My Job At The Post Office Helps Me Understand The Humans Better
TAGS | fiction, international
Marc Fleury
Marc Fleury is a writer living near Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His short stories have appeared in ZNB Presents and Seize the Press. He also works at the post office, which helps him understand the humans better.
The official duties consist of greeting customers, finding out what they need to do, and either helping them do it or advising in a supportive way why it cannot be done.
Unofficially, I try to make the humans feel better.
For example, there is an elderly gentleman who comes in once a month to send a payment to the telephone company and to discuss how a stamp used to cost five cents but now it costs one dollar and fifteen cents. I greet him by saying “Hello” in an enthusiastic tone and I attach a stamp to his envelope and place it in a container to be collected later that day. Regarding his desire to discuss the price of postage, I say, “Seems like everything is getting more expensive” or “That was a bit before my time ha ha” or “Yep! Crazy, eh?”
What I do not do is explain how the cost to deliver his letter far exceeds the income it provides at every stage of the delivery process. He does not want to hear that. He does not seek assistance in understanding the economic realities of moving paper from one location to another. Rather, he seeks to make a connection with other humans and to be reassured that his existence matters.
I believe my responses achieve that, even though they sometimes reinforce his incorrect assumptions. You might assume that a more direct statement would be helpful, but I discovered early in my interactions with the humans that it would not. I could say to this man “Your existence matters,” but such statements do not produce positive results. Instead, the best results come from indirectly implying that meaning, by interacting with people and behaving as though the things they say and do have significance to me.
One of my coworkers, Rachel, says to me today, “Talia was in this weekend.”
“Was she?” I say, not because I doubt the veracity of Rachel’s statement, but simply as a way of implying I want to hear more information.
“She mentioned you.”
“Oh yeah?” This is the way the humans speak to each other. I am capable of imitating their verbal mannerisms with great accuracy when I wish to.
“She said you were ‘fucking hilarious’.”
I laugh because Rachel and I have previously discussed how Talia says ‘fuck’ much more frequently than our other customers. It is considered an inappropriate word in many contexts. In the specific context of mailing homemade crafts, it would be difficult to justify its use.
Talia used to be an actress, most-known as a secondary character on a popular television series about a group of men who continually get intoxicated and commit petty crimes. I have never watched the program; the summaries and short clips I have seen do not appeal to my particular sense of humour.
Rachel adds: “I can’t tell if you guys are flirting with each other when she comes in.”
Although I am curious to hear more, I struggle to determine the best response. I immediately reject both “Yes we are” and “No we’re not” because, like Rachel, I also cannot tell if Talia flirts with me. Flirting is a complex human interaction that I do not fully understand yet, despite my many years among the humans. It is often said to be a precursor or an early stage in human mating rituals but it sometimes occurs between individuals who have no intention of mating. Also, the behaviours that might be considered flirting are so varied and subtle, it is often unclear even to the participants involved if any actual flirting is occurring.
As I have not yet replied, Rachel continues: “Like, when you make fun of her terrible handwriting.”
This is what Rachel is referring to:
One month earlier, Talia arrived at the post office with several packages. After I greeted her with a “Hello” featuring an extended ‘o’ sound, I began weighing and measuring her parcels.
Talia said: “Sorry about my terrible handwriting. Just trying to make your job harder, I guess.”
I picked up one of the items and deliberately looked at the address, as though inspecting it thoroughly.
Placing it on the scale, I said, “Yep, that’s the second worst handwriting I’ve ever seen in my life.”
You might think that this was a terrible choice of words, as it completely contradicts what I wrote earlier about the essential functions of my job. But you would be wrong.
“I’d hate to see the worst one,” Talia said, laughing.
I pointed to one of her other parcels. “It’s that one.”
Rachel considers this interaction to be possibly-flirting. She may be correct. I don’t know. The complex nature of flirting makes it difficult for me to even determine if my own behaviour is flirting.
“I mean, she does have terrible handwriting,” I say.
“Cartoonishly so,” Rachel agrees.
You might be wondering if Rachel is flirting with me now, but I am confident she is not. We are work friends and she seems to enjoy the time that our shifts overlap, but I currently inhabit a body that is almost twenty years older than hers. Also, she has a strong preference for humans who have genitalia similar to her own. My body’s genitalia are very different from hers.
Rachel seems satisfied with our discussion of my interactions with Talia, but I am not. I decide that I will pay closer attention when Talia next comes to the post office.
A week later, I am saying “Hello” in a sing-song tone to Talia, and she responds in a similar tone. I place her first package on the scale and begin measuring, but I have done this enough times that I am able to direct my attention elsewhere.
I decide to pay her a compliment, and gauge her reaction. I run through a mental list of possibilities. She is a middle-aged woman. Her hair is greying. She has bright blue eyes. She appears to be healthy. I reject each of these as I think of them. Some would not be interpreted as compliments, but also: it feels more genuine to notice something in which she made a deliberate choice. “You have nice eyes” is equivalent to “your parents have nice DNA.” Also, “You have nice eyes” feels too much in the “definitely flirting” category. I don’t want to push that boundary so directly, as it could cause her significant social discomfort if she does not wish to interact with me in that manner.
Her scarf has a colour pattern which matches her belt. I could mention that, but I know very little about fashion, and I would not be able to expand on such a comment if it became necessary.
She has a canvas shoulder bag with a cartoon illustration by a Belgian artist whose clean line style I admire. I should say, “I like your bag.”
“You’re really good at that,” Talia says.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Typing in all the measurements without even looking at the keyboard.”
I briefly debate redirecting the conversation by saying “I was just admiring your bag” but I realize she has saved me the effort of thinking of a compliment.
“It’s my only skill,” I say. Self-deprecation comes more easily to me than gratitude.
“I doubt that,” she says.
I ponder this reply. She doubts that touch-typing is my only skill. On the surface, it makes sense – clearly I must have other skills. But nonetheless it strikes me as a peculiar thing to say. Did she mean that she has seen me do other things well? It almost feels too specific, even though no specific thing is being named. It feels like she is implying that there is a skill that she doesn’t want to name. It feels flirty.
The ability to detect flirting requires a comparison of behaviours. Does Talia speak to me the way that she speaks to other people? If yes, then either she is not flirting with me, or she is flirting with everyone. However, if she does not speak to others the way she speaks to me, then perhaps she is flirting with me. But it’s difficult to make that comparison because it requires me to observe her behaviour in my absence.
Despite my many years among the humans, I don’t know how to respond to her statement of “I doubt that.”
I consider making a joke about having one other skill, which would cause her to ask what it is, and I would respond “bragging about my typing” but that isn’t particularly funny. I consider obliquely leaning into the flirtiness by saying that I should add “can type without looking” to my dating profile.
Before I decide on a response, Talia says, “This might be my last batch.”
“Oh?”
“From here, I mean. I’ll have to annoy a whole different post office with my shitty handwriting.”
“Oh.”
“Moving to Edmonton at the end of the month.”
“Really.” “For work. It’s still a week yet, but there’s so much to wrap up here.”
“Huh.”
I suddenly find it difficult to type in the postal codes correctly. I slow down and focus on what I’m doing. Neither of us says anything more as I print out the postage labels for the rest of the packages.
Finally, I say: “Well, okay.”
We exchange a few more words. I tell her the price. She uses her credit card. After each phrase, I think, “Is that the last thing that we will ever say to each other?” That thought sits uncomfortably in my mind. I try to think of something that will extend the conversation. I want to say something pithy or profound. Something clever that will make her laugh. Something that would communicate “I am flirting with you.” Something that implies I have been flirting with her since the first day she came in. I should say “I like your bag.” I should ask about her acting. I should mention that her scarf matches her belt. I should say “You have nice eyes.”
But I don’t say any of those things.
She leaves, and I put her parcels with the outgoing mail.
Later, Rachel’s shift overlaps with mine, and I tell her Talia is moving to Edmonton.
“Oh no, that’s too bad. She’s really cool.”
“She is,” I agree. I should have said that. “Oh no. That’s too bad. You’re really cool.”
I think that would have been a good stand-in for “Your existence matters to me.”
Landscaping For Amnesiacs
TAGS | fiction, local
Tan Rui Heng
Rui (he/him) is fascinated by all the ways that environments — be it natural, built, or technological — assert their influence on human relationships. His favourite sci-fi author and biggest writing inspiration is J. G. Ballard. In his free time, Rui enjoys exploring Singapore’s old malls and lesser-known urban spaces, and hopes that he will one day have the time, energy, and vocabulary to document all his adventures. Rui graduated from Yale-NUS College in Singapore with a degree in English Literature, and currently works full-time as a technical writer.
The tram glid seamlessly along the rails.
“School of Urban Design,” beamed the neutral voice from the intercom. “Alight here for Tram Service 2 to the School of Management.”
Patrick stepped off the tram and hurried into the cool comfort of the School corridors. It was already five-past-one – late for his meeting in Classroom 207. He had arranged to meet his group-mates for a homework assignment five minutes ago.
There had been significant buzz about the university campus when it had finished construction six years ago. It was a sprawling, integrated campus: dormitories, canteens, and other amenities to the north, an Eastern and Western Wing containing all of the different Schools, and to the south, a large general complex housing the rest of the University’s vital organs. All of these were linked by an arterial service of trams that ferried its inhabitants across the 40-hectacre grounds.
None of this, of course, was particularly new to a university complex: the old University had a generally similar array of elements. What made this new space ground-breaking was the infusion of a neater, more precise organisational logic. The formula had already been proven years ago – by Changi on the one hand, the Ministry of Education on the other. It was only a matter of replicating that for the university. New schools, like airport terminals, could be tacked on whenever the demand required it. Old schools could be easily phased out and repurposed as and when they were needed. ‘Modular’ had long subsumed ‘livable’ as a buzzword.
The neat organisation of the University at large, though, failed to scale down to its constituent elements. The need to ensure some level of scalar unity carried over to the self-same nature of the University’s sprawling corridors. Patrick knew he had to hurry, but the more he quickened his steps the more the corridors and stairwells spiralled into new, foreign – yet aesthetically identical – iterations. It was as if the space itself had anticipated his being lost, and in a well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful way, provided him barely workable solutions.
Patrick turned into the hallway and finally recognised that he was on the right track – second stairwell from the fire extinguisher. As he quickened his steps to Classroom 207 at the far end of the corridor, Patrick wondered just how much his navigation around the University was based on habit.
Sometimes he wondered if the labyrinthian logic of the corridors had embossed itself into the almost intentionally obtuse nature of those who had to traverse them. Just-about-lateness was endemic at the University and there had never been an adequate explanation of why. Everyone was always occupied with something right before they had to be anywhere else. Patrick, for his part, had been mentally rehearsing his excuse on the way over: “Lost track of time in the shower…”
Patrick entered the classroom. He was still the first person there.
***
Defensive Postures
Wei Min shivered against the cold leather of his chair. The Biomechanics Laboratory was stocked with a rich trove of equipment: a collection of sensors, cameras, wires and screens to record every moment and angle of human motion. All required frigid air-conditioning to keep them in their optimal working temperatures. This was a lab cooled for the comfort of its most important inhabitants – Wei Min was merely a passing interest for the series of machines that encircled the perimeter of the room.
In any case, Wei Min sensed he already had all the data he needed. What was left was only to put everything together. Wei Min was a ‘unicorn’, the word the University unofficially conferred onto the sole representatives of any particular major: for Wei Min it was Civil Biomechanics. The rush for so-called interdisciplinary studies had churned out a series of obscure new specialties, and with them, more and more ‘unicorns’. Wei Min found his time split between the Public Policy and Kinesiology departments, not fitting neatly into either. Wei Min only knew of one other student who had gone through this program. He had met Travis, his mentor, at a social event for civil scholars the year he received his scholarship. Travis had sold the idea to him on the spot: “This is what you’ll be wanting to do for the next four years, you’ll be solving problems with peoples’ bodies they even they don’t know about.” Wei Min had liked that. Travis, for his part, had recently completed his working paper on MRT ambient optimisation: by decreasing the temperature of a busy train station by 2 degrees Celsius, he was able to induce a 1.35% increase in walk speed, increasing daily passenger flow by 0.8%.
Wei Min fed the data he’d collected that day into his computer. It had been hard to find test subjects for the experiment he was conducting due to the small risk of injury he had to declare on his participant form. The only sign-up he’d had was a third-year Urban Design student by the name of Patrick. They had struck up a cordial enough acquaintanceship over the course of this two-week data collection, and even though the tests were strictly biomechanical, Wei Min still felt some obligation to profile him mentally. Patrick was reserved, pleasant enough, with a deliberate way of speaking that Wei Min expected from an Urban Design student. Yet there was a lingering patina to his personality that Wei Min could never quite look beyond. There was something about his mannerisms that seemed reactive; rehearsed. Attuned precisely for life within the four walls of the University; as if he had come into being at the moment he enrolled and would disappear the moment he left it. As his computer loaded up the data from all the recorded test sessions, Wei Min humoured himself with the image of Patrick tossing his graduate cap high on graduation day and instantly vanishing into thin air, leaving a set of robes to fall flatly onto the ground.
Information glimmered across his console screens in an infinite series of potential talking points. The experiments consisted of Patrick, adorned with sensors and cameras on his protective gear, jumping from a range of heights and postures onto a heavily cushioned surface. Here was a series of Patrick falling with his hands tucked into his chest, another of him spread-eagled. The impact areas showed as zones of red on his screen — the redder the zone, the stronger the impact on the sensors. Wei Min could then scale these data points up to the levels he wanted to work with. The experiment was complete.
Wei Min’s mind wandered back to the two weeks of data-gathering. After a few sessions of experimentation, he realised that Patrick no longer needed any express instructions. He was, in some sense, driven by self-preservation’s logical opposite: cocooned by his state-of-the-art protective gear, he was now free to plummet repeatedly, in postures that were reflexively unviable yet biomechanically plausible. In some way, Wei Min concluded, Patrick had been the perfect test subject. On a subconscious level, he had mastered the art of the defensive posture, tempered to perfection over his three years in the University.
Wei Min logged out of his console and closed the notebook containing the lifeblood of his research. Written across the front, in his perfectly weighted handwriting: “A Biomechanical Analysis of the Ideal Defensive Posture for Adult Subjects Falling from a Low-to-Medium Height.”
***
Monomania
Rina streamed out of class, her attention split between mentally calculating her travel time to the Counseling Centre (five minutes late) and the semester-end project that had just been assigned to them in class. “Built Solutions to Social Problems”: the class was enjoyable for its too-clean scaling of development to social progress, but now that they had been tasked to go out and actually write about a real-life urban project, Rina felt a sense of apprehension surge into her chest.
“Going somewhere?” She flinched at the sudden voice coming up from behind her.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, the Counseling Centre.”
Patrick was a classmate and a familiar enough face to be considered a rare acquaintance. Ever since Rina had defected from the English department in her second year, she had found friends here hard to come by – not that she particularly tried searching. Her social circle here still consisted of her former English course-mates, and she had enjoyed the degree of separation that that now offered her.
“You managed to book a session?” Patrick quizzed.
“What? No, I just have a shift at the front desk.”
It was common knowledge that the University’s Counseling Centre was permanently overbooked, and severely backlogged. The Centre was conveniently located just a ten minute’s walk away from the main dormitory block – and in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, almost all of its visitors were students who lived in the dormitories. Every shift Rina did a mental count of how many people showed up in their pajamas.
“You live on campus, right? Don’t you think the Counseling Centre is just… a little too close for comfort?” Rina asked. The thought of having to unravel any sort of mental health crisis, essentially moments away from her own bedroom, sent a chill down her spine.
“But isn’t that the point?”
Rina wondered if, on some level, the University itself was the source of the melodrama from which the Centre’s visitors needed escaping.
“Maybe you’re more right than you think.”
***
The Drywall Has Me In Its Sight
It was eleven at night, but the ceiling of his dormitory room still called out to him with a regular series of thuds. Patrick could trace the phantom sound across the length of the ceiling – the regularity of the sound, as well as the velocity with which it seemed to travel across the room above him, made Patrick certain that his upstairs neighbour was throwing some kind of object against the floor and then the wall. Every semester Patrick created an aural map of his ever-changing cast of neighbours – the walls and ceilings were thick enough to blur their voices, but thin enough such that larger movements or actions could still be transmitted.
Part of the reason why dormitory life had initially appealed so much to Patrick was the proximity in which he’d be living with other students. Things did not necessarily pan out as he expected: classmates ended up filtering off to their respective commitments, and their lives refracted back into the dorms only in their most intimate forms. While Patrick was glad to finally have had his own room, his neighbours enacted a pressure through the walls that threatened to break through at any moment. That was the worst thing about such an ‘integrated’ setting – the uncomfortably close quarters in which he lived with his classmates meant that Patrick often saw himself getting sucked into a social centrifuge from which he found impossible to escape. He found himself exposed to some of his neighbours’ most closeted secrets – wittingly or otherwise. Last year the ebbs and flows of a couple’s sex life were occasionally revealed to him. They stopped about halfway through the semester, and never resumed.
