Chapter Text
Pᴀɴᴅᴏʀᴀ ᴡᴀs ɢɪᴠᴇɴ ᴀ ᴊᴀʀ ʙʏ ᴛʜᴇ ɢᴏᴅs ᴀɴᴅ sᴇɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ᴘᴜɴɪsʜ ʜᴜᴍᴀɴᴋɪɴᴅ ғᴏʀ ʀᴇᴄᴇɪᴠɪɴɢ sᴛᴏʟᴇɴ ғɪʀᴇ.
Uɴᴀᴡᴀʀᴇ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ғᴀᴛᴇ ᴛʜʀᴜsᴛ ᴜᴘᴏɴ ʜᴇʀ, sʜᴇ ʟɪғᴛᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ʟɪᴅ ᴏғ ʜᴇʀ ᴊᴀʀ ᴀɴᴅ ᴜɴʟᴇᴀsʜᴇᴅ ᴇᴠɪʟ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴇᴛᴇʀɴɪᴛʏ.
* * *
ii. Decomposition (1 month)
in medias res
The hard plastic chair and cold air-con of the cramped room made themselves known again to Barbie as she opened her eyes.
“Miss Handler,” a distant voice called, muffled, then clearer when her attention was gained. “Miss Handler.”
The three representatives from Mattel’s Board of Directors—CEO, CFO, and COO—looked on with concern. Their Head of Legal impatiently cleared his throat. “As we begin, I believe you have a statement to read into the record.”
Barbie sighed imperceptibly, embarrassed at being caught off guard. Not a great start. “Yes, your honour—”
“We’re not judges, Ma’am,” the Head of HR added.
“No,” she agreed. Attorney Ken’s notes couldn’t protect her here. “Of course.”
There were a thousand and one more pressing worries Barbie should be having right now, yet the one at the forefront of her mind was how simply yet hopelessly she wished she had someone to hold her tight and let her know she wasn’t alone and tell her that everything was going to be alright.
How tragically ironic, then, that she’d uncovered the power of unlimited wish fulfilment, but there were no more wishes left for her.
* * *
iii. Precipitation (1 week)
ab initio
Poetry is—
A string orchestra, its melody rising and falling in a never ending cycle of increasing tempo. The cellos and violins and violas crescendo and blur into the lonely wail of a steam engine departing from a station.
—heavy tomes, dogged-eared and yellowed with age, wisdom and history made tangible. Poetry is also—
The train accelerates into a dark and endless tunnel, away from sight and the known universe, arpeggios breezing past allegro and presto, a prestissimo adrenaline rush of bows on strings, speeding away and away, never coming back, never to be stopped.
—words, beautifully arranged, thoughtfully spaced out in verses. Serif fonts; elegant and tangible in their fading ink.
Robert snapped the heavy book shut and shoved it back onto the library shelf. It was a first edition anthology, although only T S Eliot’s The Hollow Men had kept his attention beyond its starting verses.
Not that it mattered to him now, leaving the books behind as he slinked towards the exit. He had stowed away in the campus’ Arts Library for hours, aimlessly skimming through shelves of Literature and Poetry as was habit (reading English on days he was feeling particularly lethargic, and other languages if he was feeling restless or inquisitive) until the energy to face the outside world returned to him.
A small section of last night’s string serenade performance he’d attended drifted through his mind, which led to one daydream and another, culminating in the abruptly satisfying realisation that what his PhD students had calculated during their latest consultation on particle-antiparticle annihilation hadn’t been completely wrong.
No. The basis for their hypothesis was sound. Its mathematical parameters simply needed modification.
“Not borrowing anything today, Doctor?” The sole librarian at the reception piped up, stopping Robert’s brisk walk towards the exit doors.
He recognised her face from when he’d first entered the library in the late morning, and allowed a small, polite smile. Now that his mind had been appeased of its lethargy, it also noticed and informed him of the subtle cues in her body language.
He took a step toward the reception counter. “Is a library only meant for the appreciation of books?” He teased, watching her blush and feeling a wave of relief that he hadn’t misjudged.
“You’re an actual staff member of the college,” he continued, to be sure. “Not a student volunteer.”
