by Judith Huang
“The well?”
“You didn’t take note of it when you first came here, but we were at the well when you first arrived. It’s at the centre of this world. Here, get back on my back and I’ll show you.”
Soon Sofia was flying past mountains and rivers and forests and hills, whizzing through them as though they were merely figments of her imagination. At last they came to a well that looked as ancient as time itself, all overgrown with moss, its brickwork crumbling.
“Why does it look so old?” asked Sofia.
“The well is at least as old as this universe. If you look into the deepest wells, you can see the stars. But in this well, you can see not just the stars above the heavens but the stars that were in the sky when you first began the world, because it is a timewise well as well as a depthwise well.”
Sofia peered over the edge of the well into its depths. It reached so far down that it seemed a deep black, laced with pinpoints of light that she knew to be the stars. And sure enough, they were of the same constellations that she remembered tossing off into their separate galaxies.
“To get back, you need to toss something into it and sing the song you sang to open the glyph of the chandelier and the table,” said Milton.
Sofia looked around her on the ground. She found an almost perfectly round white stone and decided that was what she needed to throw into the well. As she did, she raised her voice and began to sing the song her father had taught her so long ago.
As she did, the white stone made a distinctive plop in the deep water that slept in the bottom of the well. The splash resulted in rings of ripples around her. It was a sound that went both backwards and forwards in time. Sofia tuned her voice to the sound of the ringing. Something clicked in her mind, and she felt the world about her dissolve, even the mass of tiger that stood beside her.
She closed her eyes and sank into the darkness. When she opened them again, she was in the Prism antechamber, the dark wax table before her and the chandelier winking at her once again. She ran to the mirrored doors, passed through them, and the Prism resolved itself into the golden cube.
To her surprise, she was no longer in the lab, but in her room. Had Uncle Kirk brought her back to her house? She was surprised to see he was nowhere about.
But first of all, there was the terrible shock of being back in the ordinary world, a world that seemed so dull and strange to her despite the fact that she had lived there ever since she was born. Somehow it seemed flat to her, as though it were concealing hidden dimensions.
She kept trying to see below the surface of things, feeling that the walls were secretly only the superficial layer. But her room looked exactly how she had left it, a little messy and filled with schoolwork and tuition homework on the desk, and her clothes and school uniform were still strewn across the bed.
Where was Uncle Kirk? Was her mother back from her shopping? It seemed aeons had passed since she left this flat—and indeed it had been aeons, in that new universe that she had created—but it was really only a few hours since she had left, and in what she thought of as the real world, only a few hours had passed.
It was in the middle of the night, or the early hours of the morning, so it was strange that her mother was not at home. Sofia called her mother. No answer. She tried Uncle Kirk next. No answer either. A chill ran through her. Had something happened to them? It was unlike either of them not to pick up.
Just then, she noticed a note on her bedroom floor. It was from Uncle Kirk.
“You’re in danger. Meet me at the Changi docks” was all it said in his familiar handwriting.
Sofia was terrified. She couldn’t stay in the flat any more. Why was she in danger? Of course, she had activated a secret government programme. But, would they really do something to her, a teenage girl, for that? After all, she had sort of done it by accident…
Her block suddenly seemed so exposed. Any of her neighbours could look through the window grilles at the front of the flat, or through the grille of the open door.
Anyone could spot her if she went downstairs. She thought about contacting Isaac. She was in love with him—well, sort of—but could she trust him with something as critical as this? Could she trust him with her life? Would he be pleased or displeased that she had activated the Utopia Machine without him? He didn’t even know she had access to the Utopia Machine…and she wasn’t sure if she should tell him.
Could she head to the MRT station? But there, too, there would be netboxes tracking her every move. And she could not detach herself from her own, which scuttled and bobbed around her like a little bird. The thing was practically indestructible.
She picked experimentally at her wrist, even using the tip of a knife, where she thought the chip that connected her to her netbox was, but it was useless. The chip was embedded deeply, and she didn’t know exactly where it had been implanted. Even her own mother did not know exactly where it was, and it was so nano there was no way she could be sure if she had removed it. There was nowhere to run, nothing she could do.
Or was there? Uncle Kirk said to meet him at the Changi docks. But that meant going into the Voids, which was something Sofia was extremely unwilling to do, even under the circumstances. But the alternative was to simply wait in the flat, for them to come, for them to take her away…
No! Something in her fought against her chest. Her people needed her. All the creatures and people she had created in her new universe depended on her to protect them. Her mother, her father—if he were still somewhere out there, if he were still alive—and Uncle Kirk, they needed her. She had to keep her wits about her. She had to find a way. She could not simply give up! Where could she run where she wouldn’t be tracked?
Changi Docks. That was where the boats took you to Pulau Ubin. And she had no idea how to get there at all. It meant going through the Voids, the smelly half-submerged world that existed beneath the wastes of the real Singapore. The Voids—they were the only place she could disappear into.