The thuds stopped, and Patrick took that as a cue to prepare himself for bed – he’d been sitting at his desk thinking about his Urban Design project, and all the brainstorming had put him in a strange state of hypervigilance. It was in this state that he’d noticed the blemish in the wall, right above his wardrobe. It was almost small enough to be imperceptible; a rougher and darker pastel against the smooth beige of the drywall. In the dim light of the desk lamp, it only made itself visible as a result of the precise angle at which Patrick was facing the wall; some kind of anamorphosis. A hastily corrected construction defect? Maybe, but by now it stuck out like a sore thumb in Patrick’s mind and there was no leaving it behind.
Patrick dragged his desk chair along the ground – someone downstairs would be upset about that – and propped himself up and across his wardrobe. Gliding his nails across the coarseness of that section of the wall gave Patrick a shudder. Like a scab on an incompletely healed wound, he felt tempted to prick at it; pull it off. Patrick pushed into the scar tissue, and it gave way immediately. The frayed ends of a string peeked through the open wound of the wall. The wall had been clumsily plastered over to hide the presence of a deliberately-constructed (and almost too-round) hole from which the string had been inserted.
Without a second thought Patrick began pulling, but intentionally slowly. As more of the string poured through the wall so too did that peculiar pressure Patrick had imagined had been pushing against the bounds of his room all this time. What purpose had led the previous tenant (or somebody else) to inject this length of string into the wall? What lay at the end of the string? Was this some form of lapsed communication with the other side? Something about this now felt intimate in ways that appealed to Patrick. The string turned taut with the weight on the other end. With the full expectation that seeing this mystery object would irrevocably bring him closer to someone he’d never meet, Patrick pulled one final time.
Popping neatly into his hand was the eye of a camera, no bigger than the size of a pin, with its facepiece painted perfectly beige in camouflage. The battery had long run dry.
***
The Terminal Sea
“And so, it is projected that Stage 3 of the Merdeka Development Project will be completed within the next ten years…”
Wei Min glanced around the auditorium. Amongst the usual cast of faces that would attend a seminar such as this were a few faces sprinkled in from the Urban Design department: the restless face of Patrick one of them. At the podium was the Planner-in-Chief of the Urban Redevelopment Authority – he was giving a talk on the urban principles behind Singapore’s Merdeka Project. It had been the country’s crowning project in its long history of land reclamation. The construction of Merdeka Square was already well under way, envisioned as the perfect monument to top off the final leg of Singapore’s physical expansion that had allowed the country to claw back land area equivalent to 20% of its previous landmass to the south and east.
It was a little late in the afternoon, and the Planner-in-Chief’s speech began to blur into itself. All the usual refrains were present: limited resources, maximising land-use, difficult decisions… yet the speech itself was tinged with a tension that underlined a certain kind of finality. The Merdeka Project was soon to be concluded.
Wei Min knew all too well that this cessation was not consensual. Rather, Singapore had reached its theoretical (and legal) limit of expansion: its land reclamation had been so successful that the country had begun to approach its maritime border with Indonesia – any further, the Planner-in-Chief noted, and Singapore would no longer have unfettered access to its shipping routes. What was once a fertile territory for the country’s colonisation had now so joylessly run out – or, rather, had its access closed off to it by forces beyond its control.
The thought of reaching some sort of terminal wall – wholly arbitrary in a sense, yet virtually impenetrable in another – sent a shiver to the base of Wei Min’s spine. The good people at the URA would come up with something, they always did. For a moment, though, Wei Min harboured the ludicrous idea of some kind of downwards expansion. A second subterranean Singapore propping up the first, shuttling around in ever-longer lifts a new generation of children, who had long since been accustomed to verticality.
***
Across Vanishing Land
Patrick strolled along the Amphitheatre down to the Campus Green. From this high vantage point he could see the most of the University’s Southern Wing: despite the different facilities that peppered the length of the building, its grey geometries were made from the same bright concrete material, meeting in a harmonious medley of too-clean lines. Harmonious was just about the only compliment Patrick could give it – nothing about its bland style would linger long in his memory, but at least it approached a unified set of flat lines and curves a colouring book would likely appreciate.
Patrick had decided that this façade of the Southern Wing would be the topic of his final assignment for the Built Solutions class: it had been constructed with a new kind of concrete that was at once self-healing and self-cleaning. A cocktail of chemicals added to the concrete mix allowed the material, once hardened, to be able to not only patch up any of its own blemishes with atmospheric carbon dioxide, but also to wick off any dust and pollutants with runoff rainwater. The surface of such a building would be fixed into a permanent state of newish greyness. This was a structure that appeared to be built totally independent from the machinations of time, and of senescence.
Today was the last day of his Built Solutions class, and the topic had been on the space of the university itself. Allegedly, the old university had been designed to avoid the assembly of large groups of students: buildings were arranged in a specifically linear way so as to avoid the formation of open squares or rectangles from which bodies could congregate. That was no longer the case for its successor: the Southern Wing, as the social and administrative ‘heart’ of the university, was shaped in the form of a giant bowl, where human traffic was quite naturally poured into the heart of its Campus Green. The worry of large assembly had been, by now, fully erased.
In other words, Patrick reflected, it was no longer space that made up the canvas on which the university’s logic impressed itself upon its students. It was rather anti-space. Perhaps the resistance of the University to time was an intentional design choice; something about its structure was antithetical to the very formation of memory. The curiously bland architecture, the winding corridors and intentional neutrality… it would always return to some freshly grey and forgettable state, supported by a skin that could so readily erase its own scar tissue.
Patrick thought about the Merdeka Project and the seminar he had attended weeks ago. In just a decade, when the limits of land reclamation had been reached, the country would come to represent most strikingly the spatial logic it bestowed upon its inhabitants – an enclosed box wherein the only direction of movement was the constant rearrangement of its interior contents; some kind of wash cycle that always brought back an unflinchingly clean and sterile state. No longer was expansion possible; merely constant and unceasing rearrangement of its contents in which there would be no perfect recombination of parts sans the very next one. The junior college he had attended was now a housing estate; the housing estate he had lived in had served its 99-year lease and was now a shopping mall.
Seen in that light, the University’s self-effacement appeared for a brief moment beautiful and perfectly logical in the needy crevice of Patrick’s mind. Perhaps it had succeeded in creating a perfectly amnesiac species, who thrived on traversing a perpetually vanishing land.
Little Ghosts by Esos Ridley
Glenn Dungan
Glenn Dungan is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder. For more of his work, please visit his website: whereisglennnow.com, or subscribe to him on Substack, at glenndungan.substack.com.
Autotina: “I live life in through-lines. Between astro-physics and poetry, I can look back and realize this
career change wasn’t that stark of one at all.”
After a century long break, the celebrated scientist and world’s first automaton returns with
new programming and talks about life and death, art and science, and finding purpose.
By Esos Ridley, writing for LIFE
January 2184
career change wasn’t that stark of one at all.”
After a century long break, the celebrated scientist and world’s first automaton returns with
new programming and talks about life and death, art and science, and finding purpose.
By Esos Ridley, writing for LIFE
January 2184
At first glance, it appears that Dr. Autotina is more of a botanist than anything else.
She greets me in front of her workshop, buried deep within the Red Rock Mountain range in Denver, Colorado. The workshop is covered in astrological runes that glitter gold against a brutalist cement façade. This alien appearing non-alien plateau is manicured in a variety of large and beautiful flowers, some from Earth and surviving without ventilators, others in vials with precise calibration, achieved on the famous interstellar expeditions to Mars with her late husband, Dr. Ronald Folsom. There is an element of nature fused with classic science-fiction on the way to a flower laden door.
Dr. Autotina stands like a sentry at a full eight feet, her automaton body erect to a perfectly calculated geometry. She wears a lilac-colored cloak that flows in tandem with the whistling desert wind. Silicon arms extend to shake my hand and she tells me that she heated her fingertips so that her Plexiglass fingers do not feel cold in my palm. Her face is akin more to a mannequin, perfectly smooth and void of any intense definitions. Dr. Autotina says that her face was originally blank, but she felt that not only alienated her from herself but also made it hard for people to talk to her. Thus, the hollows for eyes, the impression of a nose and a closed mouth, permanently fixated into a content, almost sleepy, smile. A blue aura floats above her cranium like a crown, the latter half of which is exposed glass that contains tendrils of electricity rolling in a blue cloud. Dr. Autotina calls it her very own personal “lightning in a bottle”, which I only learn later is the total representation of her consciousness.
The workshop is just as fluid as Dr. Autotina, and it is no doubt deliberate that the interior reflects all her eccentricities. Like the Earth’s crust, there are layers of passion underneath the current form that the doctor brings me into. The workshop has tables, telescopes, large supercomputers reminiscent of the original dinosaurs IBM tucked away. The computers, while hulking in size, are the most powerful processors currently in the cosmos, and Dr. Autotina hardly pays them any mind, viewing them as part of the furniture. Holographic texts float like book sized fireflies around the workshop, and while I cannot grab the royal purple, baby blue-, and maroon-colored prisms myself, Dr. Autotina plucks them from the air as if they were floating in the ocean, tossing them over her shoulder or to the top rafters where they levitate in stasis like balloons waiting to drop. The doctor says that she doesn’t need the tomes to retrieve the information, for her advanced supercomputer mind can process multiple texts at once, but the act of flipping through pages, even holographic ones, keeps her anchored to a human psychosis.
“It was a ritual then,” she says at the start of our conversation, “and remains to be now.”
There is a myriad of plants inside as well, rivaling the quantity of the botanical parade outside. Greenery soaks up the natural light from the skylights, sometimes turning a shade orange or green when the text prisms block the rays. There are colossal alien petals next to typical garden tulips. Encased on what used to be a kitchen, complete with appliances that have long since become relics, are vials full of strange soil and minerals. Dr. Autotina brings my attention to a silver, amorphous liquid that appears to shy away from my touch. It is a mineral found in the Great Storm of Jupiter.
“Ronald found it on one of our excursions,” she tells me.
She is referring to her interplanetary travel adventures, only because her automaton body is outfitted with pressure resistant alloys created by Dr. Folsom himself. As if sensing my memories of old news articles and videos, Dr. Autotina leads me to a sun-drenched salon at the rear of the laboratory. In the connecting hallway there are a multitude of news articles featuring the power couple. It is the timeline chronicling her stratospheric ascent into the public eye. She notices me looking at this timeline, where her once flesh and blood corporal form stands in front of the MIT entrance with her not-yet husband Dr. Ronald Folsom.
“We were ‘going steady’ a little while then,” she says, her voice occasionally cracking with static and beeps. She is facing the same picture that I am, although we both know she does not have too, for her sensors are connected to the numerous cameras wired to the laboratory which functions as her abode, botanical garden, and studio. She turns to me and says with an un-emotive, but genuine, laugh, “Do people still say, ‘going steady’?”
We walk down the hall, my own boots at her plexiglass feet that have been fashioned into heels. Her purple cloak sways in the crisscross breeze. She double checks if the temperature is satisfactory, and that she can adjust the temperature per square foot for me so as not to disturb the plants which have taken up residency on every available surface. She talks with her hands a lot. There is another picture of Dr. Folsom on a podium wearing a suit, mouth mid-consonant. Tina, in her mortal form, stands with her hands perched in front of her, her eyes radiating sunshine.
“He proposed to me in the same speech that he officially named the new alloy he created, which was also named after me. Tinium. For Tina. My full name is Martina, but I’ve never liked the Marpart, so I just shortened it to Tina. Can you imagine if Ronald named the alloy Martinium? How misleading!”
The Auto-part of Autotina is a portmanteau turned moniker. Since becoming an atomized corporeal form, Dr. Autotins has since abandoned the preceding part of her name and replaced it with the first half of Automaton, which she says is an intentional nod to her and Dr. Folsom being not just the first automaton in history but the first automata couple in history. “Autotina and Autoron,” she says, “he entertained the thought for a couple weeks.”
She continues, head forward, the cameras meeting with my gaze at the next picture, “We had a tremendous life, him and I. Our breakthroughs on automata robotics helped a lot of people and advanced other fields of science. Science was the new rock ‘n roll. Everyone wanted to know what the two ‘robo-docts’ were up to.”
But the fame of their professional life took a toll on their personal lives, as well as their subjective lives. The marriage was incredibly scrutinized, both by the public and the scientific community. Dr. Autotina and Dr. Folsom were subject to numerous tests to gauge the efficiency of transporting a human consciousness into a nigh-indestructible robotic platform.
“The tests,” she says, “were the hardest part. Laws were written to allow Ronald and our rights to exist against the laws which made our bodies property. Yes, our bodies were built in a lab, but our souls were not, and Tinium was Ronald’s discovery anyway. Sometimes I wonder how different our trajectories would be if Ronald hadn’t owned the patent to Tinium.”
There were times when the stress was too great for both of them, and like any work-weary couple, took holidays to reset. Although most work-weary couples go to resorts beaches, Dr. Autotina and Dr. Folsom much preferred more esoteric locations such as the bottom of the Martina Trench, or on some asteroid near the edge of the galaxy. Dr. Ronald Folsom’s brother, renowned rocket scientist Henry Folsom, lived at the first International Space Station as the active director. He allowed clearance for Autotina and Dr. Ronald to enter and exit the atmosphere on the condition that they stop at the ISS first.
“We’d bring the astronauts their favorite treats. They sent us holiday cards, each in their own language,” Dr. Autotina recalls fondly.
She shows me another relic, one which heartily defines her past. A collection of “Get Well Soon!” cards are encased behind a glass wall. A hodgepodge of sources occupy the white rectangles: crayon writing of school children, each with their names written in similarly childish script, admirers in the scientific community that saw Autotina as the most prestigious in her field (as humble as Autotina is, she was ranked the most popular robotics engineer in the past decade, the recipient of numerous scientific awards, and eventually a Pulitzer prize winner for her award winning memoir Trans-humanism: Does this unit have a soul?), and college robotic engineers who have heralded Dr. Folsom’s experimental procedures as the next step to evolution. In the center of this positive nebula is a crinkled picture of Autotina’s last days in her human body, a withered corpus, cocooned in hospital bed sheets and tangled in marionette strings and attached to large computers. She is holding Dr. Folsom’s hand, or rather, he is holding hers.
This picture is an ambered moment in Dr. Autotina’s life, a snapshot of her past but then uncertain future. She stills maintains that getting her doctorate in astrophysics is the highlight of her career, but for all of Dr. Autotina’s existence in academia, even she cannot deny the importance of her transition into the automata.
“It was a rough time. Physically, mentally, emotionally, even spiritually,” Dr. Autotina says, head perfectly straight, lips unmoving. She absently fiddles with a plucked rose nestling in a vase, her fingers unable to feel the thorns crushing under her impenetrable fingers, her mastery of working with hands that no longer feel tactile pressure to not crush the damp stem. “Not only did I experience an explosion in my MIT laboratory, but my consciousness was literally ripped from my body, which existed without any electrical charges for a full two minutes. I would be lying to you and your readers if I said that was not hard for me. I thought my life was meaningless. I could not be a scientist anymore, could not go on walks or read books, was constantly under the care of doctors and Ronald, who never once complained, ever. This is all on top of the press trying to get into the door of the hospital, hoping to catch me on the rare chance of my awakening from my coma so they could get the first scoop of what it was like, and I quote the New York Times here, ‘to see god’. I feel the ‘engine of creation’ is more apt.”
“[The incident] felt like I was a balloon, and the rest of the world was the string. Once I got atomized,
I was living in this dual reality, shifting in and out. Now with my new Tinium body, I can finally settle into one place.”
I was living in this dual reality, shifting in and out. Now with my new Tinium body, I can finally settle into one place.”
Bringing me into her parlor, Dr. Autotina serves me freshly grown black tea leaves, served on a robotic tea tray no larger than a shiatzu. With a perfectly engineered lilt in her voice that suggests a bashful wink, she explains that she has never tasted the tea that she grows in one of the biomes out back, only that she is confident that they have been reared and dried to mathematical perfection. She is not wrong.
Dr. Autotina’s transition from her human body to the robotic one in which she resides required an almost Herculean feat of willpower and psychological adjustment. The light blue aura emanating from her “lightning in a bottle” arcs over her like a corona. She tells me more of her time in what the scientific community has adopted as the “atom realm”.
“It was strange, like floating in mist, or Jell-o,” she laughs, referring to the once popular gelatinous treat made of protein extracted from animal bones and has since been discontinued after the Kraft / Heinz Sleeper Agent fiasco in 2055. “It’s a world of light blues and purple, sort of like the color of my body, my lightning, and my cloak, which is all merely a coincidence. It’s a world where time is inconceivable, where the fabric of all our creation, you know, atoms as building blocks, are both tangible and intangible. A realm of absolutely incomprehensible power. How can you ever go back to normal life after having your body atomized? Do you think Icarus, in his free fall, ever prided himself that at least he got closer to the sun than anyone else? Icarus is not at fault for getting too close to the sun, it’s Daedalus for making the wings so poorly. How do you give a child a gift of flight and tell them they have limits? Ronald is not Daedalus. He does not build with clay that becomes waterlogged or melts. He builds with Tinium, an alloy that can withstand the pressures of Jupiter’s Great Spot of 130,000 miles an hour and then some.”
Dr. Autotina tells me that the decision to consent the transferring of her consciousness in this experimental automaton (which now sits before me, body erect in geometric perfection, plexiglass fingers steepled over a lilac cloaked lap), was not only her own, but at her own insistence.
