by Judith Huang
“A hundred and seventy jewelled blue crabs, my lord,” said Neam, smugly, emptying his sack onto the ground. “I’m afraid you lose, Kouza, and the hand of fair Leela is mine.”
Indeed, the village chief’s servants counted the crabs and Neam had caught a whole seventy more crabs than Kouza, and his were no less fat and juicy. “Looks like that poor Hyzid is not even going to dare show his face!” smirked Neam, as he daringly walked up to Leela to kiss her hand. “You will have me as your husband, then?”
Just as Leela was about to speak, Hyzid came up through the door, panting. Hurriedly, he heaved the sack of jewelled blue crabs at the feet of the village chief, and said, “Chief, I have come, as you had requested, with all the jewelled blue crabs I could catch in these past three days, to seek the hand of your daughter, Leela. Please accept my catch as a tribute for the feast.”
“And how many jewelled blue crabs have you caught, my boy?” asked the village chief.
“I…I don’t know,” said Hyzid, nonplussed. “I didn’t count.”
But it was apparent to everyone in the crowd who had won the competition, for Hyzid’s crabs covered the entire clearing in front of the village chief’s house, and were the fattest and juiciest of all.
“Two hundred and fifty!” declared the village chief’s servant, after counting the desperate, clicking crabs on the ground.
Smiling, Hyzid nudged Neam aside and bowed deeply to Leela, who was looking incredibly pleased. “Will you be my wife, oh lovely Leela, for whom no number of jewelled blue crabs can ever be enough?”
“Yes, I will,” said Leela, smiling and clasping his hand.
And so, the new couple was crowned with orchids and garlanded with jasmine that smelled sweet to the heavens. They fed each other sweet pink and green cakes that had been made specially for the occasion, and all the elders of the village and the village chief gathered around the couple to bless them and to glorify the goddess Sofia for making their match.
And Hyzid kissed the yellow stone around his neck, the token of Leela’s love that he had shown the goddesss Sofia, which had led her to help him, and placed it around Leela’s neck again, so that it shone above her wedding garments.
With that, the great wedding feast began under the lanterns, which glowed red and green and blue beneath the stars. And there was much laughing and rejoicing as the hundreds of jewelled blue crabs that had been caught by Hyzid and the suitors were cooked to perfection and drizzled with the most fragrant of sauces, spicy and peppery and buttery and savoury, and the crowning glory of which was the chilli crab, which made all the guests’ mouths water with its heavenly fragrance.
And there were also all manner of fragrant, colourful and delicious dishes besides—colourful fried rice nestling in real carved pineapples, roasted boar on a spit and curry chicken with turmeric and lemongrass, and all kinds of wonderful sweets and desserts made from glutinous rice, coconut milk and sweet bean pastes, and creams as soft as clouds.
And there was music and dancing as the people gathered in a circle under the hanging lanterns and beat drums and played lilting flutes and twanged stringed instruments, raising them to the moon. And in their midst, disguised as an ordinary young girl, the goddess Sofia danced and whirled in delight, celebrating with the people at this auspicious event, the joining of Hyzid to Leela, the daughter of the village chief.
And though the people of Hyzid’s village did not notice the mysterious young girl at their feast, they felt the joy of the goddess spreading like a fine fragrance throughout the village, and were glad of it.
“Sofia is glad,” they said to each other as a blessing, and Hyzid knew it too, in his heart of hearts.
And the new couple laughed beneath the pink spangled sky, kissing and dancing and thanking the great goddess who had blessed them and made their love possible that day.
Chapter 11: On the Run
The light that had engulfed Sofia exploded in a blinding flash, and Kirk found himself blown back by a silent, unseen force. His arm shielded his face as he felt an unbearable brightness searing through it, nearly imprinting the shape of his hand on his cheek. He had fallen to the floor.
When he peeled his eyelids open, Sofia was gone. Kirk looked about him wildly. Where was she? What had happened? The dark table and chandelier now glowed with strange violet lights, spinning around them like so many fireflies. Rising to his feet, Kirk ran towards them, with little regard for his own safety, tugging wildly at the roots of the table.
Panic rose within him. What had happened to the girl? What would he tell Clara? He should never have let his curiosity get the better of him! No one had been able to get past the riddle of the curlicue. What should he do now? He mustn’t panic, not now… Keep calm, he told himself, and think.
Sofia had disappeared. He knew that if the Utopia Machine had functioned as it had been made to, then a whole new universe would have opened up inside it. That would mean Sofia was in the new universe. What did it mean if Sofia had activated it? Would she be able to return to this one?
Even worse, he was sure the activation of the Utopia Machine would not go unnoticed. Surely the members of the Prism Club within the government would find out and they would be furious. They would be even more livid when they realised the person who had activated it, who would shape the reality within it, was not one of the Prism Club’s elite, but a teenage girl.
Whatever it was, wherever she was, Sofia was not safe.
And whatever it was, wherever Sofia was, he had to get out of here. He couldn’t be caught red-handed with an activated Utopia Machine in his office, and he remembered the footsteps outside the lab he had heard before they had gone into the Prism antechamber—he was not alone in the lab today.
