by Judith Huang
“Pa…?” Sofia’s voice was uncertain. She wanted more than anything to dive straight into his arms, but she also felt deeply shy. He was, after all, a man she couldn’t remember seeing before. A stranger.
*
“Sofia? Is that you?” Peter could hardly believe his eyes and jumped to his feet in surprise. He had been alone in his cell until a moment ago, and now, a young lady stood in front of him who looked remarkably like Clara, although she had his own nose. She was a lot taller than he had imagined.
This is my daughter, he thought. It was a strange thought, because of course he had a daughter. It was just that he was so used to thinking of his daughter as a concept, as somebody to write letters to or to dream about, that to have a real-life daughter in front of him was a bit of a shock. He walked towards her and held out his arms awkwardly.
To Sofia, his voice sounded exactly the same as Milton’s—that low baritone that had purred in her ear. She dived into his arms.
It was a curious sensation, bone against bone and flesh against flesh. Sofia felt her glasses crush up against his chest. But it felt so good, so right, and a wave of warmth rushed into her chest.
All those unanswered questions, all the times that she had been teased about being made in Biopolis, about having no father—this made up for all of that. He was here, he was her dad; he was real. And it hadn’t been merely her imagination that Milton would bring her to him.
“Did you send the dreams?” She knew he must have, and that they must have meant something. That the Lotan had really been wrong; she was not delusional.
“I sent you Milton…” he said.
“I knew it… The tiger has your voice.”
“No time for that, though. Can you get me out of here? Quick, before they see you…” said Peter, releasing her from his grasp.
“Yeah. I’m here to rescue you. Where are we?”
“Whitley Detention Centre. They’ve been keeping me here the last seven years.”
Sofia grabbed her father’s hand, picked up the golden cube that had fallen onto the floor of the cell and guided the prism into its prism-shaped hole. The two of them entered the Prism antechamber and disappeared from the prison cell.
Standing before vast chandelier and table, Sofia couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride at showing her father how she had figured out how to operate it. She grasped the glyph, arranging its strokes and turning it like a knob.
“You have to meet Milton!” said Sofia, her voice an octave higher from excitement. Then she began to sing.
The tiger shimmered into existence before them as they entered the new world. They were standing on a clearing in the middle of a forest.
Sofia turned to her father, her face shining.
Peter looked at her, at this amazing girl with her amazing tiger next to her. She was filled with some kind of inner light, as though everything were different. And of course everything was different—he was in a new world. He closed his eyes in appreciation of the first air of freedom he had breathed for seven years. The forest was filled with birdsong and the sound of crickets. The sky was a pale pink. A gentle breeze lifted the strands of his thinning hair. He broke into a smile. Of course, it was a new world and an old world—an ancient world that was strange and familiar all at once. Because, after all, it was his world as much as it was Sofia’s.
The beast was magnificent and everything he had imagined. It was Blakean in its golden glory. Its muscles shimmered under its bright coat, and the girl and the tiger seemed one, they communicated with such ease.
The cell had melted completely into a world, and he hadn’t seen such a vast expanse in years. He took his little girl in his arms again, hardly believing that this was his own flesh and blood.
Sofia clutched his back tightly. Her heart was filled with happiness.
They stood like that for a long time.
“Where is your mother?”
“I don’t know,” said Sofia. “I’ve been on the run ever since I activated the Machine. I didn’t get to see her before I left our flat to run into the Voids.”
“I need to see her,” said her father.
“The trouble is, how are we going to get back to Father Lang and Uncle Kirk?”
“Kirk is with you? And who is Father Lang?”
“A Catholic priest I got to know along the way,” said Sofia.
“Can you take me to the engine of the world?” asked Peter.
“The room at the bottom of the well? I had to defeat the Lotan to get to it. I’m not sure if I can go there again this time,” said Sofia, furrowing her brow. Although they had escaped into the new world, it was only a matter of time before the guards realised Peter had disappeared from his cell, and then they would find the golden cube on the floor. Peter and her would be as good as trapped, and both they and the Utopia Machine would be in the hands of the government. She needed to think fast.
“Where is it?” asked Peter.
“The engine…that sphere thing, on the pedestal, it’s at the bottom of the well. There’s some kind of room down there.”
“A room at the bottom of a well…” muttered Peter, amazed. “Can you lower yourself down to it through the well?”
“Maybe,” said Sofia. “Milton?”
“Yes?” growled the tiger.
“Can you take us to the well? Maybe we’ll be able to move the world again. And bring the cube back to Pulau Ubin.”
“That’s simple—we just need to reverse the coordinates that we used to jump before,” said the tiger.
Sofia climbed onto the tiger’s back, and Peter followed her gingerly. The tiger was large enough for both to sit comfortably astride him, although it took Peter some time to get used to the strange sensation of riding an animal and to figure out how to hold on to his muscular back. And then they were off, the grass flying beneath them as the tiger took them to the well once again.
The sun of that world was rising. Orange and golden streaks lit up the purple sky scattered with thin scalloped clouds, and a fresh breeze lifted her hair. What a beautiful place this is, thought Sofia. She felt so protective of it. It was not easy, but with the help of her friends, and now, her father, she would keep it safe.