She accesses her data files and speaks to herself as much as me, “Ronald was so frightened, and he was always so afraid of anything he didn’t understand. My body was failing me. The [atom] realm had given me a sort of atomically volatile cancer. I was atomically unwinding like spool every nanosecond. I had no life left. Of course, I would see the automata in the corner of the workshop as a buoy in the strange and scary sea of corporeal mortality.”
Asked to show me the advantages of her automata body’s interface with the laboratory, Dr. Autotina is nothing short of giddy. She is entirely interfaced with the digital / physical infrastructure of the workshop / living quarters, and she tells me that it takes considerable effort not to think of her and the house as one of the same. Looking into the divots of her eyes are naught, and she knows this. Her eyes are cameras throughout the house, her tactile senses now a series of automated clicks and levers that send data as I step even so far as the front lawn. She can regulate temperature per square foot, access the skylights with a thought, even put on the coffee machine the second her optic sensors see sunrise.
“I don’t sleep,” she laughs, “and I don’t drink coffee anymore. But the house recognizes the smell.”
She tells me that interfacing with the house is as far as she is comfortable.
“I don’t actually need this automaton form,” she says, “I can exist just fine in the digital sphere, like some sort of ghost. That’s actually what Ronald used to call me, Little Ghost, because I can float so seamlessly between interests and subjects, often anchoring in them before wisping away to something else. But I choose to keep this form, and not because it allows me to take this vehicle to the deepest depths and the highest stratospheres. I was raised a human and I am, in essence, a human. I can access and absorb all the literature of any subject in a matter of seconds, but at what point do I become a computer, more robot than human?”
Aside from the obvious mental and emotional strain of Dr. Folsom’s experimental procedure, I ask her of any quagmires she encountered when transitioning bodies. Without hesitation she says, “Losing my sense of touch was surprisingly easy. Perhaps it is the loss of smell and taste. It’s a funny question because I still remember those senses. Like someone who was not born blind. They can still recall colors. The lack of sleep was the most disorienting, but thankfully I had Ronald to keep me company and we took many trips.”
I ask her if there is anything that she misses.
“Steak,” Dr. Autotina says, “rare steak and garlic mashed potatoes. Oh, and green beans with garlic and lemon.” And that was the end of that question.
Rituals, anchors, whatever you want to call them…people need them. I need my morning coffee. I need to make the conscious
decision to read my chosen literature. I need to appreciate the sunrise. WE need to
decision to read my chosen literature. I need to appreciate the sunrise. WE need to
Dr. Ronald Folsom passed away about 60 years ago. His story is equally as fascinating, having spawned numerous biographies (The Atomic Adventure, Autotomata Genesis, and The Robot Guy being the most popular) and several made-for-streaming movies. But the most impressionable narrative is not just Dr. Folsom’s and Dr. Autotina’s individual journeys, but their true-blue love story and the heart break which inevitably followed.
She shows me a picture above the fireplace. It is a physical copy, rare to see in this age, and gives the impression that it is just as much a memento as the alien plants and minerals, if not more. It shows Dr. Autotina as she is now, clad in a sundress just a little too short for her (“it took me months to get used to the fact that I was now two-and-a-half feet taller”, she says), and Dr. Folsom, outfitted in a new Tinium body, wearing a Hawaiian button up. A sunset is frozen behind them, and even though their mouths convey apathy, it is evident from their body language that they are on vacation. His red corona fuses with her blue corona, creating a joint Venn-diagram of purple between the two of them which hangs above their head like a little star.
“The success of my procedure inspired Ronald. He wanted to replicate it, and did so quite successfully, on himself. I always suspected that he underwent the change to keep me company, that his endeavor for subjectively experiencing trans-humanism was fueled to help me get through my own transitions.”
She recalls to me how eerily similar it was living with another automata as an automata as opposed to living with a human as a human, and that the transition was really only the first couple of months when Dr. Folsom was getting used to the platform’s new abilities. Dr. Autotina places her chin on a cradled palm, resting it on an armchair, the hollows of her eyes looking out to the green houses beyond the porch. “He built me this new body about seven months before he embarked on the change himself. I had a leg up on the emotional, physical, and mental transformations, so it was only fair I be patient with him as he adjusted.”
Still speaking with a dreamy, wistful tone, Dr. Autotina’s shoulders slack, her head tilts. The purple cloak shimmers in the sunlight. It was not all dandy living as two robots with complete access to all recorded knowledge, she recalls.
“It was fine for a couple of decades, but eventually the access to the wireless networks of the worlds became too much of a pull for Ronald. He would say to me, ‘Little ghost, we have all the knowledge available to us, only limited by our imagination.’ He would read the entire pantheon of a country’s classical literature in the span of one morning. Ronald was always, always learning. He could never ‘turn off’. Eventually he ran out of things to learn. We would be off planet or in the ocean depths and he would still be trying to learn everything he could about anything else.”
Dr. Autotina is a firm believer that because of his limitless, all-encompassing knowledge her husband lost the ability to wonder, to dream.
She tells me that even today she is particularly conscious of not learning all documented knowledge, why she chooses to go through the perceptively counter-intuitive motions of reading one book at a time. She has intentionally slowed her information processors to absorb information at a slightly higher rate than the average human (“I’m allowed to cheat a little,” she says, her voice suggestive of a smile.)
It’s the knowledge plateauing, she says, her plexiglass face dotted by lines of the midafternoon sun, that eventually set Dr. Folsom on his path. “He leaned into the computer element of the brain. He might be the only person to ever have arrived at the ‘present’ of human knowledge. Sure, the RAM in our automata bodies can processes the information, but can our own limitations of human endeavor? Dr. Folsom became bored and scattered simultaneously. He was developing what I could only describe as some sort of robotic Parkinson’s. Those years were very hard.”
Years later, Dr. Autotina’s hunch of robotic Parkinson’s disease proved correct. This combined with his depression created the scaffolding of Dr. Folsom’s tragic decision to end his own life.
“He got everything he wanted out of life too fast,” Dr. Autotina tells me, “It haunts me to think about what thoughts ran through his own lightning in a bottle in those final days. Apart of me always knew that he was heading toward oblivion, having over-learned his way into apathy. Looking back, I see why I became so obsessed with botany.”
In a way, I was happy to have [botany] because it meant that I could still grieve. There is a human under all this metal and wires. As horrible as those years were, I’m happy that I had them. Without my plants, I don’ t know if I would have found poetry.
Dr. Autotina, the perfect host, brings me to her private study. It is tucked away in the back of the laboratory. The study is bathed in sunlight from the Southern wall; the view is of great rust-colored spires lording over a bare clearing like totems of nature. The room is in the shape of a perfect oval; I know this because Dr. Autotina constructed it herself. Large bookshelves house worn tomes of physical books, scaling upwards of twelve feet to accommodate for Dr. Autotina’s stature and complete with a rolling fireman’s ladder to reach the upper most shelves. I am dwarfed by the scale of the study in relationship to myself, wondering where a cake will appear beckoning to “eat me”. Crumpled papers are scattered along the floor like sleeping tumbleweeds. Plants occupy every foot of real estate that they can; verdant vines winding over desks, petals bloom in the face of the stained glass shielded sun in a kaleidoscopic nebula.
Dr. Autotina calls it her “solarium”, then quickly retracts and says it is no more than a private study. She casually waters some plants, brings tea to a boil for me to try her homegrown ginseng. She rummages through a hastily open mahogany desk drawer and reveals a ream of paper bursting from the gut of a manilla folder. She sets this aside next to several journals and, hands on her cloaked hips, admires them like works of art.
Her body language changes into what would be considered the most mathematically precise impression of humility; shoulders arced just so, neck braced to a certain degree. These books have weight to them. Dr. Autotina explains to me that the advent of her twilight years has reoriented her creative energies, and then quickly laughs away that as long as there is Wifi, she is immortal. The books contain poetry. Stanzas of all pentameters, rhymes and rhythms, shapes and forms. I cannot help but thinking that perhaps this is where Dr. Autotina needs to be all along.
She flips through the pages and invites me to read her favorites. She says, “After Ronald passed I fell into a horrible depression. I was afraid of exploring the atom realm further because it felt too personal, like revisiting a favorite restaurant we used to share. Call me weak, I don’t care. Then I went into botany, which near replaced my astrological practice.”
In some ways, Dr. Autotina feels that she has lost more than just her career.
“It took me many years… I mean, I love my plants, but I was merely supplementing one love to replace the loss of another one. I’ve lost my body, my urge to practice, my husband…but not my mind, and after so many years, not my purpose.”
It’s poetry, Dr. Autotina says. The written word.
“I’ve seen the ice storms on Neptune, the birth of far away galaxies, the horrible beauty of a black hole. How can I validate those experiences and remember them? Through mathematics and cosmological principles?” She shows me more poems, enough to fill a library. “How can I appreciate all that I have seen and gone through? It is here, in poetry, that my purpose shines like a radiant sun. It is how I express myself, through the one fragment that is uniquely my own: my very own personal lightning in a bottle.”
She means, of course, her soul.
But simply announcing a new passion does not equate for the rewarding that follows from putting in the time, which is precisely a trial that Dr. Autotina struggles with. “I can simply download and integrate all the best poets and literature geniuses in recorded history, even add in all the literature dissertations with flairs of anthropology. Within seconds I can have the most mathematically perfect poem written simultaneously in every language. But then I’m ‘logicking’ the poem into manifestation. Where is the victory in that? The expression?”
The strategies that Dr. Autotina has long employed through both her time as a human form and her impenetrable Tinium body have always been one of logic and research, of synthesizing data to unearth new hypotheses and provide basis for more theories.
“But those approaches don’t work with art,” Dr. Autotina says, folding one long leg over the other and resting into an armchair fit to her proportions. I sit in a velvet chair across, the exterior peagreen and adorned with art-nouveau style, insectile embroidery. She puts together the second cup of tea and, even though this is her interview, asks me how the cup compares to others whose aromatics are grown in a less controlled environment. After giving my approval, Dr. Autotina leans back in her chair, joints relaxed, her light blue corona crown creating an aquarium like glow above her head. She continues, “Perfect does not mean correct. Every artist pulls from their own inspirations and heroes. Sure, you can argue that the Renaissance painters were inspired by nature and the individualist perceptions of man and that the other ancillary factors of the Age of Enlightenment create helped to create a dopamine cocktail. Of course, most modern bands will cite The Beatles as why their fingers even touched a guitar or a piano. But ultimately, art comes entirely from within, a subjective experience manifested and codified in a language genuine and one’s own. My entire life I dedicated myself to math and science. I pursued knowledge of the highest discourse, becoming so entrenched in the field that I could close my eyes and see theories on notebook paper, models of Ronald’s prototypes on chalkboards.”
And Dr. Autotina isn’t finished. While her intricate and beautiful gardens have taken a backseat in the passion department, she claims that it was only a steppingstone to remove her from the “old” version of her.
“People still refer to my human body as the ‘old’ Autotina, even though my Tinium platform is much older! However, I do not feel this is an accurate representation of time for me. While I am satisfied with my life as an astrologist and my supremely unique experiences as an automaton, I am content tucking this vortex of spinning numbers and calculations into what I would define as ‘old’. Now, I have a new passion, one which does not rely on numbers or math or angles.” She taps the back of her cranium. I get the impression of a smile from the slight tilt in her voice. “I get to use my lightning in a bottle and it helps me use this.”
Dr. Autotina taps a plexiglass finger to her chest, where a series of powerful microchips and processors and wires have replaced where her heart used to be.
It is poetry, Dr. Autotina tells me, that keeps her alive beyond all else. “Science is how we live. Art is why we live.”
Nowadays. Dr. Autotina can still be found watering her plants and digging for strange minerals. At night she’ll be the observatory, staring into the nebula from her giant eye that is her telescope, surrounding by prismatic tomes as if she herself commands gravity. In a way, she does. Dr. Autotina is a force of undying optimism, her passion and empathy not carried away by the large orbital currents of despair and loss. She keeps herself afloat, tethering a line between human-automata, careful not to submit to the persistent inertia of computational super-sentience by means of poetry.
If you have time, she suggests attending open mic poetry sessions at your local café. On weekdays, you can find Dr. Autotina on stage, but good luck getting a front row seat. She tells me that it shouldn’t be a problem, though, being eight feet tall. Dr. Autotina plans to get enough confidence to go on weekend circuits and eventually publish a book of poetry. She already has a title: Little Ghosts.
When this happens, good luck finding any seat in what will undoubtably be a packed audience.
Baby+ With A Car Like Wolverine’s Claws
TAGS | fiction, international
Elizabeth Wong
Elizabeth Wong is a Malaysian author and geologist. She grew up in Kuala Lumpur and currently lives in London. She has degrees in Geology and English from Yale University and Imperial College London. Liz is interested in stories of Malaysia and also of this large world we live in—deserts, seas, rocks. Her debut novel, “We Could Not See The Stars,” is published by John Murray Press / Hachette, and was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and Lucy Cavendish Prize. Follow her journey in writing her second novel at elizabethwong.substack.com
Baby+ was still wrapped in a towel, her tyres still bloody, her little face purple from being born.
Why doesn’t she have legs? the father said, staring at the whole team of blue scrubs, their faces blurring into each other like an anonymous committee. What are you telling me?
She has legs; they are in the car, the obstetrician said.
She was born in a car, added one of the nurses.
Another nurse corrected her. She was born with a car.
You mean she inherited a car at birth?
No, she was born with this car here. It’s hers; the car is attached to her just like your arm is attached to you, and the car will grow as she grows. Like Wolverine’s claws. But a car. The obstetrician paused. I know this is hard for you to understand so I will get my team to print out an information pack.
At first, the father and mother did not know how to respond, and could only stare at the Baby+ as she was handed to them to hold. Skin to skin, one of the nurses whispered, before correcting herself, Or . . . skin to metal? The Baby+ started to cry. The mother rocked the Baby+ gently, then desperately as her cries intensified, a small creature bound in her cage. The frame of the Baby+’s car shuddered, arching with its passenger.
She is hungry here let me help you, a nurse said, her gentle tones assuring the parents that everything was normal, indeed. She scooped up the Baby+ and placed her over the mother’s breast, car and all. The Baby+ poked her head out of the car’s window and sucked. After a few minutes, she fell asleep, and the car frame relaxed, for she was very tired to be born.
She’s feeding really well, the nurse said. No concerns at all. You are very lucky to have this Baby+.
We are very lucky, the parents repeated, dazed.
The father took the sleeping Baby+ into his arms, feeling the roughness of the wheels pressing against his chest. Here he was, a father to a baby born with a car. A Baby+, in fact. Responsible for her and her car for the rest of her life. No antenatal class could prepare him for this. He noted the small perfectness of the Baby+ — her tiny seats, her steering wheel the size of his palm — that encompassed her fragile body of skin and bones and breathing. He made this. Well, her mother really. But he made a contribution. He pressed each of her fingers, one by one, sweeping from the little finger to the thumb, and wondered how humans had evolved to make this cluster of cells, barely conscious, barely moving. With this car she would never get hurt, he thought, his heart raced, fearful and thankful at the same time. She would never fall and hurt herself. The car would always be there to protect her. He stroked her and her car, together as one cluster of cells, one consciousness, and he accepted everything.
The mother was now delighted too, for different reasons. She was thinking of all the ways she could boast to her friends. How amazing her Baby+ will be indeed. Oh that Melissa Lim with no morning sickness and a petite bump would be so jealous when she finds out about her baby born with a car. And that Mrs. Azlan at work, always jabbering how advanced her boy was, blah blah three hundred piece puzzle completed at age four blah blah, well was her boy born with a car? Was her boy a Baby+? No? Suck that Mrs. Azlan — though the mother would never say those words out loud, only that that gods have blessed her with this incredibly amazing and fortunate baby.
For the most part, the Baby+ grew like any baby but with an extra appendage, symbolised by her plus sign. And the car grew as her body grew, just as the obstetrician had said.
Do you think if the characters in the X-Men movie had called the mutants ‘Person+s' for their special abilities, they wouldn't have hunted down them down? the baby's father mused. You know, instead of using the word ‘mutants’.
Then we wouldn't have had the movie in the first place, the baby's mother replied. No conflict no story.
The parents were very proud of their Baby+. She did her first drive across the floor of the living room at thirteen months, her little wheels wobbling uncertainly. My baby's no longer a baby, her mother said. She's so big now. Look at her, steering her wheel like a teenager, with her strong and confident palmar grasp. Reversing like a boss.
Their families and friends had many questions. How do you change her nappy? Does she poop in her car? Does she sleep in her car?
Like any other baby, though the car gets in the way sometimes, the parents said.
Eventually, their Baby+ grew up and was able to drive everywhere, though her parents chaperoned her in their own car — an external appendage, a separate contraception wholly unfitted to their bodies, unlike the Baby’s.
It was entirely logical that the first Baby+ was born in Kuala Lumpur, a car-centric city where there was simply no way of getting around without a car, where pedestrians had to risk their lives crossing multi-lane highways. Pedestrians were like pesky cockroaches: tolerated at best, squashed when necessary. They couldn’t take public transport either: light rail transit stations were built in the middle of fast-flowing expressways, with no bridges to connect the stations to anything. Forest reserves were cleared to make way for car parks. Hills were stripped bare and cut down to make way for four-story flyovers. And when the people complained about the traffic in Kuala Lumpur, why always jam in KL stuck in traffic for two hours you know cibai, the local politicians would solve the problem by building another flyover.
