Sofia and the Utopia Machine

by Judith Huang

  “Well, you’re not going to be able to do that without my help,” said Julian. “It’s highly secure and the guards assigned there are the best of the best. They’re Gurkhas, you know.”

  “There must be some kind of electronic system guarding it as well, right?”

  “Oh, for sure. The facility is scanned every three minutes for netboxes that shouldn’t be there, and for denetboxed individuals as well, apart from human guards. Any anomaly is immediately flagged and sent straight to the Chair.”

  “There must be some way to hack it,” said Sofia. “It’ll take our people some time, but if you could give us a rundown on the way the system works, I’m sure we can figure out a way.”

  “Consider it done,” said Julian with a little half bow.

  “Julian?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are you still helping me?”

  “Didn’t I say? I care about you. You’re probably the most interesting girl I’ve ever met,” he said.

  Sofia looked searchingly into his eyes.

  “You mean it?”

  “Yeah, of course,” said Julian. “What other girl creates universes, becomes a goddess and has to disconnect her netbox from the system? I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “And I’ve never met anyone like you,” said Sofia. Their eyes met again and Sofia couldn’t tear hers away.

  “You didn’t run away from Singapore because I kissed you, right?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Okay, good. I was worried about that.”

  “I wouldn’t mind kissing you again,” said Sofia.

  Julian didn’t need a second invitation. He leaned in for a kiss. This time, he opened his mouth on hers and kissed her deeply. The warmth that spread all over his body was electric as she yielded to him and kissed back hungrily.

  “Don’t disappear for weeks again this time,” he said as he turned to leave the room.

  “I won’t,” promised Sofia, as the room faded from view. She touched her lips, which still felt like they were warm and wet from his, but she was alone in her room at the Mari Kita’s village, feeling like she had a greater sense of mission than ever. She would get her mother back—for the first time, she felt like it could be done.

  Chapter 31: Night Flight

  Clara paced the small outer courtyard where she was allowed her daily half-hour of exercise. There were a few cracks in the wall that separated her from the outside world, and tiny

  reddish-brown ants were scurrying through them. She watched them with envy. They didn’t know they were in prison. They just went about their own little lives, passing in and out of the prison as though it didn’t matter.

  It would be folly to try to climb over the wall, of course, not least because of the electrified barbed wire—a simple, but effective deterrent to any prisoner seeking to scale and clear the wall. Furthermore, the whole building was encased in a metal net preventing flight out or in. There was also the additional layer of invisible electronic security. She thought of the Gurkha guard—he’d said his name was Ganju—who she had drawn, the one assigned to her whom stood guard outside her cell. I’m innocent, she thought. There’s no reason for them to hold me in here. Would the guard help her?

  Here he was, right on the dot at the end of her half-hour, to take her back to her cell.

  “Ah, the artist!” he said, greeting her. This was what he called her now, ever since seeing her portrait of him.

  “Ganju, do you have any children?” asked Clara, keeping her voice as low and steady as she could.

  Ganju nodded. “Two daughters. They’re five and eight,” he said proudly.

  “Do you have their holos?”

  Ganju brought up his holos on his netbox and swiped through them until he brought up a recording of two brown-skinned girls in pink and purple dresses, laughing as they dived towards the viewer. Ganju’s own two arms floated in the air to receive them. The children’s laughter echoed strangely in this building of incarceration.

  “Here’s mine,” said Clara. She brought up a holo of Sofia in her Chinese New Year clothes, smiling shyly at the camera before turning away and lifting up a hand to protest her holo being captured.

  “She’s just fifteen. Her dad is gone and she’s at home all alone. She doesn’t know I’m here and must be worried sick. I need to make sure she’s okay, but my netbox’s link to the Internet is blocked because I’m here. Please, if there’s just some way for me to send her a message, let her know where I am—that’s all I ask.” It all came from her lips in a rush—phrased almost exactly how she had rehearsed it.

