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

Science City #26

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.