“Yes, I work here, Doc—”
“Robert,” he corrected, placing an elbow on the countertop and leaning in. “You end work here at, what, six o’ clock?”
The librarian nodded meekly, followed with a hushed but excited, “Yes.”
(There was an astrophysics journal club at five o’ clock which would surely last into the evening. Robert had technically told the postdocs involved he’d be there, but hadn’t promised he’d stay for all of it.)
“Good,” Robert said. “Do you want to know where I’ll be taking you for dinner, or should we leave that as a surprise?”
She seemed to be losing the ability to form a coherent response the harder she blushed, and while Robert inexplicably found that flattering, he didn’t want the conversation to drag on. “Smart answer,” he teased. “I’ll pick you up at six, then,” he said, and threw in a wink for good measure, then he was out the doors, headed back towards the Science Faculty and the obligations of daily life.
* * *
ii.
in medias res (earlier)
Having tea with Ruth Handler’s regal, glowing spirit used to be the highlight of Barbie’s week.
This time, though, she had to sully it with her burdens and heavy thoughts, which seemed to be getting heavier by the day.
“I never once forced anyone to do anything they were ethically against,” Barbie insisted—no, pleaded. “Asking is a different thing from demanding.”
“Technically, yes,” Ruth allowed. “And I believe you completely. But you…you’re you,” she said, as if it meant something. “Smart, amiable, charismatic, motivational. An inspiration.”
Barbie shrunk back with embarrassment, hiding her grimace behind a sip of earl grey tea. Was it rude of her to not want to hear such descriptors anymore, even if from a trusted mentor?
“And that kind of charm does things to people’s brain chemistry,” Ruth continued sadly. “Love it or hate it, you’re going to have dolls and humans alike walking through fire and crawling over broken glass for you, and God forbid some catastrophe shakes them out of their daze enough to make them perceive they’d burned and bled themselves for you.”
It was becoming clear to Barbie that her wise old friend was giving her a warning and not a compliment, and now she wanted to shrink back into her chair for different reasons. “That sounds awful,” she whispered.
“The higher you climb,” Ruth cautioned, “the further there is to fall.”
Ruth’s home brewed tea was no doubt lovely, but Barbie could no longer taste a thing. She placed the shaking cup and saucer back on the dining table.
Ruth gently covered her hand. “You’re not alone in this, Barbara dear,” she said.
It doesn’t feel that way, Barbie wanted to say. It was a selfish sentiment, and wouldn’t be fair to Ruth, or to Gloria and Sasha and Ken, or to any of the Science Barbies and Mattel employees who’d shown her so much acceptance and kindness over the past year.
Unfortunately for Barbie, Ruth was a spirit, and that came with mind-reading powers. (Probably. It could’ve just been an acute sense of empathy.) “Gloria Fernández thought she was alone, too,” she reminded Barbie, “when she began letting her anxieties overflow into doodles at work. And yet you answered her call, came to her when she thought she had no one.”
* * *
“Ma, I’ve got our ration tickets,” Weilun announced to her mother as she closed the front door and stepped out of her sandals.
Her daughter, Huiqi, ran out to greet her. “What have you got, Ma?” She asked. “And did you see Pa?”
Weilun smiled down at her, holding out a handful of frail paper stubs. “These will buy us food for the next few—for the time being. I still don’t know where Pa is warded, but the policemen at the Post Office checked his name in the records and assured me he and the other freed men are taken care of at a hospital.”
“Which hospital?” Ma’s upset tone carried through the house as she emerged from the kitchen. “If it’s the one next door to that cursed prison—”
“No, not Changi,” Weilun placated. “I don’t know which one, but apparently Changi Hospital is still too badly damaged to house patients. Probably the one at Outram.”
“And still no electricity? No financial support?” Weilun’s mother continued, relentless. “I’m ready to burn all this fucking banana money we’ve got if those useless Brits don’t have a way to exchange them for legal tender.”
“Don’t burn the notes,” Weilun sighed, although the sentiment was tempting. “The Post Office said there might be a plan by the Military Admin to have some kind of currency exchange exercise. They didn’t say when, just to keep tuned in to the radio.”
