Sofia and the Utopia Machine

by Judith Huang

  “Relax lah, I got it,” she said. “Anyway, it’s basically programmed to go to the GPS coordinates already, right?”

  “Yes, but you have to manually adjust for wind speed, and then there’s the mirror-shield…”

  “I’ve got it,” Sofia insisted, and Rowan put up his hands. “Okay, okay, just one more thing,” he said. He made a few swipes at the controls. “This ensures that we’ll be able to track your position on a map from over here.”

  Sofia smiled. “That’s good.”

  The moon hung bright and full above the clouds, illuminating the way. The tops of the forest glittered beneath them, the waxen leaves reflecting the moonlight through the glass bottom of the boat. Soon they were clear of Ubin and sailing silently over the water.

  Leslie had given them a portable mirror-shield, which was cast over the vehicle so the boat would be virtually invisible to an observer. Even so, Sofia wondered if the birds they passed by could sense the vessel that was displacing air behind it as it shot forwards. When she looked down through the glass bottom at the grey-green waters of the strait, the boat cast no shadow.

  It was an uncanny feeling, not being able to see one’s own shadow. It was like being a ghost. And wasn’t she kind of like a ghost? She was like those people who had fallen out of favour in Stalin’s regime, erased from the photographs. She had completely disappeared from her life as she had known it. Now she was heading back, not to her flat in Ang Mo Kio, but to this prison she had only briefly seen the inside of. A sudden sense of foreboding hit her as she watched the moonlight cap the waves of the strait below her. She felt as if there were something they were not seeing, something they had missed.

  The Canopies loomed overhead as they reached the outer reaches of the mainland. Soon they obscured the moon. Changi Beach came into view with its rows of pine trees standing sentinel. Sofia thought of Mei, the woman she had met on her sickbed just weeks ago. She thought of all the people she had met on her journey from the Canopies to the Voids and finally to Pulau Ubin. She had never thought there were such people living just beneath where she had, yet here she was, part of a small seed of resistance, about to commit yet another break into a prison that held secret captives whom she had never suspected the existence of—until they had turned out to be her own parents.

  The nature of the world, the nature of her country had never seemed as foreign as they did right in this moment, while the sampan flew past the towering blocks of the Midlevels at midnight, the darkened windows glinting with the lights from the Canopies. Singapore unfolded like a map beneath her—the Singapore she had grown up in, yet had never truly known.

  Chapter 32: Whitley Detention Centre

  The prison was a surprisingly nondescript building with a large blue metal gate barring its entrance. A high metal net covered the entire complex to prevent escapods and drones from flying in. The plan was for Peter to deploy Yang Zhe’s code to disable the electronic security system before trying to manually break through the metal netting. Hovering over Whitley, Sofia saw the heavily fortified building through the netting and started to despair when she thought of their rudimentary tools—wire-cutters and grounding wires for the electric current—and, in the event of things going south, Kirk and Father Lang’s untried rifles.

  To Peter’s relief, he was able to get into the security system relatively quickly. Yang Zhe’s code seemed to have worked, and soon they were sawing into the metal that formed a cage around the prison, the sampan still obscured from vision by the mirror-shield.

  “You’ll have to squeeze in,” said Kirk, motioning to Sofia. “You’re small enough to get through. If we have time, we can make it wider and I’ll try to follow you in there as back up.”

  “Remember E6 and E7 are down the left side of the main corridor,” said Peter.

  “If anything goes wrong, I’ll tap out a code on my pebble,” said Sofia. “And you guys get out of here, okay?”

  Kirk nodded.

  Sofia’s mouth was dry. All her senses were heightened as she squeezed through the gap in the wire netting and slid roughly down onto the roof of the prison. She landed heavily on her left foot, which made her twist her ankle a little. A sharp pain shot up her leg and she gritted her teeth to keep from crying out. The night was silent except for the sound of crickets coming from the nearby forest. They had passed by an ancient cemetery on the way to Whitley, and all of a sudden Sofia thought of the skeletons lying beneath the tombstones, centuries old, and a chill ran down her spine.

