Frankenstein’s Playground

"At times, he felt as if he was drowning in the light - that if he put a hand to his face later on, it would come away with blue droplets. He forced himself to relax and to focus on the regular percussion of his guide’s footsteps. Finally, they came to a stop, and there she indicated the door leading to the Resurrection Chamber. ‘Frankenstein’s playground’ he recalled along with the nervous laughter of his colleagues.

  -- By Ash Hibbert

That night, standing at the edge of the overlooking plateau, Frank Tan watched the island’s largest forest go to flame.

''In what distant deeps of skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes?'' Frank quoted. ''On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?''

''Shakespeare?'' his new partner asked. Frank struggled not to laugh.

''Blake – he was talking about the revolution.''

His previous partner, Miette, wouldn’t have misquoted the poem. She would have finished it. Yet she was now like one of his ‘prey,’ as she had liked to call them: alive only in his own mind.

Miette Yeoh had been strong, proud - and like a razor-sharp icicle if she wanted to be. Moreover, she knew her Romantic poetry. Chang was not a downgrade by any means. Miette lacked what in many ways Chang Wong was prosperous with: a sensitivity of the politics in the force, an ability to sit down at a desk and read files that seemed totally unrelated, yet come back with the name of a pimp whose hooker regularly patrolled a patch opposite the site of a murder. Unlike Miette however, Chang had a family.

Miette was dead, though: stabbed and drowned.

''We should back off,'' Miette’s replacement warned. ''Security’s people couldn’t possibly get warm-fuzzies when their own projects are being stalked by Homicide.''

''They know how I feel about them,'' Frank’s voice was corrosive. ''This was stupid.''

''It got the job done - there might not have been any other way to ensure the canopy was no longer a protectorate for the dissidents. It might be easier to flush them out from now.''

''You see anyone in Homicide advocating dropping a bomb on Singapore?''

Chang shrugged. By now, he would be familiar with his friend’s wrath - and his own feelings were most likely typical of most people in Homicide.

The difference though is that I am not afraid to be their spokesperson.

Frank turned, walked back to their car and sat on the bonnet, taking in the fiery view.

 

They held front row tickets on the plateau above a rocky outcrop that lead up from jungle burning before their eyes. They were not alone in their appreciation - Chang stared nervously around at the various other units and the auxiliary fire truck. The other cars belonged to the Internal Security Agency - though the label most police departments gave to Singapore’s Intelligence Service was ‘The Gestapo’, but then only in Karaoke bars and on patrol. Frank took his time, letting the anger take form in his body, before freezing it into useful shapes to call on later. Chang leant back.

Those from Security held infra-red cameras, watching the progress of the forest’s inhabitants as they escaped the fires to whatever solace they could find. Security would intercept anything that fitted the same bio-signature as homo sapien on the outskirts of the vegetation. It was very crude, Chang’s expression admitted. Though far from the only piece of wild estate the island bore, it was the biggest, and the oldest.

Frank spied one of the Security agents whispering into a microphone.

And while they plant the blame on firebugs, our region loses yet another gene pool. Jesus, Bianca and I walked down those paths a dozen times this year alone. The clearing where we made love on a matting of our own clothing now turned to ash.

What was it the use? He asked.

The credibility lost by the initiative in the political arena would be academic to Security. The government was falling, battered by a wave of dissidents and addicted to its cure.

We counter the revolution - but at what cost, and for how long? Other members of the Asianic  Alliance other-rule our government and a band of mercenary ‘Intelligence’ agents sidestep our own damn police force. And Internal Security was a mercenary group - an organisation contracted by the Singaporian Government to deal with an enemy within: its own people. The beauty of the sweep lay in its subtlety and efficiency. The angry mobs were never opened fire upon but the stations stopped turning on their cameras, and the problem effectively went away.

''Ronin,'' Frank said to the fire - master-less Samurai.

Chang nodded. ''And they’re here to stay.''

 

Frank nodded back, but it was to Miette’s - standing at the door to her car, outside his and Bianca’s apartment block. The three had had tea, Miette bringing a bottle of wine yet no boyfriend, or husband. She’s stood there with the driver door open, Frank’s hand resting on the top of the door, a curious expression on his professional partner’s face, while his romantic partner, the one he’d spent the last six years of his life with in one form or another, begun clearing the dining table several floors above them. She had taken his hand into her own, squeezing it.

‘Take care of that fiancée of yours, your hear me Frank? She’s quite a prize. Never forget for an instant who it is that you’re fighting for, what it’s all about. You’re incredibly fortunate to have someone would cry at your funeral - just don’t ever test her on that, though.’

