Raft

But that was as much as one could say about my father with complete certainty. Anything else—well, that depended on whomever was speaking. His partners or proteges may have added he was a leader. Perhaps even a hero. The media may have contended he was one of the top however-many influential people in the world. My mother may have said provider or, sometimes, victim. But if you had asked me, rest assured I’d have said my father was the coldest and most soulless person I had ever known.

That might surprise you. Even shock you. After all, what kind of reasonable daughter would speak about her father in such a way? Well, unfortunately, that’s the way I felt; no sentiment rolled off my lips more easily.

You see, my father was the CEO of a corporation called Huang Enterprises. You may remember the company. It was always in the news for some new breakthrough or another. At one point there wasn’t a pie Huang didn’t have its finger deep inside—space travel, genetic engineering, nanotech, asteroid mining, terraforming; they had the monopoly on it all, as if existence itself was up for sale. There wasn’t the leaf of a tree or scale of a fish that didn’t have Huang’s barcode imprinted into it, that wasn’t owned or patented. And my father, as head of this monster, was the Ozymandias of his empire. King of kings, a wrecked colossus. A fair enough comparison, I think, considering the anticlimactic outcome of it all.

But no man achieves in a single lifetime what Huang Enterprises achieved. The corporation had been in my family for three generations before my father assumed position as its puppeteer and, in some ways, its sad puppet. Three Huang men at the helm of this corporate monstrosity, each of them with their own brand of cold-hearted genius. Behind them, it must be added, three generations of unfortunate women to mop up their muddy footprints.

I was born on the 152nd floor of the largest city-scraper in the world. You may have seen it. Or perhaps one like it. In the end there were a few of them around and for a while they were quite the fad. Those monolithic towers must seem comical to behold these days—dark, empty and unused—but back then they were glittering megaliths of human ingenuity.

Not very creative, I know, but then my father was committed to creating a legacy of its own mythological proportions. There was never any need for clever references to Babel and Yggdrasil, associations made with similar towers around the world. Not using my family name directly would have been seen as an offence to the end goal of our efforts: to be the inarguable rulers of the universe, the name and force against which all other names and forces would be measured. A family suffering the ultimate delusion of grandeur, some criticised—but then, given all of the Huang family’s accomplishments, who could honestly reduce their achievements to some cliched flight of imagination?

The city-scraper itself was unmatchable: three hundred and forty-five floors of glass and steel that raced two and a half kilometres into the sky, piercing heaven’s side like the Spear of Destiny. It was as wide as two of those old football stadiums and as self-sufficient as a small city.

The first hundred and fifty floors housed over a thousand apartments and houses, the most luxurious equipped with swimming pools and gardens. The next thirty floors had two schools, a university, a hospital, a bank, a shopping mall, a theatre and a playing field. Above them: an ice rink, a cinema complex, dozens of restaurants, and a park complete with trees and a pond for swans to float on. These were followed by seventy floors of “work rooms,” conservatories, laboratories and agri-pods, where the majority of the residents (largely scientists and engineers) earned their keep by designing products, growing food, harvesting organs, and experimenting with new technologies—all for the benefit of and under the “good” name of Huang Enterprises.

Each floor was lit by a holographic, sun-like orb that passed across the ceiling at an illusory depth, giving the sense of great space above us—one impossible sky stacked on top of the other, accessed by twelve white vertical tubes. The tubes commuted between floors, each carrying up to forty people at a time. They could get from the top of the tower to the bottom in less than two minutes if necessary.

From the day I was born until I was a young teenage girl, I remained in that city-scraper, not once stepping outside into actual, unpatented air and sunlight. That didn’t bother me—not initially. I mean, we accept the world with which we are presented, don’t we? For most of my childhood I never concerned myself with life outside because the idea never lingered long enough to excite me. Outside. Just as we have it on good faith the rest of the known universe is inhospitable for humans, I grew up believing that the rest of the world was an inhospitable place for me.

