Sofia and the Utopia Machine

by Judith Huang

  “Hey.” Peter emerged from the dark of the coconut trees lining the beach.

  “Pa,” said Sofia.

  Rowan excused himself, seeing that the father and daughter could use some time alone.

  After a few moments of companionable silence watching the sky, the sea and the island before them, Sofia piped up.

  “Ma was arrested, too,” she said. “I wasn’t able to contact her after I removed my netbox. But then, I wasn’t able to contact her before I removed it, too. Do you know where she might be held? She didn’t reply to any of my messages.”

  Peter was silent.

  Sofia still hadn’t had a chance to really talk to her dad about what had gone on for the seven years he had been missing. But Peter had been feeding her a slow drip of information about the physical and psychological torture that had been inflicted on him by the ISD. She had used what snatches of time she had between navigating Pulau Ubin to read his letters. She had been sickened by the accounts of his time in jail, and although at times it was still awkward getting to know this man who had been all-important yet so absent from her life, she felt she understood him somewhat more than she had now that she had read his words.

  “Do you think she might be at Whitley Detention Centre too?” asked Sofia.

  “Yes, but I didn’t see her. And I don’t know which cell they are holding her in if she’s in there.”

  “We should have broken her out while I got the machine to teleport me to you…” Sofia trailed off, not looking at her dad.

  “There was no way you could have known,” said Peter. “It’s not your fault.”

  “We have to go back for her. Who knows what they’re doing to her now?”

  “We will,” said Peter. “Now we have met Leslie and the Mari Kita, we have more resources. It won’t be easy, though—the place is top-level security and will be hard to break into. And the homing device on the machine won’t work this time, since the machine isn’t linked to her netbox.”

  “We have to go back for her.”

  “We will,” said Peter. He put an arm around Sofia, whose mouth was set in a firm line. They watched the city as it twinkled in the distance before them like a mirage, like a dream that they still couldn’t wake up from. The ordeal was not over yet, but at least they now had each other.

  From here, the Midlevels looked like beads of light strung on strings, and the Canopies sparkled with thousands of points of light, spreading like glowing jellyfish over the island. A pang of sorrow ran through Sofia, making her shudder involuntarily, as she thought of her home in the Ang Mo Kio Midlevels, now home no more. She thought of her mother. Perhaps, with these new friends, they stood a chance against the government. At least a chance to get her mother out of that terrible place. She had to believe it—she had to. As she stared at the city she had left behind, she thought, no matter what she had gone through the past few days, despite everything her country had put her through, it was still unbelievably beautiful.

  Part 4

  Chapter 29: In the Beginning

  In the beginning, there was darkness. It was darkness like nothing you had ever known or felt. It was darkness so absolute, it was like nothingness had swallowed everything, and turned it inside out.

  Within this darkness was the Sky, whom the first people talked to in their sleep. In the dense darkness of their unconsciousness, the people would hear the voice of the Sky whispering many secret things to them. She told them things about who they were, what the orbs were and what they were meant to be. It whispered what it all meant.

  All the first people heard the voice of the Sky, but only some brought the memory of this voice out of their sleep and into their waking hours. The ones who remembered these whispers were called Rememberers and were revered as keepers of these first secrets.

  But for now, everyone slumbered.

  It is said that one day, the Sky opened her eyes, and that day the world was flooded by an intense and beautiful Fragrance—the Fragrance of Outside. No one had known until then that they had been Inside, but this brightness, this beautiful scent, told them of Outside.

  The first people were astonished at this Fragrance. “Where does it come from?” they asked. “If it is truly from Outside, an emanation which we cannot be the source of, does this mean we are not alone?”

  Soon, expeditions were sent to investigate the Source of the scent, which they decided had to be linked to the Sky, for even though they had not heard the whispers since the Fragrance came, they assumed that they came from the same essential goodness.

  “Perhaps,” said the learned among the first people, “it is a different manifestation of the same Thing. Or Person.”

  And so the first people held their first council, where they chose three of their wisest and bravest to be the Expeditors, their representatives to the Sky. “Take yourselves to her, along with these gifts,” said the council, “as a tribute to the Emanation, for it is a thing of beauty and awe.”

  And so, summoning all their strength, and all their wisdom and technology, the first three went on their way to find the Source of the Fragrance, certain that they would find their beloved Sky.

  At around this time, the first people invented perfume with the intention of presenting it as a gift to the Fragrance when the Expeditors found her. Somehow they understood that this would be the best way to communicate with the Source, or the Voice, or the Sky (by now it had acquired many names). Thus the earliest of perfumes were made as imitations of the Fragrance. Those who acquired especial skill were Fragrancers, a title earned only after a lifetime of contemplation and experimentation.

  They scoured the seas and islands for the finest herbs and fruit and flowers, for the saltiest salts and the deepest ambers, and forged them together in dark, smoky fires in the depths of their woods. This was the first great age of the Fragrancers.

