Launch Pad

by Shelly Bryant

  The driver pulled into the drop off point at the Esplanade and switched off the meter. “Forty-seven dollars and eighty cents,” the meter announced. “Cash or card?”

  “Cash,” Helena said, handing a fifty to the driver.

  At the Hougang station, a woman carrying a plant in a red plastic bag fishes her fare card from her pocket and enters the ticketed area.

  At the Buangkok station, two women exit the ticket gantry, the younger woman carrying a sleeping child and the older woman carrying the child’s school bag.

  At the Sengkang station, a group of manual labourers ascend the escalator to the left, standing two abreast on the steps.

  At the Punggol station, a boy exits the gate, carrying a remote-controlled helicopter out of the station.

  The couple exited the cab and made their way into the hall. They settled into the centre seats in the fifth row.

  Helena looked around, then turned to Damon, looking impressed. “Thank you, Dr Alquist! Great seats,” Helena said.

  “Yeah, he came through, didn’t he?” Damon said, just as the lights went down.

  “At least he did something right with this production,” Helena whispered.

  At the Bugis station, three girls walk huddled together, the one in the middle showing the other two her watch.

  At the Bayfront station, a man in a green T-shirt tosses a cigarette to the pavement as he enters.

  At the Downtown station, a boy rides a skateboard to the staircase, stops, picks up the board and ascends the stairs.

  At the Telok Ayer station, a child stumbles and starts to cry. His mother squats beside him and wipes his face with a tissue.

  When Kent, Gloucester and Edmund walked onstage, Helena felt Damon jump beside her. When she glanced at him, he smiled and shrugged.

  “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall,” Kent said onstage.

  “More lifelike than you expected?” Helena leaned and whispered in Damon’s ear.

  “You might say that,” he replied.

  “His breeding sir, hath been at my charge,” Gloucester was saying as she settled back in. The three characters moved in neat unison—almost too neat, she felt. The flow was exquisitely programmed, which seemed to her to be the problem. She had anticipated that the characters would be somewhat more mechanical in their movements than what she saw here, though she had not been quite as surprised as Damon seemed to be. She had been in many labs with advanced robotics and knew that the fluidity of robotic movement had improved greatly over the past several decades. It had never been the movements that made her sceptical about this production. They moved smoothly, and their timing was impeccable. It was the latter that seemed to her problematic—the unerring precision of all they did and said. There would be no missed lines in this production, no heroic save by a fellow actor who covered the mistake and made it look as if it had been planned all along. It would be perfect, and that would make it uncanny. Perfect was not human. To be human was to be flawed. This, in fact, was what drove the impulse to write, perform and watch tragedies. How could a robot troupe capture that?

  At the Bukit Batok station, an elderly man taps on the glass of the station control booth to get the attention of the staff inside.

  At the Bukit Gombak station, a woman carrying a white dog stands at the top of the stairs, waiting.

  At the Choa Chu Kang station, two women walk arm in arm towards the shopping centre. A child walking with them begins to trail behind.

  At the Yew Tee station, a boy in school uniform stops and speaks to the elderly man running the photocopy shop on the side of the station facing the shopping centre.

  At the Kranji station, a large crowd alights from a bus entering the country from Malaysia. Upon alighting, a woman stops to buy curry puffs from a man standing beside a large basket near the bus stop.

  At the Marsiling station, a boy rides his BMX down the wheelchair ramp.

  Sensing Damon stealing several glances in her direction throughout the first scene, she tried to stay focused on the performance instead of her own doubts.

  “This is most strange, that she whom even but now was your best object, the argument of your praise, helm of your age, the best, the dearest, should in this trice of time commit a thing so monstrous to dismantle so many words of favour.” The robot Cordelia lowered her eyes demurely as France recited the lines.

  Helena felt Damon’s eyes on her and turned to smile in his direction. When he nodded and turned back to the stage, she returned her full attention to the actors.

  “Sure her offence must be of such unnatural degree that monsters it,” France continued.

  Before long, Helena was lost in the beauty of the verse. It’s not that different from listening to Gen read an audiobook, she thought, and I do that all the time.

  At the Woodlands station, a queue forms at the ATM, blocking access to the entrances of the restaurants that line the back of the station.

  At the Admiralty station, a pale-skinned man carrying a child on his shoulders is approached by the station operator, then lowers the child from his shoulders, grabbing the boy’s hand as they walk towards the ticket gantry.

  At the Sembawang station, a middle-aged woman helps an elderly man onto the escalator ascending to the platform.

  At the Yishun station, a boy carrying a large backpack and wearing oversized headphones runs into the station, scans his ticket at the gantry and runs up the escalator two steps at a time.

