“We’re all born unhappy.”
“We were hosting outsiders under our house, did you know?”
“Really?”
“Yes, they’re a family of three. I saw the child one night. She was six, seven, I don’t know. I saw her bent over a book I’d dumped many months ago. She was crying for some reason, and so I walked up to her and threw my arms around her. In a minute we were both crying like crazy. We only broke apart when we heard someone cough behind us. It was the mother, I think. I ran into the house. The next morning I peered into our crawl space and saw nobody. Like they were never even real.
“Theresa—”
His breath rasped the wind and bit off the end of my name. I felt cold. I rubbed my palms together and pressed them to my cheeks. I walked ahead of him and saw by the rusty gate swinging crookedly on squeaky hinges a trash can knocked over.
Trash, I thought, it’s following me around.
The plastic bag inside was split open, unraveling crumpled papers, cigarette butts, plastic pull tabs, used coffee cups that bled shamelessly onto the sidewalk. The dented lid was thrown halfway across the grass, and I was about to pick it up when from behind me Mr. Isaac gripped my arm, wheeled me around and kissed me lightly on the lips. I could feel my heart had leapt to my throat, because everything was just all too perfect in such an imperfect world. I pressed my hand on his face and it came away wet. Sobbing, he took my hand, and kissed it to his lips, held on to it for a long moment.
III
Early in the evening of the day the walls were toppled, our neighborhood became a great blue void, dotted by arms flailing and heads breaking through the surface like ants swimming in a child’s glass of water. The pillar-like trees were swept by so fast that they came off the earth in a tangle of roots and branches.
We’d scaled the slope of my roof and stood on its beaten shingles surveying what remained of the city. Houses were crushed in the rage of water as black as the sky, which for months had emptied on us a deluge so unappeasable in its fury, to drown the guilty and innocent alike.
As if they were only a pyramid of cards, or houses made out of matchsticks, buildings and telephone lines detached from the ground with a sound I’d never forget – Krr-r-ssh – until they tipped and sprawled defeated under the filthy surf. We saw all manner of things afloat in the water: splinters of wood, pieces of plastic, felled trees, rafters, roofs of houses, dead bodies, my brother; and, really, among the remnants of our vanquished lives, how could we differentiate at all what was trash and was not?
It was only four nights later when we saw the moon peek through the sky, dim at first, then bright and clear, full of promise. It smiled at me and there was a feeling of peace in the air. I leaned over the battered railings of my rooftop, in my sundress drenched, and felt the air heave the smell in from the water below. It seemed only a minute ago that I dreamed to grow wings and soar afloat in the sky, but now the black naked sea beneath looked inviting. One single step toward the void, one single step to cease all the desires that attended living. I saw my body below. I held my breath.
AND THE HEAVENS YOUR CANOPY
TED MAHSUN
The communal announcement from the Secular Authorities blared over the speakers and echoed between the buildings: “Strictly no littering at all times. Perpetrators can be charged with the maximum penalty of eternal exile to the penal levels.”
I never understood why the Secular Authorities took littering so seriously, especially when nobody had even so much as dropped a tissue in public in the last eighty years or so. Special recycling chutes were set up in every building and public space, and people knew to put them to proper use.
As usual, I tuned out the announcement and concentrated on calibrating windows. I couldn’t see inside of course, because from where I stood all I could see was the dark carbon shade of the circuit board that coated the reverse side of the windows up there on level twenty, but even through the blaring din of the announcement I could hear a rhythmic tapping focused on the center of the panel closest to me. Someone inside was trying to reach out to me.
I sighed, placed my tools on the platform, and wiped the grease off my hands on the cloth around my neck. I reached out to the small access node and touched my finger on its sensor panel. The panel lit green, indicating it was ready to receive data. Using my neural processor, I gave it the sudo command to open the window.
The window popped open with a metallic gasp, then slid up, revealing the figure of a man looking anxiously back at me. He looked to be in his fifties, garbed in a blue-striped long-sleeved shirt, a brown pair of slacks, and wore a locater/partnering band on the fourth finger of his left hand. The band’s blue light wasn’t blinking.
I pulled the goggles up from my eyes so that they rested on my forehead. Then I gripped the guard rail on the platform and balanced my weight with my arms. “Yes?” I said, in a not-too-friendly tone. I needed to get back to work and these windows weren’t going to recalibrate themselves.
The man looked behind him as if to make sure his room was truly empty of any other occupants, then peered out the window and took a look above and below him. Then he turned his attention back to me.
“Hey, miss,” he said. “You the window cleaner?”
I tried not to roll my eyes.
“Window programmer,” I said. “Yes, I am. How did you know I was here?”
“Oh, I switched the window view opacity to fifty percent so I could see what’s going on outside as well.”
“Well, it’s just me out here,” I said. “How can I help you, sir?”
“I, ah, I... can I ask you a question?” the man asked, rubbing his palms together.
“Sir, if you could just hurry it along...”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m sorry. Look, a friend suggested I talk to you regarding the windows.”
And here it came.
