We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Nostalgia? Whose nostalgia? You can’t tell me what to be nostalgic about.” The thing that had been sitting uncomfortably in her chest since the first night she had taken up her sword came to a boil. “This building is being preserved. That’s a lot more than other past locations in Singapore have had.”

  He ran his fingers over the worn stone surface of the roof’s edge. “This place has such memories…”

  “You have to believe me, I’m doing this for you.” She took bold steps towards him, and he didn’t move away. “Your memories will be rewritten, whether you like it or not. Our Government may like what you are. They like what you represented as the Supreme Court. They like the way you look on the television screens when Grand Prix is beamed to the world.”

  She waved her sword accusingly at the racetrack. “But that’s all you’ll ever be, from now on. A pretty picture. A tourist attraction. They could have built something else to house the art museum. But they wanted to use your skin, because your skin is what they think is important.” She swung the sword back towards him. “Can you live with that? Can you live with becoming somebody else?”

  He seemed to straighten up. “I used to be the Supreme Court,” he said, a glint of his former hardness returning to his expression. “Important decisions were made on my watch. What I did used to influence the entire nation.”

  “And no one will change that for you,” she said. She thought of Bukit Larangan, it’s history faintly etched, fading into a few neat lines of the country’s official narrative. “You are so lucky and you don’t even know it.”

  “Will you remember me, at least?”

  “I’ll come over for tea,” she said. “There’s a swingset on top of Fort Canning that seats four. We can hang out with your former neighbour. And the old Forbidden Hill. We could talk about history, or anything you like. I’ll even bring a lizard for you, if you want.”

  He smiled. She could barely see his blue eyes in the mad, harshly shadowed lighting. “I’m still right. I am still fortunate to have you as my executioner.”

  “You had a good run,” Jing-Li said.

  “Well. I won’t deny that.”

  She did not blink as she brought the plastic blade down.

  * * *

  Sunday night. It has been a year since the groundbreaking ceremony, and the races are on again. The former Supreme Court stands, its form cloaked in netted black scaffolding on which its façade is projected. Its interior is a mess, gutted masonry like phoenix ash, but the millions around the globe watching the race live do not need to see that.

  Across the track sits a grandstand, its rows packed with the chattering masses. They have paid well to be here, even if only for a brief time. Amongst their number one might pick out the shape of a young woman, her back straight, an unreadable smile on her face. From this distance you cannot tell, but she is turning and turning a small object in her hand, which appears to be a coin of some sort.

  But she is only one face in the crowd, and as the camera pulls away she becomes invisible, part of the story no one sees.

  The black box of the former Supreme Court, drenched in new light, remains impassive. Around it rise skyscrapers—shades of New York, shades of Abu Dhabi—that vanish into the night, the hands of a new city reaching ahead.

  How to Make a Time Machine Do Things that Are Not in the Manual

  or

  The Gambiarra Method

  Fabio Fernandes

  The elevator fell five decades in three seconds flat.

  “We need to calibrate this thing, to synchronize it on a decade-floor basis,” Raitek said.

  “Is that really necessary?” Jonathan asked.

  “Do you even have to ask?”

  Patel looked up at both men and sighed almost inaudibly. He was used to the young, eager tech from Ghana, always wanting to know more, to push the envelope further, to suck up every quantum of information as if he were a sponge, a veritable black hole.

  But he still wasn’t used to this weird manager from Brazil. They had already been working on this project for months when the higher powers saw fit to send this guy all the way from Rio de Janeiro to Accra. All just because he had a top-notch score in project-trimming and problem-solving? The man wasn’t even a scientist, for crying out loud!

  “Jonathan does have a point, actually,” he decided to cut in. “Why is it necessary, really?”

  Raitek raised his left hand and lifted two fingers.

  “Two reasons,” he said. “First, the symmetry. The more symmetrical a relationship we can establish, the better we can gauge and calculate the length of the prototype's displacement in time.”

  Patel considered the fact for a little while, then wobbled his head in agreement. “It stands to reason,” he said.

  “And the second?” asked Jonathan.

  Raitek opened a smile from ear to ear.

  “Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Second is the beauty of it.”

  * * *

  Time travel was discovered in 2077.

  As happens with many scientific discoveries, it was completely accidental. Sometimes you are looking for one thing when another gets in the way, with results you are most definitely not expecting. Take Viagra. Or antigravity associated with superconductors.

  Time travel was discovered during experiments on locative media and augmented reality as applied to elevators.

  Anyway, it happened at a very interesting time in history. The human race had suffered a long period of war and disease, which ended on a grim note in the 2060s with the Second American Civil War and the Big European Depression. Even though it was still far from universal peace and understanding, it seemed to be entering a period of relative tranquility. A post-virtual environment embedded in antigravitational elevators—part of an ambiance designed to soothe and distract people during the long risings and falls through the two hundred or so floors of the arcologies—seemed as good a place as any to give this new age a jumpstart.The environment turned out to be not only a virtuality but a time displacement device which took its occupants to a very different set of coordinates from what was expected. Suffice it to say that, when the doors of the elevator opened, the dumbfounded passengers were not in Accra anymore—at least not in 2077 Accra, but in a shabby building in that same city… one with a mere thirteen floors. And, more importantly, according to the ceiling display that showed date and time, in 2011.