  At the Khatib station, a woman carrying a bag with the words Eu Yan Sang across it exits the station and joins the queue at the taxi stand.

  The scene changed. “Thou, Nature, are my goddess,” Edmund’s voice boomed from stage right. As he strutted towards front centre stage, he continued, “To thy law, my services are bound.”

  The performance was fine, but Helena had to stifle the urge to laugh. She glanced around the audience to see if anyone else noticed the irony of a robot uttering these words, but most seemed absorbed in the performance.

  “Who in the lusty stealth of nature take more composition and fierce quality than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed go to the creating a whole tribe of fops got ’tween asleep and awake?”

  She couldn’t help but think of how different this image was from the sterile facilities of a robotics factory. Stop comparing, she chided herself. No one else seems to have a problem getting into the story. Stop thinking about the actors and think about the action.

  “Fine word ‘legitimate’! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed and my invention thrive, Edmund the base shall top the legitimate. I grow. I prosper. Now gods stand up for bastards!”

  Edmund raised his fist overhead and turned his gaze upward. Helena was transfixed. He was beautiful. The words were well articulated, but gritty. Almost human.

  At the Yio Chu Kang station, a man carrying a Wilson tennis bag exits the ticket gate and greets another man who is waiting near the station control booth.

  At the Ang Mo Kio station, a woman with two children stops in front of the ticket gantry and searches through her purse. Several passengers push past her to enter through the gantry.

  At the Braddell station, a young man in army uniform reads a newspaper as he waits near the station control booth.

  At the Toa Payoh station, a boy weaves through the crowd, eyes fixed on his tablet’s screen.

  By the time the second act began, Helena had become absorbed in the language of the play. Before it finished, she had developed real sympathy for the characters. Thoughts of the actors were put on a back burner.

  Confined in the stocks, Kent hailed his king.

  “Ha!” shouted Lear in reply. “Makest thou this shame thy pastime?”

  “No, my king,” Kent said.

  “Ha ha!” mocked the Fool. “He wears cruel garters. Horses are tied by the heads, dogs and bears by the necks, monkeys by the loins, and man by the legs. When a man’s over-lusty at legs, then he wears wooden nether-stocks.”

  A
s the Fool went through the inventory of animals, he mimicked the movements of each, going from horse to dog to bear to monkey as smoothly as a martial arts master shifting between poses. When he said, “and men by the legs,” he kicked Kent’s shin, making the prisoner wince. Beside her, Damon twitched in sympathy.

  That momentarily broke the spell for her. Leaning towards Damon, Helena smiled and whispered, “Don’t worry, it can’t feel a thing.”

  He shrugged. “Looks like a man to me. I can believe he felt that as much as I would have if the thing had kicked me.”

  She shook her head and leaned back in her seat. As the scene went on, the king leaving his conversation with Kent behind to squabble with his daughter over the size of his force, Helena again became absorbed in the tension onstage.

  “What need one?” Reagan asked haughtily.

  “O, reason not the need,” Lear cried, striking his breast with a fist. “Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs— man’s life is cheap as a beast’s.”

  At the Novena station, four women enter together and stop outside the ticket gantries before splitting up, two entering the ticketed area and two leaving the station.

  At the Newton station, the cleaner stops sweeping at the side of the hall, leans her broom against the wall and takes her mobile phone out of her pocket.

  At the Orchard station, four young people in T-shirts with Notre Dame written across the front stop to consult the signboards after they exit the ticketed area.

  At the Somerset station, a man in a wheelchair plays a harmonica. Several passersby leave money in the box next to his chair.

  At the Marina Bay station, a couple walks hand in hand out of the station, where they immediately board a taxi.

  The staged storm had been magnificent, programmed to suggest the tempest through the subtlest cues. Lear, Edgar and the Fool had retreated into the cave, their banter perfectly paced. The audience had laughed uproariously. The scene was moving to a more sombre crescendo.

  “What has thou been?” Lear asked Edgar.

  “A servingman, proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served the last of my mistress’ heart and did the act of darkness with her, swore as many oaths as I spake words and broke them in the sweet face of heaven, one that slept in the contriving lust and waked to do it. Wine I loved deeply, dice dearly, and in woman out-paramoured the Turk—false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind, says suum, mun, nonny. Dophin, my boy, my boy sesey! Let him trot by.”

  As his speech tapered to nonsense, a half-clad Edgar rushed towards the cave entrance, where the storm continued to rage. Lear and the Fool moved to intercept him. The king cried, “Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well, thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself! Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings! Come, unbutton here!”

  Lear ripped off his clothing, revealing underneath a skinless robot, the inner mechanical parts laid bare. Lightning flashed outside the cave entrance, casting an uncanny illumination on the metallic form.