“The radio,” Ma scoffed in disbelief. “Which isn’t going to last much longer when the fucking electricity’s still not back on—”
“Please, Ma, not now,” Weilun begged, giving her mother a meaningful look. They could argue all they wanted in urgent whispers at night; she just didn’t want it to happen in front of her 5-year-old.
“Ahma, what’s the problem?” Huiqi asked, looking between the two women. She was afraid, and confused, and not at all deserving of the past 4 years—how could it be mere years and not centuries—of horrors. “Is the radio broken?”
“Not yet, dear,” Weilun soothed. “And with luck, it won’t.” She crouched down to be at eye level with her daughter, and only now noticed she was clinging to the homemade doll Weilun had sewn from leftover tablecloths and pajama material for her first birthday.
And what a birthday it had been, huddled in a damp, dim underground bunker with a hundred others, flinching at every rumble of explosion that got less and less distant until the ground shook and until silence became scarier than the overhead roar of fighter jets.
Huiqi had learned to speak, and named her doll Yuan. Hope.
“Now these,” Weilun explained, waving the ration tickets, “can be used to redeem fruits!” Her excited grin was a little too practiced, but her daughter reluctantly smiled. “Fresh fruits and fresh veggies! No more eating just tapioca and porridge with salt every day. Aren’t you excited?”
Huiqi nodded. Her obedience was a little too practiced. Weilun scolded herself for the tears that threatened to spill over. “Good girl,” she praised, voice shaky. “Have you and Ahma had dinner?”
“Yes,” Huiqi and Ma said at the same time.
“We saved a bowl for you on the stove,” Weilun’s mother added. “I finally opened the last bottle of soy sauce that had expired, but it smelt so awful, I had to throw it out.” She shook her head. “Even the stray dogs wouldn’t touch our trash today with that inside.”
“It’s okay,” Weilun said. “Plain porridge it is.” She gave Huiqi a comforting squeeze on her shoulder. “Do you want to go out tomorrow?”
“Yes!” Her enthusiasm this time was genuine.
Weilun blinked and sniffled and sharply inhaled back her grief. She had to keep it together for a while longer (and then keep pushing back the date she promised herself she could let go). “Try to get a good night’s sleep then, yeah?”
No grownup could sleep peacefully, even if the world had finally, technically entered the warm embrace of ‘peace time’. But children like Huiqi…they deserved to rest. Even if just for a few blissfully ignorant hours.
Mankind, at birth, is inherently innocent.
Weilun didn’t know if she’d have another peaceful night’s sleep for the rest of her life. Not just because her husband was going to return home with nightmares of his own, a Sook Ching ‘survivor’ in barely-alive form. Not just because the memories of burying her brother were still too raw. Not just because the letters to her sister-in-law up in Ipoh remained unanswered. Not just because the telephone cables outside were broken and the house had a leaky attic and her only child might not actually get the vaguely promised polio vaccine, let alone go to school.
She could not properly sleep with the knowledge that some powerful and paranoid nation or bloc could be provoked any time into the kind of aggression that could destroy entire cities in the blink of an eye.
If not taught well, that innocence will be corrupted.
“Okay, I’ll sleep early,” Huiqi promised, gently nudging Weilun away from her troubled thoughts. “Where are we going tomorrow?”
“If there’s no stay home alert,” Weilun told her, “we can visit the deSilvas at their farm and ask for a bouquet of lilies.” She smoothed her daughter’s hair back. “Then you, Ahma, and I will take a bus to Bukit Chandu, where I hear there’s a makeshift memorial site to the Malay Regiment and all the other foreign troops who fought and sacrificed themselves to protect Singapore. And we’ll give the lilies to them, alright?”
Little Huiqi, still so naive yet already too wise, nodded. “Can Yuan come along too?” She asked, holding the doll up by its arms.
“Sure,” Weilun agreed.
“Can I give Yuan to the troops?” She continued. “To protect them in return?”
Again, Weilun tried not to cry. Hugging her daughter tight helped a little. “That’s incredibly kind of you,” she praised, thinking of the humble rag doll buried under anonymous bouquets, garlands, and letters. “Of course you can.”