Besides, the tower was safe. It contained everything I could possibly need. For a while, I even felt comfortable. I found my way around with ease and grew accustomed to almost every steel inch of it. There always seemed to be more to explore, though, but then, if one is blessed with an ever-curious nature, anything can be explored in endlessly greater detail. That was something I learned from my mother. The plant and animal life in the park didn’t just come into the world and simply be, she once told me. Nor did they reveal each of their secrets in one go. No, they grew and changed and fought to survive, constantly facing the gauntlet of existence, and I observed as much of this as I could with mounting passion.

Although everyone my age was at school during the day, which was when I was allowed to actually leave our house, there were always familiar people to speak to in the more residential parts of the tower. Ticket conductors, restaurant owners and grounds-keepers, they all knew the young barefoot girl in the pink and yellow dresses flitting about the tower, and they treated me with distant graciousness. It was only much later that I questioned the motives of those overly polite residents. Perhaps most of them deferred to me because I was the daughter of the CEO—but at least this allowed me to gain access to most of the floors and facilities quite easily. Most of the doors of the tower were open to me, and I stepped through them willingly, with a trusting insouciance.

In fact, in the entire tower, there was only one area I had no desire to explore and roam: my father’s office.

“Office” really isn’t the word. The room was the Hall of Valhalla itself: incomprehensibly spacious with almost nothing inside. Extraordinarily high ceilings supported by six colossal, shimmering marble pillars. Marble floors. No art. No decor. In some comically hyperbolic way, the obscenely large space was completely bare apart from my father’s small desk.

The tiny desk sat at the furthest end of the space and it took a person about ten minutes to cross from the large double doors to where he was sitting. It felt much longer than that, though. The walk was a silent one, and when I made it I felt as if I was walking to the gallows. But my father? Part of me believed he covered it each morning to remind himself of how far he’d come in life and how much further he still wanted to go. A form of mental self-flagellation, I suppose. A purging of apathies. If the distance ever became a problem, or an annoyance, he’d know to keep his level of commitment in check.

On the left side of the room, instead of a wall, there was a gargantuan pane of tinted glass that ran the entire length and height of the office. All that could be seen through it was the surface of an endless carpet of thick white clouds, the vast and unblemished universe above, and the bellied curve of the earth in the distance.

Magnificent, and yet I hadn’t ever seen my father spare as much as a glance at any of it.

Bent over his desk, he burrowed into his work, in a perpetual state of not-wanting-to-be-disturbed, his hard acne-scarred face barely moving. Two black beady eyes flickered intensely as he dragged and tapped digital documents on the large clear screen that hovered in the air above his work space. His maroon tie rested in a perfect knot around his neck like a patient noose. He was a man of terrifying precision, not so much a person as a bloodless vessel for some mathematical, chaos-phobic force in the universe.

On the other hand, the memories of my mother are more complicated, and it is about these memories that I truly wish to speak. In my mind there are two versions of her and each wrestles for dominance.

The first is the mother of my earliest years—when she was a beautiful woman full of life and energy.

Hand-in-hand we’d walk through the park on the 188th floor and she’d often stop to show me a flower or a butterfly, something or another. She taught me what she knew. She would crouch beside me and her hair smelled of honey, her skin of rose oils. Her hands were powdery and soft, with long piano-playing fingers capable of the lightest and most assured touch. When she smiled, her lips parted effortlessly, revealing perfect white teeth. Her eyes were a red-brown colour I haven’t seen before or since.

Sometimes I would lie on my stomach on her bed and watch as she sat at her gold dresser to dab on her blush and pencil in her eyeliner. She’d catch my eyes in the mirror and blow me a kiss. Staring at her with my chin in my hands and my bare feet kicking back and forth, I’d imagine she was a dancer preparing to debut in some spectacular show.

She did it only for herself, if for no other reason than to remind herself that she was still a woman, regardless of my father’s lack of attention.

The only time I really saw my mother and my father together was at dinner. Around him she would become different—unusually quiet or agreeable. From across the table she’d sometimes slip me a wink and a smile, before returning to her stoic and refined poise. I loved it when she did that. It made me think of the awkward silence over dinner as a game we were playing, to see who could act the stuffiest and most dutiful the longest. But my father, guzzling his meal at the end of the table as if it was nothing more than fuel poured into some giant engine, never had a clue.