  Ganju shook his head. “I want to help you,” he said. “You are good artist and good person also. Very few people bother to get to know the guards here; they think we don’t care. Or maybe that we can’t speak English. I have daughters too, so I know how you feel. But it is my job to guard you. I cannot break the rules.”

  “I’ll still be here if you allow me to link my netbox,” pleaded Clara. “I’m not trying to escape. I just want to let Sofia know where I am.”

  “And what if she comes here?”

  “She’s fifteen! What can she do?”

  “Please,” said Clara. “Just one little message. Just to let her know I’m okay. You wouldn’t want to disappear on your family and not be able to tell them where you are, right?”

  “I think about it,” said Ganju.

  “Thanks,” said Clara, hope rising in her chest. “This means so much.” She touched him on his upper arm through the bars.

  *

  “So Ma is in Whitley Detention Centre,” said Sofia to her father.

  Peter frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I have a friend with contacts who helped me find out,” said Sofia. “His name is Julian. I trust him.”

  It was, of course, unsurprising that Clara was at Whitley, thought Peter, but having just been incarcerated there for the past few years, it was the last place he wanted his wife to be.

  “We’ll need to plan this properly,” said Peter. “The good thing is we’re with Leslie and company. That flying sampan will come in handy, for one thing. I’ll bet it could get us back there undetected.”

  “So we’re going to have to break in.”

  “Let’s bring it up with the Sharmas and see what they have to say.”

  They met in the living room of the blue house that evening.

  “Clara’s at Whitley Detention Centre,” said Peter. “The same place I was being held. We have to rescue her. They’re probably torturing her right now. We have to get her out of there. Will you help us?”

  There was a strained silence in the room.

  “As much as we’d like to help Clara, this would threaten the existence of the Mari Kita,” Leslie said finally. “The only reason we’ve managed to exist this long is we haven’t interfered with the government for the last seven years. That’s why we didn’t try locating you or breaking you out,” he nodded towards Peter, “although we supported you when you left Biopolis.”

  The silence grew in the room as this sank in for Sofia. She had been so taken in by everything she had seen of the Mari Kita up to now that only now did the obvious questions come to her mind. If Leslie and the rest had been Peter’s colleagues, and if they had refused to work further on the Utopia Machine at the time that he had, why hadn’t they tried to help him? Why had he been left to rot in jail for seven long years? The Mari Kita suddenly seemed a lot less heroic.

  Sofia hesitated. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to say anything in front of her elders—it seemed disrespectful to interject, since she was, after all, just a kid. But it seemed increasingly obvious that someone had to say something. Was her dad just going to take this? Had he just accepted that they weren’t going to help? She looked at him, but his lips were pursed and he didn’t seem like he was going to speak. It was as though he had taken it as a given that no one would risk their necks for him, or now his wife. Like this was just the way things were.

  “
I don’t understand,” said Sofia, breaking the silence. “I thought you guys were a resistance. What’s the point of being a resistance if you don’t resist? My mum didn’t do anything wrong! She didn’t even do anything! You helped us—and we stole the Utopia Machine from the government. Why won’t you help my mum?”

  “You don’t get it,” said Yang Zhe. “The government has probably known about us for some time. But they don’t know where we’re located because all of this—” she gestured expansively to mean everything within the mirror-shield “—is housed in a bubble reality. And they’ve pretty much left us alone because we haven’t taken any active steps to intervene in politics or rescue dissidents like your mother.”

  “We helped you when you had already broken out of prison,” added Leslie. “Breaking someone out of Whitley is a whole other level of defiance. They wouldn’t let us get away with something like that.”

  “But in principle you oppose the way they’ve arrested her, right?” asked Sofia, growing impatient.

  “In principle, we support you, of course,” said Leslie.

