We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (7 page)

“Hmm.” He leaned back in the swing seat. “I cannot say. I remember what it was like, but I don’t really remember it. It was so long ago.”

She couldn’t understand. “But you were there. Weren’t you?”

He leaned backwards into the chair, completely calm. “Yes. But memory is quite difficult.” He pointed to a sign, one of many that were scattered around the park, packed with information written in four languages. “See that? That’s all anybody remembers. Some days I think of the old kings who used to live here, and I realize that I cannot remember their faces, or I only remember a very vague picture of them. Then I wonder if the Tumasik I remember is the same as it was back then.”

“You’ve told me stories,” said the former City Hall. “But I’m sure there was so much more.”

“Of course there was much more,” the former Bukit Larangan said. “But it’s all gone now. Singapore’s history started in 1819, that’s what the history books say, right?” He gestured at the signs. “That’s all left. That’s who I became.”

Jing-Li shook her head. “But—”

“How much of Singapore’s history before the 19th century do you know?” The former City Hall asked.

“A sleepy fishing village,” she said softly. “That’s what they teach us at school.”

“No, it was a lot more than that,” said the former Bukit Larangan said. “But I don’t remember what it was anymore.”

She looked down at the sword in her lap and felt like she was falling outwards. The Straits Settlement coin resting in her hand had taken on immense weight and heat, like it was a burning coal.

“But you were there,” she repeated emptily to herself.

Sunday night. Halogen lights of unthinkable wattage sear the air, burning a bright orthogonal circuit into the cityscape, thousands of metres long. Thousands cram into rows of seats, specially erected for the weekend, while thousands more press against wire nettings at odd ends and corners of the circuit, as racecars streak past at 400kmh, blurs of screaming metal tracked by faithless, tireless cameras. The Padang, forcibly crowned with a strobe-lit stage, suffocates under the weight of a sweaty, screaming crowd, while above the city, people in air-conditioned restaurants and bars peer down at the blips of cars blazing, ant-like, around the track.

The young woman runs in the alley behind the former Supreme Court, sealed off to prevent people from getting close to the racetrack. The Marina Bay Street Circuit has given her grace to wander the grounds, even the areas deemed off-limits, but she has more pressing matters on her mind. Her target is the former Supreme Court.

For her, for the both of them, it has to end tonight.

Jing-Li ran up the grand steps of the former Supreme Court, her footsteps sending solid echoes reverberating. She knew where the guardian was, up on the roof where they’d last met. She was sweaty, and her heart raced from shoving through the clamouring, oblivious crowd, but none of that mattered.

The moment she burst out through the stairwell the guardian turned towards her from his spot at the edge of the roof, haloed by the stadium-strength lights surrounding the Padang. “I see you’ve come.”

“Don’t think of going anywhere,” she said, pulling the plastic sword from its plastic sheath, her voice and breathing harsh. Down on the road the F1 racers screeched and made popping noises as they slowed down for the corner turn, lending the scene the surreal soundtrack of an air raid.

“I would not dream of it,” he said, his voice carrying over the melee. “In fact, I was rather hoping to stay here for the long term.”

“No,” Jing-Li shouted, over the din. “You can’t. I’ve decided. That’s not how this country works. You served a purpose, that purpose is done, it’s time to move on. Your neighbour has done it. You’re no different.”

He looked a lot smaller than she seemed to recall, like a lost doll somebody left by the roadside. “But I am different. I thought you might think of me fondly, given your childhood. There’s such strong nostalgia…”

“Nostalgia? Whose nostalgia? You can’t tell me what to be nostalgic about.” The thing that had been sitting uncomfortably in her chest since the first night she had taken up her sword came to a boil. “This building is being preserved. That’s a lot more than other past locations in Singapore have had.”

