bai will protect you? Come lah, ask her to do my homework for me,”

A lanky boy loitered near the gate, his too-small school bag slung over his shoulders. It seemed like he bought it years ago. He reached out as if he were going to grab Adil’s collar but he never got the chance.

Enam’s arm shot out, blocking his path. So firm that the boy skidded to a stop. Her pink veins pulsed, brighter this time, like snakes within an artificial polymer.

The boy’s expression faltered for just a second before he forced a scoff, acted as if he was unfazed, and ran straight towards his group of friends.

Adil nervously wiped at his nose with the back of his sleeve. He turned to Enam, his voice small.

“Will they ever stop?”

Enam paused for a long moment. Then, she reached out, brushing a stray curl from his forehead.

“Do not worry for I will be here,” she said simply.

Each day after picking Adil up from school, Enam would resume doing household chores. She would also pick Adil’s shoes up after he kicked them off at the door and unpacked his school bag for him while he took a shower or watched the latest cartoon show on television.

Ever so methodical.

I was curious about the incident. Wanting to know more, I lingered in the kitchen, watching Enam cut bananas into small pieces for Adil as his afternoon snack. Her movements were fast yet so precise. I remembered thinking how efficient it would be to have one of these cyborg nannies.

“Does that kind of thing happen often?”

She looked up at me, her unreadable face betraying nothing. “What thing, Tuan?”

“Call me by my name. I meant those boys at the gate. Does it happen often?”

The pink veins flickered in sync with an unseen command, her response delayed by a fraction of a second, just long enough to remind me that she was perhaps processing.

“Why are you asking me?”

“You’re supposed to speak properly to me, Enam,”

For a long moment, Enam did not speak. I wondered if I had offended her, not that I knew if she could be offended in the first place. Was she programmed to understand disrespect?

It was bizarre. I thought all cyborg nannies were supposed to follow orders to the tee.

Just as I was about to ask her again, she said,

“I exist to take care of him,”

Could a machine truly care?

⁴ A vulgar Hokkien term for a woman’s genitals

Day after day, I observed Enam and Adil. They have developed a close bond over the three years that Enam has been with them. Such is one conversation we had after school.

“You think if I had a metal arm, I could punch through walls? Create a big lobang? You could do that, right, Enam?” Adil asked, eyes shining.

“Yes,”

He grinned. “Cool,”

She smiled back at him, a proper one with pearly white teeth showing. The first I had seen.

I watched the exchange with fascination. There was no wariness or hesitation.

Adil spoke to her as if she were a person. I wondered if he knew the difference. To be honest, at that point, I was already starting to feel that there was not any.

After dinner on Tuesday, Ai Ling scrolled through her tablet, quickly tapping at her screen while I continued my writing. We were seated at the dining table.

“Enam, make sure he brushes his teeth before he tidur,” she said without looking up.

“Yes Puan,” Enam replied. She turned to Adil, her voice softer. “Come, Adil,”

When she spoke to Ai Ling, her tone was clipped. With Adil, it was like the way a mother might coax a child. If this was programming, it was incredibly sensitive.

The boy obediently followed. Ai Ling remained seated, still engrossed in her digital world. She eventually paused to take a sip of wine, a night-time habit for her.

I took this opportunity to ask her more about Enam and her species.

I learnt that Enam means “six” in Malay and that Enam had been the sixth cyborg helper belonging to Ai Ling.

“So, who were your previous helpers?”

“Cyborg nannies or also the jungle ones?”

“Er, just the cyborgs,”

“Lima,” Ai Ling replied without skipping a beat. “‘Five’ in Malay. It was … defective. I sent it back to the warehouse, free delivery if you do so on the day they glitched,”

Defective.

The word sat uncomfortably in my mind. What did that mean for a cyborg?

“At the end of the day, they are just robots. They break and they need repair here and there. Just like aircon. Ulokam sends a replacement. I’ve had what - four? Five? Oh ya, five. Doesn’t matter. Enam’s been here the longest.”

Ai Ling continued to list the names of her previous cyborg nannies, with matching Malay numbers, and how they too malfunctioned.

“There are so few of them in Singapore, not everyone has it yet. Not even sure if they can even buy in the first place,” said Ai Ling. “I wonder how long Enam will last.”

