This story by Rimi B. Chatterjee is a part of Kitaab Quarterly- Vol 1
Maggie Larson held out the bottle of suntan lotion to Sandra Okafor Liang, who took it without a word. Sandra knew why Maggie was sulking. Sandra squatted down carefully on the pitching deck of the yacht and began rubbing the lotion into Maggie’s shoulders. Maggie muttered, ‘Four years! Four whole years of pandemic party-pooping, and now the Singapore rave scene finally opens all the way up, but Sandra’s gross dad has to forbid his widdle baby from going, and she’s like yes, Daddy, anything you say, Daddy.’ Sandra felt Maggie’s muscles jumping with outrage under her fingers. ‘You’re such a wimp, Sandra. When will you grow the fuck up?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sandra, as she gently protected Maggie’s shoulders from the mild December sun. The sea breeze ruffled Maggie’s golden curls as Sandra twisted them away from her neck and said soothingly, ‘At least Daddy let me take this weekend trip with you on Jordan’s yacht.’
‘Gah. Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
Sandra tried to suppress a twinge of exasperation. ‘You said you wouldn’t bring it up again if I promised to help you with your finals project.’
‘You haven’t helped me yet, Sandra,’ Maggie sniffed. ‘You’re all talk.’ Sandra didn’t point out that she’d only made the promise yesterday, and the projects weren’t due for another month. Maggie shrugged her hands off. ‘Where’s Julio, why’s he taking so long?’
Sandra ducked her head in the hatchway and yelled, ‘Julio! Maggie wants you!’ She left Maggie muttering on her sun-warmed towel and joined Jordan at the bow. He smiled at her, one hand on the wheel. ‘Maggie still sulking?’ he murmured above the drone of the boat’s engine. Sandra nodded, crouching down by the binnacle behind the windscreen to avoid the spindrift. The wind tugged at the long straight strands of her ferociously ironed-out hair. Her daddy hated her curls. They reminded him of so much he’d rather forget.
Behind her Julio, junior model from Mexico and Maggie’s current squeeze, appeared from below deck, resplendent in a posing pouch and a ton of oil. Maggie grumbled at him as he sat down in Sandra’s place and got busy with the lotion.
Maggie and Sandra were final year students at the Singapore Art School, specialising in photography, though in Maggie’s case it was more accurate to say she was majoring in selfies. Julio and Maggie were both eighteen, while Sandra was two months’ short of her eighteenth birthday, which would fall bang in the middle of finals in February 2024. Jordan was older by a decade and spent his time helping his father run his various businesses in the city, when he wasn’t partying his brains out. It was 23 December 2023. ‘Don’t be too hard on Maggie,’ Jordan said softly to Sandra. ‘You’ll see, she’ll lighten up when we get to the island.’
Sandra laid a hand on his arm. ‘Thank you, Jordan, for arranging this trip for us. At least my dad trusts you.’
‘You shouldn’t let Maggie boss you around.’
‘She’s my best friend,’ said Sandra mildly. ‘If she can’t boss me, who can? Other than my boyfriend, of course.’
Jordan winked at her. Sandra felt the heat flushing her coffee-coloured skin. Jordan was one of the few people who didn’t make her self-conscious about her colour. Everyone else in Singapore treated her like a freak of nature.
That thought reminded her of the words of Professor Kerry Kantasingh, her mentor. Professor Kantasingh had found Sandra crying in the lightroom after being bullied by a bunch of Chinese girls. ‘They told me to go back where I came from!’ she had blubbered. ‘I’ve lived my whole life in Singapore!’
‘Hey, girl,’ the professor had said in her soft island accent from the other side of the world. ‘They shouldn’t blame you. Your mother was Nigerian, right?’
Sandra nodded miserably. ‘Violet Okafor. She was a model. She left when I was two. I… I don’t even remember her.’
‘They’re jealous, those privileged kids,’ Professor Kantasingh had said gravely. ‘You should know that.’
