Sofia and the Utopia Machine

by Judith Huang

  Just a few paces ago she had not been able to see it, so flat was the land on either side. But now she saw it was enormous, bigger than the shadow of a mountain. She stared hard at the liquid, which seemed a dark, viscous green. She reached her hand towards it—

  “Don’t!” Milton hissed, his whiskers twitching as he grimaced.

  The liquid wrapped itself around her hand. It was like a hand itself, holding hers. It looked the way mercury did when it had fallen all over the lab floor when she broke a thermometer—only this stuff was alive. She shook her hand violently, but the rubbery substance clung on so tightly that it was making her hand tingle. She beat her hand against the ground. Milton snarled and pounced upon it, his body a streak of orange lightning. His teeth sank into her hand and fresh blood gushed out of the wound. Sofia screamed as the green stuff scrambled towards the red spout, wriggling like a worm. In two seconds, the blood was gone, and the liquid lay placid once more, a tiny puddle of stars.

  Sofia clutched her hand. Milton had wounded her wrist, but missed her artery. Her head was spinning with pain as she yelled up at the innumerable stars. The land was so flat she heard no echo, but instantly it was alive with something else—something terrible. It was like being in a velvet box, a soundproofed room.

  For several seconds, everything was absolutely still. Then the lake seemed to spread, rippling from the centre, and all of a sudden it was as wide as a sea. To her horror, the dusty red ground at her feet was being swallowed up by the tide, the green liquid gliding supernaturally towards her. Something was rising from its depths—or perhaps, the lake itself, so flat before, became Depth—dark emerald green, its back plaited with shivering stars.

  As she looked, something stirred in the lake. Then, without warning, the surface broke. It was like watching a mountain emerging from the lava. It was stirring, and the liquid boiled. This was no shark, no whale, but something far more ancient, more primeval, and its advance shook the very firmament.

  Sofia scrambled onto Milton’s back as quickly as she could, gritting her teeth against the pain. Milton wasted no time, his great powerful paws eating up the ground as he ran for their lives.

  Sofia hid her face in his fur, not daring to look behind her. But even then the sudden streak of light flashed over her eyelids as it tore the sky in two. The fire lit up the entire land, and suddenly the dull red turned to livid orange. Her eyelids flitted open instinctively, and for a moment, she thought the earth had caught fire. But she was staring straight into the eye of the dawn—a yellow eye as wide as a river, its pupil tall as a skyscraper.

  The earth vibrated with a long, lonely sound. The rocks jiggled on the ground, and everything turned black.

  *

  There was something pulsing near her. For a moment, she thought she was home, snug in her bed, but then the damp smell, like the inside of a cave, rose to her nostrils, and she knew she was still terribly, terribly far away.

  She tried to open her eyes, but couldn’t. Wake up, she thought fiercely to herself. You have to wake up! Part of her didn’t want to. Part of her wanted to simply sleep forever, certain that when she woke up properly, she would be home. Milton! Was it Milton? Her eyes flew open.

  For a moment, Sofia thought she had gone blind. But then she realised she was in a place so dark she could not even make out the outline of things. She tried to move her head to look around, but she couldn’t. Panic seized her heart.

  “Milton?” she whispered. Her voice sounded oddly muffled. She tried again, this time raising her voice. “Milton!”

  “Ah, you wake,” said a voice.

  “What…Who are you?” Sofia tried looking around again, but her neck was still paralysed. “What have you done to us?”

  “There was only ever one of you,” said the voice. It seemed to be emanating from the dark, or the room, or the cave, whatever it was that held her.

  “Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”

  “My child, of course you see me. You are looking at me right now.”

  “I’m not a child,” said Sofia indignantly, momentarily forgetting her fear. “And I can’t see you. Let me go!”

  Somehow, the dark became even darker. “You are only seeing what was always there.”

  “Okay, enough already. Let me go! What have you done to Milton?”

  “That black and orange beast? It was only a figment of your imagination.”

  “N-no he isn’t! I was with him before—before I blacked out. What is this place? Who are you? What happened to the monster?”

  “There are no monsters,” said the dark.

  Fear gripped her heart again. There was something silky to the voice, something sinister. It was the voice of someone with something to hide.

  “You’re lying,” said Sofia. “I saw the eye. It was right behind us, on the edge of the green lake.”

  “The green lake that expanded like a sea? The green lake shivering with stars?”

  “Yes! The green lake!”

  “There is no such lake. You are mistaken, my child,” said the silky voice, in a manner that would have been soothing if Sofia hadn’t been seething. Without her knowing it, Sofia’s eyes filled with tears of frustration.

  “You have to let me go! The world is in danger! I don’t know who you are, or what you think you’re doing holding me here, but if I don’t do something about it, you and everything else here will die!”

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” the voice said. “My dear girl, I see they have truly got you bad…”

  “What? Who are they? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a disease, my dear. A terrible, terrible disease. I don’t know why, but it seems to infect your species quite easily. A genetic defect, perhaps. A sort of collective delusion, but quite easy to cure.”

  “What do you mean? I’m not sick,” said Sofia, feeling more and more troubled.