She chuckled and took another sip, unaware that Adil was listening from his bedroom, his fingers tightly curled around Enam’s long sleeve as she tucked him in.

⁵ Malay for “hole”

⁶ Malay for “sleep”

Unfortunately, the school bullying persisted.

The lanky boy taunted Adil regularly, shoving him during recess breaks and throwing eraser dust into his hair. Day after day, his confidence seemed diminished. He was even teary on some days.

On Thursday, I asked Adil why he did not defend himself against his bullies. His reply came easily.

“Enam says to ignore them as they’re jealous.”

A shy boy, he did not look at me when he said it. Instead, he was focused on the snack Enam had just prepared for him, a plate of cut apples, neatly arranged in a spiral. He picked up a piece with a metal fork and chewed slowly.

“Jealous of what?” I pressed.

Adil shrugged. “That I have Enam. That she manja me. They say that mummy has no time for me so she bought Enam for me,”

There was no arrogance or hurt in his voice, just a quiet certainty.

Enam, who had been wiping down the counter, paused mid-motion. She gripped the cloth in her hands. She turned her head just slightly, not enough to meet my gaze, but enough to show she was listening.

I leaned forward. “Is that what you think too?”

Adil hesitated this time. “I don’t know,” he admitted, picking at the edge of his plate. “They’re not as rich as us. They don’t have her, so maybe,”

He finally glanced up at Enam, his brown eyes softening. “They just don’t have someone who actually looks after them. Some of them only have maids who can’t wait to get out of the house on Sundays,”

“Does your mother know about the bullying?”

“I don’t know. She’s never here. The only time I told her about it, she just said that ‘boys will just be boys’,”

Adil’s words stayed with me long after our conversation ended.

What can I say about a society that envies machines? A nanny made of wires and metal, yet somehow more of a guardian than flesh-and-blood parents who barely glanced at their children. A robot in the absence of love.

⁷ Referring to Southeast Asians

⁸ Malay for “spoiling” or “taking care”

On Friday, I stood with Enam at the school. I wanted a seat and so, Enam stood next to me behind the metallic assembly line, each cyborg waiting for their designated child.

Adil walked fast, as usual, head low, hands gripping the straps of his school bag.

But today, the lanky boy was stalking directly behind him.

“Eh, tin chi bai bodyguard not here yet, is it?” Mocking, like a cat toying with a mouse.

His friends chuckled with him. “All you rich suckers.”

Adil kept walking. Then, a shove.

He stumbled. I expected Adil to turn around, maybe yell or fight back. Instead, he took a deep breath and started walking again.

Another shove, harder this time, and Adil fell to the ground. His palms scraped against the concrete, a thin red line forming where the skin broke.

Adil cried in pain, cradling his hand while the lanky boy laughed, feeling proud of his triumph.

I turned to Enam, wondering if she could heal Adil. Her pink veins pulsed rapidly now, glowing almost too brightly beneath her synthetic skin. Her fingers twitched at her sides.

Then, she stepped forward.

Everything shifted at that moment. The way her footsteps landed was ever so calculated. The boy’s laughter faltered.

Enam bent down, picking up Adil’s school bag from where it had fallen. She dusted it off with slow, methodical movements. Then, she knelt beside Adil, carefully inspecting his scraped palms.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Adil sniffled but shook his head. "Aidoh! My hands so pain,"

She nodded. Then, finally, she turned her attention to the boy and walked menacingly towards him.

Despite his tall height for a boy his age, he strained his neck to look up at her and did not take a step back.

“Oi,” he spat, voice cracking slightly. "You can't touch me. You know that, right? You- you’ve got rules. You are programmed,”

Enam tilted her head, and now, I was certain that something did flicker behind those black eyes.

“You hurt Adil,” she said in a voice so hauntingly smooth.

The boy blinked, not expecting a defiant answer.

An unnerving silence settled over the gates. The boy’s friends had suddenly gone quiet, watching the scene unfold.

That was when Enam moved.

It happened in an instant.

Enam’s hand shot out like an iron viper. A hard grip wrapped around his throat and lifted him off the ground.

His legs kicked around in the air, the dirty soles of his tight velcro sneakers up for all to see. His hands made an attempt to claw at Enam’s wrist, fingers slipping against the cold synthetic skin. Her pink veins pulsed violently bright, illuminating her arm like a shiny sword.