  “Just not in fact,” said Sofia flatly. “I don’t understand. You guys knew about the Voids. You knew about the way people live there. And you could help them, but you don’t. I didn’t know!” Sofia’s voice was rising. “ I didn’t know the kinds of conditions people were living under! I didn’t know they have…sky gardens and luxury villas and control rooms in the Canopies. But the slums—” she spat out the word “—with darkmould in the Voids. I didn’t know people could just be put away for years—and that they could just lock you up and throw away the key. If I had known that, and if I had the kind of power and technology that you guys have, I would have done something about it!”

  Sofia looked from face to face, and no one would meet her eyes. Then she turned to Peter, and she saw that his eyes were shining with tears. He had a look of inexpressible pride on his face.

  “I’m not asking you to come and topple the government with me. I’m just asking that you lend me some of your tech. Maybe that flying sampan, and whatever you could help me do to get past the security at Whitley. That’s all. I’m not asking you to reveal your location. I know it’s important to protect the base,” said Sofia after the awkward pause in the wake of her outburst.

  A low murmur passed through the group of scientists. Sofia stared through her tears as Leslie and Yang Zhe conferred with furrowed brows.

  “Clara will have to have her netbox removed or disabled the moment you reach her,” said Leslie slowly. “Or taking her here will lead them straight to the base.”

  “Does that mean you’ll help us?”

  “No Mari Kita will accompany you on the mission,” said Yang Zhe firmly. “But we will give you whatever tech support we can to ensure your success.”

  There was a murmur of approval around the circle of scientists at this decision. Many seemed relieved that some kind of decision had been made at all, that they hadn’t left this fierce young girl hanging, but were also safe from risking their own necks in the mission.

  “Remember Clara’s netbox,” repeated Leslie.

  “We’ll make sure of that,” said Peter quietly. His own netbox had been the first thing he had attended to the moment he had reached Pulau Ubin. As it was an older version, it was easier to remove than Sofia’s and he had managed to do it himself.

  *

  Despite their expressed reluctance to help them in their mission to rescue Clara, the Mari Kita were hardly idle when it came to the preparations. They looked over the floor plans Julian had sent her for Whitley Detention Centre and it took Yang Zhe a week to figure out a flaw in its security system—something that neither Peter nor Kirk had been able to do. Before that, it was futile to even attempt to break Clara out because the alarm system would have been set off immediately.

  Being held at Whitley for seven years meant Peter had a pretty good idea of where everything was in the prison. He made a holo of the building for the team so they could figure out what the best route was for breaking in. They eventually settled on the roof as the ideal spot for entering as security there would be the weakest. Peter speculated that Clara was being held in either E6 or E7, one of the cells that had been empty as far as he had known while he was there. Although he did not know exactly where on the island the Centre was located, Julian’s information furnished its coordinates. Surprisingly, it was at ground level, on a hilltop that the rising sea levels had not affected.

  Then there was the matter of a proper surgeon to remove Clara’s netbox en route to Pulau Ubin. As they couldn’t involve any of the Mari Kita, and Dr Xin was far away in the Voids and couldn’t be picked up for the task, Peter decided the best option would be to assemble a kind of quick-fix kit that would temporarily disable the netbox’s GPS function but not completely remove it from Clara’s body.

  “None of you have netboxes, right?” asked Rowan, looking from Sofia to Peter to Kirk, then to Father Lang. They shook their heads.

  “No, man, nobody’s on my tail if I can help it!” said Kirk. “I got rid of that thing as soon as I got to the Voids.”

  “Well, you guys are going to need a way to communicate when you’re on the mission. The Mari Kita have our own way of communicating off-grid. Quantum messaging.” Rowan took out a couple of pebble-like objects and passed one to Sofia.

  “In quantum mechanics, scientists discovered that a linked particle would change instantaneously if its partner were modified, no matter how far apart in time and space the two particles are,” said Rowan. “These pebbles consist of multiple linked particles which, if modified, will immediately show on their partners. You can write messages on them with your finger tip like this—see.” Rowan demonstrated, writing “hello world” on his pebble. The same words appeared immediately on the companion pebble Sofia held in her hand.