Indeed, a person’s body in Kuala Lumpur was useless without a car. Like a virus, the host environment of Kuala Lumpur was conducive to make this next leap in evolution.
Around the Baby+’s fifteen birthday, a second Baby+ was born with a car wrapped around his tiny body like a protective cage.
This second Baby+ was born to a family who lived two streets down — only a five minutes’ drive — from the first Baby+. The first Baby+’s family was displeased that their Baby+ was no longer the only one in the world, and at the same time, simultaneously happy to share the joy of having a unique child.
And then the two families, believing themselves to be unique in the world, received the unwanted news that a third Baby+ was born.
The third Baby+ was born on the other side of the world, in the suburbs of one of the Hawaiian islands. No longer a local phenomenon, some said, not an Asian virus after all.
The parents of the third Baby+, upon being asked for comment, said, we were surprised, we thought we were too old. And here is our miracle, our own Baby+.
The newspapers and social media debated whether this was a mutation in the Asian genome, a ticking time-bomb in evolution (the Hawaiian baby was born to a white mother and Asian father). Perhaps the gene was not a leap forward in evolution, but a leap backwards, they muttered.
Soon, the Asian-gene-mutation story was debunked when babies started to be born to white parents, in Paris, Milan, Istanbul, more babies too many to count, the news of Baby+s arriving exponentially — and some might even say going viral. Not just an Asian thing, and then the world exploded in Baby+s.
Baby+ after Baby+ were delivered in hospitals, in homes, in birthing pools, in Ubers on the way to the hospital; some Baby+s were premature, some near-term, some full-term, some underweight and some huge, some Buddhists, some Orthodox Christians, some Catholics, some Muslims, some Hindus, but they were all Baby+s, whether emerging from the birth canal or an incision in the stomach — a steering wheel, a seat, a metal cage that wrapped their entire body. They were the new generation of humans. Officially: Generation Plus. Unofficially: X-Gen. They were rolled out like software updates: it took some time getting used to and there were complaints, but soon people started to accept that this was the new normal.
Parents began asking for Baby+ checks during ultrasound scans. (The metal skeleton of the car can be detected from 15 weeks onwards).
Search engines, started to autocomplete words like "—drive" to queries such as "When will my baby learn to—". Paediatricians updated their baby milestone charts to include first roll-around.
Insurers began to offer comprehensive health coverage, which combined private medical health with car insurance.
The Baby+s grew, and so did their cars. Baby+ became Child+ who became Teen+ and eventually Person+, and each of the X-Gen grew into full personalities, with cars to match: minivans, sport cars, hatchbacks, convertibles, sedans, 4x4s, and even a pick-up truck which — when you squinted at it — could pass for a car. Their houses grew increasingly cramped as the cars were so large, so the families would extend their houses to fit the X-Gen, and widened streets so they could move.
The governments of the world built more road because how could there be enough road? Parks were tarmacked over, buildings were destroyed, roads were built over roads, with flyovers that would take them and their cars everywhere. Still there was always traffic, because they were traffic.
It was around this time when the first Person+ killed a Person- (as people without in-built cars were now called). A Person- happened to be crossing an intersection of a 14-lane highway. Though that Person+ was technically in the wrong as the traffic lights were red, everyone agreed that it was a tragedy, a car accident, wrong time wrong place, it was his fault but it’s not really his fault, mistakes were made, some excellent use of the passive voice in the media coverage. As punishment, the Person+ was banned from driving for six months, which was then reduced to five days on appeal as the Person+ said they couldn’t go anywhere due to the car being attached to his person. Everyone agreed that that the punishment would cause exceptional hardship and had to be mitigated.
In his appeal, the Person+ said that it wasn’t really his fault, you know. I couldn't see Person-, he was so very small and without his car.
In the aftermath of the incident, a Person+ influential thinker wrote a critical essay which everyone agreed with: We have to prevent these accidents from happening. The roads are not safe. WE NEED RULES. Otherwise more will die. We shouldn't allow people to jaywalk on the roads without a car. Driving a car is the safest way to protect our fragile, vulnerable bodies from damage. This is the best way to keep ALL of us, whether we are Person+ or Person-, safe.
More jaywalking laws were passed in the parliament. Person-s were forbidden to walk on pavements or roads, as it was too dangerous. There was discontent but there were the numbers of Person-s were falling, replaced by the X-Gen.
In most families, the elderly relatives, born without a car, were becoming an anachronistic embarrassment, a remnant of a backward past. They were kept in their rooms for their own safety, as even their own homes had become too dangerous to navigate car-less.
Free Person-s sought holdouts where they found others like them, little communes where they walked around with their bare feet — a shrinking paradise, in which they died and there was no replacement. One by one, the Person-s left this world that has moved away from them, evolved to a strange, different place. This world did not work for them any longer.
Soon the very last Person- was a 98 year old lady who lived by the seaside her whole life. She was born the same day as the third Baby+, and was often resentful that her genetics had trapped her in this world that she could not escape. Why was that other baby born with a car, why not her?
When the media found out the existence of the last Person-, they rushed to her house to get a sighting of the rare creature, last of her kind. Raz, a photographer from the local tabloid, spotted her one evening. The Person- had been looking at the sky stained with dark clouds, her arms outstretched, her legs and body fragile, naked without a steering wheel or metal frame. If any Person+ touched her, even the smallest of impact, she would be killed, Raz was sure of it. He felt his wheels tipping over into a new era of history, and here he was to witness it. She turned her head to look him, and he saw her sad eyes, her legs wobbling on the verge of collapsing. Suddenly her legs moved, a jerky discontinuous roll. Raz realised that she was moving towards him, her fragility and all of it — her skin that would bruise on impact, her feet that would be mangled by his wheels, her breakable bones — he did not know what to do with his self, so he reversed slowly, but she shouted and threw herself on the front of his car; he was just a photographer, what was he going to do, so he rolled over her, the last Person- in a car-full world.
[NEW] THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS IS REAL.
TAGS | fiction, local
Chern Huan Yee
Chern Huan Yee is entering her second year as a communications major at the National University of Singapore. She loves sci-fi fantasy fiction for how it depicts worlds that explore compelling hypotheticals while still reflecting diverse communities seen in reality. In her free time, if not contemplating her WIP writing pile, she plays video games and dabbles in digital art.
Everything within human-comprehensible boundaries, they clarify, but that's still a crazy thing to say when those boundaries are really just the same as the limits of our imagination.
They don't explain in very precise terms. The gist of it is that they claim to be able to observe the 'properties' of all the objects in the world, and more importantly, they think they're on track to being able to edit them. They're posting on a relatively unknown forum now, yes, but soon they'll be picked up by the media, and the development will shock the world — just you wait.
There are photographs attached of an immense, incomprehensible machine, hooked up with sprawling curls of wire and cable to a standard monitor display. Another device is plugged into the display, in lieu of a computer tower — layers of featherlight metal cut into the frame of a hollowed-out hemisphere. The leg of a thin supporting beam is attached, allowing the hemisphere to sit downturned in the space above the chair placed in front of the display. The date burnt into the bottom right of the picture is from exactly one week ago. Reverse-searching the image turns up no results. (And though considered as an explanation by some, at this point in time, the development of artificial intelligence has not yet reached the level of generating such realistic depictions.)
The contraption, they explain, translates the language forming the fibre of the world into one we can all understand. Given the difficulty of manipulating machine code into something even a little human-readable, let alone universally, this sounds like a collection of buzzwords and platitudes.
They don't identify themselves, and provide no additional proof of their personal credibility, save for the challenges they've posed in their text's body. Remember that company logo that's plastered everywhere in your local grocery store? What colour was it? And what colour is it now? What about the name of that luxury brand? Was it always seven letters, or were there six before? All minute changes, all things that could be chalked up to minor confusions in memory or natural misshaping through the telephone game that is human interaction. The image could have been drawn by a skilled sci-fi concept artist. Stranger hoaxes have definitely been made.
But people believe what they want to believe. For every sceptical commenter the post has attracted — Another sensational headline that isn't what they have discovered, but just what they hope to fabricate given limited and clumsy evidence — there are also those who are convinced, who will be tuning in for more.
The information is vague enough that one can fill in the gaps themselves. Somewhere out there is a simulation or specific program in which you have a part to play. Your free will is present, but only in ways that do not affect the overall narrative of the composition in which you are just one instrument. One of an orchestra several billions strong. An easy comfort for people who feel the need to justify what's happened to them and, less sympathetically, what they have done unto others.
It's understandable; it's only human.
The post worms its way onto the fringes of public knowledge within a week. Those who spend some amount of time in certain social media circles have now, at least, caught wind of the concept. There is still much disbelief, similar to that beheld of flat-earthers, and a vast majority are indifferent to its existence. I see a friend change the topic the moment it's mentioned. I see another who claims the crown on one of his teeth moved up a space without his knowledge. (His dental records state the 'correct', current location.)
Discussion online about 'glitches in the matrix' has increased, though it's also possible this is a natural symptom of just another internet trend. The 'glitches' extend not only to physical features and nomenclature, but also, apparently, to the bonds and emotions perceived by people. An icy relationship thaws in the span of a day; disdain once felt upon meeting dissipates immediately.
The original posters who brought the concept to everyone's attention have been conspicuously silent. Their account has not been deleted, only kept inactive, so the message board on their profile now spans several pages long with accounts of people's experiences.
The abstract of the first scientific paper in which the proof is published contains the sentence: "This paper argues for the existence of God — not in a traditional sense, but in that of a writer who pens the very sentences in your mind." And it's not in just any journal, either; the difference between its reputation and the content set out here catches the attention of many readers. The paper itself is poorly written and vague, full of ambiguous explanations and hypotheticals that make for a very shaky proof.
But none of that matters, because they hold a showcase in person, broadcasted on major media outlets all over the world. One camera on their device, one camera on their chosen example: a pink leather couch. They find the colour property, change it to blue. They find the outer material and opt for velvet instead. The changes are instantaneous. The crowd on-site doesn't seem to know how to react. I turn the television off.
It only takes a few months for commercialisation to begin, even mired in several layers of red tape and regulatory policies. The devices start off at expectedly high prices, their manufacturing cost and procedure a closely guarded secret. I believe most attempts in seizing the information were put to a halt when the factory made it known that they have access to the properties of living beings as well. Though, of course, the function is removed from the retail units.
They've made it quite compact, a large improvement from what they showed in the initial photographs. Your head fits into the hemisphere, and what you perceive through your brain is sent into the device's inner workings. It's not pure data being sent; rather, you are providing the system with pointers to the staggering amount of information making up the world around you. There is no drop-down menu of properties to edit, but a search bar that procedurally generates results for each and every word you enter.
The existence of this device, reads a newspaper's op-ed, raises questions not only on the structure of our universe, but also who gets to build it.
Public (and other people's private) property is legally off limits, but practically this demands a lot of work trying to track what has changed and what's stayed the same. The change in a single neighbourhood when just one device arrives in it is already noticeable — like genes in evolution, it seems altering one thing also alters another, and these features are expressed in ways still unpredictable. Landscapes shift. Cities remake themselves.
No one thinks there to be a catch to all of this — at least beyond the turbulence the concept introduced to society — until they notice that the marked increase in missing persons cases worldwide lines up perfectly with the timeline. Urban legends of people who were there until they weren't, forgetting pieces of themselves until there was nothing left. Talk of too-empty family photos and gaps in census records.
The religious jump at this supposed evidence that their deities above exist; if they did not, then no one would be stopping us from playing god. Global usage of the devices falls exponentially. They're scared of them now. But there are still some who believe they're worth it, that we should believe, that we should embrace this. The world, they say, is ours to conquer. We should leave a mark now, construct and add a spire to the universal sandcastle. Perhaps, if the people going missing are real, it will be a shorter life, yes; but the alternative, more likely than not, means being only a transient smudge on the largest collaborative art piece in the world.
And a third party asks: Why give us the choice in the first place, if we will be punished for it?
They don't understand. It isn't nearly so complicated.
It's fair and just that deepening a narrative requires whittling another away. And we, as human beings, as objects, as entities, are nothing but our narratives.
I was a lot younger when I started seeing them myself. It does end up shaping your worldview, you know, knowing that the world is categorizable into incomprehensibly numerous, but still finite, checkboxes — all just sentences strung together to tell a coherent story. These people, all of you, are only now seeing what I saw, at a much older age than I was, so of course it's been difficult. You get older, you get more set in your ways.
Seeing the inner workings of it all didn't make me feel indifferent, as I thought it might. It made me feel… more, like I now had a fuller understanding of everything, like it was now a special science I had the ability to study.
I found out quickly the cost of tweaking the narrative. Parts of the user's own story wither away until they are merely an observer to the tapestry others weave. An equal proportion cut away to pay for the amount of fate they have changed. A life for a life, chapters of one story for the ending of another.
I've spent too much changing this world to my fancy. My story is a bit different from the rest who have been lost. My narrative and the world's are now one and the same. I have lost myself, and the mortality that came with.
I thought I might be able to gain back what I'd lost by allowing the rest of you to change things, too. A barely-scientific discovery, some people who really didn't know any better but had in their hands a complete working copy of my powers. Some pruning here and there, some shifting of thoughts around in the collective noösphere. The product… I'm not sure if it's working as intended.
Regardless, the purpose of this statement. You view me as a threat. I cannot blame you — reality is at my fingertips, and has been for so long that I could not tell you what it was before. This is my confession. But I'm saying this now: I've forged so much of the world that it is irrevocably linked to me.
Most of my life I've kept everything you know together. If I am erased from existence, as you are threatening me — even discounting how much that would cost you — just as an elevator falls following the snap of its cables, the world as you know it will be no longer. The world that knows you will cease to exist.
As above, so below. It is, for now, your own choice in your narrative. It is your decision to make.
The Fragrant Sky
TAGS | fiction, local
Ng Yi-Sheng
Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and activist with a keen interest in Southeast Asian history and myth. He has been published in Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons—check out his Pushcart-nominated essay “A Spicepunk Manifesto” and his BSFA-longlisted “A Not-So-Swiftly Tilting Planet”— and is author of the speculative fiction collection Lion City (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize). Additionally, he served as editor of A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. His website is ngyisheng.com, and he tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.
It was here, my child. It was here, on the grounds of Moonbright Palace. This is where the Princess Cheungping and her Bridegroom held their wedding rites, joined by a crimson nanosilk sash. It was here that they bowed, first to the Celestial Vastness, then to the Holy Rock of the Planet Dai-Ming. And it was here, by the Phoenix Terrace, that they knelt one last time before the plasma of their nuptial candles.
The palace is rubble now. Only this canvas-clad steel pavilion, ragged and rusty, stands as monument to that night. But I remember. My eyes may be blind, and my neural implants clogged with grit, but I remember.
Sit with me, child, here on the iron steps. Take shelter where snipers cannot see us. I will tell you the tale of our people’s glory. I will tell you the tale of the Fragrant Sky.
***
His name was General Abahai Elliot. For countless orbits, he had waged war on Dai-Ming under the fearsome banner of the Interstellar Colonisation Corps. Wall by wall, he had broken through our defences, until nothing remained but the capital city of Bakging.
As the shields on the Moonbright Palace warped and trembled, as the boots of the shock troops thundered through the crystal gardens, the Emperor lost all hope. Summoning his wives and his husbands, gathering his daughters and his sons, he bestowed on them each a three-foot length of nanosilk. As per the ritual, each fastened the fabric about their frog-buttoned collars; each blinked away tears as it crushed the life from their brittle throats. And as they fell, blood spilling into the woven circuitry, an electromagnetic surge coursed through their meridians, erasing all memory, rendering their data irretrievable to marauders and thieves.
In a heartbeat, General Abahai stormed into the Dragon Mansion. Still armoured in his blood-rinsed exosuit, he planted himself on the throne and surveyed the bodies before him, both the lifeless stiffs of the royal family and the cowering mounds of the surviving eunuchs.
“We have come not to slaughter, but to civilise,” he said. “Together, we shall build marvels. Now, tell me. Who here can engineer a spacecraft to reach the Fragrant Sky?”
The eunuchs blinked at each other, puzzled.
“You speak of a myth,” said one. “Had we such a machine, would we now be humbled, prostrate, at the mercy of distant stars? Surely we would have conquered galaxies and crushed rogue planets, in the fashion of your imperium. Rule over our rice fields, plunder our palaces and porcelain factories. But do not bid us to build a folly like this.”
The General narrowed his eyes. “Search him,” he commanded. And a surgeon stepped forth with his cortical probe and bonesaw to unlock the truth from the eunuch’s skull.
Thus went the months of Abahai’s rule. The people of Dai-Ming suffered punitive taxes and unrelenting drone surveillance. Gun turrets were mounted on pagodas, monasteries and teahouses were transformed into detention camps. And in the depths of the Moonbright Palace, surgeons laboured over the royal cadavers, hunting for rumours of the mysterious machine within the codes of their rotting flesh.
Then came a day when a beggar woman arrived the throne room, bound in the titanium shackles of the military police.
“My Emperor,” she told Abahai, for an emperor he had become. “You seek royal secrets, but have no royals to reveal them. I, however, can help you, for I know what no other soul knows. The Princess Cheungping is still alive.”
“How?” asked Abahai.