“You will never harm Adil again,”

Her voice echoed clearly through the precinct.

The boy’s face was turning blue and his eyes were beginning to bulge. His friends had scattered, but the other students watched, wide-eyed and frozen. Some had their phones out while the others were yanked back by their cyborg nannies, quickly fleeing the scene.

I should have understood why they did that instead of intervening with their superb strengths. Something was happening. Something bad.

I exhaled, realising I had been holding my breath. I am afraid to say that I just stood rooted to the ground.

“Enam!”

Adil shouted. He looked scared.

“Enam, put him down!”

For the first time since I had met her, she hesitated.

Then, with a sharp exhale of air from her vents, she let go.

The lanky boy crumpled to the ground, gasping, his hands flying to his throat while his schoolmates quickly surrounded him.

“You machines will kill us. We will all mati,” one of them called out to Enam who did not look at him.

She casually turned to Adil, her expression unreadable.

“It is safe now. Let us go home.”

I was stunned. I dared not speak and thus, we walked in silence. I was grateful for how short the walking distance was.

By the time we reached Ai Ling’s condo, the videos had gone viral. Enam’s face, her vibrant veins, the horrifying ease with which she had lifted the boy, all of it was spreading like wildfire across social media.

I finally mustered my courage to address what had happened.

“Enam,” I asked quietly as she prepared Adil’s late afternoon fruit snack, grapes without the stems, her movements as fluid as ever.

“Why did you do that?”

The knife in her hand stopped mid-air, hovering above the cutting board. The pink veins across her wrist flickered, almost as if they were breathing.

“I exist to take care of him.”

⁹ Singlish term for “Oh no!”

That fateful evening, Ai Ling, oblivious to the events of the day, received a group call from the Ministry of Family Care.

I was not privy to the conversation but I managed to make out some parts.

Immediate retrieval.

Malfunction detected.

Spoilt unit.

Defective. Defective. Defective.

Ai Ling’s voice remained calm throughout the call but I could see the tension in her shoulders, the way her fingers continuously clenched and unclenched around her wine glass.

When she hung up, she exhaled sharply and finally said it.

“They’re taking Enam back,”

Adil froze, a fork halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“They're coming to fix Enam now,”

“No!”

Ai Ling sighed, rubbing her temples. “Adil, you should know this. This is protocol. Now, I have to pay the delivery fee because I didn’t inform them. This is how I have to find out. it-”

“She protected me!” His voice cracked. “She just wanted to- she-”

“Enam attacked a human boy,”

“He deserved it!”

“He could have died!” Ai Ling snapped, finally losing her patience. “Look, Enam broke the rules and will come back after they fix it,”

“Liar!”

“You could have told me about the bullying, I would have spoken to your form teacher,”

“You’re never here. You are not my mother!” Adil shouted as he shoved his chair back, running to the living room to Enam, who all this while, had stood by the window, watching the dusky sunset.

“Enam,” he said, grabbing her hand. “You don’t have to go. We can run away,”

Enam looked down at his small fingers wrapped around hers. Her pink veins pulsed faintly, her black eyes unreadable.

“That is unnecessary, Adil,”

“No! They’re going to shut you down! They’re going to tear you apart! That’s what they did to the others and they never came back,”

Enam crouched in front of him, pressing a cool metal hand against his cheek. He sniffled, gripping her other wrist.

“Do not be sad, Adil. I have known,”

“Then stay,” he begged.

Her lips twitched into that almost smile. The special one she always reserved just for him.

Enam did not struggle when they arrived within a few minutes. Two men in dark suits, representatives from Ulokam World.

She simply stepped forward when they called her name.

“Zero-six, you are required for immediate diagnostics and decommissioning,”

Adil clung to her arm. “No, no, no!”

Enam bent down, brushing his hair back one last time. “Adil, be strong,”

He sobbed. “Please don’t go,”

And for the first and last time, I saw it.

The way Adil looked at her. Not as a machine, not as a tool, but as something more. The question was never about how real these cyborg nannies were.

It was about what made them any less real than us.

Enam pressed her forehead to his, just for a second. Then she pulled away and walked out the door with the representatives.

Adil did not speak for the rest of the evening. Ai Ling tried to cheer with him but soon gave up, having to prepare for an online meeting.

