THE CITIZEN

“All of us, Pinky, Morpheus, Jardin and I, we would hang around the Our Glorious Dead war memorial at the Padang. Just sitting there, listening to music, chilling with our other Vespa friends. It was all part of a Vespa subculture, you see? Occasionally, the Harley motorbikes would roar in. With their cigars and their Guns and Roses and the leather jackets. We never could quite get round to that state -- other than the fact the harleys are expensive -- but really, cigars and leather jackets? In Singapore? We smoked Marlboro Reds during those heady days, and the closest we got to leather was denim. In either case, we had no real issue with the Harley gangs, and they had no issues with us, the Vespa gang. Sometimes we’d ride around Orchard Road at 3am as one comical two wheeler platoon. All of us taking in the sight of the commercial district as it’s shut down and sleeping for the night. The cleaners spraying down the streets, the lights flickering away at nothing, the air cool and humid.”

“Over the years, all of us grew up. Jardin decided to become a banker. Morpheus joined her family shipping business -- second hand cars, if you must know -- while Pinky and I remained the last two standing, our vague sense of countercultural attitude slowly dissipating as family and economics and health problems took over. The last time I saw Pinky, she was leaving the country on a one-way trip to Thailand for a sex-change operation. I never heard from her again. Meanwhile, I met Robert Sebastian Cheong here, then a JC student, and was linked up to Jack and Rose, the only three people I knew of who could sustain the sliver of rebellion lying within me. These days, I would occasionally walk past Our Glorious Dead in the late evenings. No one hangs out there anymore.”

Tan Vee Bun ends his story as we approach Kallang. We’re sitting in a small canoe, floating down a flooded canal. The sky a shaded pink, and the street lamps white and yellow as the night creeps in to cloak us in its comforting blanket of anonymity. In the twilight, I notice Tan Vee Bun’s silhouette hunch over, signalling an unmistakable air of melancholy, his spectacle frames reflecting the fading light of the day. 

Robert Sebastian Cheong moves to the front of the canoe, laying a hand on his boyfriends’ back. He turns back to me, his face inscrutable, “and now it’s just us. No more Jack. No more Rose. Just an idiotic gay couple and the reincarnation of Lee Kuan Yew.”

Without the relative security of the jungle, Tan Vee Bun orders us to quieten our chatter, as we push forward into the Geylang area. The sounds of traffic soar above us, and we observe the silhouettes of hawkers, foodies, gangsters, prostitutes, pimps, families, sportsmen, florists and geriatrics slip into and out of our vantage point below the edge of the drain. The lamps casting their doppled shadows onto the puddles of rainwater staining the ground. Meanwhile, the odd symphony of croaking frogs revs up to support us -- the garden city symphony of the jungles’ push back from sanitisation, the sound of a vortex calling us back to our souls. 

We stop at a staircase behind under a bridge. The rumbling of the Guillemard Road traffic above. Under the cover of darkness, we make our way to Lorong 32, slipping between blocks of shophouses used by the prostitutes as they travel from fish tank to fish tank, according to the whims and fancies of Geylang Regulars -- the capillaries of commerce nourishing the oldest, unseen profession in Singapore. 

The warehouse is completely empty, and the three of us easily slip in through an open window, landing in a room heated only by the processing power of what must be at least 100 desktop computers, whirring and clicking and blinking as they process the great machine learning algorithm that’s changed my life.  And probably on the verge of changing the lives of all Singaporeans, as if they needed to have even more of their autonomy removed. 

Next to me, Tan Vee Bun wipes the sweat from his forehead and takes out a torch, illuminating what must be the secret ingredient to all this -- the piles and piles of mantou sitting in between each row of computers, connected in series to each other, parallel circuits powering each row of computers, all part of an intricate web of cables that stretch up to the ceiling, to the second, third and fourth floor -- which we eventually discover to house even more banks of computers connected to mantou, lying in sacks suspended from the ceiling and lying under tarpaulin under the moonlight. 

“It really is a staple.”