Sofia shuddered involuntarily. She had never been to the Voids. They were almost unreal, almost mythical to her—something to scare small children with to make them behave. Everyone knew that you would get yourself killed if you went to the Voids. Well, she was just as unsafe here. But where in the Voids? It was a vast, sprawling place—if only she knew someone who lived there, someone who would know how to get to the docks…
But she did! Grandma, she thought. Her father’s mother. She lived in the Voids, didn’t she? She wished she had her address… Sofia didn’t dare to use her netbox to look it up. They would be sure to trace her search.
She was certain the government could monitor all the streams on her netbox. It was an open secret that they did, and although this had never bothered her before, she saw now what a dangerous system that was for someone on the wrong side of them. Was there a paper address book somewhere in her mother’s stuff?
Sofia stumbled into the study, bruising her thigh in the process. She coughed as dust flew every which way as she rummaged through the vast pile of rubbish. She couldn’t imagine why Ma kept all this stuff. In her excitement about finding her father’s writing when her mother had made her spring clean, she hadn’t done a good job, so there was still way too much stuff in here. Something seized up in her throat as she thought of her mother.
Where was she? If only she had told her sooner! If only—Sofia’s hand grabbed on to something small and shiny. A thumb drive! She hadn’t used one of these before but she knew that her mother’s ancient but still serviceable tablet had a USB port. And it wasn’t connected to the Internet any more, which could only be a good thing.
Sofia plugged the tablet in and waited impatiently for it to charge. It took what seemed like forever. Finally she opened the drive. To her disappointment, it didn’t contain any address files. She looked desperately through the tablet, performing a search for addresses. To her shame, she realised she didn’t even know her grandmother’s full name. As she scanned through the address files, something
caught her eye. Novena Centre, said the screen.
Novena… Novena… Something about it sounded important, sounded familiar. A subterranean MRT station, abandoned due to the flooding? Then she remembered—her father had been Catholic. Novena had something to do with Catholics. And she was sure of it now—it was an old MRT station. And an old church. Was there a priest who would know where to find her grandmother? Didn’t priests keep lists of old people like that, old people who lived alone? Excitement fluttered in her chest.
She was just about to download the map and coordinates onto her netbox, when she stopped herself. Too dangerous. Instead, she grabbed a pen and wrote it down on the inside of her wrist. Stopping by her room, she hurriedly changed into a fresh uniform and packed a few necessities into her backpack.
She took one last look around the flat. Its green walls looked dimly back at her. Her netbox’s holos flickered, casting shadows on the walls. Outside, she could hear her neighbours making the clanging and frying noises associated with breakfast.
Already, in the early sunlight, laundry flapped like joyful birds on the poles outside the windows. Like it or not, for the last 15 years, this had been home. She was suddenly struck by the smallness of the space, especially compared with the universe she had been in just a few hours ago. Could her whole life have passed in just these few hundred square feet? She did not know if she would ever see it again.
Before she got sentimental, Sofia locked the iron door and walked briskly to the escapod lobby. She arranged her face to be as impassive as possible. She was just another schoolgirl on her way to school in her school uniform. Nothing unusual, she thought. She hoped the netbox in the lobby was not monitoring her pulse, because she knew her heart was racing.
The doors opened and she stepped inside. There were already five people in it, and a couple of them shuffled aside politely to accommodate her bulging school bag. As the escapod plunged towards the MRT station, she felt like her old life was being sucked away, that she was being swallowed by a blind, endless gullet, from which there was no return.
She feared the Voids, but she feared the ISD more. She didn’t even want to think about what they might do to her.
She got to the MRT station without incident. The bullet train pulled into the station silently. “Ang Mo Kio,” said the faceless woman’s voice. Novena, thought Sofia. I want to find out how to get to Novena. She briefly considered asking the control station auntie, but she decided against it. She didn’t want to do anything that would attract attention.
Sofia decided to take the train to Newton. She had the vague notion that Novena was somewhere near Newton. Surely she would be able to find her way to a tunnel or burrow leading to the Voids from there. Someone there would know.
As the train pulled out of Bishan MRT, she sensed a few curious glances thrown her way. Yes, she had not got out like the other girls in RGS uniforms. She tried to look normal.
Then the pop-ads started, and for once she was thankful for them—there was a new one today featuring a long-dead comedian flouncing around in a curly wig, which seemed to entertain everyone.
She just hoped with all her might that no one had taken her picture to send to her school or one of the media outlets as a possible truant. Outside, block after block whizzed by, the trees and gardens blurring into a green stripe, the sun filtering through the buildings like venetian blinds.
Somehow, despite the terrible danger she was in, Sofia’s mind kept flickering back to school. She imagined her classmates—it was just about half past eight—shuffling in their white school shoes to her classroom, shoulders pulling up backpacks, tromping over the cow grass that would wet their socks with dew. What wouldn’t she give to be there with them!
To be free—she thought suddenly. Free to not care, free from the responsibility of anything more serious than whether you got an A on your next assignment, or whether someone in your project work group was slacking off. Or whether Jessica Lee, whom she suddenly realised she didn’t even hate any more, was ignoring you or inviting you to her table this week.
It was surreal, to think that she may never see them again. She was suddenly struck by the thought that she could still, conceivably, get off the train and catch the next one in the other direction. Go to school, pretend everything was fine, that her mother had merely gone to one of those conferences overseas. Perhaps it was not too late?