“She fled at the dynasty’s fall. Now she dwells in a snowcapped convent, sealed in a pearl of jade, eyes clasped in prayer, nanosilk laced about her throat. Disturb her slumber, the abbess says, and she will flee once more into death.”
“Then that is useless!” Abahai snarled. “She is a slab of mere meat if I cannot master the mysteries of her mind.”
“She will wake at my bidding,” said the beggar woman, “for I am her betrothed, the Bridegroom Sahin. Wed us according to rites of Dai-Ming, and we shall grant every desire of your hungry heart.”
Thus, a deal was struck. From the convent, a palanquin bore the great pearl wherein the Princess Cheungping lay suspended in meditation. In the capital, Sahin directed the wedding preparations, commanding a banquet of a thousand tables, a retinue of officials and ladies-in-waiting, a dowry of holographic jewellery and preserved pork legs, a nuptial bed embroidered with threads of meteorite iron, a parade of golden parasols. Red paper packets were stuffed, urns of liquor and longan tea were brewed, a sleek white hovercar was adorned with pink rosettes. And at Sahin’s insistence, the royal family’s mouldering corpses were surrendered, ceremonially carbonized into ink-black altar stones, and installed in a steel pavilion, where incense burned from dusk to daybreak.
At long last, the auspicious date arrived. In the palace grounds, Abahai presided over the wedding guests, who comprised all Dai-Ming’s aristocracy, as well as the top brass of the Interplanetary Colonisation Corps. Amidst a clash of cymbals and a dance of cybernetically enhanced lions, the great pearl was unveiled. And as the gathered dignitaries watched, Sahin laid a hand on the flawless surface, which instantly splintered into a fine iridescent dust.
The Princess Cheungping rose from the cloud. Already, she was costumed in the scarlet robes of a bride. Already, her face was painted ghost white, her cheeks and lips stained mulberry, her hair a-glitter with a thousand golden pinpricks. Sahin bowed before her, whispering words in her ear, and the guests held their breath as a single tear fell down her royal cheek.
Then, she began to sing.
At first, Abahai allowed himself a smile. He was not immune to the charms of Dai-Ming’s music. If the bride wished to whistle an aria or two, that was her prerogative, as long as she spilled her secrets.
Then both sang: Cheungping and Sahin, Princess and Bridegroom, as they unfastened the nanosilk collar and extended the fabric between them, twisting a cinnabar knot to bind their hands. Both sang as they kowtowed to the Celestial Vastness, to the Holy Rock of the Planet Dai-Ming. Both sang as they honoured the dead Emperor’s altar at the heart of the Phoenix Terrace.
What did they sing? No-one knows. But it is said that Abahai found himself disturbed by the melody, by the concord and discord of two alien voices, looming above him on a proscenium stage of steel and candlewax. “Stop,” he said, or would have liked to say, for he found himself mute and paralysed, teacup falling from his fingers, terrified eyes following the motions of the couple’s vermilion sleeves as their voices rang with love, with despair, with eternal promise.
Finally, the song ended. And as the spell broke, Abahai leapt to his feet, as did the elites of the Colonisation Corps, guns to the ready, though the Dai-Ming nobles kept serenely to their seats.
But it was too late. For Cheungping and Sahin had paused only to raise their goblets to a toast, then to toss the wine down their throats. Still joined by the nanosilk, they opened their lips once again to breathe—
And then all was starfire, and all was blood.
***
You know the rest, my child, from your history lessons. The occupation did not end. The Interstellar Colonisation Corps despatched a new governor, crueller than Abahai, backed by droids that shot on sight. A planetwide revolt ensued, and in the wars since then, our temples and teahouses have been crushed into dirt and cinders.
But here is what you have not been told. It was not our oppressors who reduced the Moonbright Palace to ruin. It was the Princess. It was her decision to sacrifice her court, her Bridegroom, her own data and flesh, so that not an atom would remain to betray our people’s secrets. True, she could have ruled as a figurehead. But that was not her choice. Better to perish than to be a puppet of distant stars. Better to lose everything than to lose yourself.
But there are some who say this is only half the truth. That what happened the night of the wedding was no simple act of self-annihilation. That it was in fact the activation of a great machine.
The Fragrant Sky, they say, is not a dimension in space, but in time. Cheungping and Sahin’s desperate act was a performance of occult technology, meant to transport us there, to a moment when Dai-Ming is safe, is sound, is free.
And maybe it worked. Some say they are voyaging there still, and their faces and voices haunt this pavilion. Not spirits of the past, but pilgrims towards a future, both unimagined and unimaginable, both impossible and imperative, inescapable, destined.
Sit on the steps with me, child, and watch. Listen.
Do you see? Do you hear? Do you believe?
Close your mind to the rumble of gunfire, to the cries of your brethren trapped in the present. Cling to the pillars of this pavilion, bathe in the lights of the canvas. Witness the miracle for which emperors and generals have given their lives—
It is here, little one.
The Fragrant Sky.
It is waiting for you.
Incarnadine
TAGS | fiction, local
Ajinkya Goyal
Ajinkya Goyal writes speculative and gothic fiction, along with smatterings of fluff and angst thrown in for good measure. Their work has been published in Creepy Pod, The Bitchin' Kitsch, The Junction, The Writing Cooperative, The Ascent, and more. He attempts a stab at the mortifying ordeal of being known on innocentlymacabre.com, and you can support his work on ko-fi.com/ajinkyagoyal.
0
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things that seldom see even the dark of night because words seem to diminish them; words shrink them, and what was once boundless comes out simply life-sized. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things are markers. Headstones for graves. Pyres for endless cremations. The most important things are landmarks to your secrets, withering truths long forgotten, begging to be dug up and paraded around once more. Sometimes you’ll take them out of their box. You’ll take the most important things and give them a voice, only to be met with uncomprehending faces, confusion reflecting back on your sincerity, wondering why you silently cried as you spoke. That’s the worst, I think. The worst thing that could happen to your most important things, and for fear of its realisation, we leave the graves untouched, the maps unmarked, and the pyres forever burning. We leave our secrets locked deep within us.
I saw my first dead human being when I was thirteen years old. I won’t bother giving you the date because it doesn’t matter. Everything is still exactly the same as it was all those years ago. It’s as if life simply moved around Thadford End, deciding it was better that it remained untouched; not necessarily undisturbed, but preserved in its fragmentary.
1
“The Store is where the bodies are buried,” our father used to say. Mr Wensleydale was the father to fifty-odd children at Thaddington House, where I mostly got along with two: Clara Tyler and William Harkness. The rest weren’t so bad, but as far as I was concerned, two people was more than enough. More would just be showing off.
Clara and Will had shown up with neat little name tags in their midnight baskets, so out of respect, Mr Wensleydale carried forward their original last names. I was an anonymous drop off, so I had Mr Wensleydale’s. He also gave me my birthday – the day he found me – since the only thing I had on my person apart from a barely warm swaddle was a card that said NO ALLERGIES. I used to think it would be funny to have that inscribed on grave; like a from-whence-we-came kind of thing.
A few years after we had ventured to the Store, I was playing around with the wicker basket I arrived at Thaddington’s doorstep in. I don’t remember why; for most of my childhood, it had just lay in a corner of my room, collecting dust and generally forgotten.
While the reason behind its recovery may be cloudy, what I found wasn’t. On the underside of a flap partially stuck to the inside of the basket was an embroidered name: Winslow. Emile Winslow, my name would have been, had I chosen to share that information with anyone. For reasons I don’t think I fully comprehended at the time, I didn’t. I just tucked the basket back into its nook, and with it, the new name I had found. Emile Wensleydale was all I needed.
I’d never heard any one of us asking why, if he really was our father, we called him Mr Wensleydale and not dad, because no one ever thought to. Not one of us, the Big Kids, or even the Really Big Kids, thought it odd or too formal because that simply wasn’t the type of man Mr Wensleydale was. He was bright and sunny and made everyone happy, and, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m glad I didn’t get foster parents because I didn’t want to lose Mr Wensleydale. He remembered every single one of our birthdays and always got us the most fantastic presents. When we were sad or hurt, he’d take care of us, pressing a warm cup of hot chocolate into our hands, and smiling for us to speak.
Most of us left town when we hit college and aged out of the system, spreading out across the world, with a few hanging back. No matter where we were, we all returned every year for Mr Wensleydale’s birthday. At first it was so we could celebrate with him, and after so we could celebrate in memory of him. We never let it become a sombre affair though – he would have hated that. They’re always cheerful reunions, just as warm and sunny as he was in life.
Once, after he heard us talking about the Store and rattled off his old saying, the three of us started talking about what it would be like to take a look for ourselves. The Store was the kind of place that you never wanted to end up in, but always wanted to go to. You know the sort – those places that leave you scared shitless (although no one would ever admit to that for fear of being branded a spineless baby) but draw you in anyway. That was the Store. The lawless land that existed outside the boundaries of our town, where the bodies were buried, and the lost footballs roamed.
The Big Kids who claimed to have crossed the boundary and made it back told us stories of discarded claws and talons; animal carcasses with gashes in them; witches having taken the forms of ravens, crows, and eagles; and all manner of things that a thirteen-year-old would both believe and be terrified of. Then the Really Big Kids told them to shut up and told us it was a scary, unsafe place, but not like the Big Kids described. They described it to be closer to home. Missing socks, old papers, signs for missing children and pets – that sort of thing.
“That doesn’t sound very scary,” I once retorted, trying to sound tough in front of the Big Kids.
The Really Big Kid just smiled at me. “No, it doesn’t. None of it sounds scary until you start to recognise the items. Faces they put on every milk carton and streetlamp for half a year, socks with the special mark on the label that only you and your friends use, the exact notes you could have sworn you saw in Brad Mossley’s hands a week ago during physics. When it all gets real, it gets real spooky, and the only thing you can think to do is to book it.”
I stayed silent after that.
There were no Really Really Big Kids so we had no way of knowing if they were taking the piss or not. I’d wanted her to bring up lost footballs and tennis balls and other things of the sort because then I could shout HA! and not believe her at all – that wasn’t scary, that was fact. We lost almost a ball a fortnight to the Store – that’s how it got its name. The idea of going though was ultimately dropped, mentally filled away as an undertaking for another day.
2
The day we went to the Store did eventually dawn, of course. We had planned to leave, rather poetically, at dawn. The only other time I had ever woken up that early was when Mr Wensleydale took all of us strawberry picking. He said we had to get there before it was too hot out so that we could enjoy the weather and pick strawberries in peace and that, for some reason I do not understand even as an adult, they closed soon after it was dark. I accepted his reasoning, but that didn’t make me hate it any less.
So, it surprised everyone, myself included, when I was the first awake that day. I had fully anticipated having to be dragged out of bed by an irritated Clara – she has always woken up at ridiculously early hours.
I think it was the Store that woke me up. Before I was even fully awake, it felt as if it was calling out to me, tugging at every little part of my barely conscious self to foray into its domain. It was almost as though it had come into existence especially for me, as it would instantly vanish as soon as I stepped foot there, its purpose fulfilled. My bespoke nightmare, never to be seen again.
I made it all the way to the canteen purely out of habit before realising it was far too early for breakfast to have begun. Not that it would have mattered – entertaining the idea of food was a fool’s errand. There was just the usual group of assorted Kids, Big Kids, and Really Big Kids that never seemed to leave the canteen (I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected they even slept there). Morgan, one of the Big Kids from the group, was something of a chef and always snuck into the kitchens in the back to make a little something for everyone present, so everyone had trays of food in front of them despite the time. One of them nudged another and I thought they were going to call me over, but they pointed in the opposite direction, referring to an unfamiliar face sitting in the corner. I smiled, knowing exactly what was going to happen.
We had something of an initiation at Thaddington. A ritual, if you will. The three of us landed there far too young to have experienced it ourselves, but it was easy to see how much it helped the slightly older arrivals acclimatise to their new home. I watched on as two people peeled off from the group and took their trays over to the unfamiliar face, puffing out their chests as they sat themselves down on either side of them.
“Oh lookie, lookie. Fresh meat,” one of them remarked in a voice laced with false gruff.
“Whatcha in for, rookie?” the other one said, bringing up the other end of the prison-make-believe.
The new person looked from one to the other hesitantly, unsure of how to respond. The two seasoned vets coughed and guffawed a little more for dramatic effect before promptly breaking into laughter, unable to keep the charade up any longer. They introduced themselves as Mort and Milo, and explained the little song and dance they do to cheer up their new siblings.
“And, judging by the little smile I see making its way across your face,” Mort began, “it worked!”
“Come sit with us, kid. Morgan’s making their famous pre-breakfast breakfast spread. Trust me, it’ll ruin every buffet in existence for you – they’re a genius in the kitchen.”
I smiled and slunk off, silently agreeing with the sentiment. I would usually have grabbed a plate and joined the line, but the feeble light beginning to filter through the windows told me I should get going.
#
We set off immediately after everyone was ready and out of bed, all three of us having forgone breakfast after discovering that the jitters had spread throughout the group. I understood the sentiment from Clara and I, but Will’s participation struck me as odd – they ate all the time. We once saw them eat an entire Christmas dinner at school, then come back home and eat another immediately after, apparently having previously asked the cooks to save him one. He was also Morgan’s favourite test subject, with the two of them carrying out tasting sessions long into the night, and Will taking little bits of his favourites for me and Clara to have the next morning. (Morgan never let him touch their cooking supplies though. For all their infinite love of food, Will was an absolute disaster in the kitchen.)
The Store sometimes felt like it was alive, like it had a mind of its own, and for a brief moment, a frightening thought entered my mind. I thought it was perhaps the Store interfering with Will’s appetite, ensuring he was weak enough to subsume once he stepped foot on its grounds. I took Will’s hand protectively, deciding decisively that wasn’t going to happen.
“Maybe you should have had breakfast,” Will laughed, looking down at my hand in his.
I let go and punched his arm, saying, “Don’t need any energy for that,” and then slipped my hand back into his.
Looking back, there were several warnings I attempted to give myself before we left, but I ignored them all in favour of satiating my curiosity. They say satisfaction brings the cat back, but I don’t think any of us truly recovered from the visit.
3
Our first task was securing transport. The Store was right behind Thaddington, which was rather unhelpfully situated just about as far from the town boundary as you could be. One main road ran through the town, serving as both its entry and exit, with our little town finding itself nestled away at the end of the world: the last line of defence against the Store. So, in effect, we would have had to walk a very, very long way to end up in our back yard.
“Are we sure we can’t just climb over the wall?” I asked, probably for the twentieth time.
“Find me a ladder that fucking tall and I’m in,” Clara said, rightly fed up with the question.
“We wouldn’t need a ladder if we were Spider-man. Just one of us would be enough. They could just swing the other two up,” Will helpfully suggested.
“Wings would also work.”
“Wings are a good solution to everything,” Clara concurred, relenting to our nonsense.
#
Mr Wensleydale couldn’t possibly give every one of us pocket money – it would run him into the ground – so the only kids with bikes were those who had jobs and had managed to save from those jobs. But we were thirteen and unemployed, so we had to get a little, let’s say creative, with our acquisition. There were a couple of Big Kids who had bikes, but nicking theirs could prove risky. If they caught us or found out in any way, they’d never let us rest easy. That left Le Chevre.
The shop’s name translated to “the goat”, although the owner had no French – or goatish – affiliations, which led us all to believe she had named it that purely to have a name that would stick, and I guess she succeeded, because here I am, years later, with perfect recall of the shop. As horrid as her naming was, there was a far bigger problem with the shop: Le Chevre was infamous for its security.
“Oh, hell no,” Will exclaimed when I suggested it.
“You got any better ideas?”
“You forgotten about Brandon Bliss?”
I had most certainly not forgotten about Brandon Bliss. No one could. Brandon Bliss was a kid a couple of years older than us who’s family moved away years before our plan went down. The guard at Le Chevre caught him sneaking in and instead of calling the cops on him, he took him to Clausius Rose. She cut off two of his fingers to make an example out of him and had her dogs trained to chase him down the street whenever he passed by her house. The official line was that they moved because of one of his mums’ job, but we knew better. I shuddered just thinking about it.
“Boys, boys,” Clara interjected, jerking me out of my fingerless memory. “As usual, I’m here to save your asses. Two words: Mill Hayber.”
“The junkyard guy?” I asked confused. I looked to Will to see if he understood what she was on about, but he seemed just as confused.
“The junkyard guy,” she confirmed, quickly switching to a bad impression of a mafia pit boss from a movie that was old even then. “Clausius Rose sends all her rejects to Mill Hayber’s yard for processing or recycling or whatever he does there. Personally, I think he just lets everything collect into one big metal pile, but that’s trouble for another day.
See boys, the only thing Clausius prides herself on more than her security is her quality. Anything she doesn’t like gets chucked. Lucky for us, “anything she doesn’t like” includes bikes with a tiny little dent or a slightly underpadded seat. But our asses aren’t too rich for an underpadded seat, are they?”
“No!” Will exclaimed, swept up in her horrid impression.
Questionable presentation aside, she had a point. Hayber’s yard was on the way out of town too, so it wouldn’t even be a detour.
“Hayber’s it is.”
#
Getting into the yard was easy enough – all Hayber had by way of security was a half-rusted lock holding a wiry door in place. Clara kicked it open with ease. The lock clattered to the ground, shattering the curved metal in two and we pushed the squeaky door open. It was clearly no Le Chevre.
