Sofia and the Utopia Machine

by Judith Huang

  The clearest memory that she could recall of him was a happy one. She was young, barely as tall as her father’s knee, clinging to his hand as they walked the boardwalks in the Canopies. Not the residential areas, of course, which were far too exclusive for mere Midlevel civil servants to afford to visit—just the lower Canopies where the boardwalks and restaurants were.

  It was the weekend, and her parents had taken her to a restaurant lunch up here as a treat. Was it somebody’s birthday? Sofia couldn’t be sure, but there was an air of festivity to the memory that seemed to suggest that they had been celebrating. Perhaps her father or mother had just been promoted at work. Whatever it was, the little family was happy—it was perhaps the only memory Sofia had of her mother smiling and completely relaxed, her arms hooked with her father’s while she clung on to his other hand with little stubby fingers.

  The city sprawled out beneath them like a map, glinting in the sun as the windowpanes of the Midlevel flats caught the light, rising hundreds of storeys into the air. They were like facets of a jewel, each block rising up gracefully like the spines on so many fern leaves spreading down to the canals, over the shadowy, watery Voids.

  But it wasn’t the magnificent city that had caught little Sofia’s eye, it was something her father pointed out to her—an island, in the distance, lying out beyond the water, on the horizon, like a lazy cat. “Pulau Ubin, Sofia,” said her father’s voice, a gentle baritone at her ear, as he lifted her up in his arms and pointed towards it.

  The bright white beach lay like a ribbon around the island, glaring back at them under the blue-grey sky. It was a beautiful thing, and Sofia could smell the salt spray in her nostrils, the scent of something wild and free beyond the reach of the city.

  She could feel the strong arms of her father lifting her by the armpits, could feel the swing of freedom in the way her legs lifted off the ground, dangling uselessly from her waist. She felt so small and so safe, despite how high up they were.

  In that instant, the island seemed like a fantastical place, a place where mysterious and magical things could happen, a place unlike the humdrum everyday of Midlevel life. And then her father began to hum a tune to her, a happy tune he had taught her, and she sang along.

  The clouds kissed their feet as they walked along the corridors of the Canopies, and she was so high up and so close that her cheek was brushing his cheek. And that was how Sofia remembered her father, wistful and safe and strong, pointing out the little dark green stain against the horizon.

  Chapter 2: The Chair

  Julian felt powerful when he sat in the Chair. He wasn’t supposed to, of course. It was his father’s chair, and though Julian was confident of his father’s approval in general, he wasn’t confident that he would be too pleased if he knew that his son occasionally sat in the Chair on the sly.

  The Chair was designed to make you feel powerful—a gorgeous bubble, a dome, a tour de force of precision engineering hovering twenty thousand feet above sea level, with a floor all of glass except for the sleek, white ergonomic seat itself. You could see everything from up here.

  There was a slight drifting movement, but it was barely perceptible. The Chair’s bubbled dome was a protrusion of part of the hovering platform in the Canopies immediately on top of the Istana. Sitting in it was the closest thing to being a Renaissance angel, perched on a cloud.

  Beneath him, the earth stretched out lazily like the vast back of a whale. According to Marlowe, Faust’s first wish upon making his infamous bargain was to take flight around the world in order to check the accuracy of the maps those intrepid 18th-century explorers were making.

  Now, Julian reflected, anyone with the money could do the same in a day trip. And he, of course, didn’t have to make a trip at all. Sitting in the Chair meant he was at high enough an altitude for a god’s eye view, yet low enough that the clouds didn’t get in the way. And at sunset you got these gorgeous flaming panoramas, where the sun spread a rainbow of colours along the horizon and the city’s lights glowed like stars.

  Beneath him, tiny lights, like blood cells carrying oxygen to different parts of the body, streamed through the roads, canals and skyways like blood vessels. It was late afternoon, and the traffic was just approaching the mad rush of peak hour again. But up here, it was extraordinarily, luxuriously quiet. Julian liked to pipe in some music—Bach, usually, or sometimes Handel. But today he chose Wagner, just because he was in that sort of mood.