After dinner, however—once my father had returned to his office—the two of us would laugh and chase each other around the house, letting out all of our pent-up mischief and giddiness. We’d collapse into each other’s arms on the bed and I’d twirl her long dark hair around my finger until I drifted into sleep.

I’m sure you’ll believe me when I say those first few were the best years of my life. There’s honestly nothing I would have changed. But things did change, as things always do.

One morning she woke to the sensation of a tingling in her arm. My father had already left for work and I was standing at the door, watching her. My mother was sitting upright on her bed, rubbing her left arm with her right hand. As I entered the room, she flicked her head up in surprise. She forced a smile. I smiled back at her. She asked what I wanted to wear, if we should dig out something bright and pretty for the park. Naively reassured, I gave myself a head-start by running out, back towards my bedroom. But no familiar laughter followed me. I stopped and looked over my shoulder. My mother was not behind me. Worry crawled up from my gut like hundreds of small insects, and I knew something was wrong.

I ran back to her bedroom. I saw my mother’s long bare back, hanging to the floor. Her head was squashed into the tiles at her shoulders, twisted unnaturally to the side.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a sound. I stood rooted to the spot. Surely this inelegantly slumped figure could not be my mother? Surely, when I finally screamed so loudly that I thought I’d torn open my throat, my real mother wouldn’t have just continued to lie there, sprawled crookedly on the cold floor?

My mother was taken to the hospital on the 152nd floor, but they didn’t help so much as emphasise each horrific component of her new and mysterious condition. She regained consciousness, but there was no relief to be had in this development. Her head was capable of little more than a drugged swivel on her neck. Her eyes were no longer sparkling carnelian gemstones but a dull obsidian, permanently locked on some far-off thing. Over the course of two days, every one of her basic motor functions ceased. Her legs and her arms were the first to go. These were followed by the muscles in her neck and her face. Ultimately, she was incapable of blinking an eye or swallowing water.

The doctors conducted test after test. She was probed and prodded for days before a panel of experts confirmed she had been infected by a rare, non-contagious virus and there was nothing that could be done to help her.

This infuriated my father. He was not a man disposed to being told what could not be done, he needed to know what could. He spent all hours on finding a cure, and it was only later that I began to realise that his efforts were based more on the blow to his ego than anything else.

That sounds harsh, I know, but he offered her no comfort during that time—never sat at her side to hold her lifeless hand, never whispered words of love and hope in her ear.

The woman in the chair no longer looked like my mother. The colour and life was gone. Her skin hung on her face. Her hair was a mess. Finally, my father surrendered. He settled for an alternative to a cure. This alternative was so monstrous that he could only have decided on it as a means of resolving his own sense of powerlessness. There is no other reason for him to do what he did.

He had a robot avatar built for her, linked it directly to her brain, and gave her at least the illusion of mobility. From the chair, my shrunken shadow of a mother could control a six-foot human-oid machine, willing it to perform basic actions via thought alone.

No care had been taken with aesthetics—my father was more concerned with functionality than beauty. This mother was a metallic skeleton bursting with plugs and wires. No voice. No expressions. No heartbeat. Through the cold, mechanical effigy of a human being, however, my mother was once again able to prepare my lunch, to tend to the house and to walk with me through the park.

I did try for a short while, mostly for my mother’s sake, but holding those hard metal claws never came close to holding my mother’s soft hands. Looking into its two milky, globular “eyeballs,” I saw none of her familiar warmth—just the mirrored reflections of the environment bouncing off its polished body. It had no colours or textures of its own. Each movement it made was the will of my mother, and that offered a slight consolation, but I’m sure you can understand when I say it was impossible to accept it as any form of replacement.

I’d enter the kitchen and it would be standing over the counter, either chopping onions, preparing sandwiches, or doing something else one might call “motherly.” The head would pivot mechanically to its side and tip to position me in its line of sight. It would edge towards me, one heavy foot in front of another, and I would take a fearful step or two back. Picking up on my apprehension, the robot would return to the counter to continue its chore, as if I had never entered the kitchen at all.