He ran his fingers over the worn stone surface of the roof’s edge. “This place has such memories…”

“You have to believe me, I’m doing this for you.” She took bold steps towards him, and he didn’t move away. “Your memories will be rewritten, whether you like it or not. Our Government may like what you are. They like what you represented as the Supreme Court. They like the way you look on the television screens when Grand Prix is beamed to the world.”

She waved her sword accusingly at the racetrack. “But that’s all you’ll ever be, from now on. A pretty picture. A tourist attraction. They could have built something else to house the art museum. But they wanted to use your skin, because your skin is what they think is important.” She swung the sword back towards him. “Can you live with that? Can you live with becoming somebody else?”

He seemed to straighten up. “I used to be the Supreme Court,” he said, a glint of his former hardness returning to his expression. “Important decisions were made on my watch. What I did used to influence the entire nation.”

“And no one will change that for you,” she said. She thought of Bukit Larangan, it’s history faintly etched, fading into a few neat lines of the country’s official narrative. “You are so lucky and you don’t even know it.”

“Will you remember me, at least?”

“I’ll come over for tea,” she said. “There’s a swingset on top of Fort Canning that seats four. We can hang out with your former neighbour. And the old Forbidden Hill. We could talk about history, or anything you like. I’ll even bring a lizard for you, if you want.”

He smiled. She could barely see his blue eyes in the mad, harshly shadowed lighting. “I’m still right. I am still fortunate to have you as my executioner.”

“You had a good run,” Jing-Li said.

“Well. I won’t deny that.”

She did not blink as she brought the plastic blade down.

Sunday night. It has been a year since the groundbreaking ceremony, and the races are on again. The former Supreme Court stands, its form cloaked in netted black scaffolding on which its façade is projected. Its interior is a mess, gutted masonry like phoenix ash, but the millions around the globe watching the race live do not need to see that.

Across the track sits a grandstand, its rows packed with the chattering masses. They have paid well to be here, even if only for a brief time. Amongst their number one might pick out the shape of a young woman, her back straight, an unreadable smile on her face. From this distance you cannot tell, but she is turning and turning a small object in her hand, which appears to be a coin of some sort.

But she is only one face in the crowd, and as the camera pulls away she becomes invisible, part of the story no one sees.

The black box of the former Supreme Court, drenched in new light, remains impassive. Around it rise skyscrapers—shades of New York, shades of Abu Dhabi—that vanish into the night, the hands of a new city reaching ahead.

How to Make a Time Machine Do Things that Are Not in the Manual
or

The Gambiarra Method

Fabio Fernandes

The elevator fell five decades in three seconds flat.

“We need to calibrate this thing, to synchronize it on a decade-floor basis,” Raitek said.

“Is that really necessary?” Jonathan asked.

“Do you even have to ask?”

Patel looked up at both men and sighed almost inaudibly. He was used to the young, eager tech from Ghana, always wanting to know more, to push the envelope further, to suck up every quantum of information as if he were a sponge, a veritable black hole.

But he still wasn’t used to this weird manager from Brazil. They had already been working on this project for months when the higher powers saw fit to send this guy all the way from Rio de Janeiro to Accra. All just because he had a top-notch score in project-trimming and problem-solving? The man wasn’t even a scientist, for crying out loud!

“Jonathan does have a point, actually,” he decided to cut in. “
Why
is it necessary, really?”

Raitek raised his left hand and lifted two fingers.

“Two reasons,” he said. “First, the symmetry. The more symmetrical a relationship we can establish, the better we can gauge and calculate the length of the prototype's displacement in time.”

Patel considered the fact for a little while, then wobbled his head in agreement. “It stands to reason,” he said.

“And the second?” asked Jonathan.

Raitek opened a smile from ear to ear.

“Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Second is the beauty of it.”

Time travel was discovered in 2077.

As happens with many scientific discoveries, it was completely accidental. Sometimes you are looking for one thing when another gets in the way, with results you are most definitely not expecting. Take Viagra. Or antigravity associated with superconductors.