The netboxes flickered to life again as the doors shut at Braddell MRT.
BIOPOLIS SCIENTIST ARRESTED
The words floated above the commuters’ heads like a three-dimensional ticker. Her mother’s head appeared below them, rotating like a barber’s pole. Her features were stern, grimacing and somehow, sheep-like. The people around her stirred a little, but most kept their eyes carefully averted.
Sofia held her breath and tried to still her heart from pounding too loudly. Her mother was under arrest! No, there was no going back from here. This was her life now, the life of a fugitive. How long could Ma hold out? It wouldn’t take them long to figure out Sofia was involved. They just needed to have arrested Uncle Kirk—a lump reached her throat. Uncle Kirk! Had they already arrested him as well? Or would she be able to meet him at the Changi docks?
At last, the train pulled into Newton. The station doors opened silently for her, as her netbox beeped for what was possibly the last time, deducting her final fare. Here goes, she thought. She would have to find one of the burrows. She was going into the Voids.
As she stepped outside the station, she already felt the stares burn into her. She wasn’t just imagining it, was she? Dark-skinned construction workers eyed her as she stepped past the old people sitting on the ground. She hadn’t realised just how conspicuous she would be, in her pristine school uniform, with its pure white shirt and neatly pressed pleats—she had thought only of getting out of the flat unnoticed. She would have to find a place to change—but where?
“Tissue paper, tissue paper… Miss!” A little boy trotted up to her hopefully, holding out ten conjoined packets of tissue paper. Normally Sofia would have walked straight by without answering or even glancing at him, but now she thought better of it. She took a packet and placed a small coin in his hand.
“Do you know where Novena is?” she asked.
The boy beamed, his smudgy face lighting up. “Burrow over dere. Den the right lane track. You want Novena the old MRT or Novena the church?”
“Novena the church.”
“Den you must go left after dat.”
“Thank you,” said Sofia gratefully.
Just then a fat old woman walked up to her. “Ah Boy! Come here!” she shouted. The little boy gave Sofia a scared look as the woman grabbed his shoulder and whisked him away. “Don’t talk to that kind,” she said within earshot.
Sofia walked towards the burrow, even more conscious of her appearance. She felt exposed—her clean face, her neat ponytail, her white school socks and school shoes, already slightly muddied by the thick grime on the ground, looked extremely out of place here.
She gulped. It looked deep, very deep, and very dark. A few young men stood at the entrance, their thighs tattooed with menacing dragons. She wondered if they would make her pay a toll to use the burrow. Even worse, she wondered if they would grope her as she passed. Her face flushed at the thought. An old woman squeezing past her coughed and spewed a globule of spit at her feet. Sofia hurried towards the hole.
The burrow was really nothing more than a huge hole that led to a narrow tunnel, reinforced by concrete. Once upon a time, before her parents were born, it had been some sort of old MRT station—the kind that went under instead of over the ground.
That was before the floods had wiped them out and the darkmould had cleared them of anyone even halfway respectable. Now only the poor, the criminal and the old even used it as a path, risking life and limb to get to their destinations, for the roofs were constantly caving in. No human being would want to go anywhere near them, thought Sofia.
She walked briskly to
wards the entrance, giving the gangsters a wide berth. She felt their eyes glued on her. Sofia’s cheeks coloured. She ignored them, held her head high and strode on. To her relief, they lost interest almost immediately.
The tunnel was crowded, the sides crammed high with newspapers and cardboard boxes. A fire hazard, thought Sofia, her mind instantly connecting the sight to the news articles from the outlets about repatriation. But when she looked closely, she saw there were humans in the piles. My God, Sofia thought, do people actually live here?
But they must, she realised. Most of the ground floor was flooded half the time, the sea threatening to reclaim the granite it had thrown up so long ago. It was lapping at the foundations even here—the floor was damp and slippery with algae or mould. The sea was reclaiming the land slowly but surely, which was why they had to build so high in the Midlevels, and why the truly rich lived in hovering homes in the Canopies.
Within the flimsy zinc sheets and walls of cardboard she saw a whole race of scuttling creatures, some blatant and curious, some studiously inscrutable, all watching her as she passed. Squeezing past two shoddy little huts, she accidentally tripped over a sack of rice. Its contents spilled to the floor, and, to her horror, what seemed like hundreds of cockroaches scuttled out.
A voice swore in dialect from inside the shack, as the precious rice skittered across the floor. A skinny man, a bulbous vein pulsing in his neck, emerged from the shack, his white singlet stained with sweat. In his hand he held a huge chopper, and his face was full of fury.
Sofia turned and ran. A dog started barking, raising an entire chorus that echoed through the walls. She ran like she had never run before, her legs and lungs aching, but she did not dare to stop or even glance behind her. She cleared small piles of sackcloth and scattered broods of chickens, running and running until she realised she was alone again.
After what felt like an hour, she stopped, sinking to the floor. There was no one here. She was safe. Or was she? The corridor, narrow and dirty, was distinguished by an ancient set of rails in the ground. It was completely empty. She looked around her, frightened. The black walls seemed to breathe at her, and a rank smell hung in the air.