A month later, she had washed up on the shore of the major inlet, stripped by the flashing bulbs of the police photographer. Wrapped in plastic and posted, her dignity a thin film covering the water churned up in the waves. Now, he no longer had a fiancée - a girlfriend, yes. He was no longer quite sure he knew Bianca. He had lost certainty in the same week he’d lost Miette. The woman who lived with him was far from being a stranger - she wore the body he’d lost himself in countless times. She was the one who had kept him sane. He’d clung onto the hope offered by her doctors - that it could simply be a matter of resolving some inner conflict before she would again ‘reawaken.’

So Frank had played the game he knew best of all - the waiting game. And until now, patience had proven to be one of the only virtues he need remind himself about - for if the thought that Bianca would need to be ‘spoon fed’ had put him off his fears had been quickly laid to rest. For before, she had played the role of the supportive partner, outside the realm of work as a habit - now though she relived it, brutalised him with her energy - nervous or otherwise. She had successfully dragged him up from the melancholia and perfectionism that his line of work demanded, and yet every time she did, she steeped a little lower to his level, became more like Miette, yet without the bitterness against life that kept them going. The bitterness of a broken contract: of a life offered and then taken away. Bitterness at such a beautiful city, yet so immune to the suffering of its children, so uncaring, stealing them with impunity from their mothers and into the night.

He looked out to the wall of flame in the distance. Perhaps it was a giant mirror, reflecting all their phobias and paranoias in their loneliness, away from the fire of their loved ones. Perhaps it was a looking glass, through which stood their alternative selves, peopling a parallel universe. Perhaps a universe where I never met Miette, and I finally became the one I hunted. Maybe where Bianca never took to the surf beside me and I never became a hunter. But this is my life, and I’m not going anywhere - least of all into that fire.

We’re here to stay as well.

He turned to his new partner, who had stifled a yawn self-consciously. They both grinned, him a little sheepishly, and Frank indicated the car.

''Come on - I’ll drop you off.''

They climbed in and turned away from the red, and into the black. His friend had children waiting for the sound of their door to let in the thin shard of soft light, who would pretend they were asleep, and feel the reassuring tucking by their father’s hands. And he had a fiancée, betrothed lover, waiting in the half-light of their lounge, looking out into the half-strange city between the blinds, waiting for her guide to return from wherever in the city he breathed. 

 

The following day, Frank was half way through the files he’d already read when he got the call he’d both anticipated and dreaded.

He looked up to his office terminal - the Precinct’s Biolabs had paged him. On his desk were the profiles of the dissident suspects. Miette would have underlined the word ‘suspects’ in her speech if she could - and she had in a way: the files had been hers, before she had washed up on the rocks. They had even suffered her doodles. Wherever she had found something of great interest, Frank would know it by the amount of decorations bordering the page, indicating how long she’d spent going over the names, the dates and the places.

Frank slid the files away, and stood up from his desk - making sure that the slowly revolving blades hanging from the ceiling didn’t draw any attachments off his desk. If all went well however, the files could very soon become obsolete.

He nodded to his acquaintances. Not all of them were his friends - few of them could be. Yet none were his enemies, and dark looks in this building led to the slow death of any officer.

Frank stepped into the waiting elevator, pulling the cage doors closed and began descending into the Precinct building’s catacombs - down to the Biolab.

''You’re okay with this?''

He looked across to Miette, standing beside him.

''Of course I am - this is a great move for you. You don’t need my permission,'' Frank reminded her. ''You know that.''

They had been in the same elevator, returning from the marina where some unhappy campers had tied a man to the pier at low tide. Now it was morning, and the tide had gone back out again. The sea had taken with it a few bubbles yet left the grisly shell behind, bracelets of raw-flesh where he had struggled against the rope. When they had found him, though, the thrashing had long ceased. Instead, he had just bobbed there peacefully before drawn back to land, sea snails already having found a home in his shoes.

On the way back, Miette had told him of her invitation, and subsequent decision, to liaise with Internal Security on the Dissidents Case.

Frank had simply nodded.

She turned to face him.

''There’s more to it than that and you know it Frank.'' She stood with hands on her hips. ''If you feel uncomfortable with taking on another partner for a short while, just to spit him out when I finish my stint, say so - or if you’re thinking it’d be a great opportunity to use some of that paid-leave and get away with your beautiful fiancée somewhere, tell me that.''