  “It’s a form of madness, my dear. Pardon my bluntness. But there is no world for you to save. The fate of the world does not rest on your shoulders. The tiger, the lake, they are all products of your overactive imagination. A little rest, a little medicine should take care of all that. You will be back to normal in no time.”

  Sofia kept quiet. There had been something awfully familiar about the voice from the start, but with this last speech, she felt like she could almost place it—it sounded like someone she had met before, had met somewhere in what she now thought of as her old life. Was she mad? Was she imagining things? Was she, after all, snug in her own bed this whole time, afflicted by some terrible disease?

  “So you still don’t know,” said the voice, almost conversationally, while the questions swirled in her throbbing head.

  “Know what?”

  “About the real reason why your father left.”

  “My father was a good man!” shouted Sofia. She was really, really angry now. “And anyway, what has he got to do with any of this? I’m not letting you get into my head, not ever! Do you understand?”

  “Not strictly accurate,” said the Lotan in an infuriatingly calm voice. “Don’t you want to know why he left? It was because of the experiment. Specifically, the experiment with you.”

  “What experiment? What are you talking about?”

  “With your DNA. Your mother, Clara, worked in Biopolis, right?”

  “Yes, I mean, she used to. I don’t know what’s happened to her now,” said Sofia sourly.

  “Why, Sofia, do you think you could access the Utopia Machine when no one else could?”

  “I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”

  “Clara modified your genes. If you don’t believe me, have a look…”

  Sofia wanted to shut her eyes but found she couldn’t. The images were somehow being beamed straight into her consciousness. An old, strange holo appeared before her. There were two people. With a start, she recognised a much younger Clara and herself, a child of six or seven, in a cold blue room. The picture was patchy—holos were new technology in those days—but it wa
s clearly a laboratory. It was her mother’s lab—newer, more impressively outfitted, gleaming on every surface with an antiseptic feel.

  The young Sofia was stretched out on the operating table. She was crying. Clara was biting her lower lip as she lowered some kind of helmet over Sofia’s head. She was wearing a white lab coat and her expression was unreadable. Sofia watched her young mother restrain her younger self, slotting the table into what looked like a very small pod, some kind of medical scanner. The little girl’s arms and legs were restrained—Sofia was trying to kick free of them, to no avail.

  Then, just before the pod was sealed completely, Clara injected something into the little girl’s foot, and she stopped kicking, falling completely still.

  The display froze, and the image melted away. A new holo of a double helix appeared—her DNA. It spiralled before her like a magical snake.

  “You see, you were part of Batch 1.0, the first generation of the Utopia Machine Republic, slated to be the first of the new citizens able to operate the Utopia Machine. And that, my dear, is why the glyph opened for you and no one else.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Sofia. “I don’t remember any of this.”

  “You were designed to operate the Utopia Machine, Sofia. You were one of the children designated to populate the new world, the escape pod for the people who commissioned the new reality, to activate the machine. And the proof of it is, that you did… The problem,” continued the Lotan, “is that there were…shall we say…bugs in your programming…”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Tears were streaming, unbidden, down Sofia’s face. Was this the reason she had felt so different from everyone else all her life? Was this the rational, scientific, accurate explanation for all the madness, all the visions, all the dreams? For all that teasing in the schoolyard? Had Jessica Lee, after all, known something about herself that she hadn’t?

  “Tell me, Sofia, do you believe in God?”

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, it is an interesting question. Throughout the history of humanity, ever since the rise of consciousness, your species has had…a unique collective delusion. It is most fascinating. It is the assumption—not even an induction, mind you, but an assumption—that your little lives are watched by something larger than yourselves.”

  “And what does that have to do with the bug?”

  The Lotan laughed—a booming sound that resounded and washed over her, raising the goose bumps on her skin. “My dear girl, that is the bug! You have put your finger on it! That is the question, is it not? Whether your lives are rounded with a little sleep?”

  “Stop quoting Shakespeare. It doesn’t make it any clearer what you’re trying to say,” said Sofia, trying bravado to hide the creeping fear that was enveloping her.

  “Very well. God is the bug. The Cosmic Juggler, which has no audience. The Man behind the Curtain. The Great Whale. The Leviathan Himself. The playmate of the Lotan—the invisible man who supposedly has me by a fishhook and a flimsy covenant. He’s a charlatan, a chimera. He doesn’t exist. He’s dead. He was probably never alive in the first place.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “You were designed for superior intuitive function. Or spirituality, if you prefer. The problem with increased intuition is that it also breeds delusions. Delusions, for example, of saving the world, or thinking that you are the only one who can do it, or that the world revolves around you, of thinking you are somehow chosen, or special.

  “Sofia Tan Rui Fang, you are not special. You are one of hundreds of modified citizens, one of thousands of experimental subjects in this programme, one of the lucky ones that survived the procedure intact, I suppose. But not without certain negative externalities. Your programme was buggy. Your mother made you, without the permission of your father. That is why he left. He left her because of you.”