  She spotted an air well in the roof and decided to head towards that to get into the building. She scrambled over the roof, the sharp edges of the tiles rough against her palms and knees, and her left ankle still hurting.

  So far, so good. She looked around her, surprised once again by the absence of guards. It couldn’t be this easy, right?

  Creeping down the corridor, she came outside a door labelled E6. She lifted the slit in the metal door, and tried to peer inside.

  “Ma?” She whispered hoarsely. “Ma? Are you there?”

  The door swung open silently, suddenly, nearly knocking Sofia off her feet.

  The cell flooded with bright neon light. No Clara. Inside was a burly man with a thick black beard. He barked a command and immediately, two Gurkha guards appeared on either side of Sofia and took hold of both her arms.

  “Ah,” said the Inquisitor. “We’ve been waiting for you. Where is Peter Tan?”

  Before she was immobilised by the two guards, Sofia had the presence of mind to send the distress signal to the flying sampan with her pebble. She prayed earnestly that her father, Kirk and Father Lang had received the message and were sailing away right this moment to safety.

  “I don’t know!” said Sofia, much too quickly.

  The Inquisitor stared at Sofia more intently. “You’re the daughter,” he said. It wasn’t a question but a statement. “The one who broke Mr Tan out, I suppose. When we discovered that your netbox was disconnected, we knew you were involved.”

  He laughed a humourless laugh.

  “Did you think you could break into the ISD twice and not get caught?” he sneered.

  “So you stole the Utopia Machine. You and that…American, I suppose. Do you have it?”

  When Sofia didn’t answer, he said to the Ghurkas, “Search her.” They immediately frisked Sofia, turning out her pockets, which revealed the shiny golden cube, its wire circuitry winking in the bright neon light of the cell as well as the grey pebble, which they also took.

  “Sofia? Sofia! Is that you?” muffled shouts from the next cell, E7, filled Sofia’s ears.

  “Ma! I’m here!” said Sofia.

  “Sofia!” shouted Clara again. “Are you okay? What are you doing here?”

  “Let’s go somewhere quieter, shall we?” said the Inquisitor.

  “Ma!” shouted Sofia again as the guards dragged her away from the corridor. One of them had removed her glasses, so everything was a blur and she felt particularly helpless and disoriented.

  The room she was brought into was freezing cold, with a huge air-conditioning unit blasting directly on top of her head. She was positioned on a small stool, much too unstable for her to sit comfortably. Goosebumps rose on her flesh and her mouth, already dry when she had dropped into Whitley from the sampan, was now parched. Her tongue felt as if it were stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  “So you thought it would be easy to come in here a second time. That we wouldn’t be waiting for you,” said the Inquisitor. “You thought it was so easy to get into our system, that our security was so easy to break into…with your code and your wire-cutters.”

  Sofia said nothing, and the Inquisitor changed tack.

  “So this is the Utopia Machine,” he said. He was holding the little cube in his hand. Sofia felt an instinct to dive straight for it, but her hands were bound, and she couldn’t see clearly without her glasses. The golden box was a blur of bright yellow to her.

  “Would you like to show me how to operate it
?”

  Sofia bit her lower lip and kept silent.

  “I said, open it!” bellowed the Inquisitor. Bits of spittle flew in her direction as Sofia felt the blast of his speech.

  Still, she said nothing.

  “Well, if you won’t, we’ll figure it out. We always do,” said the Inquisitor, his voice dangerous.

  “You can’t,” said Sofia quietly.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, you can’t,” Sofia raised her voice. To her surprise, it came out calm and steady. “My parents made sure it would only work for me.” Sofia surprised herself saying this. She had not entirely come to terms with her discovery in the dark depths of the Lotan’s cave, the discovery that she had been modified precisely to activate the machine. She still felt confused about it. But she saw now how important it was for keeping the Utopia Machine out of the hands of the government. She saw how it could be a bargaining chip, how it might mean she had something to trade with this cold ISD man.