That night, I found him sitting by the window, knees pulled to his chest, staring out at the city.

“She takes everything away from me. Enam was perfect, she was the best we had. She wasn’t defective,” he said quietly.

I swallowed. “No,”

He turned to me, his eyes shining.

“She just cared about me,”

Adil was right. Enam’s only fault was her affection for him.

He did not cry but I heard him whisper, “Goodbye, Enam,” into the dense air.

In the morning, Ulokam World delivered a replacement.

A new cyborg nanny.

She looked nearly identical to Enam. The same smooth, grey skin. The same long braid and outfit. The same pink veins.

“Tujuh,” Ai Ling said, introducing her to Adil.

I don’t speak Malay but I had an inkling that it meant “seven”.

Adil stared at her for a long moment. Perhaps he was searching her face for traces of the one he had lost.

Then, slowly, he reached out and placed a hand on her wrist. Tujuh’s pink veins pulsed softly, akin to a heartbeat.

“Hello, Adil,” she said.

Her voice was familiar but not as soft. He hugged her.

“Please take care of me,”

And just like that, the world moved on.

Ai Ling barely glanced at them as she swiped through her phone, already preoccupied with something else.

As I watched, I had the sinking feeling that Enam had been just like this once.

That she, too, had arrived one morning, pink veins pulsing, created to serve a household. And one day, Tujuh would be replaced just the same.

I left Singapore that day. My trip had come to an end. I came with the intention of writing about advanced technology, the next great innovation in childcare. But as I waited for my plane, I realised I had been poking around in the wrong areas.

Good riddance to the stifling heat.

Science City #26

TAGS | fiction , local

Joseph Tan

Joseph Tan is a screenwriter and filmmaker who has recently turned to writing short stories. One of his pieces placed second in the English short story category of the Golden Point Awards 2023, and his other work have been published in anthologies and collections such as The Perks of Being Dumped.

The weeping couple thrust their rosy-cheeked baby daughter at you. Fifty dollars, and you can have her.

You ask, why are you selling your child?

Because they have sold everything else. This is all they have left. They want to escape, forever, and they have found a way. They need just that little bit more money to make the final leg of their journey. They say, you look like you can give her a good life. She still has hope; they don’t. So, fifty dollars. Just fifty dollars.

You tell them you will pay their way there, if they bring you with them. You want to see the great escape for yourself. The couple look at their crying baby, then at you, and nod.

In Russia, there used to be cities made of science.

After World War II, the Soviet Union built naukograds – literally “science cities” – to conduct bleeding-edge scientific research. Built with prison labour from gulags – many of whom were executed afterwards to ensure secrecy – these science cities were classified top-secret, found only on highly restricted maps while any and all physical indications of their locations were destroyed, hidden, obscured. Residency was restricted to authorized personnel and their families, while visitors had to be vetted and given clearance.

The naukograd that was the couple’s destination nestled in the eastern slopes of the Urals; it was one of several designated science cities that concentrated on nuclear military research. Uranium processing plants, a research reactor, and a munitions factory sat alongside apartment blocks, schools and playgrounds. Decommissioned following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Science City #26 laid abandoned until another group of scientists settled around a one-hundred-metre underground bunker of fortified concrete and steel used to test low-yield nuclear weapons.

A dry breeze rustles dust through everyone’s hair as the couple explain your presence to the lead scientist; he has expected their arrival, but not yours. The baby dozes against her mother’s chest. The other scientists shuffle around, waiting for formalities to end. A wiry man with wild hair and a vaguely South American air nods at you before being nudged away from further signs of friendliness by a colleague.

The scientists usher you and the couple up the back of a Soviet army truck. They drive slowly to avoid the potholes on the unmaintained roads. Falling asleep, you dream you are walking your cat Yan, his orange fur grown back after the failed chemotherapy. A wisp of memory lets you remember that Yan loved flopping belly-up into your ex-lover’s lap, and she would laugh that beautiful laugh that was as big and deep as the world while she administered the scratches your cat so desired. Someone is walking behind you. Her footsteps fill the spaces between yours, a syncopated shuffle-step that overlapped more and more, until they became one. You hear her calling for you; you turn around. You know it is her, but she has a different face now, because enough time has passed for you to lose enough memory of what she looks like. At that horrible epiphany, she vanishes, leaving you alone with the mewing of your once-dead cat.