  After a few minutes of absolute confusion and, in one case, total denial, the temporary denizens of the past—two techs and one project manager—returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so. They got out of the elevator safe and sound, back where—and when—they belonged. Without knowing why it had happened.

  But intending to find out.

  * * *

  It took Hiran Patel, the project manager who was aboard the elevator when the “episode” (the only word they used inside the lab and the building to refer to the incident) happened, a couple of days to be sure everything was under wraps, so upper management didn’t find out what had really happened. He wanted to reproduce the conditions of the experiment again before he could present it to the board of directors with a new business proposal: to establish a time agency travel somewhere in the past (probably 2011 Accra, if the elevator could somehow only go to a fixed point—the mathematics would still have to be worked out) and offer his clients a plus. He could get quite a bonus for that.

  Unfortunately, things didn’t work out so easily. As soon as the veracity of the time displacement procedure was established, the bureaucrats came.

  They had the facilities shut down until further notice. Not only the labs of creation, production and ambiance editing, not even only the lab containing the elevator carriage used to test it, but the entire building, even unrelated areas. Every lab tech, every assistant, even the secretaries and cleaning staff were politely asked to remain inside the premises for as long as it should be needed to debrief e
veryone. Everyone’s needs, one of the bureaucrats said (Patel couldn’t tell who, they all looked the same to him), would be taken care of.

  Patel was the head of the software team at the time the discovery was made. This meant that, until the arrival of the bureaucrats, he was in charge of a team of eight people, namely: three programmers, three IE (immersion environment) modeling designers and two WS (world¬builder/scriptwriters), most of them from the games industry, seduced by the allure of making money in the glamorous countries of New Western Africa that thrived on software production after the collapse of Europe in the ’30s.

  Patel was one of them; he had come all the way from Wolverhampton, leaving behind a so-so life developing robotic pets as companions for elderly people in home care facilities. But it wasn’t as if England had anything else of significance to offer him, and besides, he had no attachments there, nothing that really mattered. When he first saw the sun glinting on the top of the brand new Nkrumah arcology thrusting up from the middle of Greater Accra, that Solerian dream dwarfing the now obsolete postmodern steel-and-glass buildings, with their mere two or three dozen storeys, he knew he had made the right decision.

  When the bureaucrats came, however, he started to have second thoughts.

  * * *

  Then the man from Brazil arrived. A tall, black, bald, lean man in his mid-thirties, with an easygoing smile that won over most of the team.

  Except Patel. He knew better than to trust a suit.

  The man walked up to him and extended a big hand.

  “Raitek da Silva,” he said in a perfect English. “Nice to meet you, Mr Patel.”

  Patel shook his hand. A surprisingly rough hand, very different from the well-manicured jobs he associated with most bureaucrats.

  “Care to show me your research?”

  “What can I possibly show you that I haven’t already, Mr Da Silva?”

  “Please, call me Raitek. Seriously. We’re going to work round the clock here, and I won’t be wearing this suit for much longer, you feel me? Besides, you may have shown the other executives, but you haven’t shown me anything. And I am the one you must show things to. So, if you please…”

  Patel didn’t like the patronizing tone, but he already had his orders from above. He had no choice.

  So they went for the Grand Tour of the Little Lab.

  “In the beginning,” Patel said, “we were simply researching a more high-resolution and cost-effective immersion environment to be used in arcology elevators. Something to pass the time, and to act as a pressure valve for borderline claustrophobic individuals.

  “Then something went wrong. During one of the experiments with the prototype, we lost the signal from the car.”

  He paused, more for dramatic effect than for anything else, and glanced at Raitek. The suit was still listening attentively, hands behind his back. Patel went on.

  “Five minutes later, the signal was reestablished. When the car was opened and the three team members aboard it were debriefed, they all said the same thing: that the doors had opened on another place and another time. That they were apparently still in Accra, but, according to the elevator display, in 2011.”

  Then Raitek raised a hand.

  “Can you trust them completely?”

  “Mr Da Silva,” Patel said. “I was there. I am one of them.”

  Raitek nodded.

  “So I am to assume the lab cameras registered everything? And the car never left the lab?”

  “As I have told your men countless times. They have the records.”

  “They are not my men. So: you all must have traveled, if such a time travel really occurred, in some sort of ‘bubble’ inside the car?”

  “As I’m sure you already know, that is the current theory, yes.”

  Raitek stopped, straightened himself and looked around. “Do you have a private room, Hiram? May I call you Hiram? And, please, call me Raitek. I really insist.”

  Patel had to control himself not to huff audibly. “This way. And my name is Hiran, ending with an ‘n’, not an ‘m’, if you please… Raitek.

  Raitek grimaced.