  At the HarbourFront station, a man carrying several shopping bags follows a woman through the ticket gantry after she scans both fare cards.

  At the Telok Blangah station, the station control staff hangs a sign reading “Out of Order” on the fare card top-up machine.

  At the Labrador Park station, a woman disengages a phone call, slips her handphone into her bag and takes her fare card out.

  At the Haw Par Villa station, a man carrying a sleeping child scans his ticket and heads towards the station exit.

  At the Kent Ridge station, a young woman holding a child by the hand walks behind a young couple towards the ticket gantry.

  The rest of the performance took a slightly different approach to the question of the audience’s belief in the humanity of the actors. Lines that might have held no special significance for a human troupe were played for ironic effect in the remaining scenes of this production. When Albany said, “Humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep,” his eyes took on an evil green glow. When Gloucester’s request to kiss the king’s hand met with the reply, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality,” the king extended an uncovered arm that revealed an appendage that terminated in a steel claw. The captain’s declaration of “I cannot draw a cart nor eat dry oats, but if it be a man’s work, I’ll do it,” was accompanied by sharp, precise movements, repeated several times like an arm on a robotic assembly line in a high-tech factory. The occasional foregrounding of the actors’ robotic forms elicited waves of laughter from the audience.

  At the one-north station, a man carrying a laptop bag watches the screen of his tablet as he waits near the station control booth.

  At the Buona Vista station, two elderly men lean against a ledge on one side of the station, one reading a newspaper as the other watches the people passing by.

  At the Holland Village station, a woman in office attire reads the screens over the ticket gantries, then reaches into her bag and pulls out her phone.

  At the Farrer Road station, a young man runs his finger along the path of the Circle Line on the map, then turns and walks towards the fare card purchase machines.

  At the Botanic Gardens station, the staff from the convenience store on one side of the station closes the rollers and locks the shop.

  At the Caldecott station, a young woman looks at her watch as she walks through the ticket gantry and towards the escalators leading to the platform.

  The play was drawing to a close. Lear lay dying, lamenting the passing of his only loyal daughter. Receiving news of Edmund’s death and that of the Fool, the king cried, “No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”

  Helena felt Damon tap her forearm. He placed his handkerchief in her hand. She quickly used it to wipe the tears from her eyes. Damon took her hand as they listened to the final lines of the play.

  At the Marymount station, there are only two passengers, a young man in business attire and a young woman in denim shorts and a yellow singlet. She enters the ticket gantry twenty-seven seconds after him, and heads to the escalators to her left.

  At the Bishan station, a stream of passengers transit from one line to the other.

  At the Lorong Chuan station, the uniformed man inside the station control booth runs his finger down the screen of his computer.

  At the Bartley station, a boy yawns as he plays a game on his tablet as he stands near the fare card purchase machine. A middle-aged woman approaches him and they leave together.

  At the Tai Seng station, a man carrying a white cardboard box exits through the ticket gantry and walks quickly out of the station.

  The lights went down. After the briefest pause, applause erupted from the audience. Helena and Damon rose in unison with the rest of the people seated around them—a standing ovation for the robotic troupe.

  At the MacPherson station, a middle-aged woman stops at the foot of the escalator and bends over, massaging her calf.

  At the Paya Lebar station, a man in a red Manchester United jersey scans his ticket and walks to the escalator on his right.

  At the Dakota station, a man waits outside the station control booth for a woman who exits through the ticket gate and walks over to greet him. The pair leaves together.

  At the Mountbatten station, a man holding a young girl by the hand scans his ticket, picks the child up and carries her through the gantry, then walks towards the lift
to the platform.

  After the show, Damon pulled Helena backstage. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said.

  They were greeted by an eerie scene. The whole cast sat silent and unmoving backstage. There were no congratulations, no noisy celebrations. It was like a museum of abandoned models of perfectly wrought human forms.

  “I’ve never seen a cast party like this. Especially not after a performance that was so well received,” Helena said.

  “I guess there’s never been a cast like this,” Damon replied, leading her past Cordelia and her sisters towards where Lear sat between Kent and Gloucester. “They look so lifelike, don’t they?” he said.

  “Not now, sitting here like this,” she answered, “but they did onstage. Much better than I expected.”

  Kent’s head turned towards her. “Thank you,” he said.

  She started. “Oh, I didn’t realise they were programmed to interact between performances.”

  Kent smiled. “They’re not.”

  She looked at him, then at Damon. Both men were laughing. She had a distinct feeling she was the butt of the joke.

  “You’re not a robot,” she said, turning to Kent. “I’m very sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too—seems to me the robots have the easier job. Makes me wish I were one. I’m exhausted.”

  “Helena,” Damon said, “this is Dr Alquist. Dr Alquist, Helena.”