‘Of me?’ Sandra had wiped her eyes in the dim red light. ‘Why?’
‘Because there’s a skin tone that glows like gold on film, and you have it, Sandra. They’re jealous because they don’t have the elegance that you effortlessly possess.’
‘I do?’ Sandra had said doubtfully. Her father wouldn’t have agreed. Her hair, her colour, her mannerisms—sometimes she thought her very existence poisoned the world for him.
‘Don’t be ashamed of your biracial identity. I’m from the Caribbean: we’re all mixed there.’ Sandra had wiped her eyes, and Professor Kantasingh had smiled with a hint of mischief. ‘It’s why back home we’re all gorgeous.’
Those words had helped, a little, although lately the professor had begun to push her towards working in front of the camera rather than behind it. ‘You’re tall, you’re poised, you have great bone structure, you’d take the modelling world by storm. Don’t waste it, Sandra.’ But that wasn’t what Sandra wanted. She didn’t want to be a carbon copy of her mother. Kenny Liang had made sure of that.
Every Christmas season, Kenny would remind his daughter that Violet had walked out of the house to do the Christmas shopping and never returned. She hadn’t even looked back at two-year-old Sandra in her father’s arms. A year later, her lawyer had served the divorce papers, and Kenny’s last sight of Violet had been in court. Sandra had only pictures of her, from lookbooks and fashion shoots. Behind those glamour shots, there was a void, filled only with her father’s vinegary reminiscences.
And then, aged fourteen, Sandra had met Maggie, who had declared they were to be besties forever. Maggie was biracial too: her mother was Afghan and her father English, but she was sandy-haired and burned easily in the sun, so most people assumed she was white. Pretty soon Sandra had found herself cast as Maggie’s caretaker and chief punching bag. Sometimes it hurt, but it was better than having no friends at all.
‘Look, Sandra,’ said Jordan, ‘there’s our private paradise.’
Over the white arrowhead of the bow, a hump of forest seemed to rise from the grey-green waters of the Malaka Straits. ‘It looks kinda wild,’ said Maggie, joining them at the binnacle. ‘You sure there won’t be, like, snakes and things?’
‘I’ve brought the insect-repellant torches,’ said Jordan. ‘And there’s food for three days, so we’re good till Monday evening. Julio, I’m gonna need your help to carry it all ashore.’
‘Sure thing!’ said Julio. He lived to please.
‘Monday evening!’ Maggie hooted. ‘I can’t stay that long! I told my Mom I’m sleeping over at Sandra’s.’
‘Yeah, but your mother’s busy showing those sheikhs around town.’
‘Shakes?’ Julio’s perfect brow wrinkled. Jordan rolled his eyes. ‘Sheikhs. From Al Ayyarun Corporation. You know, the Persosphere,’ he added helpfully. ‘Your mum probably won’t even notice if you stay an extra day.’
‘Huh. True.’ Maggie hmphed. ‘All Mummy talks about is how Al Ayyarun’s thorium reactors are going to solve the climate crisis.’ Maggie’s mother was a contractor working with Ramdhun Oil and Natural Gas to pioneer new energies. ‘I wish she’d hurry up and broker the deal already. Then I can upgrade to the Ramfone 7,’ Maggie pouted. ‘She promised.’
They dropped anchor. Julio, his muscles jumping like cats in a bag, swung Maggie off the deck and carried her ashore, to delighted shrieks. The boys unloaded all the plastic crates of food and drink. Maggie pursed her lips as she looked around. ‘There’s no view here,’ she sniffed. ‘I want to be able to see New Singapore.’ The boys made a quick foray along the shoreline and said they’d found a darling little beach. Julio and Jordan pitched the tents there and moved the stuff while Maggie and Sandra walked by the shore.
