Sooner or later they would toss it out and take the loss, but in the meantime a clan of geckos had set up housekeeping in the nooks and crannies. Geckos-wall-walking lizards with pale, translucent skins, and slitted eyes, and swollen-fingered paws. Here came one now, picking its way stealthily across the water-stained ceiling. It was the big matronly-looking one that liked to crouch overhead by the light fixture. "Hello,
Gwyneth," Laura called to it, and yawned.
She checked her wrist. Four P.M. She was still far behind on her sleep, hurry and worry and jet lag, but it was time to get up and get back after it.
She stepped into her jeans, straightened her T-shirt. Her deck sat on a small folding table, behind a big woven basket of paper flowers. Some Singapore politico had sent Laura the bouquet as a welcome gift. Customary. She'd kept it, though, because she'd never seen paper flowers like they made here in
Singapore. They were extremely elegant, almost scary look- ing in their museum-replica perfection. Red hibiscus, white chrysanthemum, Singapore's national colors. Beautiful and per- fect and unreal. They smelled like French cologne.
She sat, and turned the deck on, and loaded data. Pop- topped a jug of mineral water and poured it in a dragon- girdled teacup. She sipped, and studied her screen, and was absorbed.
The world around her faded. Into black glass, green letter- ing. The inner world of the Net.
PARLIAMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF SINGAPORE
Select Committee on Information PolicyPublic hearings, October 9, 2023
COMMITTEE CHAIR
S. P. Jeyaratnam, M.P. (Jurong), P.I.P.
VICE-CHAIR
_Y. H. Leong, M.P. (Moulmein), P.I.P.
A. bin Awang, M.P. (Bras Basah), P.I.P.
T. B. Pang, M.P. (Queenstown), P.I.P.
C. H. Quah, M.P. (Telok Blangah), P.I.P.
Dr. R. Razak, M.P. (Anson), Anti-Labour Party
Transcript of Testimony
MR. JEYARATNAM: ... accusations. scarcely less than libelous!
MRS. WEBSTER: I'm well aware of the flexibility of the local laws of libel.
MR. JEYARATNAM: Are you slurring the integrity of our legal system?
MRS. WEBSTER: Amnesty International has a list of eighteen local political activists, bankrupted or jailed through your Government's libel actions.
MR. JEYARATNAM: This committee will not be used as a globalist soapbox! Could you apply such high standards to your good friends in Grenada?
MRS. WEBSTER: Grenada is an autocratic dictatorship practicing political torture and murder, Mr. Chairman.
MR. JEYARATNAM: Indeed. But this has not prevented you Americans from cosying up to them. Or from attacking us: a fellow industrial democracy.
MRS. WEBSTER: I'm not a United States diplomat, I'm a Rizome associate. My direct concern is with your corporate policies. Singapore's information laws promote industrial piracy and invasion of privacy. Your
Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank may have a better screen of legality, but it's damaged my company's interests as badly as the United Bank of Grenada. If not more so.
We don't want to offend your pride or your sovereignty or whatever, but we want those policies changed. That's why I came here.
MR. JEYARATNAM: You equate our democratic government with a terrorist regime.
MRS. WEBSTER: I don't equate you, because I can't believe that Singapore is responsible for the vicious attack that I saw. But Grenadians do believe it, because they know full well that you and they are rivals in piracy, and so you have a motive. And for revenge, I think ... I know, that they are capable of almost anything.
MR. JEYARATNAM: Anything? How many battalions does this witch doctor have?
MRS. WEBSTER: I can only tell you what they told me.
Just before I left, a Grenadian cadre named Andrei
Tarkovsky gave me a message for you. (Mrs. Webster's testimony deleted)
MR. JEYARATNAM: Order, please! This is rank terrorist propaganda.... Chair recognizes Mr. Pang for a motion.
MR. PANG: I move that the subversive terrorist message be stricken from the record.
MRS. QUAH: Second the motion.
MR. JEYARATNAM: It is so ordered.
DR. RAZAK: Mr. Chairman, I wish to be recorded as objecting to this foolish act of censorship.
MRS. WEBSTER: Singapore could be next! I saw it happen! Legalisms-that won't help you if they sow mines through your city and firebomb it!
MR. JEYARATNAM: Order! Order, please, ladies and gentlemen.
DR. RAZAK:... a kind of innkeeper?
MRS. WEBSTER: We in Rizome don't have "jobs, Dr.
Razak. Just things to do and people to do them.
DR. RAZAK: My esteemed colleagues of the People's
Innovation Party might call that "inefficient."
MRS. WEBSTER: Well, our idea of efficiency has more to do with personal fulfillment than, uh, material possessions.
DR. RAZAK: I understand that large numbers of Rizome employees do no work at all.
MRS. WEBSTER: Well, we take care of our own. Of course a lot of that activity is outside the money economy.
An invisible economy that isn't quantifiable in dollars.
DR. RAZAK: In ecu, you mean.
MRS. WEBSTER: Yes, sorry. Like housework: you don't get any money for doing it, but that's how your family survives, isn't it? Just because it's not in a bank doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Incidentally, we're not "employ- ees," but "associates."
DR. RAZAK: In other words, your bottom line is ludic joy rather than profit. You have replaced "labour," the humiliating specter of "forced production," with a series of varied, playlike pastimes. And replaced the greed motive with a web of social ties, reinforced by an elective power structure.
MRS. WEBSTER: Yes, I think so ... if I understand your definitions.
DR. RAZAK: How long before you can dispose of "work"
entirely?
Singha Pura meant "Lion City." But there had never been lions on Singapore island.
The name had to make some kind. of sense, though. So local legend said the "lion" had been a sea monster.
On the opposite side of Singapore's National Stadium, a human sea lifted their flash cards and showed Laura their monster. The Singapore "merlion," in a bright mosaic of cardboard squares.
Loud, patriotic applause from a packed crowd of sixty thousand.
The merlion had a fish's long, scaled body and the lion head of the old British Empire. They had a statue of it in
Merlion Park at the mouth of the Singapore River. The thing was thirty feet high, a genuinely monstrous hybrid.
East and West like cats and fishes-never the twain shall meet. Until some bright soul had simply chopped the fish's head off and stuck the lion's on: And there you had it:
Singapore.
Now there were four million of them and they had the biggest goddamn skyscrapers in the world.
Suvendra, sitting next to Laura in the bleachers, offered her a paper bag of banana chips. Laura took a handful and knocked back more lemon squash.. The stadium hawkers were selling the best fast food she'd ever eaten.
Back across the field there was another practiced flurry. A
big grinning face this time, flash-card pixels too big and crude, like bad computer graphics.
"It is the specimen they are showing," Suvendra said helpfully. Tiny little Malay woman in her fifties, with oily hair in a chignon and frail; protuberant ears. Wearing a yellow sundress, tennis hat, and a Rizome neck scarf. Next to her a beefy Eurasian man chewed sunflower seeds and care- fully spat the hulls into a small plastic trash bag.
"The what?" Laura said.
"Spaceman. Their cosmonaut."
"Oh, right." So that was Singapore's astronaut, grinning from his space helmet. It looked like a severed head stuck in a television.