Time travel was discovered during experiments on locative media and augmented reality as applied to elevators.

Anyway, it happened at a very interesting time in history. The human race had suffered a long period of war and disease, which ended on a grim note in the 2060s with the Second American Civil War and the Big European Depression. Even though it was still far from universal peace and understanding, it seemed to be entering a period of relative tranquility. A post-virtual environment embedded in antigravitational elevators—part of an ambiance designed to soothe and distract people during the long risings and falls through the two hundred or so floors of the arcologies—seemed as good a place as any to give this new age a jumpstart.The environment turned out to be not only a virtuality but a time displacement device which took its occupants to a very different set of coordinates from what was expected. Suffice it to say that, when the doors of the elevator opened, the dumbfounded passengers were not in Accra anymore—at least not in 2077 Accra, but in a shabby building in that same city… one with a mere thirteen floors. And, more importantly, according to the ceiling display that showed date and time, in 2011.

After a few minutes of absolute confusion and, in one case, total denial, the temporary denizens of the past—two techs and one project manager—returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so. They got out of the elevator safe and sound, back where—and when—they belonged. Without knowing why it had happened.

But intending to find out.

It took Hiran Patel, the project manager who was aboard the elevator when the “episode” (the only word they used inside the lab and the building to refer to the incident) happened, a couple of days to be sure everything was under wraps, so upper management didn’t find out what had really happened. He wanted to reproduce the conditions of the experiment again before he could present it to the board of directors with a new business proposal:
to establish a time agency travel somewhere in the past
(probably 2011 Accra, if the elevator could somehow only go to a fixed point—the mathematics would still have to be worked out) and offer his clients a plus. He could get quite a bonus for that.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out so easily. As soon as the veracity of the time displacement procedure was established, the bureaucrats came.

They had the facilities shut down until further notice. Not only the labs of creation, production and ambiance editing, not even only the lab containing the elevator carriage used to test it, but the entire building, even unrelated areas. Every lab tech, every assistant, even the secretaries and cleaning staff were politely asked to remain inside the premises for as long as it should be needed to debrief everyone. Everyone’s needs, one of the bureaucrats said (Patel couldn’t tell who, they all looked the same to him), would be taken care of.

Patel was the head of the software team at the time the discovery was made. This meant that, until the arrival of the bureaucrats, he was in charge of a team of eight people, namely: three programmers, three IE (immersion environment) modeling designers and two WS (world¬builder/scriptwriters), most of them from the games industry, seduced by the allure of making money in the glamorous countries of New Western Africa that thrived on software production after the collapse of Europe in the ’30s.

Patel was one of them; he had come all the way from Wolverhampton, leaving behind a so-so life developing robotic pets as companions for elderly people in home care facilities. But it wasn’t as if England had anything else of significance to offer him, and besides, he had no attachments there, nothing that really mattered. When he first saw the sun glinting on the top of the brand new Nkrumah arcology thrusting up from the middle of Greater Accra, that Solerian dream dwarfing the now obsolete postmodern steel-and-glass buildings, with their mere two or three dozen storeys, he knew he had made the right decision.

When the bureaucrats came, however, he started to have second thoughts.

Then the man from Brazil arrived. A tall, black, bald, lean man in his mid-thirties, with an easygoing smile that won over most of the team.

Except Patel. He knew better than to trust a suit.

The man walked up to him and extended a big hand.

“Raitek da Silva,” he said in a perfect English. “Nice to meet you, Mr Patel.”

Patel shook his hand. A surprisingly rough hand, very different from the well-manicured jobs he associated with most bureaucrats.

“Care to show me your research?”

“What can I possibly show you that I haven’t already, Mr Da Silva?”

“Please, call me Raitek. Seriously. We’re going to work round the clock here, and I won’t be wearing this suit for much longer, you feel me? Besides, you may have shown the other executives, but you haven’t shown
me
anything. And I am the one you must show things to. So, if you please…”