Far to their left, Singapore’s skyscrapers were lit up for Christmas week against the eastern sky, which had darkened with oncoming dusk to a deep purple. To their right, the blaze of white light that was New Singapore trembled against the sunset. ‘The first-ever privately owned high-tech floating city,’ said Maggie, waving at it. ‘Tomorrow there’s a super-exclusive Christmas Eve party, only for the world’s biggest moneybags.’ Sandra tried to look suitably awed.
‘Dad says in a couple of years, everyone who’s anyone will be living on New Singapore,’ said Jordan, coming up behind with a beer for each of them. ‘Old Singapore will go back to being a malarial swamp village.’
‘Or it’ll sink below the waves,’ said Maggie smugly. ‘But we’ll all be sitting pretty in our private marinas. Mummy has tickets to the public launch on January 4. Cheers!’
‘Cheers.’ Sandra wanted to say her father couldn’t afford the downpayment on a floating villa, but she didn’t. Julio said nothing either. He just spread a rug for Maggie to sit on.
Maggie flopped down with a sigh and swigged her beer. ‘Ah! I wish Dad were here instead of in Hong Kong. Then I’d get to be on New Singapore for the party: Daddy can’t ever refuse me anything. The light show’s going to be amazing. I hope we’ll see it from here. I don’t want to have to haul this camp somewhere else.’
‘I think it’ll be okay,’ said Sandra. For days now, teasers of New Singapore’s imminent launch had been saturating the airwaves. The floating city had been built by Ramdhun Corporation, and it was a high-tech marvel. It had gardens down to the water’s edge, statuary by famous artists, layer-cake malls and even a Formula-E racetrack buoyed up by the hulls of five retired aircraft carriers.
There had been a bit of a scandal in 2019 when an anonymous post on Sharebox had alleged that the basic design for the city had been stolen from a book on green eco-cities by a university professor. The post had included a detailed breakdown showing how all the sustainability, permaculture and citizens’ participation had been stripped out and replaced with hidden workers’ barracks and service gulags, but Ramdhun had squashed that one easily. The corporation was rumoured to run a large deniable troll army to take down anyone who dared harsh their mellow.
All through the pandemic, while New Singapore was being built, the Ramdhun top management had lived on the RSS Sardar Sarovar, the converted cruise ship in the heart of the city. A Hollywood studio was even shooting a movie there, crazier, richer and more Asian than ever. There were rumours that Ramdhun was applying to the UN to make New Singapore the world’s first privately-owned nation, with its own passports, border controls and laws. If the old city was rags-to-riches, New Singapore was the thorium-powered future of wealth.
Maggie gasped as fireworks erupted from the floating city. Drones hovered in the air, making the New Singapore flag of a red sun setting on a black sea below a white sky. The black rectangle below the red semicircle was a grid of dark dots silhouetted against the fading sunset and bordered by a single line of lights. The darkened drones looked like tiny aliens poised for an invasion.
Music blared suddenly behind them. ‘Party time!’ Maggie crowed, tossing aside her empty and running back to the boys. By the time Sandra had collected the bottles and joined her, Maggie was chewing a gummy and bopping to the music from Jordan’s ultra-powerful mini speakers. Jordan held out the packet of edibles to Sandra and raised an eyebrow. She shook her head. ‘It’ll get you in the mood,’ he murmured, taking her in his arms. She leaned into him. ‘I’m already in the mood,’ she whispered, and nibbled his ear. The truth was, if she took one of the gummies, Maggie’s jibes would hurt too much.
As the moon rose and made a track of silver across the sea, they danced and drank and ate the hors-d’oeuvres from Jordan’s award-winning chef. Every so often they would stop to admire the firework displays over New Singapore. Sometimes they could hear deep bass and beats pulsing over the waters from the floating city. ‘One day,’ Maggie yawped, ‘that’s going to be me over there, spending my mun-nay!’ The moon, three days away from full, climbed the heavens. Then Maggie grabbed Julio round the waist and towed him unceremoniously into one of the two tents. Jordan waved goodbye to the pair with a touch of irony.