''Please - make up your mind.'' He asked.

''Look - this is your call.'' The cage opened and she marched swiftly in pursuit of her partner across the open office space. ''I need some sort of blessing - tell me that my taking this initiative hasn’t pissed you off.'' ‘What’s on your mind?’ She’d seemed to want to add.

Frank took the list of messages the secretary handed him: Bianca had called, a contact had called, and - his boss wanted a word about assigning him a new temporary partner.

It was everywhere, unavoidable.

 

He turned around to Miette, who waited angrily. He looked out the fifth floor window at the public square opposite. Juveniles twisted around on skates and boards in the yellow half-pipe. He stuffed the note in a pocket and gathering his words.

They both knew that the brief exchange of personnel could only help to improve her career.

''As much as I find it hard to believe how you could wish anything more than to spend freezing mornings at the wharfs untying frozen corpses,'' Miette’s expression softened and she looked away. ''I think that -'' he breathed deep. ''The chief’s given this to you for a very good reason - you’re the best one to represent us with it to Security. Yes, Miette - you do have my blessing,'' and more. You always have had it.

Miette had busied herself with filling her own cup as well.

''Thanks,'' was all she could get out with, before their boss signalled to Frank across from his office.

The elevator drew to a stop and he pulled the cage open, stepping wearily out into the cold, blue glow.

Miette had only meant to stay out of Homicide for two weeks - a month at most and only then if she had elected to. She was supposed to have come back whole and new - not as the first package of evidence in a new case.

An assistant was there to meet him, and she took the lead, navigating the canister- and crate-lined corridor. Down here, day and night shifts maintained the machinery that hummed in the distance. He remembered her briefly from the last time he was here, with his ex-partner in the marine blue. He had come here for much the same reason - or that was at least what he tried telling himself: to catch a thief of a beloved. Frank watched her lab-coat tails flay in front of him.

At times, he felt as if he was drowning in the light - that if he put a hand to his face later on, it would come away with blue droplets. He forced himself to relax and to focus on the regular percussion of his guide’s footsteps. Finally, they came to a stop, and there she indicated the door leading to the Resurrection Chamber. ‘Frankenstein’s playground’ he recalled along with the nervous laughter of his colleagues.

He muttered a ‘thank you’ and she turned, disappearing into the wall of light beyond the mist, her heels against the floor like an amplified heart beat, leaving Frank beside the unopened door. Soon, even her footsteps vanished into nothingness. Frank stood there. Slowly he looked around, letting his fingers drop from the handle.

If I called out now, would she or someone else come running? Would the blue mist redirect my voice, siphon it off into an empty room. I could lose myself if I tried - if I wanted.

Does that room - half morgue, half maternity-wing - scare me so much?

 

Pulling the door handle out with sweaty palms as the pressures equalised, the door hissed as he turned and committed himself.

He surveyed the sparse, narrow room, lit by a vague white light that shone into the clear, sterile ambiance The door had resealed behind him, and he took the few steps to the level ground.

''Watch your step.'' The only other occupant of the room warned.

The doctor, a raised hand requesting him to wait, sat beside a bench running along the right wall. To his left, the access panels to deep-frozen ‘coffins’ covered the wall. Yet instead of corpses, they held the blue prints of the genome of every officer in the force, each subtle mutation making the difference between blue eyes, and brown eyes - a slight tendency to alcoholism, or an inclination to write symphonies.

Yet it was for what stood at the other end of the room that he had come, on a raised level after a short flight.

The doctor, Personal Access Device in hand, stood up and walked alongside his client who moved towards the steps.

''As you know, we keep a DNA sample of every officer on file - comes in handy whenever there’s a need to clone an ‘appealing central piece’ in an open funeral.''

''She was my partner.'' Frank informed him.

The doctor stopped at the base of the steps, not looking away.

''Yes - I know.'' His voice was neither mocking nor dismissive but compassionate. Frank paused, and wondered whether funeral directors felt compassion for their livelihood. This resident necromancer was the expert here though. Not just on the process of death and its mechanics, but its inevitable beauty. Tiny tremors ran through him as he placed his hand upon the surface of the giant cylinder, as if feeling the echo of the prior inhabitant’s uncertain cry. ''It’s also a useful alternative to looking for a compatible donor for whatever organ or limb a bullet has just turned into pulp; but you didn’t come here for just an arm, or a thigh. You came here for the whole set - a body.''

