by Judith Huang
“What?”
“I don’t really know. But don’t you see? If there were some way to activate that thing, we would have the chance to build a perfect world…”
Sofia shook her head. “There’s no such thing as a perfect world,” she said.
“There could be, if we built it. If you built it,” he added. “I’ve seen the stuff you’ve built, just on holosheets. They’re imaginative, and beautiful, and…perfect.”
“They’re not really… They wouldn’t really work in real life,” said Sofia.
“But you see, in this world, only the best people would be allowed to live there,” said Julian, a little impatiently. “All the… I don’t know, all the stupid people, all the worthless types of riffraff you get in the real world, they wouldn’t be admitted in the first place.”
Sofia’s brow creased. She wanted to object, but didn’t exactly know what she was objecting to. After all, it wasn’t all that different from this garden, right? If it were a private garden, you could let whomever you liked in, and keep whomever you liked out. In theory, it sounded like a wonderful idea. And she was excited that Isaac thought her world-building exercises had such potential that he was telling her about this secret machine that could make a new world for real.
“It’d be like paradise. Shangri-la. Or the Garden of Eden. Just like I said to you in my letter,” he said.
Julian was standing very close to her now, and looking straight into her eyes. Sofia had rehearsed this moment in her mind over and over, night after night after chatting with him, yet now that it was here, she was at a loss for what to do. But something told her not to break her gaze. As the music built to a climax, she felt the tension build between them. He had taken hold of her hand, and her face had grown incredibly warm.
And then, suddenly, his lips were upon her lips. He was kissing her! She could hardly believe it, but she was having her first kiss!
Sofia felt like her whole body was on fire. She had closed her eyes instinctively when he came in for the kiss, and now all she could feel was the heat of his mouth on hers, and the awkward jostling of her glasses digging into her face.
But this rushing feeling inside her—was it love? It had to be. Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen, with one’s first kiss?
Chapter 7: Uncle Kirk
Uncle Kirk was coming for dinner that night, Sofia realised with some relief. At least she wouldn’t have to be alone with her mother.
After their argument at Auntie Rosie’s house, eating alone with her had become insufferable, and besides, she didn’t think she could hide her preoccupied jitters that came from constantly recollecting her first kiss.
Uncle Kirk was one of the few people Sofia and Clara saw regularly. Even before her father disappeared, as far back as Sofia could remember, he came for dinner at their house every other Thursday. He didn’t need to be told—it was a standing invitation.
Uncle Kirk worked in a laboratory in Biopolis like Clara, and even though Sofia had seen it countless times, she could never really figure out exactly what kind of scientist he was. He seemed much more like a philosopher than a scientist, since he was always debating things with himself. He mostly tried to prove and disprove things, and sometimes he also debated about what kind of shampoo he should be using, and whether its smell was offensive.
There was a rhythmic knock on the door—their secret knock—and Sofia smiled as she opened it to see him standing there. She closed it again, unbolted the chain and let him in. He stepped off the escapod gratefully. Those things were always too small for him, and when he balanced on them he looked a little like an elephant on a stool.
When she was a small girl, Uncle Kirk had freaked Sofia out a bit. He had fluffy blonde hair and blue eyes, which were the first things that unsettled her. Sofia saw a lot of blonde, blue-eyed men in ads on the streets and on pop-ads, and sometimes, on occasional trips to the Canopies, she would see specimens in person, but none of them looked even remotely like Uncle Kirk, who seemed to specialise in disconcerting.
He was very tall and lanky, had wide-set eyes and a slightly knobby nose, and he liked to peer at Sofia in a very intent manner, like an exotic bird examining an interesting seed. It was fitting that Uncle Kirk had a bulbous nose which almost always looked as if it were about to peck at something, because officially his field of research was smell, or as he liked to put it, the ability of small bits of stuff to detach itself from the main stuff and float into your nose, nature’s particle detector. Anyway, he was one of her mother’s favourite people, having been her classmate in university, and was now one of Sofia’s favourite people too.
Uncle Kirk shuffled in, holding out a couple of oranges apologetically.
“They were the best I could find in the crazy crush,” he said. “Damn, I need to do my Chinese New Year shopping earlier next time.” He shook his fluffy hair so it stood up even more, like Einstein’s.
Sofia took them from him. “No problem. It’s not like anyone around here eats any of them anyway. Ma is on a diet.”
Uncle Kirk groaned. “Not again! Tell your mother she’s already freakishly thin, okay, and to stop dieting. If you Singaporeans diet any more you will disappear completely, and then who will rule the Riau Islands with a firm but fair hand? And who will the Republicans in the US use to pontificate about the virtues of free market capitalism?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Clara shortly, appearing from behind the kitchen door. “Good thing you came. I made too much beef bee hoon today.”
“No such thing as too much beef bee hoon!” whooped Uncle Kirk.
They sat down to eat. Uncle Kirk was his usual animated self, his chopsticks flying with a fluidity that defied physics. Soon he had polished off his food before Sofia and Clara were even a quarter of the way through theirs.
“So, how’s the research going?” asked Clara pleasantly. She had recovered from the day before. Somehow cooking and setting tables calmed her down, and there was something so nice about having three people at the table instead of the usual two.