  He flicked a switch, and the info streams came on—tracking the minuscule dots of moving ships, MRT trains, even individual escapods and citizens, if you cared to zoom in on them. Traffic reports, weather forecasts and key financial indicators streamed in a moving matrix on his right. He swiped the display to the thoughtcloud stream. Gossip about local celebrities, the best sales for Chinese New Year clothing, and worries about the water supply today—so the terrorism rumours had been seeded successfully.

  The aggregators flashed. Discontent—a little bar on the left—was low; the weather was fine and no one had forgotten their umbrellas for the light shower predicted for the late evening. There was a flame war going on about property prices again, and some possible seeds of unrest among the server farmers, but nothing that tripartite negotiations wouldn’t sort out. Another cat holo had gone viral—but the MDA bots had scanned it and it was nothing to worry about.

  Bored with the privileged info streams from the Chair, he turned to his private holo streams from his netbox. Several notices for a primary school reunion—Julian showed these slightly more interest, flicking through some old holos his friends had created.

  The truth was, after the initial surge of power from secretly being in the Chair, the usual Chair display was really quite dull. People can be so extraordinarily dull, he thought. Vast streams and torrents of uncensored information from the best academic libraries and universities lay ripe for mining in the netbox rivers, but hardly anyone accessed them, instead limiting themselves to petty social interactions.

  What he needed, he thought, was a real girlfriend. And not one of those giggly, frivolous things he saw at society parties. Not that he hadn’t had his share of flirtations, of course. Any society girl with half a brain knew he was just about the biggest catch in their circle. And he knew he could dress, act and look the part. He always had the latest gizmos and gadgets that were all the rage at the time. And when he was not in his status-telegraphing pure white school uniform, he wore the coolest, most exclusive labels. He holidayed in the most exclusive destinations and had the sophisticated taste that only money could buy—ski trips in the Swiss Alps, where the pristine snow glinted off the tops of blinding white mountains against a blue sky; rich hot cocoa from the most refined of Mexican cocoa beans; delicate bubbles of caviar that burst against your palate. He made sure he was spotted often at the most exclusive country club, where he had swimming and tennis lessons, and had VIP passes to invitation-only rooms in nightclubs and bars, so he was never short of female company, if he so desired.

  He’d had one serious girlfriend—whom he had picked up at a Cambridge May Ball and jetted into Paris that same night, an evening spent hovering over the Eiffel Tower—but she had thought better of dating someone with such a high profile and moved with her family to the Maldives or somewhere like that after their break-up.

  Frankly, he was bored. Bored stiff by the same damned company, the simpering smiles, the eager handshakes of fathers eager to display their daughters. It was never that hard to get a girl, if you were as loaded and privileged as he was. But it was also horrifying how little he felt afterwards. It was all so sordid, beneath all that refinement.

  The pretty society girls, their eyebrows plucked and their fingernails manicured, their hair disgustingly stiff from coiffing, just tired him out these days. Even the older ones, the ones with degrees from Bei Da or Swiss finishing schools or French Sorbonnes, were still dull as dishwater after a while. It was like they all expected him to take on the sole responsibility of carrying the co
nversation. Or maybe, he thought, they were just scared—that they hadn’t lived up to the perception of his extensive experience. That if they said something wrong, he would have them banished or their tongues cut out, or something.

  Julian felt lonely.

  That was when it came to him—that old story of the Caliph of Baghdad who disguised himself for one night every year and roamed the marketplace with his vizier, incognito. Well, he had no vizier. But he did have a couple of good magic carpets… He would take the jet—no, that would still give him away. He would slum it and scour the Midlevels for some sweet, unspoiled secondary school girl. It would be fun. Maybe he would even fall in love. That, at least, would be a little bit different. After all, sometimes Julian wondered what life, “real life”, in the Midlevels was like. He always had the impression that being in the Canopies all the time divorced him from the “real” Singapore, which disturbed him somewhat, since he cared a lot about his country. Maybe he would learn something from this. He warmed to the idea.