At the well, they looked down into the dark drop filled with stars.
The thought of lowering herself down into those depths scared her, but she had been in the round room before, and she knew it was there. She just had to believe that it was there, no matter how hard it was to fathom that there was a space beneath the water that she could breathe in.
Slowly Peter lowered Sofia into the well. As the walls of the well rose up before her, Sofia stared up at the light above. As she went down into the depths, the light receded into a tiny pinprick of white. Finally, there was a splash as the bottom of the bucket hit the water. She took a deep breath and held it, shutting her eyes as the bucket continued to descend.
She felt the water caress her face and her hair float above her. After a long time, when she could not hold it any more, she finally took another breath, and found that she could breathe just fine. She let out a sigh of relief and opened her eyes.
Sure enough, she was back in the room beneath the well, and there before her was the sphere on the pedestal. This time, the words flashed
RETURN TO PREVIOUS COORDINATES?
The ticker tape of the words cast a purple light on her face and shadows on the walls of the circular room.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice came out muffled as before, as though passing through a viscous substance.
The stars in the constellations surrounding her glowed, and once again she felt breathless, as though she were being squeezed. The world was all in a whirl. She felt it compress around her, constricting her chest and making her nauseous.
She could not breathe—she was gasping, dying. It was all a mistake! She was still in the cave with the Lotan, trapped. Or perhaps she was in her bed back home, and it was all a dream, a nightmare—her father was not above her looking down in the well…
<
br /> And then she could breathe freely again. Sofia opened her eyes. She was still in the room at the bottom of the well.
JUMP SUCCESSFUL, declared the sphere, which transformed back into its serene, round purple self again. The liquid in the room seemed to ripple slightly.
“Milton,” she said weakly, still recovering from the jump.
The golden tiger appeared before her. “I need to get back to the forest, and bring my dad with me,” she said. “Tell him to throw something into the well so we can travel back to my world.”
The tiger nodded and disappeared again, to relay the message to Peter. Moments later, a small round stone plopped into the room, descending slowly through the liquid.
Sofia watched as ripples bloomed around it, forming a beautiful pattern that was etched out in sparkling lines. The stone descended towards the sphere.
When they made contact, the sphere suddenly consumed it like a living creature, and a projection of the Prism antechamber grew out of it, surrounding Sofia and the round room.
So this was how the well worked, thought Sofia,. When she opened her eyes, she was back in the forest of Pulau Ubin, lying on damp fallen leaves as droplets of rain landed on her cheeks, and her father was lying beside her.
Chapter 27: The Mari Kita
Rain was falling through the forest intermittently. The canopy broke its fall, so only some water reached the ground. It wasn’t heavy rain, like the monsoon rains that beat down on the rooftops at the end of the year. Kirk looked up into the trees and felt a sprinkling of droplets fall on his face.
Sofia had been gone for more than a day now.
Kirk was actually surprised the ISD hadn’t yet tracked him and Sofia down to Pulau Ubin. Although the island was pretty much a wasteland, the authorities maintained a regular patrol of the waters near it, though of course they dared not get too close because of the strange phenomena that had been reported in the waters surrounding the island. He fervently hoped that what he had heard about his former colleagues was true, since he hoped to contact them—they were the reason why he had brought Sofia to Pulau Ubin in the first place.
Just then, Sofia suddenly appeared from behind the trees. “Uncle Kirk!” she cried.
“Sofia! And…Peter?”
Kirk could barely believe his eyes. The man who was before him, gaunt and greying, looked like Peter Tan, but he had aged so much in the last seven years it was painful to see. He noticed the grey streaks in his fringe and how he was skinnier than ever. Peter’s white shirt hung off his bones, and his flesh bore the marks of torture. Overcoming his shock, the American stepped forward to embrace his old friend.
“Peter Tan! It’s so good to see you! Where have you been all this time?”
“They locked me up,” said Peter simply. “I’ve been in Whitley Detention Centre for the last seven years. I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.”
“How did Sofia break you out?”
“Built-in mechanism in the Utopia Machine,” said Peter. “The engine of the world has a homing function that allowed the cube to be teleported to my location. I’ll bet you didn’t even notice it disappear and reappear. I embedded a chip inside myself so it would always be able to locate me.”
“And they never knew?”
“They never got it out of me,” said Peter happily.
“Damn. I never knew you had it in you to be a dissident,” said Kirk. “But now I see it. Anyway we’re all fugitives now…”
“This is Father Lang,” said Sofia, introducing the priest, who nodded at her father. “I met him in Novena, in the Voids. He’s been helping me.”
“Good to meet you,” said Father Lang, reaching to shake Peter’s hand.
“Where’s Clara?” asked Peter.
“You know, that was what I was worrying about before you guys appeared. I’m afraid the ISD must have got to her. It’s quite possible she is being held where you were. We need to join up with the group that calls themselves the Mari Kita,” said Kirk. “There have always been rumours that those people who left Biopolis just after you stopped the Utopia Machine from working set up here. We just have to find them.”
“Was that around the time they arrested me?” asked Peter.