“Oh, you know, the usual. I’m basically a glorified photocopier. If they ever invent a robot who can photocopy speeches and edit out the embarrassing errors and blatantly racist statements I would be out of a job. But fortunately, I look good on the brochures.”
Kirk had come to Singapore after floating around in post-doc purgatory in America. He had been “conceived in New Haven” and hailed from Amherst, Massachusetts, a fact he bandied around a lot, despite nobody caring where that was, how to pronounce any of these names or what they implied about himself.
His PhD thesis had proved a null hypothesis, and he didn’t much like teaching bratty undergraduates, so he snapped up the job offer once Clara had told him that Biopolis was hiring. Technically he was a senior scientist assisting the Nobel laureate Singapore kept on its payroll for having created the first synthetic pig.
“How’s Professor Swenson?” asked Sofia. She had only seen him twice in her short life. She liked him because he had once looked at her and said, “Watch out for that girl—she has the light of election upon her!” when she was just three and clambering over the Biopolis grounds. Then he had gone back to rattling the water cooler. He was also technically Clara’s boss.
“Oh, you know, the usual. The man lounges around in a bathrobe and eats peanuts from the vending machine. That’s all he does all day. He’s Emeritus from Life.”
“That’s about right,” said Clara with a grin. It was a matter of no uncertain discomfort that Professor Swenson received twenty times her pay, and Kirk three times, even though she worked ten times as hard as both of them put together. But Kirk and her had an arrangement to split their combined salary by half ever since Peter disappeared, since he wouldn’t have got the job if not for her anyway, and he was, as he said, “condemned to a lifetime of bachelorhood”. He was essentially Clara’s American brother. Anyway, he was one of those people who preferred to live on water and oxygen—and Cl
ara’s cooking, which was not bad—though he was known to hoard gourmet shampoos in secret.
Soon they were chattering away about the latest in synthetic genetics.
“Would you know, they have invented a new kind of bottom feeder,” grinned Uncle Kirk. He always liked being privy to new knowledge before it was generally known to the public. “They’ve synthesised the nursing capabilities of human females with certain marsupials that allow for new maternity surrogates… Testing has begun in the Upper Canopies but we’re not sure where they will go once the infancy has played out. Perhaps they’ll retire to the Voids. No one is very sure.”
“Well, that would definitely lighten the load on working mothers, if it filters down,” said Clara thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t need daycare in the office and childcare centres if we could just have a good surrogate,” she added. “And they’d be much better than hiring maids, if they were custom-made. Won’t have cultural problems, then.”
Sofia shifted her weight awkwardly in her chair. She didn’t like being reminded what a burden she had been to her mother’s career. She knew it couldn’t have been easy for her to have juggled her Biopolis duties and childcare.
“Not sure what the religious honchos will have to say about it though,” murmured Kirk.
Uncle Kirk had a lifelong quarrel with religion. Today, though, both Sofia and Clara were quite preoccupied with their own thoughts and tuned out when he chattered on about it.
“You know how some religions and cults talk about relocating the elect to a different planet or solar system or that kind of thing… Even the Christians have the idea of a new heaven and new earth, kind of like the world generated in that Utopia Machine of yours, Clara…”
Sofia perked up. There it was again—the Utopia Machine! It had popped up in her father’s papers and in Isaac’s discussions, and now here was Uncle Kirk talking about it. It couldn’t just be coincidence!
“The Utopia Machine? You worked on it, ah?”
Uncle Kirk looked flustered. “No, no, it’s just an old pipe dream—nothing to get excited about. I was just talking about how the theoretical new heaven and new earth might actually be brought about through technology rather than through some mystical religious happening, as such…”
“But it was at Biopolis? At your lab?” Sofia turned to Clara. “Ma?”
Clara looked extremely uncomfortable.
“Kirk, shut up,” she said. “You don’t want to bring up that thing. It doesn’t work, and that’s all there is to it.”
“But you did build it—you and Uncle Kirk?” Sofia insisted.
Clara’s mouth formed a tight line.
“Let’s not talk about this at the dinner table, okay?” she said, with the same expression on her face that she had whenever Sofia tried to bring up anything to do with Peter, or their other relatives, thus clamping down on the conversation.
But Sofia was excited. What if her own parents—not just her father but her mother as well, had worked on the Utopia Machine? Did that give her some kind of right to it? Did it mean it was in her mother’s lab right now, in some form, in some dusty, forgotten corner, just waiting to be discovered? Could she maybe follow her mother or Uncle Kirk down to the lab and even see it? Might that be what Isaac had been longing for them to do together? Maybe this was the key.
She thought of Isaac again. His kiss still burned on her lips, and she was terrified that her mother would be able to tell that something was different about her. But it wasn’t just the kiss—it was also the idea of the Utopia Machine, which she kept turning over in her head. But the thought of that much power frightened her. And the gleam in Isaac’s eye when he had talked about the perfect world had seemed somehow not right, not wholesome…
Perhaps she should not talk to Isaac again. She didn’t want to get involved in something like that. Did she? Yet, it took every ounce of willpower not to message him again on her netbox.