* * *
i. Synthesis (1 year)
in medias res
Weird Barbie and Scientist Allan (formerly presenting as Scientist Barbie before realising they were always meant to be an Allan) were discussing quantum entanglement. Most of the technical jargon flew right over Barbie’s head, but Allan’s explanation of ‘particles whose fates are tangled with each other’ had piqued her interest.
“So things that are quantumly entangled are basically soulmates!” She exclaimed.
“Er,” Allan considered. “Kind of, although it’s not that sim—”
“Oh, I never knew theoretical physics could be so romantic!” Barbie squealed. “You and the others could be Nobel Romance Laureates for this discovery!”
“Hmm,” Weird Barbie hummed, skeptical. “Don’t think that’s how Nobel Prizes work, girl friend.”
“Well, we’re now autonomous and independent from the Human World,” Barbie said. “So we don’t need to wait for them to manufacture a new line of toy items—or in this case, toy awards—for us. We can create a ‘Nobel Romance Prize’ that’s exclusive to the ULABK,” she reasoned, referring to the United Lands of Allans, Barbies, and Kens (still, admittedly, often referred to by its old name of Barbieland).
“With due respect, chief,” Allan chimed in. “I think now’s not the greatest time to rock the boat.”
“What boat?” Barbie asked, looking out the conference room’s windows, only to be met with the familiar sight of origami cacti and succulents gleaming in the ever-shifting glitter dunes. Then her face lit up with recognition. “Oh, I remember Writer Barbie telling me the other day—it’s an idiom!”
“Yep,” Weird Barbie agreed. “They’re right, too; let’s not go declaring to Mattel that we’re making too many new things up right now. You know how envious human beings can get. Might send the wrong message.”
Barbie pinched the bridge of her nose. Her prolonged exposure to the Human World had infected her with feelings such as impatience, and she fought hard not to let it show, lest it spread to the other innocent ABKs.
“I may not be a science expert,” she said. “But I do know this: if not for us, the humans still wouldn’t know about the possibility of connecting dolls with their humans, or even the possibility of doing it vice versa, or even independent of any doll ownership.” She crossed her arms. “They owe us. Shouldn’t that be enough?”
“More,” Weird Barbie said simply. “There’s no such thing as ‘enough’—well, according to the Kens, there is; good for them, honestly. But there always exists the want for more.”
* * *
iii.
“Congratulations, Dr Nair,” Robert called. “And good morning.”
She raised her head from where she’d been focusing on the beginnings of a rangoli, inclining a friendly nod at Robert. “Thank you. For my engagement or my new lab?”
“Why not both?” He gingerly crossed the room’s threshold. Last night’s hookup had, in theory, gone perfectly, yet left him with the same unfulfilled emptiness of all other perfectly successful hookups, the same dreadful feeling of not understanding what everyone else could.
As a beloved mentor once said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Robert sidestepped the bowls of dyed sand and rice grains Dr Nair had placed beside her, moving inside the room to give her a wide berth. “Can I stay and watch?”
Dr Nair raised an eyebrow. “Watch me give a lonely housewarming for my Spectrometry Lab?” She scooped up a handful of indigo grains—
450 to 460 nm. The ocean depths. The plumage of a peacock. A bright, uplifting sitar.
—and started spreading them across the sterile vinyl floor. “It might take hours.”
Robert had already taken a seat at the foot of the nearest lab bench. He’d folded his lanky self to take up as little space as possible, briefcase balanced on top of his folded legs. “As long as it wouldn’t be disrespectful of me to leave before you’re done with the housewarming, I’d much rather spend the time before my official office hours here.”
“Ah, so you’ve chosen an experimental lab, dealing with applied science, to hide from the Dean and his latest salary negotiations,” Dr Nair teased. She pinched a sprinkle’s worth of orange grains—
605 to 615 nm. Tumeric and autumn. A tiger’s gaze. The gentle chime of woodwinds.
—to outline the indigo circle. “Something they say about hiding in plain sight within enemy territory, am I right?”