We’d go to the park, but as soon as the doors of the tube slid open, I would hurtle ahead. I’d turn to wave, a tight smile screwed on my face. When I had run far enough, I’d duck behind a bush and sit sobbing softly, all the while peeking through the leaves as the robot walked through the park by itself, cranking its head from left to right to find me.

In the evenings, while the machine was being recharged in its customised wall-unit, I would disappear into my mother’s room and embrace the real her—throw my arms around her limp arms, burrow into her bony shoulder—and cry myself to sleep.

One morning, on one of the days selected for a flushing (when the park was shut down for a session of light-dimming and programmed rainfall), I sat on my bed and observed what I could through the tiny square window in my room. I could see only the faintest outline of a distant mountain range, cloaked in mist. The two and a half peaks (all I had ever been able to see of the range) were at the end of a long horizontal stretch of land. My concept of travel was based mostly upon going up and down, and I had little understanding of exactly how far those mountains extended. I didn’t know whether it would take a few hours or a few days to get to them.

The expressionless robot was standing there, holding up a yellow dress. The dress had a white frill along the neckline and tiny blue flowers printed along the hem. It had been my mother’s favourite (was my mother’s favourite, I should probably say) and she wanted me to wear it that day. The robot left the dress on the edge of my bed and went out.

After showering and getting dressed, I walked into the kitchen. For the first time, I did not see the robot preparing my breakfast. I moved through the kitchen and entered the living room.

The robot was sitting at our dinner table, doing nothing. It was simply staring at the wall.

As I approached, the head revolved in my direction. It stood quickly from the chair and stiffened.

It walked towards me slowly, each of its heavy feet thumping on the floor, and its right arm extended out. It opened its hand. I stared at the hand for a moment and, sensing that the action was no simple plea for affection, rested my soft hand in the rippled rubber palm. The cold metal fingers closed gently over mine. Then it turned and led me towards the door.

I was being taken out of the house, although I had no idea where we could be going. I hadn’t yet eaten breakfast. The park was closed. It was still early in the morning and nothing was open. Once out of the house, we walked along the smooth black walkway under the light of the low sunlight orb. It moved slowly from one end of the curved blue ceiling to the other. I looked down. With the orb low and behind, our shadows stretched out ahead of us, reducing the two of us to stick-shaped characters of similar appearance. No skin. No steel. Just two long, black stick people walking hand-in-hand.

We waited outside the glass doors at the tube stop among a small crowd of early commuters. I was the only child in the group and the adults towered around me, each looking lifeless and disgruntled, the sort of expression you’d expect at the end of a long day, not the start of one.

One of the long white vertical tubes raced towards us—thrust down by the water pressure that powered each of them through the building—coming to an almost soundless halt in front of the silent group. The doors opened and four people entered. They sat. Their seats were raised and the next four available seats rose in their place. Eventually the robot and I were able to enter and take a seat.

Sitting in the tube as it raced downwards from floor to floor, watching and waiting as people stepped on and off, I still had no idea where we were going. The park raced past. Then the floor with the restaurants and entertainment facilities. I looked at the robot sitting beside me, but there were no clues to be read off its empty metal face.

The tube cleared out until only the robot and I were left. Finally it stopped on the first floor of the scraper. I thought we would be getting out there, but the robot stayed in its seat. The nose of the vertical tube extended below ground, a space I had always assumed to be reserved for leftover track. This, as I was about to discover, was incorrect.

The robot stood, pushed a red button beside the door, and the carousel of seats began to move. We were lifted up, across the top of the tube, and began our descent on the opposite side. The chair-lift stopped and the bottom doors opened, revealing a floor I had not known existed until then.

My mother willed the robot to stand up and I did the same. We stepped off the tube and into a long white corridor. The door closed behind us and the tube raced upwards.