‘Whew,’ he said, turning to her. ‘Finally, Sandra, I get to spend quality time with you.’
He switched the music to something gentler, and they sat side by side on the rug. The moonlight silvered the waves lapping the beach. ‘This has been so fun. I don’t regret missing the rave at all. Thank you, Jordan, you’re the best.’
Jordan put an arm around her. ‘I told you I’d bring your dad around.’
‘Yes, he’s…always extra mean around this time. Because today’s the day Mother left, all those years ago. He has to remind me that I remind him. Just by existing.’ She tried to stop the bitterness from seeping into her voice.
‘But he trusts me,’ said Jordan, smiling in the moonlight. ‘I’m a proper Chinese businessman’s son. I push all the right buttons for him.’
Sandra didn’t mention the hours her father spent railing at Jordan’s playboy habits. Jordan might check the boxes, but other than that big green tick, there wasn’t a lot in there. Also, a tiny part of her did wonder why a hot catch like Jordan spent all his time with an underage schoolgirl, but she sternly suppressed that little voice. She suspected it came from a piece of her mother in her.
Suddenly things went dark as Jordan’s head obscured the moon and began to descend like an alien spaceship. Sandra sat up straight and wriggled out from under. ‘Jordan, I’ve been thinking…about what you asked. About…the next step.’
‘Oh. Well, I did say it’s entirely your choice. I’d never force you to do something you weren’t totally comfortable with.’ His teeth flashed in the moonlight, and a bouquet of fiery chrysanthemums lit up the night sky. ‘But I will say, Sandra, it’s a beautiful night, and we’ve had a lovely time. Wouldn’t it be sweet to round it off with the best thing ever?’
She had to admit it was tempting. ‘But I’m not yet eighteen.’
‘So? You’ll still be the same person you are now, two months from now. You’ll always be my little baby Sandra, even when you’re eighty with no teeth or hair.’ He grinned at her look of dismay.
‘I know I can trust you, Jordan. But…can I trust myself? I…I might go too far.’
‘Too far?’ He looked amused. ‘You’re not exploring a cave or diving for pearls. It’s just me and you, being awesome together, like always.’ He leaned toward her, haloed by the sky’s expensive fire. She turned her face aside, away from the light. Oh god, she wanted to dive in, find every pearl in the dark folds at the bottom of her soul, explore every cave, and yet….
She stiffened in shock. ‘Jordan!’
‘What? What, Sandra, did I hurt you?’
‘No, no, look there!’ She pointed across the strait to the southeast, to the impenetrable darkness of Sumatra. His gaze followed her finger, and he frowned. ‘I don’t see anything.’
She struggled with the words. ‘It was like the earth heaving, no, tilting.’ God, she wished she’d had her camera in that moment, instead of Jordan’s big old head. ‘The stars vanished, and the horizon looked weird.’ As she spoke, a dull thunder sounded, low and sullen. Jordan frowned. ‘But I can see the stars.’
‘For a moment, it was…’
‘Do you think it was an earthquake? Should we rouse the two lovebirds?’ Jordan looked back at Maggie’s tent, then at the blaze of New Singapore. ‘Maybe it was some special effect for the party.’
Sandra frowned. ‘What kind of party trick would do that?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. New Singapore is stuffed to the bilges with super advanced tech. Maybe they were projecting on the sky or something. Wow! Look at that!’
Smoke canisters had gone off all round the floating city. The roiling white clouds glowed, lit from below, and then even Sandra gasped as luminous dragons appeared, writhing sinuously in the clouds.
‘Sandra! Get your DSLR! That is some next level drone show!’ Sandra ran to get her camera and tripod. By the time she returned, the dragons were battling. ‘Heh. I think they symbolise the market spheres,’ said Jordan. ‘That big orange one is Ramdhun’s Indosphere, and it just made short work of the green one, which is, I dunno, Al Ayyarun of the Persosphere? The red one’s probably Lionfist, the corp that rules the Sinosphere. I have no idea what the blue and purple ones are.’