  One of the great Fragrancers of this age was said to have crushed and captured the scent of a single frond of fresh fern, bottling it like a butterfly in a molecule; another, the scent of the earth when it is struck by lightning. These and many rare smells were captured, from the depths of rare flowers to the scents that emanated from the land. But none came close to the Fragrance that filled the air, that was both green and gold, light as air and solemn as musk, redolent of youth as well as drunk with age—it seemed to speak in another language of a time before the first people, deeper than the darkness itself.

  Then, one dark day, even as the first people had reached the height of their civilisation, even as their bell jars reached the very moons themselves, the Fragrance left that world. The first peoples did not notice at first, for they had cloistered themselves in the bell jars, burning the incense of a thousand esoteric fragrances in these towering houses of glass, and rarely spent time in the open depths of space and darkness any more.

  The first expedition had yielded no results, and the Expeditors disappeared without a trace—some said they were transported to beyond Outside, but many feared that they had died. The subsequent dozens that followed, too, did not return. Disheartened, the first peoples stopped seeking the Source, the whispers but a distant childhood memory in their hearts.

  The farther the expeditions chased it across the orbs, the farther yet the Source seemed to be. As if in consolation, subsequent Expeditors settled in the new and strange lands the search for the Fragrance had led them to, producing more and even more fantastic and beautiful glass houses to house the exquisite creations of their Fragrancers.

  Some Expeditors brought back fabulous perfumes, each claiming to have received them from the sacred Source, but each, in turn, was discredited by the fact that, no matter how perfect their creations, they never seemed to match the completeness, the utter awe-inspiring beauty of the Fragrance of the Sky.

  Embittered by the experience, some set out to discredit the existence of the Source altogether, calling into question the link made by their ancestors between the Voice and the Fragrance.

  “What is to say that these a
re inseparable and interconnected phenomena?” one such expert wrote. “What is to say that they come from the same place, except for our over-attribution of personality and consistency to a Thing or Person (we are not quite sure which) which, after all, may not match our ideas of Thinghood or Personality?”

  One day, one of them built a fabulous telescope and proved to his colleagues that the Sky was infinite space, and not, in fact, a large blank canvas of deep velvet blackness. The people were fascinated and repelled by this idea, while certain experts seized upon it as proof that there was never a Sky in the first place.

  By this time the Fragrance had faded completely from the living knowledge of the people, although some of the Rememberers remained, warning that another Emanation was yet to come, where all would be revealed. But most dismissed the idea that an original Fragrance had existed at all and decided that Fragrance was merely a projection of the imagination, and that, although all should and could appreciate the great jars of fragrance which still dotted the landscape of the orbs, only the credulous could think the Expeditors had all been in search of a real thing.

  “Is it not good, is it not wonderful that there are now many fragrances instead of one, elusive, maddening, impossible Fragrance?” they said, as ribbons were cut at the openings of new bell jars. “Surely, surely this is better than the thing we thought we were seeking,” they consoled themselves. “Surely there is no point in chasing that which seeks not to be sought.”

  Chapter 30: Julian

  Julian had all but given up on Sofia when he finally received her message. Strangely, it didn’t come from her account, but it sounded like her. It was disappointingly brief. He had offered multiple times to send an escapod to her school to take her up to the Canopies to meet him again, but was met with absolute silence. Maybe she had been scared away by their first meeting. But hadn’t it gone well—even exceptionally well?

  “Any chance we can meet online?” he typed. “Would love to know what’s going on. I asked some of your friends and they said you haven’t been at school the past few weeks.”

  Thinking he had lost her because of some mistake he had made shook Julian. He was used to being attractive and easily getting a response from the various society girls he flirted with. Why was it that the one girl he had had a genuine connection with had fled after she’d met him?

  Having bared his soul to her in previous messages, he felt like he was involved with her somehow. And he had visited and revisited her holosheets just to immerse himself in her world but it was a poor substitute for the girl herself.

  “I got rid of my netbox,” read Sofia’s message. “So it’ll be a bit harder to meet online. How about tomorrow at 9pm?”

  So Sofia was on the run. Nobody got rid of their netbox unless they were so concerned about being tracked that they were willing to give up their entire connection to the Internet, their friends, their money and their life. Julian was shocked that she was caught up in a conspiracy so subversive she needed to get rid of her netbox. Perhaps it was even an anti-government conspiracy or a criminal network. You needed contacts a normal schoolgirl didn’t have to get rid of your netbox. It all didn’t square with his image of her as being naïve and innocent, but it was certainly exciting.

  The next night they met in his virtual study, as they had the first time he had made contact with her. She didn’t have a skin on at all, so she looked just like she had in real life, only a little thinner and maybe more stressed out.

  “Isaac?” asked Sofia. Julian had forgotten—he hadn’t told her his real name yet. He didn’t often give out his real name online.

  “Sofia,” he said, “I was so worried about you.” He stepped forward, and she fell easily into his arms. After they hugged, they parted and she sat down in the comfortable winged armchair.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” she said. “It’s been so crazy. I’m really sorry I couldn’t contact you earlier, but you know the Utopia Machine that you told me about? The one that was supposed to be linked to the Prism Club? It was in Biopolis. My mother and my father, my missing dad, built it years and years ago, and I activated it, and it created a new universe…”

  “The Utopia Machine,” breathed Julian. “So it does exist. And it wasn’t a failure?”