  “How?”

  “My parents…they engineered me so that only my DNA could activate the Utopia Machine. So you see, if you want to use the machine, I would have to cooperate.”

  “Do you know where you are?” asked the Inquisitor, incredulous. “This is the ISD, little girl. We have all kinds of ways of making you cooperate.”

  “Free my mother,” said Sofia recklessly. “Free her. Let her go, let her leave the country. Then we can talk.”

  The Inquisitor laughed. “You’re not the one making demands, okay?” he said. “We hold all the cards here. No need act tough. You’re what, fifteen? We’ve broken tougher criminals than you.”

  At that word, Sofia felt a shock going through her. She was a criminal. But she was in the right. It was the state, with its coercion, its pitiless order, its ceaseless repression and detention without trial, that was in the wrong. She was convinced of this.

  “Well, we’ll see if indefinite imprisonment changes your mind. You know, nobody knows exactly what we do to people here. More importantly, nobody cares. We’ve been doing this for years. Decades. Don’t think we haven’t. Everybody,” he gestured broadly, “is very comfortable in this country. They accept this as the price for stability. Nobody is going to fight for you. You could be here for a very long time. You think Singaporeans care about human rights? They just care about filling their stomachs and about peace and quiet, that’s all.”

  The Inquisitor left the room, leaving Sofia shivering on the stool, her hands tied, and still half-blind without her glasses. It was a very long time before they dragged her out of there and into a tiny, empty cell, where she gradually thawed out from the cold blast of the interrogation room and fell into a fitful sleep.

  Sofia couldn’t tell if was day or night in the cell when she woke up feeling groggy and not even a bit refreshed. No one had come for her the whole time she was sleeping—at least she had been spared the torture of sleep deprivation. It was the first time Sofia had really been alone since meeting Father Lang when she first descended into the Voids, and as she sat on the narrow plank bed that jutted out from one side of the tiny cell, her mind raced.

  The Utopia Machine was out of her hands now. They would no doubt force her to activate it sooner or later if she couldn’t withstand whatever tortures they had prepared for her. She had read of methods of torture used on prisoners during the Japanese Occupation—toothpicks under the fingernails, water pumped into one’s stomach with a hose until one’s skin became thin and stretched out and delicate, and then stamped on from outside—and she was sure there had been newer ones devised since then. With all the might of the government research machine into psychology and physiology, there were plenty of methods the ISD could employ that she couldn’t even imagine.

  But what would happen to all the cities, all the villages, all the people in the new world if she gave them up? If it were really used to settle members of the Prism Club, or serve as an escape hatch for the elite in the face of national disaster, what would those people make of the universe which had so much of her own imprint on it? Would they raze it all to the ground so they began with a pristine slate they could mould to their liking? Or what if Julian were right, and what they wanted from the world was to exploit its resources, trading them to the rest of the world, felling its beautiful forests or mining its unknown minerals, or selling the rights to enter the world to the rich and powerful from other countries… It would change the world irretrievably.

  Sofia knew from studying the histories of conquests and colonialism that an encounter with technologically superior conquistadors would only spell disaster for the indigenous. She knew her people were not ready for the ruthlessly efficient elite of her country.

  On the other hand, there was her mother—and as much as she had resented Clara for everything that had been wrong or difficult about her life in school as a fatherless child, it all paled in light of what she knew her government was capable of doing to her. And her mother loved her! With a love so basic it was like gravity, a force she could not live without. As wonderful as it had been to find her father, she realised now that his return into her life hadn’t solved the great yearning in her heart. Although it had been the one thing driving her onwards in this adventure, she now recognised that her mother’s silent sacrifice, her dutiful feeding, clothing and loving of Sofia all these years had meant everything. And she now realised, to an extent, why her mother had done what she did.