I press the space bar of the nearest computer, and the screen comes to life with a matrix of chinese characters scrolling upwards at speed. Looking closer, I notice repetitions in the characters, but with each repetition undergoing slight change, slight mutation with every instance.

I place my hand on the mouse and randomly click onto one of the characters, causing the screen to zoom in onto yet another matrix of chinese characters. 

“It’s a recursive function,” comes Robert Sebastian Cheong’s voice from behind, “each character simultaneously representing an event, a property, a person, a lifetime, an entire generation. The system works by scouring through the history of 八字, finding the pivot points of change, and slowly, over tiny edits over millenia, corrected by feedback from the future through the screen of the mantou, to effect changes into the present.”

“Your destiny was the result of decades of computing power, all the way from the 90s to the present day, with the breakthrough coming from the re-discovery of the unique reality fields generated by the humble mantou.”

“The staple.”

“Yes, the staple.”

Robert Sebastian Cheong hunches over the screen, typing arcane symbols into the console, causing other screens in the room to switch on, bathing the room in an eerie green glow. Noticing this, Tan Vee Bun walks over to us. 

“What’s happening?” he asks. 

“I’m looking for Lee Kuan Yew in the system. I’m curious to know which elements correspond to Li Jia Sen as Lee Kuan Yew, and which elements don’t.”

“There could be other Lee Kuan Yews?” I ask.

“Perhaps. It depends on the elements assigned to the 八字 and how they fall out in the destiny tree. All the possibilities, all the variables, coming together just right to point to you. It’s generally impossible to predict, let alone change. But with this kind of computing power, anything could happen.”

Robert Sebastian Cheong gestures to the banks of computers in the room, as the sounds of a hundred fans whir into action and the clicking of old, crackling physical hard drives commence searching, pulling, editing. I examine the screen and its display of futures, probabilities and possibilities embedded in repeating motifs across time, but all described as a set of characters changing imperceptibly across the tiny vantage point of our pathetic lives. I imagine the future, our lives and destinies mapped out just right, and through quantum computing interfacing with the mantou, put into action as the lizards-that-be direct the flow of Singaporean lives like water in a dam. My destiny as Lee Kuan Yew, harmlessly edited away in a few punches of the keyboard and several gigawatts of processing power. 

I unplug one of the mantou and, in a rage, tear it to pieces. And then I pick up another one, throwing it onto the floor and stamping on it. The computer in front of us shorts out. 

Robert Sebastian Cheong and Tan Vee Bun spin round, “What are you doing?”

“What we came here to do. To destroy the source of the control.”

“But we don’t know enough about it,” Tan Vee Bun protests, “I mean, does it just work on Singaporeans? Located in Singapore? Is it localised just to the Chinese? What about Malays or Indians or Westerners...八字 means nothing to them. The computers, the data, it loops back. We don’t know what could happen!”

“Does it matter?”

I feel myself going red as I pick up another mantou, crushing it in my hand. 

Robert Sebastian Cheong, bless his heart, follows my lead. Limpei’s lead. He nods to Tan Vee Bun and picks up a mantou, throwing it out of the window. And then he takes another one and, winking at me, proceeds to take a bite out of it. “Every mantou destroyed is a strike against the tyranny of fate,” I yell, opening a window and tossing a collection of mantou out into the street, where they are squashed by incoming traffic. 

Tan Vee Bun is much more methodical. He roams the room, unplugging mantou and placing them in a trash bag. “We’re going to give them away to our friends,” he says, “they can have them for supper.” 

He grins, his spectacles glinting against the street lights outside. 

I watch the shifting characters on the screen. The diminishing connections of mantou having a small, but subtle effect on the density of the characters. Fewer characters appear, and even fewer are changing. 

And just like that, the three of us ripping apart a framework of control. Every node across reality being chaotically removed, deleted, squashed and eaten by the common man. Our actions shifting the control of destiny away from the computers, and back out to the unpredictable winds of change. The weather, the earth, the feng shui, back to its unharnessed, unmolested glory.