The robot walked and I followed. The lights above the corridor were warm and yellow. On both walls of the long corridor were rows of framed pictures: photographs of my father shaking the hands of suited men (looking as if they’d like to suck the powers out of each other), schematics of unknown machinery and devices, certificates, a map of some kind, as well as what I now reckon must have been architectural floor plans. At the time I had no clue about any of those sorts of things.

At the end of the corridor, a door came into view. My mother lifted the robot’s arm to punch a code into a keypad. The door opened and we stepped inside. The lights inside buzzed to life, revealing one part of the large space at a time.

A living room with three chocolate coloured sofas, various ornaments, paintings and paraphernalia—even a piano in the corner. There was a kitchen with all the accessories and amenities, as well as a fully stocked pantry-hall with enough food to feed a family for years. At the top of a spiralling steel staircase, I could see a number of bedrooms. We wasted no time, bee-lining through it all, making our way to the large steel door behind the staircase. The robot opened it by punching the same code into a keypad, and we went into a new room. It was large and filled with things I had never seen before. Things that, quite frankly, scared me. Strange weapons hung on racks attached to the walls. Three sets of body armour were on exhibit behind three glass cubicles. There were oxygen tanks. Gas masks.

I’ve since realised that the entire house was a protective bunker of some sort. My father was either more paranoid than I had imagined, or expecting some war or catastrophe to occur—one that would force the three of us to vacate the city-scraper and take up residence in that large, furnished, underground house.

My mother’s robot offered no tour of the house. We had come for a specific reason and she went straight to it. She opened a large drawer and pulled out a brown cardboard folder. She turned and held it out and I took it from her slowly. I was about to open it but my mother’s robot extended its hand and shook its head. I was not supposed to open it straight away.

After that, the robot closed up the room, switched off the lights, and we left the house. The tube returned to our underground floor and took us back home.

There, my mother’s robot prepared lunch and dinner and marched back to the recharge unit for the rest of the day. It was not like her to shut down so early, but I felt guiltily relieved that I would have a break from our increasingly awkward interactions.

The rest of the day proceeded normally. I received private instruction from my regular old tutor, as boring as ever. I had my lunch, and I managed to push thoughts of that unsettling morning trip from my mind until the evening.

As usual, my father and I ate dinner in silence. Afterwards, he mentioned he’d go for a swim upstairs and, once he’d left, I went to my bedroom.

I sat on the bed for a long time holding the dossier. Should I open it? Something inside me said I should wait, and I decided to heed the instinct. I put the dossier in my bottom dresser drawer and went to sleep.

The next morning, I awoke as usual, but the robot did not come by with anything particular for me to wear. I showered and dressed. I remembered the dossier, but a growing sense of unease had surpassed my curiosity. I was afraid of what I’d discover inside. There was no reason to believe it would be bad news, but I felt it. The moment I opened it, horrible things would be set free. They’d fly out into the world and I’d never be able to put them back in.

The robot wasn’t in the kitchen, nor was it in the living room. Perhaps it was standing like a palace guard in its recharge unit? But when I opened the door, the unit stood empty. Finally, I entered my mother’s bedroom.

The machine was standing beside my mother as she sat in her chair. The plasma-window behind them showed the wide digital image of a mist-draped lake in the valley of two green cliffs. Both the robot and my mother were standing on the rippling surface of the lake; they appeared to be part of the image. Then the image changed and they were on a grassy, wind-flattened plain beneath a cloudy blue sky.

At first I thought the robot was assisting my mother in some way. Feeding or cleaning her. But it wasn’t doing anything. It was bent over her with its arms out. My mind ticked over slowly and the horrific truth of the situation became apparent. The robot wasn’t helping her. It was stooped over her body and its metal claws were clasped firmly around her floppy neck.

My mother was dead, her face inert and blue. She had used her robot to strangle herself, and the robot, having disconnected as soon as my mother’s brain had ceased to function, was still frozen in its final, merciful act.

I could do nothing but stand and gawk. I was in a strange and surreal place and I couldn’t register anything. I remembered seeing my mother in the bed more than three months earlier, but this time there was no running for help. No scream.