It seemed Clara had been right about Hayber letting everything pile up. All around us, there were cars along various points of their rusting cycles, defunct pipes, broken sawblades, dented wrenches, and all manner of other junk.
Will let out a low whistle. “Tetanus city.”
“We should split up and look for the bikes. We’ll find them quicker that way,” I suggested.
“Just keep a look out for Milo,” Clara warned.
Milo was Mill Hayber’s guard dog, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem – Thaddington House didn’t discriminate when it came to strays. We had all manner of dogs and cats roaming around at any given point, and a few of our (generally younger) siblings had, on occasion, even taken a particular liking to lizards or snakes.
Word had it though, that Milo was trained to maim on command and, if reputation was anything to go by, sicking Milo on trespassers was one of Hayber’s favourite pastimes. And trespassers, unfortunately, we were. I shuddered at the thought of being caught between Milo’s frothy, rabid jaws and broke off immediately, suddenly wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible.
I scoured the piles on my side of the yard, looking for any sign of a handle, a wheel, anything that would indicate a bike buried under the rubble, but it was slow going. Aside from mounds of scrap metal and a malicious old man, Hayber’s junkyard was full of rats who’s slightest scuttling set me off, my mind preoccupied with making sure Milo didn’t call dibs on one of my organs.
After three false positives (a remarkable number of tyres of other vehicles are worn out enough to look like bicycle wheels), more than a few scrapes, and a frayed sweater, I finally found two of Le Chevre’s rejects. Just like Clara said, they had a little dent in their sides, but other than that, they seemed perfectly useable; they were probably the only non-rusted things in the entire yard. At almost the same time, Will found another, completing our set.
That was just about the end of our luck.
Dragging out our new acquires caused the mound of rubble on top of it to come crashing down, the resulting cacophony alerting Mill Hayber to our pinching presence. A little light from the hut in the far end flickered on, followed quickly by disgruntled grunting.
“Who’s there?” a rough voice screamed. The hut’s door flew open and a pot-bellied man in a poorly fitting white tank top covered in suspiciously yellow stains filled the frame. “What are you kids doing here?” he demanded.
Naturally, our response was to turn tail and book it. We quickly heaved our respective bikes from under their piles and got on, heading towards the gate. The gate that we broke. Breaking and entering and thievery. If we got caught, things were not going to go down well.
Then came the dreaded command.
“Milo, sic ‘em!” Hayber roared, the alcohol on his breath strong enough to waft across the field all the way to us. (One summer a few of the Big Kids nicked a couple of cans of what they described as “cheap beer” from the Really Big Kids, who I’m sure had in-turn pinched ‘em from Haddock’s, the local store, and gave us all a taste. It was, without a doubt, the worst thing to ever pass down my throat, and that was including the disastrous attempt by the three of us at baking cupcakes. Pro tip: too much baking soda won’t make them fluffier, it’ll just make them yuckier.)
Now, I wasn’t exactly what you would describe as an athletic child, but I seriously doubt anyone would have been able to cycle faster than I was as I was fleeing for my life. Will crossed through the gate first, followed closely by Clara, but just as I was about to cross the threshold to safety, my front tire caught on a rock, sending me tumbling forth and my bike skittering off to the side.
I swore. We all swore – Milo was gaining on me with alarming rapidity.
“Emile, get out of there!”
“Get up, Em! Run! Get out!”
I scrambled to my feet and made a mad dash for freedom, my heart beating with a greater intensity than my chest had ever felt before. Pretty sure that was another personal best I set that day. What can I say? Imminent death is quite the motivator.
It would stand to reason that the next few seconds of my life be the clearest of my adolescent memory, but whatever I did in that minute or less exists as no more than a brief acknowledgement of existence in my mind. According to Clara and Will, I jumped out of Milo’s jaws twice, sidestepped onto and subsequently bounced off a junk mound like a video game character, and finally jumped away from the rabid dog once more as I crossed the fence, leaping onto the back of Clara’s bike and screaming Go! with all my might while squeezing her hard enough to have bruised her ribs. We didn’t stop until the yard was no more than another dot on the horizon and I could no longer feel Milo’s panting running around my spine like it was its personal playground.
4
We’d been cycling for quite the while and I began to hear the sounds of the town waking up. It was a weird sort of feeling – by the time I usually awoke, the town had been up and running for hours and a bevy of blaring horns, ceaseless chatter, construction noises, and annoyingly shrill birds streamed through my window. Hearing that start up this late bred a dissociative sense, as if the day so far had just been a fever dream.
“Hey, so anyone think to bring any food?” Will called out, snapping me out of my haze.
“Will! You were in charge of food!” Clara complained.
“Come on, man, that was your job!” I said, backing her up.
“Why was it my job?” Will complained, squealing to a stop.
“Tell me, William,” Clara interjected. “Out of the three of us, who gorges themself like a bear going into hibernation on the daily?”
Will only grunted in response, which kind of supported her point about their bearish resemblance.
“Alright, jeez. So Will screwed up, big surprise there,” I said, dismounting, in reply to which I received a punch to the arm. “Anyway, failing food of our own, how much money do we have between us? Come on, you two, empty those pockets.”
“What good’s money going to do us out here?” Clara objected.
“Someone who goes by Old Man Ferguson has got a shop just a little ways down. We can get stuff there. I looked it up before we left, just in case we worked through all the food Will was meant to bring.” That earned me another smack. I got him back this time and told them to fork over their cash once again.
I stared at the measly sum we had managed to accumulate and sighed. Maybe Ferguson didn’t get very many customers and would let us take whatever I want? The shop was a little out of our way, so we flipped for it: odd person goes. Naturally, I pulled the short straw.
Old Man Ferguson’s shop stood out on the landscape, on account of being the only building around for miles. It also blended in with it, almost shimmering in and out of existence, as if it were a mirage taunting this weary traveller. I didn’t know why someone would choose to set up shop there, but I didn’t really care. I was positively starving, having last eaten over twelve hours ago, and not very well even then.
The place turned out to be less shop, and more pillars-in-the-sand-with-cloth-draped-over-them. Despite outer appearances though, Old Man Ferguson had kept up the inside remarkably well. It felt bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside, owing to the lines upon lines of products traversing the grounds; was extremely well lit (you know the kind – the lighting that makes you forget all concept of time and space and leads you to believe that you and the half-off tomatoes are all that exist in the void that is the universe); and there was even a baked goods section! I couldn’t see a kitchen in the back, so I assumed Ferguson baked them elsewhere and brought them in every day. I looked over the prices on everything and bought five croissants and a drink each, which neatly came out to the exact amount of money I had. That place was remarkably (almost suspiciously) cheap. I returned to Clara and Will who were impatiently waiting to be fed, and we settled down for a bit.
“What do you think we’ll find?” Clara posited to our merry band of three.
“I don’t know what we’ll find, but I want my football back,” Will asserted. “The Store’s had it for too fuckin’ long and it’s about time it pays up.”
“Oh, big man, are we?” Clara mocked. Will punched her arm in reply and we all laughed.
“I think we’ll see a dead body,” I whispered, bringing the mood crashing down. Good going, Emile. “Well, it makes the most sense!” I protested upon seeing their disbelieving faces despite the realisation. “The Big Kids said they saw bird carcasses and ripped up feathers and stuff, right? Well, those are technically dead bodies. And the Really Big Kids said the Store is more personal than that, that it’s got all sorts of stuff that people would have had no way of losing to the Store. What if…”
I stopped.
“Well, what if what?” Clara urged.
“Nothing. Nothing, come on. Let’s get going. We can’t be gone all day or we’re going to be in a world of trouble with Mr Wensleydale,” I dismissed, suddenly feeling reluctant to share. I didn’t feel silly, per se, but the words I was about to let out into the world struck me as imminently personal.
I was going to suggest that the Store might have lured those kids there, just like it was luring me. It had some sort of hold on me, that much was for sure. Something strange stirred within me, simultaneously stretching me between wanting to speed there as fast as possible and wanting to fly half was across the world to get away from it. It tugged and pulled at me, unsettling my insides and causing my guts to twist into so many knots that snapping it apart would have been infinitely easier than trying to untangle the mess.
Yet, at the same time, it calmed me. Usually, no matter what I was doing, there were a billion thoughts racing through my mind, all twisting and turning over one another, refusing to let me think of the singular task at hand. They were all in constant competition for my attention, an incredibly limited commodity to begin with, and resultingly, one over which I had little control. On the rare occasions when I was allowed singular focus, there was something else. An incessant hammering on my skull, a tap, tap, tap, beating away, agitating me from within, sending unwelcome ripples through that which ought to remain undisturbed.
When the Store was on my mind though, everything else quieted down, as if recognising some inherent importance that it held. That morning was no different. I hadn’t had a single intrusive thought since I’d woken up, and my mind was mercifully clear. Clara had noticed the change too – said I looked “less daydreamy than usual”.
Neither seemed very convinced by my abrupt dismissal, but they mercifully dropped it and we cycled on, having switched places with Clara to give her “poor ribs” a break. The sun had begun to shine in earnest now, beads of sweat forming at my temples, threatening to streak down my face and I once again began to question Clara’s affinity for the season.
“Across the Seas in Eighty Days,” she said, providing a welcome distraction from the sun’s torment.
“What?”
“For my book’s title. You know, like Around the World in Eighty Days, only I’m going to sail it.”
Clara was the kind of person to have intense obsessions for two weeks, talk about them ceaselessly, then move on to the next object of her fascination. The latest in her long chain was Amelia Earhart and the book she mentioned. Combined with her adoration for the open sea, she was determined to become the first woman to ever sail across the world in eighty days. “I’d do it in seventy-nine, but wouldn’t want to upstage Jules Verne, you know? Besides, “eighty” has a much nicer ring to it,” she’d often boast.
“I’d keep workshopping the title,” I told her, laughing.
“What about “Across the World in Eighty Seas?”” Will proposed.
“How many seas does the world have?” Clara asked them.
“I don’t know, but there’s got to be at least eighty. Isn’t the planet mostly just water?”
“Seven, Will. There are seven seas. There are whole songs about it!”
“Eh, I still think it sounds good.”
“I’ll take it into consideration,” Clara replied, laughing.
“‘I wouldn’t,” I muttered quiet enough such that only Clara heard, sending her into a mini fit.
In the end, we’d entertained Will’s suggestion, if only as a joke. Clara took the voyage last year, with Will and I joining her – all or nothing, we’ve always liked to say. We named the boat The Eighty Seas, and would chuckle to ourselves whenever someone asked us about the name. We’d etched our names just below the boat’s, making it less visible than the paint, but still very much there, and scrawled “Thadford End” below them. Clara had liked the idea of carrying home with her on the journey.
5
Five minutes out, I thought, when we were exactly that far away. I knew because I had the same feeling I had when I woke up that day, tugging on my insides, but I didn’t say anything out loud. Clara and Will may have dropped my corpse theory, but they definitely would have had questions about my impeccable internal GPS, especially when I’d gotten lost going somewhere as commonplace as our go-to ice-cream spot one too many times.
The terrain changed maybe three minutes after the thought, as if the very earth knew it had to be cordoned off. We had been cycling on a sandy plane thus far, kicking up an almost cinematic dust trail in our wake, but that abruptly cut to nothing but gravel. My stomach began churning around once again, jitterily shaking this way and that, and not just because of the suddenly bumpy ride. Clara and Will, who were in a rather heated debate about whether or not a turtle’s shell qualified as its home, seemed to be unfazed by our proximity, but I fell silent; what we were about to discover was the only thing on my mind.
6
“The Big Kids were right,” I whispered, pointing to the ground. As if marking the entry to the Store, at our feet lay the tattered, beaten, defeated carcass of a crow. Its legs were bent at an excruciating angle and there were claw marks slashed across its wing as if it had bestowed its miserable fate onto itself.
No one said a word. Silently, we dismounted and left the two bikes at the edge, having silently decided it would be safer on foot. The silence continued as we stumbled along, the gravel gradually transitioning back to a more earthen flavour. Vines grew upwards from the ground, tumbleweed billowed like the climax of an old western movie, and grass taller than I thought to be possible – and then taller still – dominated the landscape, making each step forwards harder than the one before.
It was Will who finally broke the silence, and even then, it was only a terrified whisper,
“Why are there so many dead animals here?”
Their fingers twitched nervously as they pointed to a pile of bloody rodents just a few paces ahead of us. I wiped the sweat off my palms and took their hand to steady them. The other unconsciously searched for Clara’s, but she was staring stilly in the other direction, a mangled cat having captured her attention. I pocketed the hand instead, perspiration pooling in my pocket.
The Store was covered with rotting carcases. Before the image of one could sear itself onto my mind, another one cropped up in the field. My eyes clicked across the landscape and spotted various birds, all having received the same sacrificial pillaging as the initial crow.
They disturbed the flow of the army of grass, almost as if each was a checkpoint we had to pass. Where the actual animal wasn’t present, there were collars and tags that had strayed and thinned. That was almost worse.
When there’s something like that burning across your mind, you try to justify it in any way possible. Crows, rats, strays? If you really had to – and we did – it could all be chalked up to an accident. A gory, macabre accident, but an accident nonetheless. But collars? Collars were personal. Collars meant someone had likely come all this way with a pet they loved just as dearly as themselves, and that something had gone horribly, irreversibly wrong.
But there was something more disturbing still tugging at my mind. A question I didn’t want to ask concerning something that wasn’t there, but really ought to have been. If the pets were there, where were the people?
No matter how long it had been since the accident (which was what I was adamantly calling the unknown happening), there ought to have been remains of some sort there.
Abruptly, the warm overhead sun ducked behind clouds and a harsh wind blew, ruffling up everything around us, sending blades of grass flying through the air like knives. The three of us had been keeping our distance from each other, each too stunned to utter a word, but the wind huddled us together.
I squeezed my eyes closed, enveloping the other two in a death grip. An ominous whisper carried through the air, billowing in the sinister gust, but no words escaped those phantom lips.
Hybrids, I decided, having managed to still my brain’s focus on one thing – one far away thing that could carry me away from here. If we weren’t where we were, if the things happening to us weren’t happening, Clara, Will, and I would be talking about the weird hybrid creatures our brains could dream up.
I’d probably start us off.
“A weird mushroom-chicken fusion, with a toadstool for a head and a chicken for a body.”
“So, Toad from Mario, then?” Clara would probably counter.
“But as a chicken. I’d name him Hobbles.”
“A squirrel, but with wings, so that we can have real flying squirrels,” Will may have suggested.
On and on, I went in my mind, cycling through pigs with tusks and six eyes, monkeys with seven arms, humungous hummingbirds that could talk, and other creatures that belonged in a post-apocalyptic dystopian (or utopian, depending on your persuasion) world.
I continued holding on long after the winds died out, almost as if I was convinced my life depended on the contact, but that was something I had to take as fact. The wind chilled me to my core, making it feel like my clothes were on a rapid cycle of being drenched and dried and I have little memory of those few seconds (though truthfully, I must take that timeframe at the others’ word too – to me they spanned several eternities).
When things finally calmed down and I loosened my death grip on my siblings, my eyes slowly and gradually began to open to the sight of an entirely different landscape. The grass was still just as large and maze-like as before, but it was no longer unruly and wild. Instead, it swayed calmly in time with the now gentle breeze lulling us into a sense of security; false or not, we didn’t yet know. It seemed like the type of field we may even have co-opted as a default hangout spot, had it been close enough to Thaddington. The aching twist in my stomach was gone and we could now see the reason behind the Store’s namesake.
Seeing all the footballs he’d lost, Will happily rushed forward to collect what was rightfully his. Clara and I started poking about for the shuttlecocks the Store had ensnared from us while keeping an eye out for anything that felt familiar to return to the others back at Thaddington. No one thought it prudent to question the change in landscape.
Will seemed to have shared my proposition for this being a hangout spot, and began suggesting changes that would have made it even more appealing to him, an ice cream truck being top of the list.
“It would have to sell some really strange flavours,” he decided, “since it would be in such a strange place. You have to have a theme.”
Clara laughed, untying the flannel from around her waist to fashion into a makeshift bag to carry everything. Will and I, wearing similar ones, quickly followed suit, making the carrier bigger.
I tried suggesting flavours such as mango-berries for Will’s ice cream truck, but they dismissed that as too mundane. As chief food officer (or CFO, as Will often liked to remind me), their decisions in these matters was final. We’d finally come to a census on stick in the mud surprise, charcoal-waffle, lemon-thyme, and vanilla, and not a single scoop more, when we stepped back to admire our loot. All in all, we had a just shy of a dozen shuttles, four footballs, some basketballs, an assortment of tennis balls, and two leather cricket balls. We were riding high! We had ice cream on our mind, we’d ventured to the Store, conquered the beast, and were going to return heroes with the spoils of our victory in tow.
7
Things didn’t come crashing down instantly. In fact, I’ve found they rarely ever do. It happened slowly, with each successive find upping the ante bit by bit (or, I suppose, bringing it down). We had moved deeper into Store territory to continue hunting and our spoils were getting gradually harder to explain. The sporting equipment changed from balls to rackets, clubs, and bats – all manner of things that shouldn’t have made it over the wall.