“Would it be possible if you could pull some strings, push some buttons and give an upgrade on my view subscription? I’m a little tired of seeing the same old skyscrapers, the same old buildings. You know, something other than the Petronas Twin Towers, the Menara KL, the Dayabumi, the Maybank Tower. I need to see something new when I look out of this office while I work. Think you could do something?”
“You mean...” I paused a short moment so that he would have a chance to rethink what he had actually requested of me. “You want free extra views?”
“If... if that would be all right,” he stammered. “All right by you, I mean.”
“It’s not all right by me. It’s illegal.” I pulled the goggles back over my eyes. “Not too keen on having the Secular Authorities paying me a visit. Have a good day, sir.” I reached for the access node.
“No, wait. Wait!” the man pleaded. “I might have something to offer you in return! Don’t you want to know what I have?”
“Don’t think so, sir. I get paid well enough for this job. Enough that I am happy not to accept bribes.”
“Bribes? No, no, no. Who said anything about bribes? This is a gift...” He ran over to the desk in the middle of his office and swiped up a bright blue solidstate and waved it in my direction.
Even through the filtered lens of the goggles, I recognized the unique shade of blue. “Tickets to the Sky Dome,” I said.
“That’s right,” the man said. “Ringgit can’t buy everything. Only lottery winners get to view the sky.”
“How do you know I want to view the sky?” I asked.
“Everybody wants to view the sky. Everybody. Even window cleaners.”
“Programmers. Well, don’t you want to view the sky?”
“I’ve already been. Wife won the last round and we went to see it together. This round it was me who won.”
“Don’t you want to go again? Doesn’t your wife?”
The man cleared his throat and threw a quick glance at his locating/partnering band. “I, ah, I, well, I doubt she wants to again. I wouldn’t want to go to the Sky Dome alone. So you can have these tickets i
nstead. Go ahead and bring along a loved one or something.”
I looked at the tickets. The date was for some time next month, the numbers flashed alluringly on the smooth blue surface. Lottery tickets were ridiculously ringgit-heavy to get ahold of. I’d always dreamed of viewing the sky from the Sky Dome, the only place in all the malls that was accessible for the public to enjoy the natural blueness of the actual sky.
Working as a window programmer who works on the side of skyscrapers meant that I never got to see anything other than other skyscrapers and of course that great climate controlling ceiling that covered the whole city, turning it into one mega city-spanning shopping mall which, in turn, was made by combining several other giant shopping malls. Always other buildings, never the real, actual sky.
“I couldn’t possibly,” I said.
The man shoved the blue wafer into my hand. “Sure you can. In return... well, my windows do need a subscription upgrade.” He winked.
×××
The next month I was scheduled to perform maintenance checks on the building with the windows where I had met the man who gave me the Sky Dome tickets. I reached the window where the man’s office was located. Sure enough, there came the tap-tapping to signal me to open it.
I thumbed the access panel and the window gasped open once more.
“So? How was the—”
I motioned him to be quiet. I sudoed a disable command to my internal communications networks so my superiors wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on our conversation.
“It’s okay to talk now,” I said.
“Sorry, forgot about your comms. Anyway, just wanted to ask you how the Sky Dome was. You went last week right? Who was your plus one?”
“I brought along my andromaid.”
“Your andromaid!” he said, throwing his arms in the air. “Aw! I told you to bring a loved one or something.”
“Yes, and I brought something.”
“Well, what did you think?”
“Think about what?”
“Think about what? The sky! What did you think about the sky!”
I didn’t know what to say, so I told him the truth. “It was a little underwhelming.”
“Underwhelming?” As I expected, he looked surprised, and even a little hurt, as if I had made a personal insult.
“I don’t understand how such a splendid thing like the sky itself could be underwhelming!”
“Was it even the real sky? It didn’t look real.”
“Didn’t look real? Of course it’s real. You were on the very top of all the malls combined, the very peak of the city! How much more real can the sky get at that level?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’d take this personally.”
“Of course I’m taking this personally. Those were my tickets.”
“Which you gave in exchange for new window views. Which, let me remind you, are illegal by the way. If ever the Secular Authorities find out your window is tuned to display a view of the Merlion Park—”
“Yeah, about that...”
“—without the proper permit and subscription they’d... wait. What? I gave you what you wanted, didn’t I?”
“The new views you gave me,” the man said, “didn’t really captivate me as much as I thought they would.”
“Why? What’s wrong with them?”
“All those buildings, those vistas. I don’t know. They just look fake.”
I slammed my fist on the guard rail. “They don’t! They’re as real as they come. I programmed, modeled, textured, and shaded them myself! I can’t believe you’re saying they’re fake.”
“I can’t believe you said the sky was fake.”
“I said it looked fake.”
We stood there, half way up the building, me on my window programmer’s platform and him leaning out the window, glaring at each other. Eventually, he said, “Seems we’ve come to a stalemate.”
“Yes.” I sighed and shrugged. “Look, I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”
“It’s okay. You really think the view of the sky in the Sky Dome looks fake? I mean, you’re in the window business. You’d know. You think the Secular Authorities could’ve faked the whole thing?”