Instead, a kind of strange thoughtlessness was promptly followed by grief. The grief entered and settled in my gut like a dark and slippery creature, living off my pain. For two days, I refused to leave my room. I hardly ate. I moved in and out of understanding her final act, feeling furious and broken-hearted at the same time. And underlying that, in the deepest part of me, guilt simmered steadily.

Perhaps I had created too great a divide between the machine and my mother. That’s why she’d killed herself. I’d treated her avatar like an intruder and had grown to despise it. All she had wanted was to walk and explore the tower—to spend as much time with me as she could. I had never considered that. I had never adapted, as hard as she had tried for me. I had never truly considered her feelings. I had been a selfish child. She had taken her life because of me … Once I allowed these thoughts to surface, I couldn’t escape them.

It was not long afterwards that I entertained my first serious thoughts about life outside. I was only able to see a fraction of the world through any of the windows in the tower—mostly the thick ribbons of mist partially cloaking the mountains—but still, I dreamed of faraway places. These thoughts were the only thing that could distract me from my grief.

As time passed, the dreams grew stronger. The need to be out in the world intensified. My heart ached for freedom. I tried to tell myself none of these dreams really mattered since I lacked the most important ingredient for such an escape: courage. Only later did I realise that it wasn’t courage I needed. It was hatred.

Hatred of the life I had been given, as well as the one I had been denied. A hatred strong enough to strip me of my fears and insecurities. A hatred that filled me two weeks after her death—the morning I remembered the dossier still tucked in my dresser drawer.

I took it out of my drawer, sat on my bed, and cautiously flipped it open. I looked towards the bedroom door, knowing nobody would be coming anytime soon. I reached into the brown dossier and pulled out a thin stack of senso-sheets. Flipping through each page, I could not work out the gist of the subject matter, but tried to pick up what I could. There were walls of printed text and signatures on the bottom corners of each sheet. An application form had been filled in, by either my father or my mother; their names were scrawled all over it. From the letterhead I determined it had been issued by the hospital.

I laid the documents on the bed and looked inside the dossier again. There were a few other items I had missed: pages with letters and codes, the moving image of what appeared to be a brain, and a handwritten note on a folded scrap of digital paper.

I have read my mother’s letter so many times since that moment that the memory of each word is etched into my mind. It went as follows:

Dear Jai-Li

You are only a baby as I write this, but I have spent so many nights wondering about the right time to show you the contents of this dossier. Hopefully, you are now almost an adult. If you are only a young girl, it means I’ve had to give you this difficult news early. I can’t imagine the reason for such a thing, but if it means I am no longer around, I hope you find the strength and courage to see yourself through your years. I am sure that you will.

I’m not sure there is a right time to read such a thing as this. Nor do I know if your father ever plans on telling you—indeed, I fear he may not. I must be the one.

Just after you were born, I made a terrible mistake, and agreed to something I shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been easy to disagree with what was planned, to go against your father, but I should have done more to resist him. I should have fled, found a way out of this place. There must have been something I could have done. I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that you must be told what I did, what happened to me. Hopefully, one day, you will find it in yourself to forgive me, although I do not expect your forgiveness to come easily.

When I met your father he was not the man you probably believe him to be. In the very beginning, we were young and we were in love. We dreamed about leaving the Huang family, the company, about eloping to avoid the terrible trap of a life of laid plans. But those years of hopefulness were short-lived. Somewhere along the line, the pressure from our families became too great. Somewhere along the line, I lost your father.

His own father, the grandfather you never met, filled his head with fear. The world was a wasteland, he said, a place in which your father would stand no chance of surviving. Furthermore, he added, your father was a wretched disappointment of an heir, a boy who could never hope to satisfy a woman like me. (Yes, this is what he actually said to him.)

This went on and on. Never once did your grandmother stand up for him. Mostly she smiled behind her husband and kept her tongue.

I turned to my own parents for help, but they would hear nothing of it. They told me to do whatever the Huang family wished. They were meek people of modest origins, overwhelmed by the prospect of their daughter marrying into an empire of such power and repute. I don’t know if they hoped some of that power would come trickling down their way, or if they were relieved I’d be protected from the world in a way they had never been, but they brushed off the thought of the psychological torment that accompanied such a “merger.”

