She shook her head, tossed her hair back, forced the sting in her eyes to fade. "Hell, Singapore's just a phone call away.

I'll call David from there every day. Make it up to him."

Singapore.

7

SINGAPORE. Hot tropic light slanted through brown wooden shutters. A ceiling fan creaked and wobbled, creaked and wobbled, and dust motes did a slow atomic dance above her head.

She was on a cot, in an upstairs room, in an elderly waterfront barn. Rizome's HQ in Singapore-the Rizome godown.

Laura sat up, reluctantly, blinking. Thin wood-grain lino- leum, cool and tacky under her sweating feet. The siesta had made her head hurt.

Massive steel I-beams pierced through floor and ceiling, their whitewash peeling over lichen patches of rust. The walls around her were piled high with bright, unstable heaps of crates and cardboard boxes. Canned hairspray that was bad for the atmosphere. Ladies' beauty soap full of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Quack tonics of zinc and ginseng that claimed to cure impotence and clarify the spleen. All this evil crap had come with the place when the previous owners went bank- rupt. Suvendra's Rizome crew refused to market it.

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