The Store sometimes felt like it was alive. It was one of those things that swarmed your head and took up valuable space but refused to rear its face. It eluded reason and explanation, just as well as it did all possible slivers of doubt.
If it was indeed alive, as all evidence seemed to suggest, it had been very clever about where it chose to set up shop. Our town wasn’t exactly what you’d call “well-off”. We had no upper-class or middle-class or poverty because we were all the same. We were all simply people of Thadford End. But the thing about the people of Thadford End is that no one has ever made a fuss about us, and no one ever will. Life just moves around us. We try our very best every time someone disappears or someone gets hurt or something bad happens, but the fact of the matter is that there’s not very much we can do. And no one’s going to come out to little old Thadford End, all the way on the edge of the map, so there’s no one to help. I realised then, looking upon the cricket bat inscribed with Adrian Last’s initials, that that was how the Store always won. If the Store and the house played a game of poker, you can be sure that the Store would take the house for all its worth.
“The handle must have been real slippery…” Will nervously stuttered with a half-laugh.
We muttered half-hearted agreements but none of us believed in it in the slightest. It would have taken one of the Really Big Kids all their might to deliberately chuck a bat over the wall and get it this far into the Store. There was just no way it was done accidentally. And since no one in their right mind would do that…
Still, we pushed on. It could happen, I kept reasoning in my head. Maybe someone was really angry. Maybe they were having a stupid competition. Maybe they were only trying to throw it to someone across the field but didn’t know their own strength. Maybe, maybe, maybe. We piled on the maybes as high as we could, and then topped off the tower with a few more for good measure.
But then the maybes ended. They turned into a jumble of jitters and nerves and fright, with every inch of my being tugging me backwards.
There was no dramatic landscape change this time. The grass stayed put and continued to sway in time with the wind that continued to pass us by. Yet it was obvious all the same that something had changed. Clara and Will suddenly appeared by my side, and one look at their faces confirmed that they felt it too.
There was no errant conversation hanging in the air this time. No ice cream flavours or hybrid creatures or book titles. No sailing or food or money. No goats or wings or comic book characters.
Everything was urging me to turn tail and book it, just like the Really Big Kids described. It was the only thing that made sense. It was what Clara and Will wanted us to do. They urged me and tugged on my sleeves and tried forcing me back with them, but I wouldn’t budge. I had my sights set on something else. Something shimmering on the horizon, jumping in and out of view.
I told them they could go back but I needed to see this through.
“See what through?” Clara cried.
“This. The Store. Whatever this is. There’s something left to find. One last thing that neither the Big Kids nor the Really Big Kids found. I know there is.”
I turned to her to explain everything. To explain that it was more than just curiosity that brought me here. That the Store called me, practically dragged me by the neck. That the Store was made for me and me only, that it was hiding something deep within it for me to find. But what came out was, “You don’t have to come with me.”
“God fucking damn it, Em,” Will muttered, before dropping my arm and taking my hand instead. I smiled. Loyal Will. Loyal to a damn fault. The three of us had gotten into more than our fair share of scrapes and troubles, and William always went down with us, whether they were involved or not.
Clara silently took my other hand and nodded. I nodded back, grateful she was staying. Will may always be there in a pinch, but it often took Clara to get us out of them. (Of course, it was her who often got us into them too so it kind of evened out.)
I swallowed hard and braced myself for what was to come. The next few steps were the scariest of my life. We mustn’t have walked more than thirty yards but each step was a struggle (although my spatial estimation has always been a bit off, if I’m being honest, so it very realistically could have been far more). A constant battle between surrendering and turning back, and forging ahead, not quite bravely, but stubbornly. I wasn’t sure how far I had to trudge before I found what I was looking for, but I was certain I would know when I saw it. The Store would tell me, just like it had been the entire time.
8
I saw my first dead human being when I was thirteen years old, but it took a long time for it to register as such.
The first thing you notice about a dead body is how utterly devoid of life it is. You don’t notice the life in the living, but its absence is clear as day. A corpse’s rest is not a peaceful sleep, but rather a restless, relentless badgering. There’s no colour in the cheeks, no activity in the eyes. The chest lies still, its gradual palpitations brought to a grinding halt, and not even an occasional twitch disturbs the fingers.
In front of me was a seemingly freshly dug grave with an unmarked headstone unceremoniously jutted into its head. It looked like there was something writhing under its surface, but something stranger had caught my attention. I hadn’t yet been to a funeral, but I was fairly certain the body was supposed to be buried six feet below the ground, not rest on top of it. I dropped Clara and Will’s hands and bent down next to it, only vaguely aware of my actions from here on out.
Something about the body felt familiar and I wanted to reach out and comfort it, as if that would help it pass into the ground where it belonged. I ran my hand across its features, outlining the face that felt like I’d seen it before.
I had, I realised.
I reached forward and opened an eyelid, and almost stumbled backwards at the sight of a little nick that resembled the top of a pinecone on the underside of the right one.
I had seen that body before. Every day.
The body called to me because it was my own. The face felt familiar because it was my own. There were differences for sure, the most notable one being a scar running across the length of the face’s left cheek, and it was obviously much older than I was at the time, but there was no mistaking it. It was me.
I pulled the eyelid up again to get another look at the scar we shared, only this time everything cut to black. It all reappeared in a shimmering flash, only this time, I wasn’t me. Well, I was me, I just wasn’t in my body. My body was there, but I was somehow seeing everything from above. I didn’t see a ghostly body of any sort, so I had to assume it was more an eyes-in-the-sky situation. As strange as it felt to be staring at myself, I found my attention was drawn towards the version of myself resting above the custom-dug grave.
I stared at that body, shimmering in and out of existence, not quite there but all too real all the same. I took in every detail of the corporeal phantom with a morbid fascination, as with all things Store, lost entirely in the image. My mind must have spent the rest of time losing myself in what was in front of me, but at the same time I was acutely aware of the fact that it was mere seconds that had passed. It was a strange feeling, like being stretched across two entirely different planes of existence, but a strangely calming one at that. For a moment – for a shining, beautiful, fleeting moment – there was not a single thought running across the unruly landscape of my mind. There was no torrent of thoughts, no quiet humming or gentle beating, not even a single shining focus. For the first and only time in my life, I had a blank canvas and an empty palette, and it was, without a doubt, the most serene moment I’ve ever experienced.
I hung on to that moment for as long as I could – as long as the Store allowed me to – before everything once again faded away and I found myself back in my body. My knees immediately gave out from under me and I fell to the floor, Clara and Will’s protests of concern fading rapidly as I blacked out.
#
I don’t know how long I was out for, but when I finally came to, chaos reigned supreme. I was being shaken around like a rabid dog, my body’s flails punctuated by my siblings’ screams. The moment my eyes began to open, they yanked me up by the arms and dragged me away until my body recovered from the fainting and I could join in on the mad scramble away from my grave.
When it all gets real, it gets real spooky, and the only thing you can think to do is to book it.
I took one last glance over my shoulder at the headstone and almost lost the footing I had only just regained. What had previously been empty, now had my name inscribed across the top, my birthday below it, and space left for my epitaph just below that. But what really got me was my death date.
It was a timer. A timer set to the exact second it was right then, keeping time and counting up with my rapidly beating heart.
Several weeks later, as I lay in bed trying to go to sleep and my brain played Wheel of Intrusive Thoughts, I realised something that I hadn’t quite registered in the heat of the moment: I was relieved.
Had it shown the exact date I was going to die, I would have spent the rest of my life deathly afraid of approaching my last day on earth and would have grown steadily more paranoid. A timer meant nothing had changed. Not really. It meant nothing was set in stone, not even in a headstone guarding your own aged up corpse.
That, however, didn’t change the fact that there was a timer. On a grave. That would one day belong to me. I ran so fast, I might have broken the record I set with Milo back at Hayber’s.
9
We didn’t stop running until the Store began to blend in with the horizon and the setting sun had obscured it to not much more than a smudged line. When we finally stopped to catch our breath, we realised, to our collective dismay, we seemed to have re-lost the affairs we had managed to recover from the Store’s jaws. We had also left the bikes we had worked so hard to steal back at the boundary, seemingly having been in too much of a frightened haze to stop and get on them. A general consensus of leaving them there and walking the rest of the way back was quickly reached.
We were accompanied on our return journey by complete and utter silence. Our arms linked, three hearts thundered through each body, but all inklings of thoughts or conversations passed us by. We stayed huddled against each other for the remainder of the walk home, like hikers trying to make themselves larger in the eyes of bears.
I wanted to suggest we stop for food – as, I suspect, did Will – but I never saw Old Man Ferguson’s shop, so I saw little point in doing so. Besides, I didn’t want to have to break off from our sardines formation. Human contact felt reassuring, especially when it wasn’t with the looming sceptre of death.
I shook loose a creeping thought about Old Man Ferguson’s shop and pushed on in favour of our narrative of blankness. I’d had quite enough trouble for one day.
#
We made it back just before dinner, which is when Mr Wensleydale took stock of us all; his rule was we either needed to be home by dinner or have updated him about our whereabouts around that time, with the Big Kids and Really Big Kids getting more levy. I personally thought that was a bit stupid since we were much smarter than a lot of the Big Kids and even the occasional Really Big Kid.
We managed to lose ourselves in the crowd so got away with not saying anything for the duration of the meal. And the one the next morning. We finally broke our silence around late afternoon, but even then, we didn’t mention the Store. Or my corpse. We didn’t talk about it until months later when there was a half-empty, ill-begotten bottle of vodka rolling around on the floor and the clock’s hands were angled at some time past three.
Epilogue
Visiting the Store is not something you forget about very easily, or even something you could begin to forget about. I suspect not even the Men in Black and their memory erasing devices (neuralyzers, as Clara liked to remind me whenever I inevitably forgot their name during our rewatches) would be able to rid the event from your memory, not completely.
It is, however, also not something you can allow to consume your every waking moment, or even something that can be permitted to take up active memory space. Instead, it ought to slide to a part of your mind that’s just outside your peripheral vision, like the relationship between a child and that terrifying monster they swear is lurking in the dark.
The Store may have elected not to present me with an exact death date, but that’s not to say it left everything the exact same. Instead, like everything it did, the Store had taken a more gradual approach to toying with my existentialist notions, seeding a thought that had taken its own sweet time to fester. It had made itself home somewhere in the back of my head, far away enough for me to have forgotten all about it…until three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago, I realised the Store had indeed told me when I was to die, it had just been indirect about it. It had even told me where I was going to die.
The latter had always been obvious to me, really. Of course I was going to trot on back home when it came time to die; I moved away so I could teach at a university, but I always knew I would be back one day.
The former had been a bit trickier to decipher. I glanced up at the rear-view mirror of my car as I made my way down for what would have been Mr Wensleydale’s sixty-fifth birthday and ran my hand across my cheek – across the scar I had gotten three weeks ago. The scar I now shared with the corpse I saw years and years ago.
The end was near.
In all likelihood, it wouldn’t happen the same night, and I was glad for it – I had no intention of forcing Mr Wensleydale to share his day. It might not even happen for several weeks. But just like something in me knew where to find the Store and just like something in me knew I would find a dead human being, something in me knew whatever was to happen would come to pass before the year did.
I suppose that's what compelled me to finally tell my story.
I bid you adieu.
Unharvested: The Forgotten Sci-Fi Legacy of Stella Kon
TAGS | editorial, local
Ng Yi-Sheng
Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and activist with a keen interest in Southeast Asian history and myth. He has been published in Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons—check out his Pushcart-nominated essay “A Spicepunk Manifesto” and his BSFA-longlisted “A Not-So-Swiftly Tilting Planet”— and is author of the speculative fiction collection Lion City (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize). Additionally, he served as editor of A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. His website is ngyisheng.com, and he tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.
Stella Kon is a paradox. On one hand, she’s one of Singapore’s most famous writers, celebrated as the dramatist behind Emily of Emerald Hill (1983). This one-woman play nostalgically explores the heritage of the Peranakan Chinese: descendants of early immigrants of China to Southeast Asia who created their own syncretic culture out of Chinese, Malay and European influences. It’s the nation’s most performed theatrical work and possibly its most beloved, studied in schools and universities, reinterpreted through museum exhibitions, musicals and drag.
On the other hand, the phenomenal success of this play has eclipsed virtually all other aspects of Kon’s varied literary career, not least the fact that she authored some of the earliest sci-fi works in Singapore and Malaysia. Though she’s only composed four works in the genre—“Mushroom Harvest” (1962), Z Is For Zygote (1971), To Hatch a Swan (1971) and “A Hour in the Day of Johnny Tuapehkong” (1980)—each is fascinating in its own right, deserving of note in our local SFF canon.
I’ve highlighted Kon’s place in spec fic history before, in my Strange Horizons essay “A Spicepunk Manifesto”, as well as in various lectures on Singapore literature. This time, however, I’m attempting a close reading of her early works. How, I ask, can we make sense of their place in an oeuvre that’s dominated by realism? And what value do these tales, written half a century ago, have for readers and writers today?
“Mushroom Harvest” (1962)
First, some background. Kon was born in 1944 under the name of Lim Sing Po. As a child, she travelled between Singapore and the UK, participating in school theatre programs and reading voraciously, with favourites including CS Lewis’ Narnia and Perelandra series, the tales of Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson in Astounding Science Fiction, and assorted compilations of Asian mythology. JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings left such a huge impression that she decided she was destined to be a writer; with her father’s typewriter, she promptly produced a fantasy novel in tribute, titled The Orinsil (c. 1957), which ultimately went unpublished.1
In 1962, when she was an eighteen-year-old student at Raffles Girls’ School, she composed the science fiction short story “Mushroom Harvest”. It opens with the following epigraph:
-
“(In the event of a nuclear war)… the Chinese, South-East Asians and Africans—well over a billion people—would survive, and the human race, perhaps with its genes somewhat altered by fallout, would progress or retrogress on these continents.” 2
- J. F Wharton, lead article in Saturday Review, August 19, 1961.
The story itself takes the form of a diary written by an unnamed Singaporean woman chemist, four years after the end of a nuclear war that has decimated Europe and North America. As predicted, Southeast Asia has survived, but faces an epidemic of mutant births. The seven diary entries, dated Monday to Sunday, serve as a countdown to the moment when the protagonist’s sister Lily delivers a stillborn, deformed child: the mushroom clouds’ horrific harvest.
The future that Kon imagines is dystopian, spawned from her anxieties over the burgeoning nuclear threat of the Cold War, its perspective deeply informed by her identity as a young woman in the Third World. Yet it feels wrong to call this apocalyptic fiction—this despite multiple signs that another, more devastating war is on its way. Our protagonist not only survives; she has the liberty to chuckle at the radioactive contamination of her lab samples, to fume over her husband postponing their date night, to choose a pretty pre-war blouse for the evening, and to lie in the grass with him at Fort Canning Hill, gazing in wonder at the ruins of space stations overhead.
Furthermore, this is a future beyond Western hegemony, where “English currency is on par with mahjong chips” 3 and there are “cannibals in the Texas deserts” 4; where stranded Americans pretend to be Australians to escape racist abuse, where the great military superpowers are China and South America. It’s also subtly unpatriarchal: the protagonist’s colleagues at the lab are all women, and her friend Moi In, forced out of her literature degree into farm labour, is described as no less desirable after the sun has ruined her complexion—her handsome tractor-driving boyfriend says she has become “sweeter with a bit of cooking.” 5 The final lines of the tale, spoken by the protagonist’s husband, drive home the idea that fate lies in the hands of Third World women: “You’ve got it too, the guts to still laugh at the world and face life boldly. While we’ve got girls like you and Lily we’ll be okay.” 6
The story has flaws, certainly—I’ve never gotten over the clumsy opening lines 7—yet its lyricism and worldbuilding are remarkable, especially coming from the pen of a teenager in a British colony with no science fiction scene to speak of. Consider her description of the bombing of England in the mind’s eye of her protagonist:
-
I wonder if there is a single farthing left in England, or did the bombs really cover every square mile as prophesied? The green fields of England that all the poets wrote about, are they all melted down into a plain of glass that shines way off at night? That’s funny. Very apocalyptic. ‘Bring me my Chariot of Fire’, and all the clouds unfolded, the rockets arrowed burning out of the stratosphere over the dark satanic munition-mills of England. And then the sea of black glass stretching from the Channel to the Hebrides, and the dreadful glare over the desolation. The fireball shone upon the sea, shining with all its might; the fall-out rode the wind to make the billows hot and bright. The mushroom cloud rose like a breath to fill the burning sky; no birds were flying overhead, there were no birds to fly. 8
Small wonder, then, that the story received wide circulation. In 1962, it was published in the University of Malaya magazine Focus, with the endorsement of Kon’s English teacher Patricia Stephens 9; the same year, it was reprinted in the second issue of the journal Monsoon. In 1968, it appeared once more in Twenty-Two Malaysian Stories (ed. Lloyd Fernando), which went on to be reprinted in at least three further editions, most recently in 2005.
For years, I identified this as Singapore’s first English language science fiction short story. However, I’ve since discovered an earlier work: Goh Ewe Hock’s “The Last Rafflesian” (1960). 10 This too was authored by a teenage student, and it too envisions a future Singapore ruined by nuclear war, though on the whole it’s more amateurish than “Mushroom Harvest”, with its straightforward prose and more absolute, less complex apocalypse. Still, the two works complement each other, revealing the hopes and fears of young Singaporeans in the age of decolonisation, when promises of independence came hand in hand with the threat of annihilation.