  He jumped out of the Chair and walked down the gangway back down to the Istana, a new spring in his step.

  Chapter 3: Isaac

  In Sofia’s bedroom, the holo display projected by her netbox glowed, promising some entertaining distraction. The light formed the shape of a sparrow before presenting her with an array of icons. She reached out to see what was new on her friends feed. Some of the girls from her class were online, their avatars sparkling with gossip. But she was in no mood for that.

  Then she noticed something new, a little prism in blue, glowing in her peripheral vision, and she reached for it.

  “Do you open the door?” Words formed at her eye level, swirling and eddying in the darkness. She was about to swipe them away, thinking they were some kind of pop-ad promotion, when she saw the little prism shining, leaping into her hand. It was quite beautiful.

  A thrill ran down her spine. It materialised in her hand the moment she touched it, the holograph rendered solid. Perhaps it was just a very cunning pop-ad. Or maybe it was just spam. But something told her it was something more—it was a gift.

  “Hi! What’s your name?” came a voice from out of the prism.

  “Sofia,” she said. “How did you get my contact?”

  “Through your holosheets. They’re pretty cool. I saw them on Natasha’s feed.”

  Sofia was very proud of her holos. Natasha was one of the most popular girls in her class, and while they weren’t really friends, they were at least listed as friends online. This cheered her up considerably.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Call me Isaac.”

  A boy! Sofia’s heart skipped a beat. Boys were strange and unfathomable creatures to her, as she had gone to a girls’ school ever since primary school. Some of her classmates knew several from their co-ed primary schools, and undoubtedly that was how Natasha knew this guy, and Sofia had been hoping to meet a boy herself. “What school do you go to?”

  “RI,” he said. Raffles Institution. That sounded pretty good. Sofia accepted the chat.

  When she did, she found herself in a perfectly-rendered study—an old-fashioned one, with shelves lined with books.

  “Hello—I’m here. Where are you?”

  Isaac materialised. He looked about 17. He was handsome, with prominent cheekbones and a fashionable haircut. Of course, avatars could look like anything you pleased, but most teenaged boys had, perhaps unsurprisingly, pretty awful taste. Isaac didn’t have neon green hair or wear a baggy shirt. He looked smart.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Um, hi.”

  The avatar Sofia had chosen for herself had purple-streaked hair and dark, big purple eyes, and, of course, she had done away with her glasses. She thought her avatar looked pretty cool, though she had probably overdone the androwear. Sofia felt a bit self-conscious showing that much midriff, even if it was computer-generated, but she also felt him eyeing

  her appreciatively.

  Sofia was terribly drawn to the books. She reached out to finger one of them. They actually felt solid, which surprised her. This guy must be loaded.

  “Are these real?” she asked in surprise.

  “Yup, they are. I collect them. Antiquarian. This is my study.”

  “How do they stay up on the shelf?”

  “It’s the latest technology. Holomatter 4.0. I can show you more if you want,” said Isaac. He rummaged in the shelf and chose a few of his favourite books. This was already going better than he had hoped.

  “Why were you looking at my holosheets?” asked Sofia.

  “Well, to be honest, I was just bored…and Natasha used to be my primary school classmate. So.”

  “Yeah, Natasha is cool,” said Sofia, her heart sinking a little. Maybe this boy just had a crush on Natasha and had contacted Sofia to suss out whether she was single. Natasha got any guy she wanted, sometimes more than one guy. It just wasn’t fair.

  The boy hesitated, unsure how to approach his question. “I like building cities too,” he said. “Did you have to do that Worldbuilder thing in Social Studies class too? They made everyone at RI do it.”

  “Yeah, we did.” Sofia remembered it clearly. They had been in the dark classroom, which was blackened like an observatory. It was like being alone in the universe, with only made-up worlds eddying around you. That was how she had got into world building herself, which had surprised her as she usually found schoolwork boring.