Eventually, it reached a point where your father felt he could do nothing but submit—and he has been submitting ever since.

Day by day, I watched him slip away from me. In the beginning he was furious about his father’s cruel taunts and threats, and we promised we’d find a way to deal with it all together. But fury cannot be channelled as one might hope. We can harness a few rays of the sun to do what we need—power a building like the one we live in, for instance—but we cannot harness the sun itself. It will burn as it wishes. And so it is with fury. The rage your father held in his heart for his father began to burn for me. His fuse shortened. Everything I did became an annoyance to him. At first, after one of his explosions, he would apologise, but these moments of contrition were brief, showing the fading remnants of the man I once knew and loved, the final few wisps of smoke before the embers of his love and compassion turned to ash. As if by death or the devil, he was finally lost. To me, and to himself.

Then came the day when the blood clot in your grandfather’s head finally ended him, as embittered and pitiless as he had always been. With his death, something changed in your father. A change that took him from me forever. On that day he truly became a Huang.

For a while he simply withdrew into himself, barely finding the energy to fight with me, let alone communicate his feelings. When this detachment was replaced by something else, it was not by love, anger or even indifference. It was by the work to be done. Your father was consumed by the need to feed the shackled monster in the basement that runs on its wheel to keep the company going. The family legacy. The empire of guilt and shame.

And so came the plans for expansion. Everything was to be heightened and widened. Blueprints were drawn to extend the tower in which you were later born, and in which you are probably reading this: a prison of steel and glass where the outside world would have no domain. A place where every son of a Huang would be able to play out the role of God, a sinister, bloated pantomime for a crowd of spectators held hostage.

When he was satisfied (as much as he could feel for a short period of time), your father decided it was time to get on with the business of producing his son.

Of course, instead of a son, you were born. Since he had never insisted on genetic preparations to ensure your gender, you must understand your father has always accepted you for who you are. Unfortunately, there was more to this acceptance than meets the eye. It was the decision that was later made that haunts me each and every day. This is what I must confess to you.

Your father was not that concerned when you were born because he already had another plan firmly in place. Since he is relatively young, having only recently been made the head of the company, his plan is to hold his position for a significant amount of time, perhaps even until he is a hundred years old, or more. He knows the baton of leadership must be passed on, but he is equally determined to have his own time to reign. He also knows I am getting older and the window for me to have more children is closing.

And so, he told me of his plan: You, his daughter, will provide him with the son he needs. One day you will give birth to a boy and this son of yours will be your father’s heir. In order to ensure this, however, my darling, I’m afraid some choices were made that I can no longer keep to myself.

You must know what is to come.

Merely a few weeks after you were born, on your father’s wishes, you were sent back to the hospital. You were isolated in a laboratory for just under a month, during which time certain preparations were put in place. Your genes were altered so that, using genes extracted from your father’s own skin, your body was set like an alarm clock to fall pregnant on the day you turn twenty years old. Within your blood a genetic clock is ticking, counting down the days until your body begins to produce a child.

Your belly will swell as the months go on. As far as I know, the child you give birth to will look and behave exactly like one produced from normal conception, but it will not be the child of any man you meet and love. It will not be a child of your choice, or even of a chance meeting. In truth, it will not be your child. It will come as close to physical and intellectual perfection as your father has ordered. It will exist for one reason and one reason alone: to follow in your father’s footsteps and take over at the end of his years of control. He anticipates being in power for a good sixty to seventy years.

This heir, the one you will incubate, will allow him two things: his long and selfish time at the helm, and you, a caretaker for the child in the early years, for I will be too old to be of any worth. Your father has no intention of ever releasing you from this tower, and this is why. You will remain here for the rest of your life, first as the daughter who will never be allowed to fall in love, or marry, or have children and a home of her own, and later as the guardian to his new son …

I do not know whether you understand what it is that I am trying to tell you. You may be too young to grasp all of these details, but take care of this letter and reread it at a later stage if it is too difficult to make sense of right now.