I gave some thought to it. The technology was definitely there. They could certainly simulate a window to the sky with the same kind of technology that we placed on our skyscrapers. It would have cost billions just because of the size and engineering involved to create the multiple curved panels for the Sky Dome, but sure, it was possible. “I suppose they could.”
“Damn. How many more things do you think they’re hiding from us? Do you think the sky even exists?”
My palms were clammy with sweat from gripping the guard rail too tight. So tight, my knuckles had lost their color. “You’d better watch what you’re saying,” I said. “Those words are clearly approaching sedition if you ask me. We’re already in big enough trouble if they ever find out you have access to restricted, unapproved views. No need to add fuel to the fire!” I looked around. Nothing but the wind and other buildings and lots of windows up here. For now, at least.
“I suppose you’re right,” the man said. “Best you continue with your window work. Thanks for the... well, you know what.”
“Yes, and thank you for the tickets.”
×××
It was a few weeks later when the subject of simulating skies in windows came up again, though this time from a surprising source. The rest of the crew were already on duty and had left. I held back; not wanting to get stuck in the rush when everybody else was leaving at the same time.
I was at the digital Kanban screen noting what needed to be done for the day when I noticed the notification panel blink red. A new memo had come in. I swiped it open and read: “Anyone good at sky modeling? Report to R&D Unit 12 immediately.”
I scratched my head. Why would they want sky modelers? The R&D guys knew we just reused the shared assets if we needed a sky background. Most of the other window programmers just filled the background with more skyscrapers. To us lot, the skyscrapers are the sky.
I was curious about the memo though. I considered myself able to draw a cloud or two, and I often did in my spare time. I looked at all the tasks that needed to be done on the Kanban screen.
There were quite a lot.
I shrugged.
I suppose all those windows could wait a few more hours or so.
The elevator deposited me on the forty-fifth floor and I made my way down a stark white corridor lined with reinforced aluminum screens, which were at the moment set to opaque so that passersby would not be able to see what was going on inside the laboratories that occupied this floor. No one else was around, and the soundproofing must have been set to max, because all I could hear was the hum of the air-conditioning and my own controlled breathing.
The corridor took several turns as it followed the angles of the building. I kept on walking down the long corridor, hoping to see a sign or digital signal that would tell me where R&D Unit 12 was, but there were none. I passed several doors, but all of them were inaccessible, except for the last. The door lit green as I approached, and slid open. An andromaid, one of the newer models with a blank featureless globe upon its neck, stepped out. It stopped when it sensed me, but then quickly approached.
“Yes, are you lost?” the andromaid asked.
“I’m looking for R&D Unit 12,” I said.
“I see. This is regarding the memo. Follow me.”
The andromaid took me back through the door and I entered a large laboratory, filled with computers and instruments of all kinds, with monitors filled with streaming data covering all the walls. In the middle of the lab were tables with more instruments and miscellaneous electronics laid out on top. At the other end of the lab was a desk, stacked with strange slab-shaped items I couldn’t recognize. As I approached I eyed them carefully because on the thinner sides were printed certain topics that piqued my interest.
Topics like, “The Art of Design”, �
�Modeling 3D Architecture”, “The Beauty of Landscaping” and other related subjects.
Behind the desk sat a bald man, hunched over, with skin wrinkled like a dried orange. Colored almost like one too. He looked up and saw me looking at the pile of items I didn’t recognize.
“Ah, I see my books have gained your attention, kid,” the man said.
I tried to restrain myself from showing surprise. They certainly did not look like any books I knew. They looked too fragile to store any kind of information in them.
“She’s here regarding the memo,” the andromaid said.
“Of course she is,” the man snapped. “She wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t sent the memo. Wouldn’t even been able to pass elevator security protocols.”
“Yes, Dr. Munawar.” The andromaid’s globe for a head glowed pink, which slowly changed shade until it became red.
Dr. Munawar laughed. “You’re a sensitive little thing, aren’t you? Be off with you! Go do something useful for a change, rather than mope around every time I snark at you.”
“Yes, Dr. Munawar.” The andromaid slouched off, its globe now glowing positively crimson.
Once the andromaid had left the lab, Dr. Munawar turned his attention back to me. “No idea why they assigned one of those to my unit. Who the hell needs an andromaid that can have moods?” He shook his head.
I held out my hand. “Sir, hello. I’m—”
“Yes, yes, you’re here because you think you can model skies,” the man croaked. He stood up and walked around the desk toward me and wagged a finger. “Well, kid, I’ll be the judge of that.”
“I hope I can prove myself worthy of your standards, sir,” I said.
“Show me some samples,” Dr. Munawar said, pointing to an access node on one of the tables. I walked over and stamped my finger to the node. The monitors that lined the walls flashed, and the streams of data that had occupied them were replaced with my hours-long creative efforts at modeling realistic clouds in the sky. The fluffy digital clouds floated serenely against a brilliant cerulean sky. All of it of my making.
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