  They had created imaginary cities filled with wondrous technology, impossibly high skyscrapers and hanging gardens that rivalled the legendary cities of myth and folklore in their splendour. When she had got back from that class, she had applied it to her own holos and created elaborate worlds of her own that she then spent way too much time tending to.

  “So,” said Sofia shyly, “what’s with the prism?”

  “Oh, that?” Isaac laughed in a self-consciously off-hand manner. “It’s just a symbol. A gift.”

  “Yeah, but why a prism? Why not a sphere, or a cube or a cone?”

  “Well, you know Isaac Newton, right?”

  “Yup. Were you named after him?”

  “Isaac is just a name I use online,” he said. “But yes, I use it because of Isaac Newton.”

  “Well, my name really is Sofia,” said Sofia, a little reproachfully. What was the deal with this guy, and who was he really? Nobody was anonymous these days. She suddenly felt a little scared and considered ending the chat right there. But curiosity got the better of her. “So what about Isaac Newton?”

  “Well, he was the one who discovered how to split light. Here, let me show you.” He reached for the prism, and Sofia handed it to him. He picked it up and held it to the light. Like everything else in the room, it was exquisitely made.

  “It’s real, right?”

  “Yeah, of course it’s real. It won’t work if it’s just a holo,” he said. “Here—” he pressed a button on a device he held in his hand, and a beam of light shot out from it. “Look at this—”

  He held the prism up in the path of the beam of light. He tilted it this way and that. Suddenly, he hit the correct angle and a lovely rainbow streamed over Sofia’s forehead—a dash of red through indigo. Sofia’s heart leapt. She had heard of the experiment before, but had never seen it performed. She had never seen a real glass prism split light into a rainbow before, and holos were just not the same. Julian gave his hand a little flourish, like a magician.

  “There—the prism experiment, splitting a beam of light into a spectrum,” he said. “It’s illustrative of the principle of our society, too. It’s quite amazing, really.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Sofia. “I thought it was just a science experiment.”

  “Well, all branches of knowledge are related,” said Isaac wisely. “At least, that’s what I think. Truth and beauty in one discipline can be applied to another. There is no shortage of metaphors drawn from science in all the classics of statecraft.”

  “Statecraft?” Sofia’s
eyes gleamed. “Do they teach you that at RI? All we have is stupid Social Studies, which is like, everything rolled into one. My teacher was just complaining about it—last year it absorbed Literature and History too, both of which used to be my favourites.”

  “Oh no, not at all,” said Isaac. “They only teach crap at my school. Everything I know,” he added impressively, “I learned from books.”

  “I wish I had so many books,” said Sofia wistfully, fingering the spines of the pile on the table.

  “Well, you know, you are welcome to borrow them any time, especially if you become part of the club.”

  “The club?”

  “Yes, the Prism Club. Anyone who’s anyone is in it, you know,” said Isaac, a proud grin on his face.

  “How do you get in?”

  “Well, that’s the tricky part. You have to be tapped. But I guess I could see what I could do…”

  “You mean you’re a member? They let teenagers in?”

  “Well…” Isaac hedged. “They don’t really. It’s an elite club for top leaders. But I know a lot about it because of

  my…connections.”

  Sofia’s heart was racing. A whole library of books—and an intellectual circle to debate them with, and a cute guy to boot? And one who seemed to have a lot of insider knowledge…

  “That would be amazing! You have no idea. My mum is always going on about how I don’t take my studies seriously, but she doesn’t buy books. All she does is work.” Sofia stopped herself, remembering she shouldn’t talk too much about her family. “But wait, you still haven’t explained to me what the metaphor is,” she added.

  “Well, you know how Singapore is split into the Canopies, the Midlevels and the Voids?”

  “Yeah… But the Voids aren’t really part of Singapore, are they?”

  “Well, that’s what everybody says, but I mean, they still contribute to the GDP, so…”