Chapter 11
Attack of the Crones
Utter silence.
A myriad of pinpoint lights simmers gently in a primordial soup of the darkest purple. Slow, majestic pan of the camera. We're looking at the night sky - that very same, instantly-recognisable, poncily deliberate shot halfwit directors invariably employ in poor B grade sci-fi flicks in a weak attempt to pass substandard work off as something bordering on artistic.
The words "1 Year Later..." fade tackily into the bottom of our screen in white, then slowly fade out again.
Cue audio.
"Rawwwwwwk" - somewhere far off, toadish choristers commence their vocal warmups for the evening's concert in the exclusive performing venue known only to humankind as Lallang Field (or, according to the signs posted around it, Government Property Keep Out Tresspassers Will Be Executed), deluding themselves in their typically male brains that some hot toadette will be distracted enough by their luscious baritones to spare a moment from her evening's engagements in snapping up tasty barflies for some hotslimytoadontoad action.
Slide camera downwards past the dark sillhouettes of towering buildings looming high above us into the very heavens, past a faded banner proudly declaring "Biopolis - a centre for biomedical sciences in Asia and the world", past street lamps which for an instant as we strain our eyes against the dark, appear to glow with the faintest, weakest orange light possible before fading from view altogether. Down still further to eye-level on the street.
We become aware of a small group of figures prowling stealthily and silently through the dark...
... bump. The camera jiggles a little bit and someone offscreen hisses "Hey watch where you're going... and that better be your rifle that prodded me in the back..."
One of the other shadows - still recognisably slinky yet scrumptiously curvy in the dark - whispers "are you sure this darkness is going to last long enough?"
Another figure, coat billowing indignantly about him replies "of course baby, you know I can last all night if I need to..."
Yet another figure says "...", inexplicably communicating to us the audience with three barely pronounceable small dots that he's rolling his eyes. Years later, this Powerful Jedi Mind Trick will be harnassed by the evil establishment known as Sellavision, and countless hapless citizens will be mystified to find themselves the overnight owners of assorted internet-capable washing machines and combination iron/waffle makers, and various other useful household implements. Or at least they would, if... ah but that is another story.
The procession of shadows halts before a ubiquitous 1940s-style film-noir door marked "Entrance" that looks suspiciously like an aging stage prop left over from some other artistically-shot animation movie involving an intrepid airman and the world of yesterday.
The coated figure raises his head and narrows his eyes. We can't see this happening of course, but his consummate acting abilities make us think that he's narrowing his eyes. Or it might just be another Jedi Mind Trick, to make us think that we're thinking that he's narrowing his eyes... which raises the thorny question if whether we truly are, because we think? bugger it, I never did attend that philosophy for dummies module.
The camera pans expectantly from an open second-floor window, to a fire escape just overhead, to an electrical wire joining a now-unlit lamp situated conveniently at head height just above the door.
Long pause.
The camera pans again, slightly faster this time.
Coat's still standing motionless. We can almost hear the gears in his head groaning with the strain of impending thought.
Someone reaches out from just behind our camera position, grabs the wire and yanks, severing it in a shower of tacky stage spark-effects, and hands the still flickering end to Coat.
"Ah yes. If I could just snag that fire escape with this wire, I'm sure we could climb up to that open window and..."
There's a tinkle, and a smug female voice says "It's open."
After a short pause, it also says, so softly as to be nearly inaudible, "ouch, that fucking hurt..."
The shadowy procession processes into the building.
Dim red backup lamps (auxillary generators only ever seem to have enough power to switch on dim red lights for some reason) adorn the grim walls of this architectural monstrosity. We glimpse views of narrow corridors flashing by, and the occasional large yellow number painted on the wall, giving the scene that subtle, subliminal military touch only a master author could dream up. Okay, fine, it wasn't that masterful. hmph.
The camera turns and twists as our procession speeds up, racing down corridor upon corridor, past junction after junction. The sound of boots resolutely thumping against a metal-grate floor (stolen from a generic First Person Shooter computer game) gradually begins to falter, before stopping altogether in a cacophony of confused metallic thunks, in tandem with the camera.
"Face it. We're lost"
"It should be right here, according to my GPS."
"That's my ipod you're holding."
"Oh."
Another voice from far off-screen, deep, germanic and monotonous with just the right timbre and resonance to - for some inexplicable reason - bring to mind the immortal phrase "I'll be Back", intones :
"Hsst. I found id. Dis vay."
Pan camera left, down yet another corridor bathed in dim red light. A shadowy giant rippling with muscles beckons us approach with his oversized Kalashnikov m1179 gatling laser rifle mark 6. He stands before a formidable bulkhead marked "Top Secret Government Project to Annihilate the Resistance Once and For All, Muahahaha. Entry to Authorised Personnel by Keycard and Retinal Scan Only. All Other Visitors Please Report To Security for Immediate Termination, And Please Have A Nice Day."
"It's locked."
"I guess we'd better report to security."
"Don't be stupid."
"Well nobody mentioned an impenetrable titanium bulkhead, look, it's not even in the bloody script."
"We're resourceful agents of the Resistance aren't we? Can't you use some Jedi Mind Trick to persuade the doors to open?"
"It only works on women. This door is definitely male."
One of the shadows breaks off from his bitterly bickering counterparts and inspects the doorframe, pausing thoughtfully as his fingers discover a hithero unnoticed coin-sized slit on the wall, which the camera zooms in meaningfully on.
"Hmm. This looks almost like..."
Clink. (Which is the sound a fifty cent coin makes when inserted into a coin-sized slit, for the slightly slower readers amongst you.)
The bulkhead doors slide apart with a dull rumble, revealing a nightmarish scene of sheer and unspeakable horror. One of the shadows gibbers a little in abject terror before keeling over in a dead faint.
*****
"Kit. Kit... wake up. You fainted." Someone with soft, smooth hands is slapping him none too gently about the face.
Kit opens an eye. Exotic almond shaped, hazel coloured eyes, luscious browny-black hair and immaculate browny-black eyebrows.... groan. Kit closes his eye again.
"Oh. Jean. Not you again."
The floodgates of memory burst open along with Kit's eyes.
"Oh my God. What happened to...?"
*****
... and this is what Kit saw just after he opened the coin-operated bulkhead doors, and just before decisively fainting clean away into an inconspicuous little puddle on the floor :
An enormous grey cavern - imagine a really, really, really big cavern in your mind's eye, now take the walls away and enlarge the whole thing a factor of ten times. Yeah, that's about what it'd look like in miniature - bathed in the same eerie, unnatural red glow that lit the maze of corridors leading up to this point. And along the cavern floor...
... lines upon lines, upon lines, upon lines of short, squat figures - there must be thousands, nay, ten thousands, nay... hundreds of thousands! of them. Kit's breath catches as his eyes focus on the baby doll figures spread out in front of him as far as his eyes can see.
They're all dressed in pink.
Hundreds upon thousands of heads are swivelling towards Kit. A hundred thousand pairs of eyes glow demonically, their pinpoint, bloodshot pupils pulsing bright red against the softer glow of the emergency lighting surrounding them. A hundred thousand evil sneers begin to form as a hundred thousand delicate hands reach into a hundred thousand A-cup wonderbras...
... fade to black.
*****
"... the clone army of Pinks?" Kit gasps, eyes rolling back in his head in pre-emptive faint-again mode. His lolling eyes note the gazillion bite-sized pieces of Pink spewn all across the room and running up the walls to the ceiling.
"Did Gawain use The Force at last? Or one of our other Masters?"
Jean stops slapping Kit for a moment to look thoughtful.
"You know, that was all rather odd. The big muscley guy pulled out something he called a Bee Eff Gee, and there was this bright flash and all the clones just exploded, just like that." Jean snaps, her fingers creating an emphatic pistol-shot that makes Kit jump half out of his skin.
"Who was that guy anyhow?" someone asks, offscreen.
"Dunno. Thought he was with you."
"Thought he was with you..."
"What? No way man, do I look gay to you?"
"Well, actually, I did see you and..."
"Shutupshutupshutup it was a platonic kis... we were just... heck anyway he wasn't with me."
"Oh. But I thought." six confused voices mumble in the background.
"Say, I wonder where he went, anyway." Jean turns around and glances at the petrified procession behind her, half of whom have apparently accidentally spilled water down their trouser legs.
"Uh, he just vanished ma'am, but he did say something about being Bach."
"Nah he said he was a bug."
"Oh. I thought he said he was going for a bath."
"I distinctly heard barf."
"STOP IT ALL OF YOU!" Kit yells his wild voice echoing crazily off the stony cavern walls : "stopitallofyou, spittleyou, syou, you... you". Everyone turns to stare at Kit's spittle flecked chin (no change there) and then seven pairs of eyes mutely follow his tremulously pointing finger to a nondescript little computer-screen set in the cavern wall.
It reads :
"Facility destruct sequence initiated. Thirty seconds to base destruction..."
Tick
"twenty-nine"
now that everyone's concentrating, they can make out a gentle feminine voice intoning calmly,
"twenty-eight"
"Oh. A stray energy shot from the BFG must have set off a self-destruct sequence." one of the black-clad, balaclavia-bedecked laser-rifle-toting shadowy boffiny-type figures postulates.
"How likely is that? I mean, that's scientifically impossible, and statistically improbable to say the least, even in the most implausible B grade movie script imagineable!" another boffiny-type rebel argues, his spectacles (over the eye holes in his balaclavia) steaming up with stubborness. "That's just plain stupid!"
"twenty-five seconds and counting. Now would be a good time to consider purchasing life insurance. For a free quote, simply telephone this number..." a gentle, feminine voice intones, the television screen now displaying a picture of a slim, attractive young lass with long flowing hair smiling prettily at the petrified processors.
"RUN YOU FOOLS!" Coat screams, and everyone begins to run helter-skelter back the way they came.
*****
"Morning comes around and I
Can't wait to see my sunny island
In its glorious greenery, whether rain or shine, it's still beautiful"...
... some long-forgotten historical figure sings tinnily through the public loudspeakers as day breaks on the Singaland River.
See, how the soft orange glow of the sun climbing over the horizon gives everything from the glittering cityscape to the shabby streetbum (although, it must be stressed that homelessness is nonexistent in the garden city, and the streetbum of course is simply opting to sleep on public benches overnight in quest of new experiences, rather than returning to his private thousand-halled mansion) a certain romantic magnificence.
See the stately arc of a swooping seagull (serial number 11950), morn-stained gold feathers ruffling gently against the wind as it trawls the air lazily; see how it plummets towards the water as it spies the silver flash of a befinned breakfast (serial number 14481)
See the sky against which the seagull flew, dull red and malign as it has been ever since The Final Holocaust. See the barely perceptible shimmer, and the slight translucency underlying the sky and the clouds of the ingenious forcedome, conceptualised and constructed entirely in Singaland, which even then was a hub of technology (and medicine, and science, and research, and mathematics, and engineering, and sports, and bungee jumping, and shoelace tying, although not yet the arts) for the world. The city's elders tell slack jawed children every morning on the holovision (televisions went out of vogue ninety years ago) that stepping beyond the shimmer means instant death in a nuclear wasteland as bleak and desolate as the ex-opposition party's headquarters. Billions of radioactive particles invisible to the human eye shred through the cells of your body, rupturing the more delicate tissues within, and mangling your DNA; it's a painful but mercifully fast death, and that, children is why you must never even approach the causeway, and why if you do the fifty armed sentries will gun you down in a hail of enriched uranium antipersonnel bullets and laser light - it is for your own good.
See the way spacescrapers, tallest here in the heart of the city reach determinedly from the earth to the heavens, vanishing into the fine mist of a threadbare blanket of low-flying clouds, see the way the rising sun comes off their reflective glass hides, transforming them for an instant into standing towers of solid gold.
See, the way shafts of sunlight pierce the cloud cover to gently illume huddles of old fogies shuffling through their arthritically slow, synchronised tai-chee dances atop the sundecks of their two-thousand storied apartment blocks.
See the liquid bronze of the river itself, bearing on it as an offering to the camera an ornate historical Chinese Junk painted by the dawn in regal, muted hues of red and yellow (by the harsh light of day it is actually purple and green), see the quaint two-hundred storied low-rise "original" shophouses (with minor modifications) that line the waterfront, bearing archaic marks like "Gap" and "Tommy Hilfiger" and even "Ted Baker".
See the sparkle off one of the shophouse windows, casting red and gold rings into our eyes as stray light concentrates suddenly and reflects directly into the iris of the camera and temporarily blinds us with the glare. (heck, you're not paying for this ride so don't complain.)
Zoom in.
See the seagull poo and grubby smears on the window face, and the peeling paint around the window frame suggesting that this particular unit has been abandoned for quite some time. See how the glare softens and the rings fade away as we near this portal into the unknown...
Zoom in.
... which as we close in still further and pass right through the closed glass window into the unit's interior, transforms into the frightening features of Dr Chee's mad grin.
Right now he's humming tunelessly and happily fiddling with a large machine lining an entire wall of the unit, fingers accelerating smoothly across buttons, dials and knobs like waterfowl taking to flight.
There's something distinctly disconcerting about that smile, Jean thinks, sitting on a stool in the corner of the otherwise unfurnished unit. And his colour co-ordination! Tch. She shakes her head in despair.
"Doctor, are you sure this is going to work? Not that I doubt you of course..."
"Work? Work! Of course work."
"Remind me how it works again?"
"We send large pulse of energy, EMP pulse at right frequency. Brain controlling chips fry. People free again. Sure work."
"But what if something goes wrong, for instance..." Jean thinks hard, her pretty face screwing up slightly with the effort "... say we got the frequency wrong?"
"If frequency even slightly wrong, then everyone brain turn to jelly. But chip still fry, is the most important thing."
"Oh. How did you calculate the correct frequency for the pulse, anyhow?"
"Ha. Is ancient chinese method involving praying to Goddess of mercy, and scientific technique call 'guessing'. Sometime work for 4D, although not alway."
"Err. Rigght. I have a bad feeling about thi..."
Dr Chee's stubby right index finger stabs at a red button marked "Danger"
"Don' worry, sure work!"