  “Ok. As long as you don’t forget to pronounce my name with a guttural ‘R’. It’s not a weak ‘R’. It’s more like a roar, if you please, Hiram.”

  Both went silent the rest of the way. When they entered Patel’s office and he closed the door, Raitek turned to him and suddenly changed his tone. He went from that easygoing mode to utter seriousness and delivered the following speech, almost as if in a robotic mode:

  “Do you want to know what I do, Hiran? Do you really want to know what I’m here for? I’m going to tell you.

  “I compress stories.

  “These are times of raw information. Information is not knowledge—at least not until it gets mixed with reference and experience. Then it becomes something else: it gets transmuted, translated into a legible, understandable message.

  “Information is pure data being fed to you from every possible source at the same time. People like me act like human filters. In the past, some tried to call us names: Googlists, information curators, Gibsonians. I don’t call myself anything. I am what I am. In fact, I don’t do anything you don’t already do. When you open a book, do you read all its pages at once? No. You read them one by one. Whether on a linear basis or not, it doesn’t matter. When you watch a bustling, crowded street at rush hour, are you able to take in every single face in the sea of people who threatens to engulf you from all around? Of course not.

  “I just happen to be able to do it a little bit better.

  “I take the ancient concept of the memory palace and shrink it down to the size of a 1:72 scale model. A die-cast aircraft toy of a memory palace in my head. All I do then is move the goods in.

  “The process is like unloading a removal van. But, instead of big, tidy boxes crammed with info, I picture amorphous masses, not hard stuff, but spongiform ones instead, bouncy buckyballs with tiny spikes all over their surfaces, like weird alternate-Earth Mongol-Raygun-Gothic antennas. I stuff the place with them, and their antennas start telescoping and touching each other. Kinky alien robot sex. I always thought it a bit too cyberpunk-chic-démodé, but it’s deeply imprinted in my culture. I’m comfortable with the imagery.

  “The balls interconnect and form a rhizome. The information sexes up and creates a wave of mutilation. All the data is cut, cropped, pasted. Measured, compared, verified. After all this processing, I expand the memory palace… and the knowledge is there. Not so simple, but you don’t need to know every single step, do you?

  “To keep it short: I’m the one you’re looking for. I am the one you need to collate all the data you've amassed, to make some sense of all your fucked-up experiences. I came here to salvage your invention, and to save your ass in the process. Is that clear or not, Hiran?”

  Patel was impressed with the apparent intelligence of the man, but not with the vulgar display of power. He knew it came with the suit, even if the Brazilian bureaucrat decided to change clothes later.

  “It is clear, Raitek.”

  The easy smile came back to the Brazilian man’s face as quickly as it had vanished.

  “Good. Good, man. We’ll work this out. You will see.”

  Patel nodded. But he was not amused.

  * * *

  The next day began on a lighter note. As promised, Raitek wasn’t wearing a suit: to match the hot weather of Ghana, he wore a light blue polo shirt, khaki pants, and flip-flops. Patel noticed the man’s feet were well-manicured.

  “Salve, moçada! Tudo beleza?” he said to everyone in a loud, happy voice. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”

  As if we haven’t already been working our asses off for months, thought a disgruntled Patel, still combing his hair. He missed his flat. He missed his freedom. He was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the increasingly military vibe of this whole lockin. He didn’t respond well to authority. That was why he always preferred working for civilian companies. Th
is time, however, he thought he might have made the wrong choice. Maybe there was no right choice at all in this line of work. It was a depressing thought.

  “Good morning, Hiran,” Raitek said, closing on him like a shark upon its prey. “Shall we begin the mission briefing?”

  “What mission?”

  “Why, the retrieval mission, of course.” Raitek showed his big-toothed smile.

  In five minutes the entire team was in the meeting room.

  * * *

  “The funny thing,” Raitek started the briefing, “is that we never see the elevator disappear at any given moment in time, from our side.”

  “Yes,” a young black man cut in. “This happens because only the environment travels in time.”

  Raitek stared for just the smallest amount of time at the young man.

  “You are Jonathan, right? Jonathan Kufuor? One of the techs who was originally in the carriage when it traveled back?”

  The young man smiled.

  “Yes, sir. That’s me.”

  “Call me Raitek, please. Same goes to everyone here. No red tape, no ass-kissing. We must do what we must do. The sooner we get this solved, the sooner we get home.”

  Yes, but we are staying here and you are going to a hotel every night, Patel thought grimly. Nice try, though.

  “Do we know why that happened, Jonathan?” Raitek asked.

  “Not exactly,” he answered.

  “But we suspect,” Patel said.

  Raitek nodded. “Pray tell.”

  “The Faraday cage principle.”

  Raitek shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but I agree with you that the analogy seems solid enough.”

  “Why is that?”

  “We are not talking about electricity here, but tachyon flow.”

  “We haven’t established this with absolute certainty yet.”

  “You probably won’t,” Raitek said. “We don’t have the tech for it, nor the necessary measurement tools. Unless we use the Gambiarra Method.”