  Albeit for a short time, Sofia had experienced the rootlessness of being on the run and now appreciated the unquestionable stability of her life before all this. She wanted her mother to be safe, to get away from all this, to be free. And if it meant Sofia giving herself up, if it meant trading in the new universe that had made her life so wonderful, and also so complicated, then perhaps that was what had to happen.

  Sofia weighed these two responsibilities—to her people and to her mother, who had loved her even when she was unlovable, who had, after all, been the person who had given her life, as well as her special ability to control the Utopia Machine, who had sacrificed her own happiness just so Sofia could live a normal life. Sofia was inconsolable. There was nothing for it but to try to use her only leverage—the fact that the Utopia Machine was useless without her cooperation.

  Sofia wondered at the peculiar situation she was in—she was an all-powerful goddess in that other world, yet here she was a helpless prisoner. That the government would imprison, interrogate and torture a teenager shocked her, but not nearly as much as it would have before she had seen some of the things she had seen in the Voids.

  Sofia thought back to her younger self—the one at the start of the year who hadn’t known anything about what life was like in either the Canopies or the Voids, nor the colony on Pulau Ubin. In a way, she envied that girl, but was aware, now, of the realities of the world she lived in, and of the possibilities of starting afresh in that new world. It wasn’t perfect there by any means, but there was that wonderful thing—possibility.

  Sofia wondered, for the first time in her life, if she were a creator-goddess in the new universe, and if she had a spirit that had set off those spirits there, then maybe there was a god of this universe as well, of the world she was born into.

  Her mother had brought her up as a soft atheist—or perhaps an agnostic, she wasn’t quite sure. In any case, she had never brought God into any conversation they had had as far as Sofia could remember. But her father was Catholic, and Sofia remembered attending Mass with him as a very small child, and of the bright beauty of one crystalline memory: of the curved nook that contained an altar. How it had curved in on itself like a womb, or a universe. It had sparkled with sky blue and golden tiles—an azure backdrop with studs of gold at regular intervals like a sprinkling of stars. Before this backdrop was a golden orb with a cross on top of it, and this orb, reflected in the orb of her own eye, had seemed in that moment, in the dark and silent church of her mind, to contain everything. Sofia had felt the numinous presence of something b
eyond the material. Was that God?

  Father Lang would say it was, of course. The kind face of the priest floated in Sofia’s mind—the crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiled and the crooked teeth beneath his thin lips. What would Father Lang say of this God who may or may not exist?

  God—thought Sofia—if you are out there, please help me. I helped the people whose prayers I heard in the new universe. So hear me now, please, if you indeed made me. I love my world and I love my mum. If there is some way of saving them both, please, let me. And please, if you care, help me get out of here. I don’t want to rot in prison for the rest of my life. I want to go back to Pa and Uncle Kirk and Father Lang and the Mari Kita. But if I can’t, at least let Ma get away, and keep the new world safe, even if it means I have to stay here. Please, God.

  Sofia wasn’t sure if she had done it right. She hadn’t prayed before, if that was what she had just done—at least, not since she could remember. Perhaps she had prayed when her dad had still been around. The image of that tortured man on the cross in Novena Church where she had first found refuge in the Voids came to her in startling detail.

  Except that he no longer looked pathetic and like he was holding in his pee—no, this time Sofia saw him as though from above, as though from the roof above the altar, or as though from through the clouds and onto earth, looking down upon the outstretched arms of the man. Instead of being racked with pain, she saw their openness as an embrace—an embrace that seemed to surround both her small form, and the whole universe.

  Chapter 33: Escape

  Time passed. Sofia had no way of marking this time except for the temperature of the air in the cell. When she could feel heat radiating through the ceiling and the walls, she figured that it was day, and when it got cooler, she deduced that night had fallen. In this way she estimated that she had been in the cell for about three days and nights. The cell was designed to be stark and uncomfortable. The walls were dirty, with the smears of dead bugs and mosquitoes leaving trails of rusty red, and the pillow she had was threadbare and smelly. They hadn’t given her a blanket, and this small cruelty she also noted dully. It was dispiriting.