Now they could hear music as the dragons’ dance-battled in the sky. Sandra began filming them. ‘Kind of cheeky,’ said Jordan. ‘Maggie said delegates from both Al Ayyarun and Lionfist are on New Singapore right now. I guess Ramdhun wanted to put them in their places. After all, no one’s got a damn fine floating city like they have.’
Sandra didn’t care, but she tried to feign interest as she squinted through the viewfinder. ‘Maggie said Al Ayyarun are building their own private city under a dome in the Persian desert. Powered entirely by thorium.’
‘Dad says the prices of New Singapore real estate will drop once the first phase is over,’ said Jordan. He looked with pride at his yacht riding at anchor. ‘Imagine that baby moored next to a floating love nest, huh, Sandra? I bet you’d lose all your scruples then, and your dad would roll over too.’
Sandra kept her attention on her field of view. It was challenging to keep the drones in focus without losing detail. The dragons were spectacular, but she preferred nature photography. Last year she’d made a cloud atlas of Singapore’s winter typhoons. She’d gotten a rare shot of asperitas clouds, a newly discovered formation that made the sky look like a stormy sea, churning and boiling above your head as if you were flying over it. If you stared at it too long it felt like gravity had been reversed. She’d taken the shot almost by instinct, and she was surprised when Professor Kanta Singh told her that only a handful of photographers had ever captured the phenomenon. The professor had urged her to enter her piece in an international competition. She hadn’t placed, but it had been exciting.
The dragons danced and shook and blew flame at each other until the big orange one triumphed. Jordan yawned and stretched luxuriously. ‘Bed?’ he said to her. She nodded. In the tent, they kissed chastely, then Sandra turned away and lay on her side. She could feel Jordan watching her, his breath tickling her neck. She almost gave in, but something, perhaps some aftertaste of her disquiet when the sky had tilted and the stars had dipped into darkness, made her keep to her half of the sleeping bag. Jordan curled round her and sighed.
*
Sandra opened her eyes or thought she did. In the darkness, among the stars, hung billboards. So many billboards. Each one bore the same figure: a tall, elegant woman, in a dress that moved like water. Under the hemline, the faint blocky skyline of a city could be seen, indistinct through the luminous veil, like a waterfall. As if the flowing folds of fabric that enveloped her legs were inundating the city. Her hair was a vast dark planet, soft as a cloud, her brows circled by a diadem of sparkling droplets. Her arms were in long opera gloves, leafy and green to the wrist, bursting into deep pink flowers on her hands and fingers. She smiled, her cheekbones darkly glowing.
‘Hello, Mother,’ said Sandra.
‘Oh child,’ said Violet Okafor. ‘I’m so proud of you.’
‘Why?’ The beach Sandra stood on seemed to be made of black sand. ‘This is a dream, right? You’re not real.’
Violet smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter. Maybe I should have said, I will be proud of you. Time is slippery. I’ve come to warn you.’
‘Oh really. What against? Sleeping with my boyfriend? Lying to Dad? Letting Maggie Walk all over me?’
‘Death.’ She waved a languid floral hand. ‘Not your own, though. A big death walks the world.’
Sandra laughed bitterly. ‘What do you know about it? You left, Mother. That was enough death from you, thanks very much.’
‘You’re nearly a woman now.’ Violet watched her with mild eyes. ‘What would you have done, if you were me?’
‘You abandoned your child!’ Sandra wasn’t going to fall for this. ‘That’s what evil people do.’
Violet smiled sadly. ‘I never intended to have you at all, Sandra. He tricked me. He thought you would make me stay. But I knew he would suck the life out of me if I gave him the ghost of a chance.’
‘You never took the chance!’