  “So it’s like text messaging?” she asked, uncertain if she was supposed to be impressed.

  “Yeah, but without going through the Internet!” said Rowan impatiently, disappointed that she didn’t seem more shattered by the revolutionary nature of what he was showing her.

  Kirk dived for the pebble in Sofia’s hands. “This is, like, a huge deal… We’ve been trying to do something like this for ages at Biopolis and nothing ever worked!”

  Communicating instantaneously without going through the networks…without any need for the Internet at all—Sofia thought this through. It was, indeed, amazing.

  “Well, you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention. We do have the Internet here of course, which you’ve used,” Rowan nodded at Sofia. “But my mum tries to have us use it sparingly because, you know, security. We’re pretty much off the grid here. Cool, right? These won’t leave a trace anywhere on the Internet. The only trouble is, of course, they need to be kept in pairs. So it’s kind of more like a walkie-talkie than a netbox, if you know what I mean.”

  Sofia nodded. Rowan reached into his backpack and drew out a few more of the pebbles. “Here you go,” he said, passing them out to the four of them.

  “Thanks,” said Peter, pocketing his pebble. “This is much better than netboxes, for sure. Untraceable.”

  As night fell over the island, Sofia, Peter, Kirk and Father Lang got their supplies together and climbed into the flying sampan to head back to the mainland. Although it would be a much more comfortable trip than their journey to Pulau Ubin in kayaks, the sampan had not been built for such long journeys, and was relatively untested outside the mirror-shield under which the Mari Kita lived.

  “There’s no reason why it wouldn’t work over water,” said Rowan, patting the sky blue boat fondly. “But if there’s a problem I guess you could always use it as a normal boat. The engine is still there,” he added. “We never removed it, so it’s still an amphibious vehicle.”

  Peter was actually looking rather pale and careworn. He didn’t like the idea of going back to Whitley when he had suffered the horror of incarceration there for so long. And there w
as the additional awkwardness of facing Clara when he finally saw her after all these years. Did she still love him? How would she react when she saw him? From what he had gathered from Sofia, Clara had pretended he never existed in the first place. Peter was hurt that Sofia didn’t know some of the most basic things about him, although he couldn’t blame her, since she thought he had abandoned them.

  Kirk tried to lighten the tense mood by joking unnecessarily, but that only caused Peter to look more ill than ever, and grow quieter and quieter. Sofia was grateful for Father Lang’s sensible, calm presence as they loaded up the sampan.

  “I know it’s stereotypical that, as the only American, I say we need a gun, but we need a gun,” said Kirk. “We’re breaking out a political prisoner from a high-security facility, for goodness’ sakes.”

  “Well, I guess you better know how to shoot it,” said Peter.

  “Well, then it’s a good thing I can, right?” said Kirk, tossing a couple of messy curls out of his eyes. The gun in question was a hunting rifle that the Mari Kita kept in case they encountered hostile wild boars in the forest, but it was better than nothing.

  “Actually, I can handle a gun,” said Father Lang quietly. When Sofia turned to him with inquisitive eyes, he shrugged.

  “You get a lot of different types in the Voids, that’s all,” said Father Lang.

  “Okay, so maybe we can have two guns, and then you,” Kirk indicated Peter, “can go without.” Sofia looked from the gun in Kirk’s hand to the other, now in the hands of Father Lang.

  “We’re not really going to shoot anybody, though, are we?” she asked.

  “If the plan goes well, we won’t have to fire a shot,” said Kirk. “If it goes badly… Let’s just say it’s insurance.”

  The little party settled into the boat. Rowan showed Sofia how to control the sampan one last time. He had already run through all the controls with her a few times during the week of preparation while they waited for Yang Zhe to crack the security system. He seemed particularly attached to the sampan, hovering near them as though worried Sofia would make some mistake and steer it straight into a coconut tree.