  Sofia felt like a ship had sunk in her heart. Her every fibre resisted the idea, yet it all made so much sense—the endless rumours, the cruelty of the other girls at school, her mother’s cold love, her weird, fantastic dreams, and above all, that deep vein of madness and crazed loneliness she knew raged in her own soul. It all seemed to make sense with this explanation, like a baying lamb finding, at last, its way to slaughter. It just made so much sense…

  She had been manufactured, and not even that well. She was damaged goods, a factory reject. There was no meaning to her dreams, her rebellion, her bravery or her life. She

  was insignificant.

  All was preordained, predetermined in some now-forgotten childhood, by forces outside her understanding and control, forces scientific and economic and logical and cold. She was the product of some failed experiment. It didn’t matter now what happened to her. There was no point. What did it matter if she escaped the clutches of the government? She could never escape the clutches of her damaged DNA.

  Rage boiled in her at her mother, her father. At Clara for doing this to her, at Peter for leaving. At both of them for being involved in this secret project in the first place, in being involved in using her as a test subject!

  Defeated, she let go of all the responsibility and it fell from her like the weight of the world from her shoulders. The lightness felt strangely comforting. She was responsible for no one, now…not even herself.

  Chapter 24: The Inquisitor

  The lamp winked on, flickering a couple of seconds before beaming a strong light in Clara’s face.

  “Ah yes,” said the Inquisitor, casually picking up from their previous session. “That, you see, is precisely the problem for people like you. For people like us.” He paused laconically. Clara couldn’t feel her limbs. She wasn’t sure if she was facing up or hanging down—the only clue was the weird rush of blood to her temples and the way the hairs on her head were standing. But she had already grown used to being unsure which way was up, and which down…

  “Surely you realise that we are allies. That we are in fact considering the very same things?” The voice seemed to recede further into the darkness.

  “The problem for us,” said the Inquisitor, “is that we are governed by two equal and opposite, and often complementary forces. Care to make a guess?”

  Clara wanted to make a sharp retort—she wasn’t sure what about. Perhaps the stupid use of mixed metaphors? Then she found she could not open her mouth.

  “Not very bright, are we? Well, I am talking about Fear and Love. Why? Well, we love our people—of course we do! These are our parents, these are our grandparents, our children, our grandchildren. These are our family, our friends. This is what makes this place home, if you will. But we also fear them. Tell me, Clara—what happens when the farmers seize control? What happens after the glorious triumph of your revolution? What happens when your little agenda topples the carefully constructed Prism of society?”

  Clara squinted at the sudden increase in light intensity, unsure if a reply was required of her. In any case her mouth felt sticky, like it were being held shut by some gooey substance. She kept silent. The man continued.

  “I can tell you the answer to that, my dear girl. We happen—if you are lucky. If you are very, very fortunate, you get good governance, a growing economy, a comfortable middle class. You even get sophistication, an international community that is envied and copied in other parts of the world. You get the gorgeous arches of the Canopies, linking the most advanced and sophisticated of hovercraft residences on the planet.” His voice had gone syrupy, rapturous. But then it snapped back into meanness.

  “What happens if you are unlucky? Who do you think will be first against the wall? Do you think the farmers will spare you and stop at just a reasonable redistribution of wealth? Do you think the religious extremists will simply be converted by your complex journalism and pedigreed reasoning? What happens after the revolution?”

  “We are the children of the revolution, Clara, you and I. We are its heirs. The revolution is over. It is already accomplished
. What you are allying yourself with is the last dregs of an ancient regime, one faded beyond living memory. We fought for this. We fought the British for self-rule, for independence, for freedom. And we got it. There is nothing more to do. And of those who have seen our city, our soaring towers, our beautiful canopies—who can deny it? It is finished, it is accomplished. We are the solution, Clara.”

  Clara didn’t want the man to see her face. She opened her mouth as the weird gooey resistance melted away. “I believe all these things, sir. They are not new to me. I have long supported the Party and I’m loyal to the State. I didn’t take the console. I didn’t activate the Utopia Machine. Your information must have been wrong.”

  A heavy hand hit her.

  The slap rang out in the empty room. Tears smarted in the back of her eyes, but Clara blinked them back rapidly, determined to be reasonable.

  “We have irrefutable proof that it was you who accessed the machine,” the Inquisitor continued, as calmly as before. “It is no use denying it. I am merely trying to help you, Madam Tan.”

  “And I wish to assist you in any way possible. But I didn’t activate the machine.”

  This time, the blows rained on her stomach and legs. It was almost a relief to feel them again, emerging suddenly from the numbness. The wind was knocked out of her. She still could not see her attackers, if indeed there were more than one.

  “Where is the console?” the Inquisitor barked from another corner, his voice different now.

  Clara instinctively turned towards him, and again was hit full on in the face by something heavy.

  “I don’t know! I don’t have it!”

  A volley of blows hit her again.

  “You’re lying,” said the Inquisitor. “It was your DNA that accessed the laboratory. Your husband is in our custody. You had every motive and opportunity to sabotage the project. We have had our eye on you, Clara Tan.”

  “I did not!” screamed Clara, galvanised by the mention of Peter. “I did not! I haven’t seen my husband in seven years! I have no idea where he is!” she sobbed.