‘That man is wahala, Sandra. He’s trouble. He thinks pretty women are like Barbie dolls. All the same: just come in different colours. He said, give up your language and your friends and your culture.’ The dress seemed more and more like waters cascading, overwhelming everything in their path. Sandra felt sick. Of course, her dreaming mind was playing tricks on her. ‘Your culture mattered more to you than me?’
Violet looked at her with deep compassion. ‘Child, you were his binding spell, his bad medicine laid on me. I was a prisoner for the nine months I carried you. A slave, no less. And then, once you were born, he would scream at you whenever he wanted to hurt me. Use your pain to break my heart. And spine.’
Sandra covered her ears. ‘I don’t want to hear this! It’s not real! It’s all lies!’
‘Look at me,’ said Violet, and Sandra saw she had her mother’s deep eyes and her height and her way of standing. ‘I hate you,’ she moaned. ‘Why did you make me?’
‘I love you,’ said Violet. ‘And now that you are woman, you should understand me as you do yourself.’
‘I’m a child. Your child,’ she sobbed. ‘Still, still a child.’
‘Oh?’ Violet put her flowery fingertips together and tilted her planet of a head. She looked down at a curled shape by Sandra’s feet. ‘Then why are you with him?’
*
The next thing Sandra saw was the fabric of the tent, murky in the morning light, and she knew the dream was over. She shut her eyes again, then rubbed them, groping for the happiness with which she’d lain down. ‘Good morning, sweetheart,’ said Jordan, and nuzzled her neck. She felt his sex pushing against her buttock like the nose of an eager dog. ‘Jordan.’ She sat up. ‘Jordan, I think we should wait. Two months isn’t that long, and I don’t want to lie to Dad. He always figures it out, and right now he’s looking for any excuse to force me to do an MBA. I need to build up my portfolio.’
‘Really? That’s why you won’t…’ He looked at her taut expression and blew his cheeks out. ‘Okay. I guess I can wait two months. I’ve waited this long, haven’t I? You trust me, don’t you?’
‘You’re a sweety.’ She kissed him. He made a sour face, but she’d already turned away to find her flipflops. ‘Why’s it so quiet?’
‘Oh, I bet Julio and Maggie will sleep till noon.’
‘No, I mean, it’s Christmas Eve today.’ She groped for the tent flap. ‘Surely there should be something. Carol singing, music, I don’t know…’
‘It’s too early, Sandra.’ But she had already made her way outside. Then he heard a strangled cry and a thump.
He came out and instantly gagged as the thicky, soupy air grabbed his throat. Sandra hadn’t made it to the waterline. She’d collapsed onto the sand just a little way from the tent, her hands framing her horrified face. Jordan knelt beside her and stared. ‘My god!’ The sea was turbid, oily, filled with wreckage as far as they could see. A thick haze lay over everything, blotting out the horizon. ‘Where the hell is the yacht? It can’t have slipped its moorings.’ She didn’t answer, just whimpered. He went on talking, trying to push the panic away, shove it back down his own gullet as it fought to escape. ‘God, this place looks like the aftermath of a war. What the fuck happened?’
Sandra looked to her left and clutched his arm. Behind her, Julio came running out of Maggie’s tent. ‘What you say about yacht?’ he asked fearfully. ‘Maggie wants to know.’
‘Look,’ Sandra breathed. ‘Look at the sunrise.’
The sky was filled with smog, but they could see the pale, lifeless disk of the sun, rising over nothing. ‘Where’s Singapore?’ In place of the city, all they could see was a shapeless mound. No skyscrapers toothed the horizon, no ships bustled in and out of Marina Bay. There was no bay. Only low dark humps veiled by haze and a heavy stench in the air.
Maggie emerged and fell to her knees. Her eyes were huge. Her hands shook. The breath rattled in her throat. ‘I want to go home!’ she screeched. ‘What is this fucking place?’