Kirk looked about him wildly one last, desperate time, hoping against hope that Sofia would materialise, and then gave up and sprinted out of the Prism antechamber. He turned towards the large doors and walked through them. The Prism antechamber shrank down to a speck, leaving him standing back in the laboratory. He picked up the golden cube, winking innocently on the floor, and ran out of the lab.
Thank goodness it was a Sunday, and if there were others around, they would be few in number. First things first—he had to alert Clara to the fact that he had somehow, inadvertently, lost her daughter. Kirk tried to contact her with his netbox but received no answer. Please be at home, Clara, he thought to himself, as he headed for the one-north MRT station, sweat beading on his forehead.
What was he to do with the box? His first thought was to come clean to Clara immediately. But then that seemed insane to him. Shouldn’t he try to pry the box open again? Get Sofia out of there?
Regardless of what the authorities did, he needed some space and time alone. So he headed for his flat. The doors opened for him, and he entered his tastefully minimalist rooms.
Desperate, he opened up the antechamber of the golden cube. The cathedral-like space emerged in his apartment, and he stepped inside. But once he got past the mirrored doors and came to the waxed table and the chandelier, there was nothing he could do to get past the boundary.
He tried his hardest to recall the song that Sofia had started to sing when she had twisted the glyph like a knob. But he was so panicked that his memory failed him. Besides, his voice sounded completely different from hers. What if only her voice could activate the Utopia Machine? Why was everything so needlessly complicated? thought Kirk to himself.
Kirk thought back to the time that Peter had disappeared some seven years ago. He couldn’t be sure what had happened to him—certainly the argument with Clara had had something to do with it, but even so, Kirk had been shocked when Peter had left without a trace. Peter didn’t seem like the kind of man who would leave his wife and child and head overseas over an argument.
Peter had left a gaping hole in the team. After all, he had been the one who had been in charge of the world-building aspects of the Utopia Machine. He had been tasked with filling the new world with a mythology and cult
ure, creating the depth and breadth of the new world. And before Peter had disappeared, he had already done some pretty sophisticated things to the machine.
These seven years had been a constant trial for Kirk. While the physics of the Utopia Machine continued to push boundaries, and the universe within the machine gained mass to build towards a big bang, the machine remained inoperable. The government grew impatient, and it became harder and harder to hold them back with promises of ever greater innovation and possibilities once the machine was ready. But somehow the team always managed to delay the first trials by saying that the machine’s tech was still not up to scratch.
The truth was, when Peter had disappeared, he had taken a key part of the machine’s workings with him, and it had been inoperable for the seven years since. Kirk knew for a fact that the project had been a strain on Peter and Clara’s marriage. In fact, that was probably the reason why he had disappeared—he had so alienated his wife that they could not stay together any more. He had even left his daughter, whom Kirk knew he loved to pieces. So many people had sacrificed so much for this project. And now Sofia had disappeared into the machine, and on Kirk’s watch, too!
He prodded desperately at the table, then tried out various tones of voice to get into that alternate universe. It was almost comical how he seemed to be talking to an inert table and chandelier in various high-pitched voices. The glyph remained stubbornly locked, even when he manipulated it the way Sofia had in front of him. The room showed nary a trace of Sofia. In fact the whole room looked completely empty of her, exactly like he had seen it when he had entered it before. He could almost will himself to imagine that Sofia hadn’t disappeared at all, and that he had simply imagined her haunting song and the blinding light that had swallowed her.
But he had seen it all happen with his own eyes. He tried contacting Clara with his netbox again. She still wasn’t answering. It wasn’t like her not to respond. Had something happened to her too?
Chapter 12: Clara
Sometimes Clara wished she had never had a child. Something about the way Sofia shut her mother out, her bedroom door always closed (it seemed) to her, her netbox always displaying swirling graphics and text around her that absorbed her so intently, made Clara feel intensely alone, marooned even, on an island of her own. It was like Sofia had turned into a little planet, and Clara was nowhere within her sphere of influence—not even a distant orbital.
Of course, she had researched all the literature on parenting like a dutiful first-time mother, and had even felt decently well-informed throughout Sofia’s childhood. But now that her daughter had spun out into adolescence, she felt everything she had read was all quite horrendously unhelpful. How were you supposed to engage a teen who barely spoke to you, and was obviously intent on building her own world?
If only she were interested in the same things Clara was. Above all, Clara worried about the artsiness of Sofia’s intellectual pursuits. She didn’t like to think of herself as one of those slave-driving Singaporean mums, but surely playing at that world-building software all day wasn’t doing any good for her grades. She would much rather Sofia be working on genetics or computer science. For that, she thought, she had only Peter to thank.
Again, it always came down to the Missing Man. It exasperated Clara that her husband, always quiet and self-effacing when he had been around, now cast a kind of enormous, malignant force field over her life with his conspicuous absence. Peter would know how to deal with the girl. But he wasn’t here. Again she pushed the thought out of her head.
Clara walked briskly out of FairPrice, laden with groceries, and waited for her escapod to arrive. A couple of well-built men were looking her way, but she didn’t think twice about it. She was just looking away when one of them came up to her and grabbed her elbow roughly.