Waking at the entrance of the bunker, the couple hand their daughter over to you. They are led past gigantic steel blast doors into a cavernous circular room. The baby fusses. You bounce her in your arms to calm her. The wild-haired scientist guides you into an antechamber with reinforced concrete and a large window of clear, blast-proof glass. He says he is to be your host. The baby coos as her parents take up positions in front of the bomb-well’s curved wall which is smeared with human-shaped soot-shadows that shift and writhe. Overhead lights cast the couple’s shadows on the wall; the other shades move aside to make room for the newcomers. The scientists push the blast doors shut on the couple, now alone in the concrete emptiness.

Your wild-haired guide tells you his name: Carlos. He is a nuclear physicist, just like his colleagues. He knows you were about to ask, because he is also psychic, just like his colleagues. That’s why they are here, at what remains of Science City #26.

The baby throws up on your shoulder. Through the window, you watch the man take his wife’s hand. She smiles sadly at him. The head scientist and his acolytes don white lab coats, and stand in a circle holding hands.

Carlos explains that years ago, Jakita Fürstner, an Austrian quantum physicist, was standing at the main altar of the Sagrada Familia when a bloodless cut opened in her right palm. A voice inside the wound whispered the final proof to an equation that had haunted her dreams since she was a child. Completed, the equation proved the existence of an afterlife: a heaven, a hell, a reincarnation wheel. In death, one either spent aeons bored to tears, in turmoil, or stuck on an infinite merry-go-round of lives. Fürstner anticipated the chaos that would arise if her afterlife equation was ever made public, so she entrusted her discovery to a scientific cadre, and then vanished off the face of the earth.

The scientists pitch their voices. The baby rests her little head against your chest. The mother strokes the father’s cheek tenderly.

Jakita Fürstner’s scientific compatriots expanded on her work. They discovered the mathematics that proved the human soul was made of electrical impulses. With a powerful electro-magnetic pulse, they could scramble those signals into non-existence, into oblivion. With that came purpose, and one by one, they came to Science City #26 where they would end any human souls that wanted to be ended, for good.

Carlos tells you the scientists are chanting in equations. Sine and cosine, a call of differential mechanics, a response in complex variables. Their voices fill the room; the baby bawls in fright.

In the bomb well, the couple embrace.

The only way to produce an electro-magnetic pulse strong enough to disrupt a human soul is by detonating a nuclear bomb, which the scientists, of course, have neither the will or the means to procure. But through a combination of psychic power and arcane mathematical equations, they learned to call forth a nuclear blast from the past. With over two thousand nuclear bombs detonated since the Trinity test in 1945, there are plenty of ghosts to channel.

You go to the window so the baby can look at her parents. Her mother sobs against her husband’s chest. His eyes are already dead.

Carlos says the couple are trapped in a never-ending reincarnation cycle. They are destined to fall in love and marry and die together in every life. The beats of the story are too familiar now. They are tired; they still love each other, they will never not love each other – but this is bullshit. So, they came here to end it.

The husband breathes his wife in. They would never have to see each other again. The scientists chant, the baby cries, yet all you can hear is your name being called in the spaces between, followed by a laugh as big and as deep as the world. Then – a roar like a jet engine from far away, a flare of light from the other side. Strands of the woman’s hair swing in the on-rushing breeze.

The roar grows until it is all there is. The windows and walls shake. The bunker is warded, Carlos says; ghosts cannot do any harm to it. The light glows orange, then white as it speeds into the bomb well.

The couple pull each other tight as the light wraps around them like an aura. You haven’t known them long, but you know they have never looked lovelier.

Their hair burns off their scalps, their scalps off their skulls. Flesh strips from their skeletons. Bones fuse together where they touch in their death embrace before vaporising into motes of ash.

You hear your name called one more time, and then there is only silence. There are no lovers anymore, and no love.

Clutching the now sleeping baby, you enter the bomb well. Two men bring in brushes and soap. You realise that the shadows of the couple are now imprinted on the wall. They are still holding on to each other. The two men get to work scrubbing out their shadows. Carlos explains that Shadows are the last vestiges of souls as he takes the baby from you. Scrubbing them away removes any final traces from the world. The couple’s shadows sigh , with relief or regret, you cannot tell..