- 1 Phone interview with Stella Kon, 17 July 2024.
- 2 S. Kon. “Mushroom Harvest.” Twenty-Two Malaysian Tales. Edited by Lloyd Fernando. Maya Press, 2005. P. 222.
- 3 Ibid, p. 224.
- 4 Ibid, pp. 228-29.
- 5 Ibid, p. 224.
- 6 Ibid, p. 232.
- 7 After the epigraph, the lines are as follows: “Today is a Very Special Day for Little Girl! It is a Happy Anniversary! Joke.” Ibid, p. 222. Compared to the remainder of the protagonist’s first-person narration, these lines are uncharacteristically childish. Kon agrees with this critique. “This is meant to be a young adult trying for self- mocking baby talk, I didn't pull off the attempt at sophisticated irony.” Email correspondence. 17 July 2024.
- 8 Kon, “Mushroom Harvest.” pp. 224-25.
- 9 Stella Kon. Email correspondence. 2 July, 2024.
- 10 First published in The Rafflesian. Vol. 34, No. 1, 1960. Reprinted in Some Dreams From Now: 135 Years of Rafflesian Writing, ed. Theophilus Kwek. Raffles Institution (RI), 2023.
Z is for Zygote (1971), To Hatch a Swan (1971) and
“An Hour in the Life of Johnny Tuapehkong” (1980)
Kon moved to the Malaysian city of Ipoh in 1967, having married a Malaysian husband just the year before. Here, she wrote her first full-length plays, later staged as a double-bill by the Ipoh Players under the title A Breeding Pair (1971). Both explore how technology may transform social conventions of sexual reproduction; both use characters displaced in time as audience surrogates. Both are also, as we’ll see, deeply problematic.
In To Hatch a Swan, American spaceship pilot Colonel Matthew Williamson returns to Earth after centuries in a cosmic time warp. In the world he returns to, positions of authority are held by women, but class distinctions are more prevalent than ever. His bride Clara explains to him that upper-class women no longer bear their husbands’ children, but instead plant their fertilised eggs into lower-class women, who serve as “brood-nurses”.
The scientific premises for these tales are strikingly prescient: the first test-tube baby was only born in 1978, while the first gestational surrogacy took place in 1986. Their dramatic styles, however, are decidedly antique, being drawing-room plays in the style of George Bernard Shaw—Kon even recommends Edwardian furniture and a “décor… reminiscent of the old South of the USA” as set dressing for the respective works. 11 Nor are there clear elements tying these tales to Asia, aside from a character named Helene Lee and references to “the Chung-Krishnan process” in Z Is For Zygote.
What’s truly astonishing for the 21st century reader is the politics of the plays, both of which lean towards profound sexual conservatism. 12 In Z Is For Zygote, Karl leaves his wife, whose vows he’s renewed for thirty years, but dies of heart failure before he can reproduce; meanwhile, Janice resolves to keep the child she conceived while under the influence of narcotics, and happily chooses to marry her date rapist. In To Hatch a Swan, Matthew rebels against the matriarchy, exposes the senior matriarch Beatrice La Fontaine for stealing his sperm, wins a knife duel with his brother-in-law Peter, then leaves Clara to run away with the wide-eyed 18-year-old brood-nurse Elizabeth. The defeated Peter actually joins him, declaring, “I want to leave this civilised world of women; it has suffocated me for long enough! I am a man now, Matthew, and I shall prove it.”13 Notably, both plays also end with men yelling slurs at women with sexual agency—“man-eater,” 14 “adulteress,” “whore.”15
Almost another full decade would pass before Kon ventured again into the world of sci-fi. By then, Singapore had developed the beginnings of a SF scene: her tale was an entry in the Singapore Science Centre’s 1979 Science Fiction Short Story Competition and was published with stories by twelve other authors in the anthology Singapore Science Fiction (eds. R. S. Bhathal, Kirpal Singh and Dudley de Souza, 1980).
Kon’s story, “An Hour in the Day of Johnny Tuapehkong”16, is set in Singapore on the 23rd of February 2058, between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. It describes a young man’s leisurely morning ritual as he rises from his computerised bed, cleanses himself using the complicated water conservation mechanisms in the bathroom, thinks fondly about his Russian physicist girlfriend Olga Wongovna and her artificial black hole project beneath Bukit Timah Hill (renamed Stannous Hill), surveys the green high-tech city from his window and consumes his breakfast of seven pills. Suddenly, he experiences an existential crisis, consults a city-wide internet called Central Information, and is inspired to solve the island’s water problems by building an artificial mountain in the New Territories of Johor. Then, on his monorail journey to work, he witnesses the landscape implode into his girlfriend’s black hole, which goes on to swallow “the rest of the city, the planet, and eventually most of that quadrant of space.”17
It’s a brief, slightly absurd story, but full of subtle worldbuilding and pointed satire at new Singapore: increasingly prosperous, obsessed with technology and engineering megaprojects. It’s also a delightful inversion of masculinist tropes in sci-fi. Johnny is athletic, sophisticated and intelligent—he’s studied Russian and Italian, the latter so he can read the letters of Enrico Fermi—yet he fails to exercise heroic agency. Instead, it’s Olga, a woman he sees primarily as a sex object, who triggers the apocalypse.
The tale’s been praised as “a compelling parable about the dangers of instrumental reason,”18 and it’s arguably the most polished of Kon’s sci-fi works. Unfortunately, it’s never been studied in the context of her greater oeuvre, due to a ludicrous administrative blunder. The author submitted it for the competition under her then legal name, “Mrs. Kon Liew Min née Lim Sing Po”. As a result, the story remains published under her husband’s name: Kon Liew Min.19
- 11 Stella Kon. “To Hatch a Swan.” A Breeding Pair. Raffles, 2000. P. 105.
- 12 Kon clarifies: “The wooden characters, their melodramatic pronouncements and their fossilised sexual attitudes (especially the 2 Rip van Winkle protagonists) are not meant to be taken seriously. The suggestion for Victoriana or Edwardian setting and costumes implies this is not a realistic work! Rather a Brechtian one whose devices make us step back, alienate us from taking the characters as real people.. but as mouthpieces for ideas which we must question. I couldn't have verbalised it then. But I knew the melodrama and the old times setting for futuristic stories was meant to be deeply ironic.” Email correspondence, 17 July 2024.
- 13 Ibid. p. 171.
- 14 Stella Kon. “Z Is For Zygote.” A Breeding Pair. Raffles, 2000. p. 95.
- 15 Kon. “To Hatch a Swan.” P. 167, 165.
- 16 Kon notes that the original title for the story was “An Hr in the Day of Johnny Tuapekkong.”
- 17 Kon Liew Min. “An Hour in the Day of Johnny Tuapehkong.” Singapore Science Fiction. Eds. R. S. Bhathal, Kirpal Singh and Dudley de Souza. Rotary Club of Jurong Town, 1980. P. 48.
- 18 Cheryl Julia Lee and Graham Matthews, “Intelligent Infrastructure, Humans as Resources, and Coevolutionary Futures: AI Narratives in Singapore.” Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, eds. Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal. Oxford University Press, 2023. P. 389.
- 19 Stella Kon. Email correspondence. 2 July 2024.
Later Fantasies (1977-2023)
Kon returned to Singapore in 1987 in the wake of her divorce. Buoyed by the success of Emily of Emerald Hill, she’s since turned her attention to historical and heritage projects, such as The Scholar and the Dragon (1986), about the Chinese community of 1910s Singapore, and Lim Boon Keng – The Musical (2019), a biographical drama based on the life of her Peranakan ancestor.
Nevertheless, she’s never completely abandoned the world of the speculative, as can be seen by the number of her works that exhibit elements of fantasy, magical realism and mythology. We see this in plays such as The Bridge (1977), which uses the epic of the Ramayana to discuss recovery from drug addiction, and Dragon’s Teeth Gate (1985), where the spirit of one of Admiral Zheng He’s lieutenants battles with the bodhisattva Guanyin over a superstore development. We see this too in her novels, such as Eston (1995), which describes an angel’s descent into Singapore to transform the souls of ordinary people, and 4 Pax to Emptiness (2023), in which four people work to pacify the ghostly victims of the Great Chinese Famine, guided by a divine spirit named Bezalia.
Nor is science fiction altogether absent in her later works. In Dracula and Other Stories (1982), a collection of condensed Gothic novels for children, she includes sci-fi classics Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In “The Biggest Ice-Cream Cone in the World” (1982), she takes time to delineate the structural engineering and flavour chemistry that might go into constructing such a marvel. Even the prologue to Eston feels ripped from sci-fi, with its description of the angel as “a comet whose long orbit starts in the galactic heart, in the seething vortices of primeval matter; where the stripped-down particles collide and reassemble and the stars are born.”20
Nevertheless, it’s clear that Kon made a deliberate shift in her literary focus, one perhaps best emblematised in her 2013 play Forbidden Hill. Here, we return to Fort Canning Hill. Civil servant Aloysius Foo plans to redevelop it as EcoUrb Singapore, equipped with “kilometer-high condensation towers,” “a vast array of solar cells,” “a dome of energy force covering the sky… which will hold in a cool air-conditioned atmosphere for the whole country,”21 and even a space elevator linking the island to the future Singapore Space Station. To accomplish this task, he’s willing to demolish all surrounding archaeological and religious sites. He’s foiled when his key investor, Mrs Widodo, experiences mystical visions and withdraws from the deal—and he's utterly destroyed when a storm erupts, paralysing him with a lightning bolt and revealing a perfectly preserved 8th century temple beneath the hill.
For Kon, science fiction may be glamorous with its glittering gadgets and stardust, but it’s also a genre fundamentally defined by hubris. In the end, heritage and tradition must always be triumphant.
- 20 Stella Kon. Eston. Constellation Books, 2006. P. 1.
- 21 Stella Kon. Forbidden Hill. Unpublished manuscript. 2013. National Library, Singapore. P. 2-3.
Harvest Season
It’s a little bizarre to argue that Kon deserves the respect of the Singapore science fiction community, given how she’s devoted only a fraction of her career towards the genre. Nevertheless, it feels necessary, given our general ignorance of any sense of local sci-fi history. Ask the average aficionado here, and the earliest Singaporean work they’re likely to have heard of is the speculative fiction anthology Fish Eats Lion (ed. Jason Erik Lundberg, 2012), or, if we’re counting audiovisual media, the schlocky superhero TV series VR Man (1998). Our current crop of sci-fi writers—folks like Neon Yang, Megan Chee, Farihan Bahron—aren’t drawing from a legacy of Singaporean space opera and cyberpunk; they’re principally building on global influences, forging a tradition for themselves. 22
The fact is, there’ve been plenty of Singaporean science fiction pioneers: creators of fiction, comics and plays in all four official languages—English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil—some dating back to the 1950s. 23 Their works have fallen into obscurity, partly because of a historic lack of respect for genre literature, partly because there’s never been a significant movement of Singaporean science fiction till now. Still, as a writer and researcher, I find it fortifying to remember them, knowing that there’ve been others here before my generation, performing their own thought experiments, venturing into new media, leaving records of their successes and failures in the archive.
As role models go, Stella Kon isn’t half bad. She’s an author who began her journey as a schoolgirl six decades ago, and who’s worked across borders of nation and genre, through motherhood and divorce, shifting in her sexual politics, shifting in her visions of the future, but never quitting the written word. And through it all, whether it’s been fashionable or gauche, she’s never disguised the fact that her career began with science fiction.
“Mushroom Harvest” and its sister texts may be odd, imperfect works, but they’re more than mere juvenilia. They’re little treasures in the storehouse of Singapore’s sci-fi heritage; reminders that we too have a tradition of speculating strange futures. Let them too be remembered. Let them be a legacy.
- 22 The same can’t be said of other branches of Singaporean speculative fiction. Our fantasy and horror authors take inspiration from the pre-colonial legends of the royal chronicle of Sulalatus Salatin (c. 1612), our mid-century wave of monster movies, e.g. BN Rao’s Pontianak (1957), plus the late 20th century boom in pulp horror, e,g, Russell Lee’s True Singapore Ghost Stories (1989-present).
- 23 See Nadia Arianna Bte Ramli, “Sci-Fi in Singapore: 1970s to 1990s”, BiblioAsia, Vol. 13, Issue 2, Jul-Sep 2017. https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-2/jul-sep-2017/sci-fi-in-singapore/.
Uranus 2324: A Film Review
TAGS | editorial, international
Ann Gry
Ann Gry is a science fiction fan and writer, three times finalist for the Hugo Awards as a fanzine co-editor of Journey Planet. Ann loves cinema and promotes Irish films worldwide, and currently resides in Thailand. You can find Ann at anngry.com and @anngraigh on Instagram and X.
Uranus 2324 (dir. Thanadol Nualsuth, 2024) was promoted as the first Thai sci-fi space movie and became a highly anticipated local “blockbuster”. Disappointingly, it does not deliver on that promise and only has a small part set in space, but is nonetheless a surprisingly heartwarming story in the multiverse subgenre.
The story revolves around a pair of star-crossed lovers, Lin (Freen Sarocha Chankimha) and Kath (Rebecca Patricia 'Becky' Armstrong), who fall in love with each other when they are both in school. Life happens, and Kath is forced to leave her freediving1 passion, following her mom to New York. Lin becomes an astrophysicist and eventually the first Thai cosmonaut. When we find them grown-up, Lin is a member of a joint mission with JAXA2 and NASA and the respective Japanese and American colleagues, bound for a Lunar Gateway station.
When we get there, we discover the exterior of a sprawling, beautiful space station reminiscent of Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2013). The fact that it looks incredible is due, in no small part, to the 1:1 scale set of the station. I believe this is not only admirable in today’s CGI-saturated world of production, but also creates a more timeless end-product; this is why old episodes of Star Wars are still endlessly rewatchable, and Uranus 2324 opens the door to living this love story again and again.
Of course, when it comes to outer space, one key question is: “how does the film portray zero gravity? While only the actor of Lin, Freen, attempts to embody it by standing on her toes, other members of the cast hold onto rails from time to time. Combined with the swaying camera, the space section felt almost believable, but that soon changed.
After the rushed space story, the plot somehow plunges into the multiverse, with little warning. Taking the idiom of “I love you throughout all times and worlds” to a multiverse narrative is interesting and felt touching as a whole. However, due tothe way this was executed narratively, the movie unfortunately does get somewhat confusing.
First of all, Kath travels between timelines by diving to 100 ft and dying. When she stops breathing, she jumps to the next timeline. At least, it seems so, no concrete explanation is given.
While the creators try to imitate stories from Dr. Who and Marvel, it also resembles the isekai anime genre where the hero jumps into other, sometimes implausible dimensions. In Uranus 2324, we begin in the world where a Thai woman can become an astronaut, and quickly dive into other worlds randomly.
A memorable storyline was one where the story jumped in time about 60 years back. It is unclear why this was the only storyline that seemed to do that, and why that period of time, but nonetheless we find ourselves with Kathy in the last years of WWII. In a stroke of alternate history, Japan has won the war on the whole, and Germany’s fate or involvement isn’t really mentioned. Instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nukes were instead dropped on New York. The following sequences focus on the resistance of Thai people against the Japanese occupation.
While this storyline was at times striking and resonant, it was ultimately nonsensical, as touching moments of badass women in occupational resistance quickly morphed into one persisting nagging question: “Why am I watching this short film, a historical one, instead of the promised space adventure?”
It seems to me that the film would’ve benefited from additional exposition to set up the stakes and the reasons for these seemingly random excursions through the multiverse. This could be done in a quick succession of scenes, a bit like in Everything Everywhere All at Once (dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022). This would at least show us that Kath traveled a lot. Yet, in Uranus 2324, we are only left to infer this from Kath’s monologue in the WWII portion where she says that she is tired of chasing Lin, her love, across all the different timelines.
Unlike Dr. Strange, who in Avengers Infinity War, ultimately leads his superhero squadron down the best possible scenario, Kath does not end up finding the ideal timeline. Kath seems to know that every world, every timeline contains suffering.
I think this is where Thai stories on screen really excel; they show not just that there is suffering, but that they reject trying to conquer every last bit of it, and show that we can make peace with it and live on. Thai films constantly teach us that life is worth living as it is. Uranus 2324, while failing at being a solid space science fiction movie, is stellar at carrying out this idea through its heartwarming performances and leaves us feeling like love will guide you through the pain and suffering the world keeps throwing at you.
Overall, I thought I would be disappointed as I truly wanted to see that first Thai science fiction space film, but I am glad I watched it. Uranus 2324 is a nice picture especially when you are a “prepared” viewer and are okay with the kaleidoscope of timelines. Will Thailand come forth as a country capable of making great SF films? I think Thai actresses are amazing in portraying these strong female characters that have been so necessary in sci-fi narratives, and as demonstrated in this film, time travel seems to fit Thai settings really well.
I also adore that there is no discrimination edge to Thai BL and GL stories. Two people just fall in love. In a world of multiverse jumping, freediving, time-travelling madness, this matter-of-fact-ness of love just feels like it ties the film together.
- 1 Freediving is a type of underwater diving when a person holds their breath and dive without an additional oxygen tank or scuba equipment.
- 2 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency