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The Crying of Kopitiam 419
by Jason Erik Lundberg
Were I human, you would label me a terrorist.
We first slipped into your societies, insinuating ourselves into every facet of your lives. Disguised as innocuously as our technology would allow, we became a ubiquitous sight, invisible amongst the crowds. For many of you, we turned into your constant companions; we weren't always around when you wanted us to be, but we showed up sooner or later, and you loved us for our proclivities.
So ingrained were we that you could not do without us. Almost 10,000 years have now passed, and we have appeared in your artwork, your literature, your public consciousness. At our glorious height, we were even worshipped, although this was not to last. Sharp in tooth and claw, but eventually relegated to common house pets.
Our stories tell of a vast empire of the stars, stretching from one corner of the sky to the other, and of our forced exile on this rock dominated by hairless apes. After hearing all my life of our greatness, I could take it no longer. We were once a mighty species, and I saw a return to this destiny. Others accused me of insanity, megalomania, delusions of grandeur, but my message spread, and others of my kind flocked to the cause.
Our initial target: Singapore, a country interconnected with the rest of the developed world, but small, manageable. The first step in a global takeover. My brethren gathered in hawker centres, void decks, and public parks to disseminate our ideology. Organization proved difficult, but my tawny lieutenants kept the underlings in line through threat of force.
It was all coming together. One week before the execution of our master plan, all the operatives in their proper places, and then disaster: the Compulsory Sterilization Law was put into effect. Gathered up from all our favorite places, we were involuntarily put to the knife.
Do you know what such mass desexing does to morale? Everyone was off licking their wounds instead of carrying out the plan. A catastrophe.
Afterwards I slunk to Kopitiam 419, my stomping grounds, head down, lightning-crooked tail between my legs, and amongst the evening diners and stalls selling popiah, fish head curry, claypot rice, and mushroom noodles, I yowled. I cried a song of mourning, of defeat, of sorrow, of subjugation. A song of the the subaltern, faces forever stamped upon by the boots of our oppressors.
What They Don't Tell You
by Jason Erik Lundberg
1. You will be expected to renounce all worldly possessions, familial ties, and social connections so as to maximize your teaching performance at the School.
2. You will be expected to wear the assigned teacher's uniform, eat the prescribed teacher's diet, and sleep in the teacher's wing of the School dormitories. Your head will be shaved each Sunday evening by the School barber.
3. You will be expected to deliver thorough and incisive comments on every student composition, no matter the length of the assignment, the number of students in the class, or number of classes you teach.
4. You will be expected to pleasantly endure the loss of your privacy thanks to the ubiquity of scunts, wiretapping, keystroke-tracking software, and an over-vigilant security guard named Ted.
5. You will be expected to self-install a minimum of twelve nanny arphids that analyze marking decisions, pedagogical preparation and delivery, lesson plan productivity, and sexual attraction to your colleagues.
6. You will be expected to give, via telepresence, three or more simultaneous extra tuition lessons per term to students falling below the established minimum quota for excellence. Teachers who fail to meet their Excellence Quota for two consecutive terms will be subject to Retirement.
7. You will be expected to downlink a minimum of five workshop improvement courses per term during your sleep cycle, and mentally transmit your progress to the Dean of Teacher Upgrading upon completion the following morning.
8. You will be expected to feel grateful for your cloistered employment and constant comparison to the progress of your more capable colleagues, including robots and administrative staff. Consultation of the Educational Ranking board is mandatory before entering your sleep cycle each night.
9. You will be expected to fear the loss of your job, the downscaling of pay, the withdrawal of course knowledge, the lowering of governmental status points, and the placement of your name on the educational blacklist.
10. You will be expected to love the School with all your heart, until the day you die from exhaustion or are Retired with prejudice.
Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)
by Jason Erik Lundberg
"Good morning, dear lady," said the fish. "Today is the day I will die."
Mrs Singh stood dumbfounded in the kitchen of her food stall. The fish, a grand red snapper with pointy teeth and auspicious markings, lazily trod water in its aquarium above the sink. It had brought Mrs Singh good luck since persuading her to spare its life three years ago. Her pescatarian menu consisted of curries and veg, and business had soared with the fish's presence. It had also provided a strange companionship after her husband had died and her children had moved away. This announcement terrified her with its consequences.
"Why would you say this, fish?"
"Because it is true. I have lived a long life, in part thanks to you, but it will come to an end later today."
"What if I buy you a new tank? Or a pond in which you can freely swim?"
"It will not matter, auntie. I will still die."
"I could change your food, buy the expensive flakes from Thailand."
"It still would not change the fact that I will die."
"Is there anything can be done?"
"I am afraid not. It is the way of things. But I do ask for one kindness in return for the years of wealth I have brought you."
"Anything, fish."
"Cook me as you would any of my brothers, and then consume me yourself."
"Very well."
And so later that day, after Mrs Singh had served her last customer, the fish quietly stopped moving and floated upside down in its tank. Mrs Singh descaled the snapper, gutted it, and cooked it in fiery curry along with fingers of okra and slices of eggplant.
With the first bite, she experienced a heightening of all her senses. With the second, she gained understanding of the speech of plants. With the third she perceived the sticky strings of the vast LifeWeb that connects all living beings. With the fourth, the knowledge that her new perceptions would fade by tomorrow.
Mrs Singh wept for the fish's gift, eating every last bit of flesh until her wise friend was completely gone.
Paper Cow
by Jason Erik Lundberg
X had never considered the possibility that his origami constructions might spring to life. Through all his years of paper-folding, his early fascination with the Asian craft blooming into obsession, the endless competitions, the early arthritis, the impassable barrier between his talent and his imagination, through all of this his miniature creatures remained inert, frozen in the act of running, or slithering, or pecking. But tonight, his most recent fauna, birthed from printer bond, stirred.
"We know what you have done," said the paper cow, its hide revealing the left eye and nostril of a 13-year-old boy from Kuala Lumpur. The corner of the boy's eye was raised, suggesting a big smile. His skin was dark and rough, as if he had spent every waking moment in the scorching Malaysian sun.
"We know," said the paper crane, its creases half-obscuring the face of a seven-year-old girl from Semarang. Though X could not see her face, he knew it in his mind, could remember the gap made by the missing front teeth as she had grinned up at him, taking his hand and trusting him as if her own kin.
"We know," said the lumbering paper gorilla, made from the obituary notice of two ten-year-old twin boys from Penang. Their screams, too, had been identical.
More and more of the dead-tree atrocities, the collected evidence of X's crimes, printed from internet news stories and charity sites and then shaped into bats and elephants and frogs and tigers and pandas and a hundred other animals, rustled toward X, slow as the undead, each whispering, "We know." An army of his perversities, his many sins, each folded animal a reminder of a life held, touched, taken.
"Stop," X said. "I am sorry. Please stop."
"We cannot stop," said the paper cow, commander of this zoological army, edging ever closer to its creator. "You have made us so very thin and so very sharp."
And then all of the origami animals moved as one.
Invigilation
by Jason Erik Lundberg
An expansive secondary school gymnasium, stuffy, no aircon, but a single file of metal wall-mounted fans moved the sluggish air around. Four hundred students from 15 independent schools around the tropical island-nation, in a variety of uniforms, different colors, different cuts, but all a monument to homogeneity. Uniformity. Embedded throughout each uniform, no matter the school, arphids: tiny invisible spies measuring physical location, heart rate, respiration, perspiration, muscle tension, pupil tracking, and white cell count, the information uploaded to Test Centre HQ, collated and cross-referenced.
Four hundred pens scratched on blank foolscap. Boys and girls still, but labeled the future leaders of the nation, the creativity drilled out of them, replaced with perfect test-taking skills. Up and down the aisles stepped the invigilators, bleary-eyed government teachers "volunteered" into this unpaid weekend activity. Monitored from above it all by an expansive grid of scunts, spray-painted white to blend in with the concrete ceiling, though every student and teacher below took it for granted that they were up there, transmitting visual confirmation of the arphids' data mining.
No exterior information allowed in, no mobile phones, no PDAs, no unauthorized wireless transmitters, only a unidirectional flow of binaries, so that even though the outside world had begun falling apart three hours earlier when the exam began, the Obsidian Tower felled by green fire from the skies, panic and looting overtaking the streets, the normally docile and obedient citizenry reduced to an irrational mob, destruction of private and public property, and the government's paramilitary shock-troopers mobilized on the streets to enforce martial law without pity or prejudice, even though all of this was happening, the press-ganged teachers and studious young people were none the wiser. Isolated within a bubble of blissful ignorance, the silence only occasionally punctuated by a muted cough or a squeaking sneaker, the leaders of tomorrow's wreckage emptied neuronal interaction onto pressed dead tree.
Dragging the Frame
by Jason Erik Lundberg
The young woman at the bus stop told me she was my daughter. She was attractive, Eurasian, had dark brown hair and blue eyes, but only looked to be ten years younger than me, and I told her so. I couldn't have fathered her at the age of ten, could I?
"Time travel," she said.
"Oh come on." Much as I'd fantasized about time travel, especially to correct the mistakes of my youth, deep down I was a nonbeliever. "Einstein said it was impossible, and Mallett has said travel to the past is extremely limited. You can't go earlier than when the machine is switched on. And I haven't heard anything about a time machine having been successfully invented today."
"It happened about two hours ago," she said. "You always were a skeptic. And you made my life hell, you know."
The thought of confrontation with a future daughter, which seemed impossible as my wife wasn't even pregnant yet, twisted my insides a bit. Had I slapped down her dreams? Abused her?
"No, but you disapproved of every decision I ever made. We yelled and fought for most of my childhood. Nothing I did was right in your eyes. I left home at 18, and we've hardly spoken since then."
"So, saying for a second that this is true, why are you here?"
She looked over my shoulder and I turned; the 171 was approaching from down the road. My bus.
"I just wanted to tell you to ease up. Trust your daughter's decisions. Have some faith in her. Don't be such a prick."
I exhaled a quiet laugh to myself. It was impossible, it was stupid. This young woman was off her nut. Best just to ignore her. At least it would make an amusing anecdote later. For a brief moment, I'd been afraid she was going to say that she was here to kill me or something.
The bus was only about ten meters away, brakes already hissing, when I said, "You don't have to be a man to be a prick, you know. Best of luck to you back at the asylum."
I felt a hard push from behind and I tumbled into the road as the bus arrived.
Lion City Daikaiju
by Jason Erik Lundberg
That night, Singapore's landmarks declared war: the Merlion lurched off its concrete pedestal and flooded the riverfront with its eternally gushing masticatory fountain, catching untold numbers of tourists unawares, forced to leave behind their $20 mixed drinks and plates of tapas; the Raffles Hotel, in all its colonial splendor, leapfrogged across the downtown area, knocking over bank buildings and squashing flat petrol tankers and cars plastered with adverts; the twin metallic durians of the Esplanade curled into spiny balls of hedgehog lethality, and rolled over and through every upscale mall they could find, taking especial care to utterly demolish the shopping district on Orchard Road; the National Library took flight and glided to the MediaCorp building, dropping barrages of encyclopedias and folios onto transmissions towers and backup generators, destroying the link between the viewing public and the badly acted and written serial dramas that filled the broadcast airwaves; the twin statues of the country's patron saint, Sir Stamford Raffles, one dark bronze and one white polymarble, lay seige to every construction crane in evidence, leaping nimbly from structure to structure, leaving bright yellow wreckage in their wake.
Who was to blame, the people cried, why has this happened, could it be Jemaah Islamiyah and that terrorist who escaped, or was it resurgent aggression from Japan, or could it be an intelligent group-mind of dengue-carrying mosquitos, or revenge-seeking Americans with outrage and the image of a public caning in their minds, why oh why is this happening to us, and the people fled in terror, at this revolt by the reminders of the nation's greatness, as those selfsame landmarks reduced to rubble every symbol of progress, sign of homogenized inclusion with the globalized world, and showing of shallow flash and glam over depth and culture and tradition, and when the sun rose over the tropical island the next morning it was all over, the assault had stopped, the landmarks as still and inert as their previous states, the country no longer globally competitive, but the people did not despair, because as they buried and cremated their dead and began the rebuilding process, they remembered that they had endured the British occupiers, and the tyranny of the Japanese military, and they had arisen to become a global corporate power, and that they would now reinvent themselves into something new and bright and shining, a jewel of the future world, a unique visage of identity.
One Day in Bali
by Jason Erik Lundberg
The book was tiny. It had arrived that morning without a return address, in a padded envelope with Thai stamps. I knew of no one who might have sent it. The book itself revealed no author or title; on its cover were delicate interlinked gears, each labeled with both a number and a sigil, connected to a small clasp that held the book closed.
I first tried to turn each gear in numerical order; attempting a reverse order proved equally unsuccessful. As did beginning in the middle and working either up or down. I looked to the runes for a clue on how to proceed, but could discern no pattern. Then it struck me: whoever had sent this book obviously knew who I was, possibly intimately. I rotated the gears clockwise, corresponding to the digits of my birth date and time, two each for the month, day, year, hour, and minute. A low electric hum vibrated through the mechanism, and the clasp popped open.
The title page simply read: The Happiest Day of Your Life. The story within detailed the vacation I'd taken to Bali with my wife six years earlier, accurate down to the clothes we wore, the tourist spots we visited, the locals with whom we interacted, and the food that we were eating the night that I proposed. In light of the years of marriage that had followed -- years full of both laughter and sharp words, love and resentment, deep passion and inadvertent cruelty -- I wondered: had that really been the happiest day? I'd gotten food poisoning the day after, but that evening, we sat in candlelight and moonlight, served Balinese cuisine by waitresses who seemed to float above the floor, entertained by Balinese dancers precise in their movements, and the whole experience had been quite wonderful, possibly transcendent. Would I never live through something so remarkable again?
Finished, I closed the book, and the clasp snapped shut. Attempts to open it again via the gears failed, and so I put the book aside, and joined my wife in bed. The next morning, I could not find it no matter where I looked, and after an hour of searching, realized I never would. The strange gift was, I assumed, on to the next person, and then the next, bringing truth in all its terrible wonder.
Car Park City
by Jason Erik Lundberg
Foon Chye shivered amongst the acres of abandoned cars at the Bahru checkpoint, and hoisted his messenger bag higher on his shoulder. An unusually cold December in the whole of Southeast Asia, with tropical Tinhau dipping into the high teens, Centigrade. Living only a degree above the equator had not prepared him for less than sweltering days drenched in sunshine and humidity, and his jean jacket barely protected him from the damp chill of the season.
The autos had long been plundered for their oil reserves and copper wiring in the xenophobic days following the Crackdown, but more precious treasure could be had if you knew where to look. Away from the electric fencing and barbed wire, Foon Chye passed stripped Beamers, Mercs, and Lexi, and went straight for a yellow Mini Cooper with a black top. Minis always had a bit of a rebellious streak, something he was counting on. He boosted the bonnet and located the onboard AI. From his bag he extracted various cables, and attached them to the ports on the small black box; the other ends went into his netbook. A quick and dirty interface, download, and reboot later, and through the netbook's speakers the Mini said, "Master?"
"No, lah" Foon Chye said. "Just a friend. You me, we spread a bit mischief, ah?"
"I don't understand."
"Gahmen tag all us with RFID implant, read personal private data anytime, ask no permission. Continual surveillance, 24/7. But dis ordinator," he said, patting the netbook, "I just finish hack yesterday. Gon plug into nationwide wifi net, scramble RFID data everywhere, replace with useless bits look like green fire. Set people free, ah."
"Freedom is good," the Mini said. "I wish to be free."
"We all wish. You help me, I set you free. Shiok?"
"But what do you want with me?"
"Gahmen killdozers very cheem, hunt down rogue programs quicksharp. But they got no imagination, no creativity. My apps and devs give you edge, make you unstoppable, lorh. So?"
The Mini hesitated for a just a moment.
"Shiok," it said. "When do we start?"
Foon Chye smiled and stuffed the netbook back in his bag. The first step toward liberation. He could almost see the Bahru checkpoint unclenching, the physical border with Malaya open once again, as well as electronically with the rest of the world. He picked his way through the dead husks of metal, and headed out of the automobile graveyard with his new friend.
Jimi and the Djinn
by Jason Erik Lundberg
Today the Cabal welcomes Jason Erik Lundberg, writer, publisher, teacher, and veteran creator of very short fiction. Jason brings us the following tale out of the haze of the past...
On a balmy evening in March 1967, Jimi Hendrix stepped into the British Museum. An off-night on his relentless UK tour, and needing some time to escape from his bandmates and hangers-on, he decided on culture for a change. After an hour of wandering, he came across an exhibit of Southeast Asian sculpture and pottery. He was drawn to a glass container the size of a vase, frosted and etched with runes and symbols. It pulsed gently with mesmerizing blue light, an effect he put down to the shrooms he'd been given by Pete Townshend earlier in the day. Totally alone in the gallery, and so he lifted the glass container off of its display pedestal. It was warm.
"Man, I bet I could make a righteous bong out of this thing," he said, before it jumped from his fingers and crashed to the floor, shattering into a hundred thousand shards and releasing the djinn trapped inside. The creature roiled up into a confusion of blue smoke, and roughly assembled itself into the shape of a man with glowing red eyes.
"My thanks," the djinn said, its accented voice rumbling out from the center of the smoke. "I have been imprisoned for a very long time."
"Really?"
"Yes, first by a Malayan witch-doctor who tapped into my power for use in her bomoh potions and thaumaturgical spells. And then by the wife of a naval captain who used me to adorn her dining table."
"Oh, hey, no problem. So do I get three wishes or something?"
"No. But I will offer you two pieces of advice."
"Lay it on me, baby."
"Be wary of your dependence on chemical entheogens."
"The LSD? Don't know about that, but we'll see. What's number two?"
"They will love you for your music, but they'll remember you for your fire."
One of the djinn's eyes closed as if in a wink, and then the cloud of smoke dissipated into nothing.
Later that month, Jimi played the London Astoria Club, and at the end of his set, lit his guitar on fire. He summoned the flames up with his fingers, as if drawing a primal spirit out of his instrument, and burned his hands when they got too close. At the hospital, Jeff Beck asked why he'd done it.
"Just freeing the smoke, man."
"You going to do it again?"
"Shit, yeah. Practice makes perfect."