Frank’s vision turned back to the blue liquid, trying to catch a glimpse of reason in the rising bubbles that merged with the flat pocket on the cubicle’s ceiling. Bianca had wished to buy a lava lamp she had seen in a shop front as a gift for a girl friend back in Venice. He had told her it would never survive the trip. She had said they would wrap it extra careful, that it would work out. Yet he walked out, and she did too a few moments later. Empty handed, but silent over their cups of coffee.

 

Frank realised he would never remind her of some things.

He tried envisioning Bianca’s face suspended on the glass, but instead Miette’s came to mind. He knew it was wrong, that something was wrong, yet he followed the memory it belonged to, anyhow, tantalised.

They had been in a virtually unoccupied public indoor pool - most families had elected to enjoy the holiday on the beach. They had swum laps of the pool side by side, matching the other in endurance, driving one another without being competitive.

Miette clasped the end of the pool, blowing air from her mouth and nose, and shifted her goggles to her forehead. She smiled at their shared exhilaration, and tucked a loose strand of her long black hair back behind her ear.

She pushed off, floating on her back and staring at the ceiling. She wore a body swimsuit. Her breasts rose and fell. She was not unattractive.

Miette up-ended and scooped the water aside, slowly heading towards him, then spinning around and pressing her back against the wall of the pool. The reflection of the water rippled along her features. She looked up at the ceiling, mouth wide open, eyes - mesmerised by the dancing light.

''Frank.'' Miette asked.

''Hmm?''

''I need a guarantee.''

He paused, uncertain - and yes, afraid of asking what she had on her mind.

''Fire away.''

''If I’m ever killed in the line-''

''That won’t ever happen, Miette.'' He protested. ''Homicide protects its-''

''Then just humour me for a minute.'' Her eyes had rested on her partner’s face. ''If I ever die while I’m in the force, Frank, let them clone me for my funeral - my people would want to see me unbruised by this crazy profession - or, if I’m attacked, raped maybe, and killed, let them replicate me and file a false report. Tell them I - died taking the force of a blow from a car bonnet, for a nine-year-old or something. But if I slip up, get caught while undercover - dredge my body for clues, hunt my killer down, do whatever it takes - but promise me this Frank. Not as my friend, or my partner - but as a human being, promise me that you’ll take to my brain with a hammer. Promise me, Frank. Or I might as well do it myself now. Promise me that you’ll keep me alive only in your memories. Frank?''

He nodded, knowing that fulfilling his promise would have him thrown from Homicide for erasing the best hope for capturing her killer.

He nodded, knowing that it was Miette - the woman (to whom) he had taught the ropes when he himself was still a cub in the department - who had taught him how to keep the better part of himself still alive despite the pressure of their work, that she’d ultimately enabled him to be in the position to enforce her posthumous wish.

He nodded, promising her.

''- And a mind to boot,'' the doctor recapped for both their benefits.

Frank turned, brushing past the doctor, moving beside the other prop of the dais. Instantly it reminded him of an air hockey table with less pronounced corners - or an Egyptian coffin.

Like its neighbour, it too stood on its own small dais, giving the additional appearance of a sacrificial altar. Beneath the curved, transparent fibreglass lid was a sandy-yellow panel.

Frank placed a tired hand on the tomb’s surface.

''Is she -'' the detective begun to ask.

''Yes. She’s in there.''

''Her final resting place,'' Frank murmured.

''Quite the contrary - this is her first.''

He had decided not to view her growth - from embryo to fetus, to neonate, girl, young adult and finally woman - that had taken place in the cylinder behind him. She had never been a substitute daughter, but instead, a sister, to fill in some way the vacuum left within him by the suicide of his own, biological sister. The prospect of seeing her as she’d been, growing at the rate of a year each day, her form floating blissfully naked in the blue liquid of the overblown test tube, had certainly tantalised him.

Yet he had declined.

Then why did he now wish to peek at her, or rather, the reproduction of her? When beneath this metal tablet nanobots swarmed through her system like tiny monkeys peddling on the bikes of her muscles, training the body of a twenty-four year-old to breathe the polluted air of Singapore, run along its busy streets that she had not even walked upon, and sing with vocal cords that haven’t even yet whispered? Was it the curiosity of a child beneath the pine tree on Christmas Eve - or did he wish to whisper in her ear, an ear that did not know even of another’s heartbeat: a simple ‘I’m sorry’. Or, was it a wish to find redemption in a baby on the dawn she inherits her predecessor’s belongings – belongings set for destruction?

''I feel inclined to remind you of the reason this is not practised on any scale -'' the doctor begun, yet Frank cut him off.