No, she decided. She would not succumb. He had kissed her…but did he love her? She felt shaken, queasy. Was the kiss just a ruse, a way to manipulate her into helping him build the new world he so lusted after? Although every part of her body longed for him, Sofia decided she should hold off on messaging him about this development. The kiss was just a kiss.
After Uncle Kirk left, she helped her mother clear up the dinner plates. And with these thoughts in her mind, she brushed her teeth, got into bed and fell asleep.
*
Sofia was in a green room that was somehow both her apartment and her mother’s lab.
Her mother was trying to tell her something, but somehow her attention was constantly distracted by something in the corner of the room, which somehow kept escaping her eyes, as though she were trapped in a round room but hadn’t realised it yet. What her mother was trying to tell her was incredibly important; it was a warning about something that was going to happen.
“Come to me, Sofia… I am waiting for you,” said a disembodied voice. Somehow, without being told, she knew it belonged to a friend, and that his name was Milton. A soft baritone, it seemed to pipe straight into her ear.
“How? Where are you?”
But Milton was singing—a song that she had heard in the previous dream—yet it could not bring into her waking consciousness. What was he trying to tell her?
Sofia found the corner of the room. It was an even smaller lab, and in it there was a secret door that she could pass through, but only with Uncle Kirk. The singing filled her ears, and the lyrics turned into the room. She was in a church, and Uncle Kirk held the key. “The golden box in the hands of a friend,” said the voice over and over again. And then Uncle Kirk grabbed her hand and they started running, running…
A great black bird swooped down from the pink sky. Sofia screamed as it opened its beak to devour her. It morphed into a terrible beast, which was about to force her to plummet onto deadly spikes at the bottom of the lab floor…
Sofia woke up with a start. For a couple of seconds she was deeply disorientated by the soft sheets on her bed. Then her mind returned immediately to the dream. She knew instantly what to do. It was something that someone had taught her a long time ago, when she was a little child, but now she couldn’t remember who.
She jumped up from her bed and went to the corner of the room where sheets of paper lay in a jumble and pulled one out, then rifled around again for a pen. She needed paper for this; she had to use both hands. That voice! It was that voice she wanted to contact!
“Who are you?” she scrawled with her right hand.
“Milton,” she wrote with her left hand, her letters awkwardly sloping towards the right, looking as though they were falling over one another. Was it her who had generated that name or some other force?
“What are you like, Milton?” she wrote with her right hand again, the letters standing like upright soldiers.
“I am sleek and orange and fly swiftly through your mind,” wrote the left hand, looking more and more disembodied from her.
“How can I come to you?” asked her right.
“I will tell you where to find the cube with a hole the shape of a prism.”
“Where can I find the cube?”
“In your mother’s lab.”
Sofia stopped and grabbed her left hand with her right, as though to stop it from writing any more. Her heart was pounding. Her mother’s laboratory in Biopolis was where she would find the answer, and it was the answer to that huge and interminable question in her life—what had become of her father.
Because that voice, the voice that called itself Milton, was not a strange, but a familiar voice. And she knew that that voice would lead to her father. No matter how little sense it all made, she was absolutely convinced that this was true, and the ugly scrawls on the sheet of paper confirmed it.
How was she going to get to her mother’s lab? She would have to wait until Sunday, when her mother was out shopping for the week’s groceries. If she knew Uncle Kirk well enough, he would be arriving at the lab like clockwork
at two in the afternoon. He liked to get work done on Sundays when there were no other scientists around to interfere with his thought processes.
All she would have to do was slip in behind him—despite all the amped up security the government claimed surrounded its top research facilities, it wasn’t like the lab was particularly hard to break into if you were the daughter of a scientist who worked there. They were used to having her around.
A new excitement rose within her. Finally. Something was happening, and she could feel it calling to her from the ether. Somehow she knew she was meant to be at the centre of it, whatever it was, and she could barely get herself back to sleep, hugging the thought of it to herself.
Chapter 8: The Utopia Machine
On Sunday, Sofia could barely wait for the morning to pass, and when lunch was over and her mother reached for her keys she almost gave the game away by heaving a huge sigh of relief.
“What’s wrong?” asked her mother sharply.
“Nothing, lah,” said Sofia hurriedly. “See you later.”
“So much to buy,” muttered Clara to herself before closing the latch behind her and stepping on the escapod.
After waiting to make sure her mother was out of the way, Sofia grabbed her bag and sneaked out, heading towards the laboratory. It was a little strange to be going that way without her mother, but nobody noticed her on the MRT, and as soon as she got used to the fact that she wasn’t conspicuous, she felt a lot more relaxed.
Soon she was outside Biopolis, watching the entrance from behind a pillar.
Sure enough, at around two, a shock of blonde hair appeared. It was Uncle Kirk, arriving right on the dot as she had predicted. She breezed past the front doors as they slid open noiselessly for him.
“Sophie! Why are you here?” said Uncle Kirk, hurriedly concealing something behind his back.
Sofia had never heard him sound so defensive. Usually he was a thoroughly friendly guy, if a little intense.