Billionaires, Carlos says. There’s only one place these bastards are only ever going to go, so they come to Science City #26 to escape their fate. We take their money, but keep them on the wall to remind them there’s more than one type of hell.

Billionaires, Carlos says again. Fuck ‘em.

The scientists agree to take care of the baby. Raise her like their own. You ask Carlos to tell her about her parents, and their love. It is important she knows that. For once, Carlos does not say anything.

You would not need to see her again. As you bid farewell, you hear her echo behind you. You hum a song in a futile attempt to drown her out, and continue on your way.

Tensile Strength

S.L. Johnson

S. L. Johnson is a writer and poet who grew up in Ohio, USA and now lives in Sydney, Australia. Her work has appeared in The Colored Lens, In Another Time, and a number of literary journals. Her poem “News Flash” was included in the British Council’s online teaching curriculum in 2022. She is a graduate of the Wayward Wormhole writer’s workshop. You can find her on Bluesky at @sljohnson.bsky.social and her poetry and collage is on Instagram at @stephaniejohnsonpoetry

The intricate design can easily unravel and disintegrate
With needle and thread in hand I pause to view
My effort to save this Earth-made piece of lace
Priceless in our alien milieu
With needle and thread in hand I pause to view
Out the porthole of my cabin, glittering death
Priceless in our alien milieu
Each human casualty's last breath
Out the porthole of my cabin, glittering death
The intricate design can easily unravel and disintegrate
Each human casualty’s last breath
My effort to save this Earth-made piece of lace

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1

TAGS | editorial , local

Vivekanandan Sharan

Vivekanandan Sharan is a third-year student studying at NUS. He can be found spending most of his time reading, taking notes and listening to music. He read Isaac Asimov's collection The Early Asimov when he was 16 and was never the same again. Currently trying to triangulate German Idealism, science fiction and his engineering major.

"Science Fiction" today is a lot like the contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma, which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes toward science and technology which are bankrupt and increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. "Hard-SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in terms of the social realities of high-tech post-industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard-Leninism.¹

Bruce Sterling wrote this thundering denunciation of science fiction in his 1989 essay “Slipstream”. It is because of this alleged failure of science fiction that he came up with the category of slipstream that would surpass science fiction; a new term, and more importantly, a new recognition for the inherent fluidity of texts that exceeded the bonds of genre and literary fiction. During the time that Bruce Sterling was writing, the Soviet Union – no longer the bastion of “hard-Leninism” (whatever that would mean) – was in the throes of perestroika and glasnost. June of that year would see the success of Solidarność in Poland, and by November, the fall of the Berlin Wall. In about two years the Soviet Union would have ceased to exist at all. If the Soviet Union did not climb out of its dream-state death throes back into the world of the real in the 1980s, what about science fiction?

Claims in the form of “the death of _” are almost always attention-grabbing. That’s because they impart a sense of the “end of history” into an argument, appealing to our loss-aversion. Sensational as they are, what makes these claims hard to shake off is that they are quite often true, from some points of view, under certain angles. It can be productive to debate these negative claims, since the process of determining what is true and what is not reveals a lot about what we consider crucial. Specifically, grappling with “the death of science fiction” can unearth conflicting notions about what it means for “science fiction” to be alive and well, or rather, to be anything at all.

¹ https://www.journalscape.com/jlundberg/page2

James Blish and SF-pessimism

We start this story of death with the classic science fiction author and vibrant critic, James Blish. Today, he is most well known for his novelization of Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, and his four-part saga, Cities in Flight. Much less well known is his critical work, written under the pen name of William Atheling Jr. Collected in two invaluable volumes, The Issue at Hand (1964) and More Issues at Hand (1970), Blish presented a unique modernist orientation to the genre, and made contact between science and modernist literary fiction. While he admired the works of canonical writers like James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Blish published in pulp magazines like Future Science Fiction, Science Fiction Stories and Galaxy Science Fiction in the 1940s and the 1950s. Blish stages a contact between these two poles of culture, in which we can discern, avant la lettre, a theoretical description of the contemporary strain of science fiction, which bears directly on the question at hand.