''Yes - I know.'' God’s ultimate fail-safe to stop us from looking too close at the clockwork - clever. ''Complete shock upon recalling their own experience of dying, leading to absolute death, and nothing left to keep the pieces together.''

Frank looked up to see the doctor staring at him strangely, as if he’d gone into shock himself, intoxicated by the symbols of mortality and longevity.

''I heard it once said that to suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror.'' The doctor mused, philosophically. ''To learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.''

Except Frank was already marching down the steps, across the room and towards the entrance, leaving the necromancer standing alone on the platform – escaping the consequences of his own words, and the implication of his own inaction.

''Do it,'' he shouted without turning as he ran up the stairs, and slammed the door behind him, collapsing upon it, holding the lid on Pandora’s Box. Imagining his own morality unravel as if sheep intestines as he permitted their hired Frankenstein to download the neurological sequence of his ex-partner from her corpse to her clone. Thus, allowing the stranger to turn her manufactured body into a member of the walking dead.

Please forgive me, Miette.

He heard footsteps, yet he could no longer bare the sight of another’s skin, especially a woman’s skin. He pushed off, heading in the direction he’d come, certain of his ability to find the elevator even in the eternally blue mist.

He soon found his pace quickening - the blue mist swirled around him grew to mirror the tempest within. Spirits formed in the morose wind-dye, the ghosts of all those who had come before Miette on the surgical table of zombification - rewired, rewound, reformed. All the distraught, undignified souls lurched and locked back into their despised earthly cage. This crazed zoo where the only consolation we can give ourselves is to become zookeepers to our cellmates, to whom even death we deny.

He swung an arm as if to clear the way for the primal groan that had congregated at his gut from the tips of his fingers and the soles of his feet.

He pushed past the elevator, and found the door to the fire exit. The cage that would take him to the much larger cage above could not come fast enough. He sucked in a deep breath as he fell back against the cool steel door of the fire exit, suddenly seeing his life as a series of desperate attempts at barricading against the forces that could drive him to the canals of his fiancée’s birthplace or to the streets as a nomad without a compass.

He raced towards and up the steps that spiralled along the Police Head Quarters’ central core. He was a killer. He was a thief. He had willingly cut off a piece of himself when he had entered the mindset of a detective. The day he had become concerned less about protecting the living and more about delving into the torso and head of the dead - not just to walk their last footsteps with them but to see what the dead saw. In that way he was no better than the necromancer he ran from. Worse, really - he was a spiritual necrophile, fucking the minds of those who had had the fortune to find the key from their cells and to the feeder’s room.

Had he wanted Miette to die so she could finally enter a realm where he could fuck her on his office desk, sipping a coffee, with none of his workmates the wiser? With a living partner who would never be a wife as long as she knew that he spent time with a dead woman, in preference to her, without even the solace of being able to prove that her betrothed was obsessing over another beyond the call of duty - because that was his duty.

The precinct’s inhabitants had leaned over the thin blue line long ago. At the rate of a dozen feet for each floor they had built, they had managed to distance themselves from the crowds of all the people amongst whom they had sworn to walk with. It was the lab-coat-clad assistant down in the underground who was more alive then the rest of them. That postgraduate who carefully and gently acted as counsellor for the deceased on the autopsy tables, who moved with sincere religious ceremonial dedication in welcoming her crypt-partners back into the physical plain, through the maternal ambience of the Resurrection chamber.

Bursting through the final doorway of the long series of steps, the blinding flood of natural light greeted Frank. Still he moved. The wind that now swirled around him that of the mid stratus. It was here that the city’s towers pierced the air like steel skeletons draped in giant silicon waterfalls.

He marched panting to the edge with arms out front to grasp the guardrail. Up above, the eye of god glared down unhappily. Down below, the processions of workers and buskers, sweepers and skaters, followed their seemingly age-old route between A and B. Here he stood, the breeze light and sun warm, yet still he clutched the rail before him to stop himself from shaking.

He drew himself up abruptly.

If someone had killed her in the change room after our laps in the pool, and they had asked me if I had wanted to bring her back to find out the face of her killer, I would have said no - an immediate, absolute denial. All this time I’ve been thinking I loved her now more than ever, justifying myself with the rationale that we’d grown so close since that day, that I had in some way acquired the right to override her posthumous wish.

He breathed in the cross winds sharply, and dropped his head, exhaling forcefully.

He had done a man’s job. Was he a man though?

-- By Ash Hibbert