  “That’s what everyone thought. Until I came along. It had been built to fit me…” said Sofia. “It seems the machine was made for only one person to activate. It was my voice, my singing that unlocked the glyph…and I learned something else. It seems my DNA was modified so that only I could activate it. Then I had to run away. I ran to the Voids…”

  Julian looked at her.

  “Yeah, I know right. But it isn’t as bad as they say. Actually, a lot of people from the Voids helped me, like Father Lang. I wouldn’t have made it if not for him. We ran and ran, and now…” she hesitated. “Now we’re in a safe place,” she finished, thinking this was as much as she should divulge.

  “You cut your netbox chip out?” asked Julian.

  “Yeah. I’m using some other kind of link to the Internet. I couldn’t risk it.”

  Julian shook his head. “You should have let me know,” he said. “I could have helped you.”

  “How?” asked Sofia, her eyes widening.

  “You still don’t know who I am,” said Julian. “My name isn’t Isaac. That’s just a handle. It’s Julian. Julian Li.”

  Sofia stared at him. Julian Li—no wonder he had been in the Prism Club, or at least, had known about it. If she wasn’t mistaken, the boy in front of her was the son of the most powerful man in the whole country!

  “Don’t look so scared,” laughed Julian. “I won’t turn you in. Actually, I want to help you.”

  “How can you help me? I’m a fugitive,” said Sofia a touch dramatically. “I’m running away from the ISD, which answers to your dad. Why would you help me?”

  Julian looked a little hurt by this. “Because I care about you,” he said. “I thought we had something special. Then you just disappeared like that.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” said Sofia. “I never thought this kind of thing would happen. Seriously.”

  She paused.

  “Julian…there are people in the new universe. I created them. I don’t even know how to describe it. You know how you saw my holosheets, the cities I built on them?”

  Julian nodded.

  “It’s kind of like that, but completely real. I can grant them their prayers. I can visit them in their dreams, grant them visions.”

  “Do they worship you?” asked Julian.

  Sofia looked flustered. “Yes,” she admitted. “I find that kind of embarrassing, actually.”

  Julian looked very impressed.

  “The only thing I don’t really understand,” said Sofia, “is why the government commissioned a machine that could create a universe in the first place. What’s the point?”

  Julian grinned. “The point? You mean aside from the fact that it’s super shiok to be, like, a god?”

  “Well, what’s the practical application of it? I always thought we were such pragmatic people. Stem cells to cure cancer, sure, but a machine that rips into an alternate universe? What’s the application of that?”

  “I can think of plenty,” said Julian. “Land, for one thing. We’ve always been starved for land, especially with the rising sea levels making the Voids increasingly uninhabitable. That’s why the Canopies exist—only the densest cities in the world have floating islands in their airspace. Not to mention potential resources—it could be a total game changer for Singapore,” added Julian. “Imagine if we could somehow charge admission to migrate to a new world without the risks or travel time of space travel. We could become the most powerful country on earth!”

  Sofia felt a little uncomfortable at the glint she saw in Julian’s eye when he enumerated these possibilities. She felt foolish. Of course the Utopia Machine was a fabulously valuable invention. Of course its potential geopolitical ramifications were huge. Until now, she ha
d mainly thought of it as her personal universe, reflective of her own tastes and sensibilities much the same way her holosheet cities were when she had built them. But it was so much more. She thought of Ha’shan and the Star—a whole, mysterious energy source that could power an entire city. Of course the government would be interested in that.

  She thought of the beautiful, lavish feast of crabs that Hyzid had caught with her blessing. The world she had created teemed with good things, with fantastic creatures and mysterious lifeforms and materials. She saw how these were exploitable resources—resources that Singapore so famously lacked. It became clear to her just how badly the government would want to repossess this world when they found out more about it.

  But she was also beginning to distrust Julian. Could she really be certain he was on her side now that she had revealed herself to be an enemy of the state? Especially when he belonged to the most important political family in Singapore? Surely he would turn her in without a second thought. Sofia felt she had to be careful not to reveal her actual whereabouts.

  “Julian?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there some way you can check on my mother for me?”

  “Of course,” said Julian. “You just need to tell me her full name—everyone’s traceable from the Chair.”

  “The Chair?”

  “That’s what we call the control room in the Istana’s Canopy extension.”

  “It’s Tan Ying Hui Clara,” said Sofia. “Can you check it now?”

  “Hang on, I’m nearby,” said Julian, and disappeared from the room. Soon, he was back. “Your mother is at Whitley Detention Centre,” he said. “I tracked her netbox there.”

  Sofia pursed her lips. It was as she had feared.

  “Whitley Detention Centre…”

  “It’s not good,” said Julian. “That’s where they hold the political prisoners. And it’s heavily guarded.”

  “I need to get her out of there,” said Sofia.