In his 1978 essay, “Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History”, Blish takes issue with two strands of critical thought surrounding science fiction at the time. In the first strand, works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Frankenstein are put forward in an attempt to legitimise science fiction by showing it to be an eternal literary mode. In the second strand, any proto-history of the genre is thrown out like the proverbial bathwater, leaving “science fiction” as the baby hurtling through the air.

Blish agreed with neither the urge (among scholarly and popular writers) to trace a genealogy for science fiction, nor the attitude that science fiction is sui generis, and took form “with the advent and rise of science and technology”.² To him, both positions were merely inverses of each other, results of a linear mode of historical thinking.
Instead of these models, Blish proposes a non-linear, cyclical, historical schema to house science fiction, drawing from the German historian Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. In Spengler’s historical schema, each culture passes through life stages not unlike an organism, from birth to youth to senescence to death. Two figures can be contemporary even if they are separated by great gulfs of space and time, as long as they lived in the corresponding phases of their cultures.

Blish, as did Spengler, believed Western Civilization had reached the winter of its discontent. The West is nearing its fall and so exhaustion permeates all its cultural work. In literature, for example, the secondary-epic of the West has already been written in John Milton; now is not the time for an enterprising Virgil, let alone another Homer.³ Nothing on the stature of either can be written today. To Blish,that the broader scope of literature itself has been exhausted; what can be written has already been written. Literature as a whole has grown decrepit, death following with no chance of rejuvenation. In this state, science fiction itself cannot have great expectations put on it. We certainly cannot expect science fiction to be more than what it already is, an attitude he considers an untenable utopianism.

Blish has a pessimistic attitude, certainly, about what science fiction can aspire to. There is no prelapsarian moment of science fiction that we can return to, and no salvation that would raise it to the level of the old masters. The content of science fiction is such that it cannot be raised in that way, given that its two sources, a degenerate science and a degenerate religiosity, are conditions of the current period of the West.⁴

Modern historians have found Oswald Spengler’s historical metaphysics overwrought, reactionary and distorting, preferr not to use enormous overarching frames and grand theories, preferring instead to be grounded and empirical. Unlike Blish, I do not a priori decide that science fiction is inherently “syncretic” or decadent. Nevertheless, Blish’s appropriation of Spengler’s thought for literary criticism is useful for the lovely description that he comes up with for science fiction: “the internal (intracultural) literary form taken by syncretism in the West”, namely “that occult area where a science in decay (elaborately decorated with technology)” is combined with a second religiousness.

It is because of the results of this “syncretism” that we see “non-ideas” such as “time travel, ESP, dianetics, Dean Drives, faster-than-light travel, reincarnation and parallel universes” find such comfortable homes in SF. Blish is arguing that these patent and fantastical impossibilities are inseparable from the essence of science fiction. What is useful about Blish’s pessimism is that it is his claim that literature is dead in the West today that can make way for the new life and new form of science fiction. Blish affirms SF as a syncretic “degenerate” form, such that instead of continuing with nostalgia for original purity, authors can embrace wholly the nature of the genre and try making something new.

This definition feels strikingly contemporary when we look at popular kinds of science fiction in the media. The list of “non-ideas” that Blish mentioned are not only still used, but have become cliché even for mainstream audiences. Surely the average moviegoer is familiar with time travel and alternate universes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, ESP from shows like Stranger Things, and faster-than-light travel from any number of space opera films, like Star Wars and Star Trek. As images they have become shorthand. What seems to run through these examples is what James Blish calls “syncretism”, which I think is useful for understanding how contemporary science fiction functions.

²“Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History” in The Best of James Blish, pg. 350

³ For Blish, the secondary-epic is the self-conscious attempt at a literary, written epic poem, based on an older, traditional oral epic. Virgil based the Aeneid on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, while Milton’s Paradise Lost was modelled on Homer and Virgil. The primary epic of Western civilization would probably be Beowulf or The Song of Roland.

⁴ He depicts this in the first book of the Cities of Flight series, They Shall Have Stars (1956), in a dystopian 2013 with a police-state America, degenerating science and a religious revival. The series as a whole is permeated with Spenglerian themes, as R. D. Mullen shows in his afterword to the Cities in Flight omnibus.