“You have to come with us,” he said.
“ISD, Dr Clara Tan,” said the other, his voice equally level and unremarkable.
“What? What did I do?” Clara shook her elbow free of the first man, her groceries spilling to the ground.
“You’re under arrest. You have to come with us,” said the second man, his voice still low and level. The first man had taken hold of her elbow again and was steering her towards a white escapod to the left of FairPrice.
“What? What? I didn’t do anything!” cried Clara, her voice rising and trembling. “You can’t just arrest me like that!”
A couple of people nearby turned to watch, and just as quickly turned away, lowering their heads and voices. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with a troublemaker.
Soon she found herself sandwiched between the two men in the nondescript white escapod, her hands cuffed in front of her.
“Put these on,” said one of the men, handing her a pair of glasses with blacked out lenses and rudely taking hers off. They also put a pair of noise-cancelling headphones over her ears.
Now she was completely shut off from the world, unable to see where the escapod was going as it sped off into the bland afternoon, or make out what was going on by hearing the sounds around her.
Her thoughts raced as she sat there, the outsides of her thighs touching her captors’. She tried to make herself smaller, to no avail. They were big men, and it was a small and uncomfortable seat, the air-conditioner blowing a blast directly at her and somehow failing to cool her at the same time. Her heart was beating unnaturally fast, and she could feel her face flushed with shame, even though she hadn’t done anything wrong.
Sweat trickled down her nose, but she couldn’t wipe it with her hands cuffed and held down in her lap. The men were completely silent as the escapod swerved, dived and turned. She felt hot and giddy. Where were they taking her? Had she done something wrong that she couldn’t remember?
Her mind raced back to thoughts of Peter. Seven years ago, had they done the same thing to him? The night he disappeared, after he had stormed out, had they bundled him into a vehicle and flown off into the night, too? Would she now be missing for seven years, or even more? Was she going to be interrogated and tortured? Incarcerated for the rest of her life? What was going to happen to Sofia? Sofia! They had just had lunch together not three hours ago. What was to become of her now that both her parents were gone?
A part of her was absurdly worried about the groceries she had spilled in front of FairPrice. She thought of the eggs that had cracked on the ground—perhaps some other team of secret police would have to clean them up. Clara was a neat person and couldn’t abide mess. People might think she had been terribly inconsiderate to have left the debris behind.
Her netbox started buzzing and nudging her. It was at her side, but she couldn’t reach it. It kept buzzing and buzzing. The two men on either side of her remained impassive. What if this wasn’t the ISD at all, she thought, but some kind of kidnapping syndicate? They could have just flashed a bogus badge at me, she thought wildly. This was all too bewildering and unreal. Her netbox quietened down as she couldn’t answer it.
Above all, she thought desperately of how she could contact Sofia and tell her what had happened. What would happen when she didn’t come back home at the end of the day? Maybe there was some way of asking Kirk to bring her to his flat and look after her…
The escapod had come to a stop. She couldn’t make out where she was because of the blacked-out lenses. The two men steered her by the elbows, and she felt herself entering a cool building. The doors slid open, and they walked in. Where was she? What was going to happen to her?
*
Kirk was incredibly frustrated. He didn’t know what else he could do. His flat seemed more and more oppressive as he paced around, tearing at his curly hair.
The realisation that it was his responsibility to contact Clara as soon as possible came to him like a deadening lump of lead in his stomach. He felt terribly guilty. Poor Clara had already lost Peter. Now she might have lost Sofia too. But Sofia was a smart girl… She might find her way back…
And it was his fault, really, for not having
shooed her out of the lab when she had strolled in after him—after all, it was incredibly suspicious, now that he thought about it, for her to have come to the laboratory alone, since she couldn’t swipe in by herself. And it was his fault, too, that he had let his curiosity get the better of him and not stopped her before she had activated the Utopia Machine. Well, the thing could not be put off any longer.
Sighing, he made his netbox call Clara. But Clara didn’t pick up. The netbox bobbed at his shoulder, indicating its failure to contact his colleague. Kirk told it to dial again, but still there was no answer. Another worry hit him: what if the government thought it was Clara who had the cube? After all, she was the one who had been heading the project seven years ago. And surely the government would be after him as well, once they realised he had been involved?
There was nothing but to head to Clara’s flat. Though dreading any confrontation, Kirk knew it was the only responsible thing to do. He hastily threw a few things into his backpack and headed out the door, towards the MRT station. Soon he was on a train to Clara’s in Ang Mo Kio, feeling irrationally as though all eyes were on him.
Stepping off the escapod on the 158th floor, he hammered heavily at the door of Clara’s flat. No answer. Where was Clara? He tried again. Still nothing. He grew impatient and reached for his spare key. Kirk rattled at the lock in desperation. Damned these Midlevel flats and their stupidly retrograde locks, he thought. Couldn’t they have installed a netbox swipe for the doors by now? Having lived in the Canopies all the time he was in Singapore, Kirk could not comprehend how the Midlevel heartlanders put up with such inefficiencies. Finally, after fumbling with the key for a few futile minutes, he managed to fit it into the lock.