Robert accepted the jibe with a smile. “I was spared practical classes in spectrophotometry as an undergraduate,” he said. “And thus, the chance to decide if the field deserves my enmity or not.” He nodded towards the brand new instrument sitting on the far lab bench, still under layers of protective wraps, the centrepiece of Dr Nair’s newly established lab and no doubt her pride and joy. “Does it measure in UV too?”
Dr Nair rolled her eyes. “Yes, but barely,” she sighed, a dozen unsaid complaints about funding difficulties and manufacturer limitations passing between them in a look of commiseration.
“Y’know,” she continued, “I don’t understand how you can be satisfied simply thinking things up in your head and leaving the joy and credit of discovering them in real life to someone else.” Her words held amusement with no condescension. “But to each their own, I suppose.”
The conversation tapered off into companionable silence. Robert watched, enraptured, as his colleague created a golden spiral pattern of a blooming lotus. His mind wandered to Fibonacci patterns, and the muted fragrance of jasmine mingling with rosewater that came from the pink and purple sands in the bowls nearest to him.
The gorgeous silhouette of a peacock slowly emerged from the spiral, brought into creation by Dr Nair’s skill. Robert’s focus was both present and distant, in awe of the art being breathed into life before him while also absentmindedly worrying about the job invitations from other universities he’d procrastinated replies on for too long.
Their promises of ample funding and academic independence were tempting. But accepting any of them would mean dividing his time between universities—possibly needing to travel between countries—and cutting down on how frequently he could mentor his current PhD students. The Dean would almost certainly counter-offer with a pay raise, but that would be met with outcries of favouritism from some faculty, and then the Dean would have no choice but to ask Robert to start lecturing undergraduate courses in classical physics, no longer an exception to the rules.
“You’d be one of the fastest-promoted Associate Professors in Berkeley’s long history,” Dr Nair said, resuming the conversation as if she’d read his mind. “If you choose to stay, that is.”
“Of course I am. I’m not going to abandon my current students whom have yet to publish their dissertations,” he said defensively, on impulse, before biting his tongue in shame.
“I know you won’t,” she agreed, effortlessly brushing off his immature outburst. “Maybe one of the other universities that wants you to set up a new Quantum Physics department—don’t give me that look, people talk and it’s easy to guess, come on—will also be willing to only have you for the minority of a given semester?”
“What an extraordinary compromise that would be.”
“Supply and demand,” Dr Nair reasoned. “I don’t think anyone here’s been promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor in less than three years, and teaching a newly-established cohort on top of that. It’d be historic.” The peacock grew feathers. “Taking up such an offer seems like a logical next step for someone like you.”
“Not if you don’t want to lecture,” Robert countered.
“What don’t you like about teaching, though?” She asked, curious and non-judgmental.
He gave a half-hearted shrug. “I like teaching, just not lecturing.”
Dr Nair moved from rice to sand, adding accents to the petals of the lotus. “Explain the difference to me.”
Robert smiled mirthlessly. “Lecturing implies standing in front of a crowd of strangers and submitting yourself to their judgment. Guiding a small graduate class is magnitudes of order more conducive for personal engagement. I excel at the latter but will likely struggle at the former.”
“You’ll never know until you try.”
Her words made sense. Taking leaps of faith was practically inseparable from the scientific method itself. Yet lately it felt like Robert’s universe was shrinking instead of expanding, colour draining out of it faster than even his vivid imagination could desperately paint back in.
He needed a change of pace; a higher purpose beyond feeling like a composer rewriting the same symphony for eternity.
* * *
i.
in medias res (later)
“You gotta stop hanging out with that Chevy convertible,” Weird Barbie said. “He gives sus vibes.”
“Bumblebee’s nice,” Barbie defended. Temporal Barbie and Gravity Barbie were standing around, nominally in the conversation, so Barbie elaborated for their benefit. “I fixed his broken radio, we bonded over our favourite pop songs, and then he offered to drive me back from Venice Beach to the ski resort—”
“You brought a Hasbro toy to Barbieland?” Weird Barbie shrieked. The other two barbies gasped.
“The ski resort way, way outside our actual borders, relax!” Barbie retorted. “He didn’t even get close enough to see the camping grounds or tulip fields!”