“Yeah. A lot of scientists quit in solidarity with you then, and of course they had to leave the mainland. It was also around that time that people coincidentally started to believe Ubin was haunted, which was probably not a coincidence,” said Kirk.
“Did people really leave A*STAR because I disappeared?” asked Peter, looking pretty gratified.
“Yes, they did. You have no idea how mad A*STAR was with the whole lot of them, refusing to work on the Utopia Machine, thanks to you,” said Kirk. “You really left us with a huge mess,” he added.
“So they agreed it was an evil thing they had planned for the Machine…to make it an escape pod for the elite,” said Peter. “It was a matter of conscience for them, too. I didn’t force them to refuse. In fact, I didn’t even know about any of this.”
“Right. Well, it looks like they might be somewhere on the northern part of this island, now…”
They trekked and trekked, making their way through the forest on paths that might have been made by humans or animals. The undergrowth rustled beneath them and the chirping of crickets was all around, along with the other sounds of the rainforest.
Then they arrived at a tar-paved road, which seemed surprisingly well-maintained.
“Aha,” said Kirk. “I knew it wasn’t true that the island was uninhabited. That was probably just propaganda to stop people from coming here, not that many people spare a thought for the offshore islands these days, really.”
“And…what’s this?” added Kirk, holding his hand out in front of him like a mime, feeling an invisible barrier on the other side of the road.
“Look, Pete…do you think it’s what I think it is?”
Peter strode next to Kirk and placed his hand on the seemingly empty space in front of him.
“You’re right,” he said.
Sofia walked up next to them and placed her palm next to her father’s. It felt like she was being repelled by a force field. When Sofia looked closely, she found that there was something strange about the landscape immediately in front of her—it was an almost perfect mirror of the landscape behind her! The same trees grew on each side of the road, exact reflections of each other. She found it very eerie.
“Invisible mirror-shield,” said Kirk. “A good one, too. We can’t pass this point.”
Sofia picked up a stone from the ground and tossed it at the invisible barrier. It bounced off and lay at her feet, several centimetres away, sizzling slightly. Her mouth opened in surprise.
“Some very sophisticated defence mechanisms here,” said Peter, frowning. “And I think I know who might be responsible.”
He looked at Kirk and laughed.
“Leslie Sharma!” they said in unison.
“Who’s that?” asked Father Lang, curiously.
“Oh, he was a brilliant ex-colleague of mine at A*STAR,” said Peter. “Physicist. He was working with nano materials last time I was still working there, but looks like his hobby of force-field-building has yielded some success too. He was part of the team working on the Utopia Machine back then. I can’t believe he’s here!”
“How can you be so sure?” interjected Sofia. She wasn’t as thrilled as they seemed to be to find their way forward blocked by an invisible shield that seemed to fry things thrown at it.
“No one else could have been able to set up a mirror-shield like this,” said Peter. “At least, not one as perfect as this one seems to be.”
“Leslie! Leslie Sharma!” yelled Kirk. No one answered. “Leslie? LESLIE!” he bellowed.
“Well, we can’t go on like this,” said Peter.
Just then, a head emerged from the forest, seeming to float above the ground, completely detached from any body. Sofia was so startled she screamed.
It was the head of a
handsome teenage boy.
“Dr Peter Tan?” asked the head.
“Yes, and you are?” asked Peter.
A torso followed the head of a lanky boy. Then came one leg, clad in brown shorts, then another, emerging from the nothingness behind the barrier.
“My father is Leslie Sharma,” said the boy. “And you’re right, he built the mirror-shield. I’ve heard about you from my father and the others. You’re a hero to us! My name is Rowan Sharma. Who’re these people with you?”
“This is my daughter Sofia,” said Peter. “And this is Kirk.”
“Dr Kirk Goetz?” asked Rowan. “I’ve heard of you too. You’re still in Singapore?”
“Yeah,” said Kirk. “Though not for much longer…not on the mainland, anyway. Pete’s been in jail the last seven years, and the only reason I’m not is that I managed to get away before they caught me. I thought your father and his friends might still be on Ubin, and that’s why we’re here.”
“This is Father Lang,” said Peter, gesturing towards the priest. “He’s helped us a lot to get over here.”
“And you’re all on the run?”
“Well, everyone except me, I suppose,” said Father Lang. “I’ve got to get back to my flock, actually. I live in the Voids,” he said.
“Ah, I see,” said Rowan. “Well, you’d better come back with me to HQ. That way everyone can welcome you to the Mari Kita. That’s what we call our community here on Ubin.” He took out a spherical device that produced holos like a netbox and after he had swiped through a few holos, a door slid open in the mirror-shield from the ground to about a man’s height, revealing the real path behind.
“There are…five of us,” counted Rowan. “Might as well call the hover boat to get us there more quickly,” he said. “You’re lucky I happened to be patrolling this portion of the border and overheard your conversation or you might have never got past the mirror-shield.” He swiped through some holos generated by his blue sphere again.
After about 15 minutes, what appeared to be a sky-blue boat, but hovering in the air, whooshed towards them. It was floating above the tree line, so Sofia could only see its bottom. It drifted down slowly and stopped just before landing on the ground.