‘Relax, Maggie, it’s probably just a trick of the light.’ Jordan pulled out his phone and stared at the screen in disbelief. ‘Everything’s offline. No bars, nothing.’
‘The city can’t just vanish,’ Maggie gasped. ‘Mummy’ll kill me!’ She pointed to the west, to the geometric white lines and shapes of the floating city, its lights winking vaguely through the haze. ‘Look, New Singapore is fine. Let’s take the yacht and go over there. Maybe they’ll tell us wh…’ Maggie’s voice died into silence. One of the bundles in the waves had flipped over. The thing that trailed from it, they could now see, was the remains of an arm. A fin loomed, and another. The bundle tossed and turned as sharks tore at it. Maggie retched into the sand. Sandra was still trying to calm her down when the helicopter passed overhead.
*
Sandra shivered, clutching the crisis blanket over her beachwear. The helicopter had taken the four of them to an emergency refugee center on the coast of Johor, just north of Singapore Island. They’d flown over the northern tip of the former nation of Singapore, and it had looked like an alien landscape. Kilometres of lumpy terrain covered with a thick dark syrup of marine mud.
So far, the four of them were the only rescues from the city proper: all the others were rural people who’d been out in their fishing boats. Hopes of more coming in were dying by the hour. Maggie, in tears, was trying to reach her diplomat father in Hong Kong. Julio seemed relieved, or dazed, it was difficult to tell. Jordan was keeping it together, but he kept muttering that he was no refugee. He’d be calling his lawyers in London at the first opportunity and taking stock of his father’s overseas properties. Sandra hunkered down and tuned them all out. She was trying to process the certainty that she was now homeless and destitute. Even her DSLR was lost.
Above her head, a TV screen endlessly played a newsclip, the last footage to come out of Singapore before the city had been buried. It showed people on the Strand at night, lit up in a blaze of Christmas lights. They were squinting into the southern sky. To the south, the horizon had seemed to rise as if the Earth were tipping into darkness. And then unimaginable violence had come out of the night.
What had caused it? The newscasters said there had been a huge cave-in on the southern margin of the Malaka Straits. Where the depth had once been 24 metres, less than the draft of the world’s largest cargo ships, the seabed had fallen more than three hundred metres. Perhaps even deeper: the data was still unclear. The cave-in had caused ‘an incredible vertical displacement of water’, the experts said stuffily. They had nothing on what caused it. Had tons of seabed simply dematerialised? Only one commentator started to say that thorium is found in very low concentrations and tons of ore are needed to make one truckload of it, but the studio cut away to commercial before they could finish the thought. In its 204-year history, Singapore had never suffered a tsunami: it was protected on all sides by its neighbours. That’s what all the news anchors said, over and over, until Sandra wanted to scream.
As the huge dark wave had loomed over Marina Bay, a streak of multicoloured light had run down the three-hundred-metre wall of moving debris and water. It was the reflected brilliance of the doomed festive city, and it had made a momentary shape, like a winged and haloed figure looking down on Singapore. People were calling it the Angel of Doom.
But that was not the image that was burned on Sandra’s brain. No, that came last, just before the feed cut out. As newscasters blabbered about how the quest for green energy was proving to be even more damaging than oil and gas, all she saw on the screen was what the newsdrones had recorded in their last minutes, looking helplessly up at the sea above their heads, full of broken boats and snapped-off coral reefs.
There had been a patch of brightness in the churning waves. It was the moon, three days short of full, shining through thousands of tons of muddy water made momentarily weightless by a horizontal velocity two thirds of the speed of sound. It had looked to her like asperitas clouds.
Author’s Bio
Rimi B. Chatterjee is a writer and academic based in Kolkata, India. She is currently creating the Antisense Universe, a story world focused on the civilisational redesign, in which this story is set. She has also set short stories, comics, novels, novellas, screenplays, and TV series in this world. Sandra Okafor Liang, the main character of this story, is a recurring character in the TV series.