“That’s still not going to sound good on paper.” Weird Barbie sighed, equally tired with rehashes of the same argument. “Our seemingly unlimited resources and your de facto unchecked leadership aren’t going to last forever, you know. And any frivolous little decision you had ever made can potentially come back and bite you in the ass.”
Barbie smiled tightly, then checked her watch. “I should be leaving for my meeting with Mattel management,” she announced.
“Be careful, yeah?” Gravity Barbie said. It wasn’t an insult, not even a warning. Somewhere along the line, every variation of ‘be careful’ had turned into the default way to say hello and goodbye to Barbie.
No longer was it, Hey Barbie! I love your optimism!
It was now, Hey Barbie! Your continued optimism is putting you at odds with everyone! Watch your step!
Barbie straightened her posture, head held high. “I have nothing to hide,” she affirmed. “And I won’t be intimidated.”
* * *
iv. Combustion (1 day)
ab initio
Gloria should maybe cool it on fantasising too much over what she read.
She’d always loved magical realism, the way stories of the genre weaved the mundane and the fantastical together. She loved the subtle escapism that took the reader exactly where their stressed-out brain needed—not necessarily wanted—to be, then deposited them back in the real world without too much whiplash when the book was closed.
Now, on an early Monday morning of ordinary weather, in her thrift store that caught a lot of rush hour traffic from curious passers-by but not enough actual sales, she very much felt like a character from one of her favourite books.
There was a smartly-dressed man in his twenties or thirties who had been standing outside the shop for the past few minutes, feigning interest in the view across the street, almost as if waiting for someone. Gloria wouldn’t have suspected he was actually observing the inside of the store had she not been paying close attention to his movement, posture, and the subtle tracking of his gaze.
He wasted no time entering the store once it was cleared of all other customers, calmly letting the swing door of the entrance close behind him before flipping its sign from WE ARE OPEN to SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED. That behaviour was normally something Gloria wouldn’t hesitate to scold a patron over, but could forgive if it were for some urgent, life-changing reason.
And the simmering tension in the air from the moment she’d noticed him made Gloria believe that something life-changing was indeed in motion, with the same certainty she’d had when she first saw Barbie in real life, in the parking lot outside her daughter’s middle school.
The man hadn’t yet acknowledged her presence, glancing briefly in her direction before focusing his attention to the shelves where the secondhand toys were displayed. There were action figures and dolls and stuffed toys of all shapes and sizes, including, of course, the iconic Barbie range.
Gloria approached him from the side, starting at the far end of the shelving unit, deliberately in his peripheral vision so as not to alarm him. He seemed to select toys at random, picking them up and putting them down, inspecting them from various angles with a delicate grasp and a focused gaze that spoke of thoughfulness and intelligence.
He was slender and lithe, bordering on petite, yet the way he carried himself lent a gravitas to his presence that few could ever hope to emulate. So, definitely not a corporate executive, Gloria thought. His profile was elusively familiar, like it belonged on a Nat Geo magazine cover.
She was a few paces away when he finally turned to acknowledge her, tossing a pastel pink plastic box for her to catch.
This Barbie leads a top-secret group of heroines in saving the world! The worn out label of the packaging cheerfully read. Within the box, a non-sentient manifestation of Gloria’s good friend and confidant grinned lifelessly at her.
“I’ve been having troubling visions,” the man said without preamble. So he’s brave, Gloria thought, unable to keep a smile off her face. Brave enough to risk making a fool of himself as a first impression. “I followed them, and it led…here.”
When he noticed Gloria had yet to laugh him out of the place, he continued. “I’m only here because of something I never imagined would happen to me,” he confessed.
It was an ambiguous statement if Gloria had ever heard one, but her experiences in Barbieland and her love for realistic fantasy had, blessedly and inadvertently, prepared her for all kinds of surreal. “Which is?” She prompted kindly.
He sighed, closing his eyes for a moment to steel himself. “The belief I could save someone, however monumental a task it might sound.”
“Well,” Gloria said. “I may have been a part of your vision, but I don’t think I’m the one you’re meant to help. I can get the ball rolling though, starting with an introduction.”