Tropes and Syncretism

Modern readers will probably be aware of the endless debates over “tropes”. Tropes are commonly defined as the eternal, shared themes, forms and motifs that have been passed down for generations, and pre-date even writing itself. However, in the midst of this heated discussion, it strikes me that “trope”, or “trope-y” is not the right word to talk about modern mainstream science fiction, whether that’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe or contemporary novels. We have presented a probable critique of science fiction in James Blish, now, how do we find a way to account for the way that SF has changed through Blish’s critical keyword?

To be precise, I argue that it is not the prevalence of tropes that marks modern mainstream science fiction (as stated in the definition above, there have always been tropes), but rather, their mode of circulation in the cultural sphere. Taking inspiration from Blish's reference to syncretism above, I argue that the modern incarnation of the trope can be thought of as an icon, or a sign that is abstracted from their original context. In this case, the 'original context' refers to whatever dramatic tension that characterized the genre of science fiction in its nascent stages. Even if Blish’s definition might not apply to science fiction as a whole, I argue that it applies to a particular contemporary mode of speculative fiction.

There are two processes here: firstly, there is a stagnant science, whose objects become re-enchanted and fetishized in science fiction, forming the stock of non-ideas like faster-than-light travel, time travel and telepathy. There is a further process, however, where the used-up signifiers of science fiction themselves become re-enchanted as objects of fetish.

The purest examples of this can be found outside science fiction proper, in popular culture. Let’s take the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe movie Thunderbolts, which is a great example of the re-enchantment of dead tropes. The movie itself reveals itself to be a retread of the older Avengers movies, ending up as a reprise of them. The movie itself juxtaposes figures like gods, spies, magic, but slotting them as interchangeable figures in a plot. This is what makes it pre-childish, because a child would be interested in playing with the bare juxtaposition, “Character X and Character Y appeared together!” rather than even having fun with it.

Science fiction now presents like a set of images, which includes “aliens”, “outer space”, “cyborg”, “space fleet”, whose appeal is mostly immediate. The space fleet in one story is about the same as the space fleet in another story, which means that new works can be created through mixing and matching images from different sources, crossing mediums. By adopting this point of view, we can contend that just because tropes are losing their contexts in modern science fiction, that doesn’t mean that science fiction has somehow lost its life force. Instead, something about it has qualitatively changed.

This criticism is not new to us, and can be attributed to Brian Aldiss in 1986, apropos of Ray Bradbury, but applies just as well to the motivation of the New Wave, which Aldiss was associated with.

On the whole, the props of SF are few: rocket ships, telepathy, robots, time travel, other dimensions, huge machines, aliens, future wars. Like coins, they become debased by over-circulation (though it is true that some of them, adroitly used, acquire baraka by long association).⁵

However, what is unique about this criticism in our contemporary instance is that signs seem to not have been “debase[d]”, but have simply lost their function. It’s not just that these signs have become degraded, they have become ironic, and part of a different game this time: use all these images in new combinations. The dramatic effect engendered by the tropes is no longer the point, it’s the use of the tropes themselves and the new arrangements they are put into.

It is not impossible to revitalize the dead tropes, though, and the best example is in Grant Morrison’s series Multiversity for DC Comics. It is a multiverse-story, and so it depends primarily on the trope-y variations of a mythologized set of characters. However, despite writing a work that is in this way incredibly syncretic (taking characters and tropes from various genres, like superhero fiction, fantasy, science fiction), Morrison is able to make it work, through a meta-fictional exploration of these trope variations instead.

So, borrowing Blish’s idea of “syncretism”, we can orient our readings of SF against different “death of…” claims, searching out for what it is, really, that matters to us about SF. Doing so can also shine light on another crucial aspect in SF: what is SF really?

⁵Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, pg. 305-306

Part 2 continued in Issue #3

Editorial Foreword

The Great Stratagem of Lady Ikedanbu

Judith Huang

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle

Cai Png

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy

Alastair Wee

The Girlfriend

Andrew Cheah

Keep Nothing on Your Person TAGS | fiction, local

Levin Tan

Singapore goes cyborg but what does this mean for families? TAGS | fiction, local

Darcel Al Anthony

Science City #26

Joseph Tan

Tensile Strength

S.L. Johnson

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1

Vivekanandan Sharan

The Great Stratagem
of Lady Ikedanbu

Keep Nothing
on Your Person
TAGS | fiction , local

Singapore goes cyborg but what does this mean for families?

TAGS | fiction , local