All I can say is that there are no words to express my regret for having allowed this to happen. Once you’ve read this, you may reject every good thought and memory you’ve ever had of me, drench it all in bitterness or hatred. And while I remain the coward who has given up on finding a way to save you from this fate, all I can do is tell you this and pray you have enough courage to find a way of fighting this cruel plot against you.

I love you, and have always loved you, but that has never been enough. I have never been able to tell you all the things I’ve wanted to. You have been fed lies your entire life. You’ve been separated from the other children in this tower so that you never find a partner and fall in love, but also so that you continue to believe this tower is all that remains of a deserted and inhospitable world. This is not true. It is a fear put into your head to contain you.

The world is not a desert. It is full of life and wonder. There are things out there far beyond what you have ever been allowed to imagine. Do not do what I did. Do not give up out of fear.

As I have said, if you are reading this letter, I am no longer with you. But no matter what has happened to me, do not spend a second weeping for me. Do not hold so tightly to your memory of me that I continue to hold you back. I deserve neither your sympathy nor your admiration. What I beg of you is that you do something for yourself. Find a way. Find love. See the world.

With hope and hurt,

Your mother

And that was it. That was the end of the letter. My mother’s final words, scrawled on a few pages.

As she had predicted, I did not understand everything at once, but I understood enough: the tower was not my home. It was my incubator. I was not being kept as a daughter. More of an investment, I suppose.

As I folded the senso-sheets into a tight square, I noticed something else: crude drawings on the back of them. I moved my hand over the pages and thin green lines appeared. I pulled my hand away and the lines began to fade. Ghost print, they call it. Secret digital print that will appear on a page only if brought near a particular, intended hand.

I unfolded the pages again, flipped them over on my bed, then smoothed out the creases. It was an image of a maze, like one of the ones my tutor had often made me do. But this wasn’t some meaningless maze from a puzzle book. It was a map.

There were two drawings. The one was a vertical rectangle divided into smaller rectangular segments, with a horizontal line across the final segment. On the bottom right, there was a second square with corners, flaps, angles, and what looked to be a tunnel extending to the top right of the page.

The purpose of the sketch struck me in an instant: it was a map of the underground house. I could see the floor plan of the corridor, the living room and the room containing the weaponry, the oxygen tanks and the gasmasks. Loose words floated between the lines: “squat-hatch,” “keypad,” “air-pod—remember to speak your name,” “Exit A-3,” as well as “Code: 65388.” As the instructions floated in, I remembered the robot’s long, metal finger punching in that very code on the keypad.

My heart leaped in my chest. I could barely contain my surprise, my fear, my exhilaration. I flicked my head to the door, expecting my father to burst in and rip the pages from my hand. He never came to my room, and there was no reason for him to do so now, but I was filled with sickening fear. My father could never be allowed to see those plans. I folded my mother’s letter and slipped it into the shallow back pocket of my dress. Then I hopped off the bed and left the bedroom.

The house was cold and lifeless, as it had been for months, the black furniture and grey walls a stubborn stand against a world of colour and life. I would never again see that place as my home, I knew that, and what I did next was an easy thing.

I opened the front door and walked out, into the wide boulevard. There was no one around at that hour of the day. With the sun-orb high above me, I made my way towards the tube stop. I watched air bubbles rise in the water within the glass rail-channels. They changed shape as they floated and quivered up and out of sight, a strange blob-like family of their own. The tube pulled up in front of me and the doors hissed open. I entered the empty tube and took a seat. Then I pushed the button I had not pushed often, but was always all too aware of. It would take me to the top floor of the tower: to my father’s office.

Even now I can’t say why I decided to go there, but I do remember feeling both fearless and composed as the magnetised doors came together. I had already decided I would not be staying, but perhaps I needed to look once more at that aloof and uncaring face.

Each of the levels flashed by my window. I closed my eyes, but could still tell when a floor had passed by the rhythmic whomp of air against the side of the tube. Without needing to stop for other passengers, the tube was able to build great speed as it raced to the peak of Huang-345.

I opened my eyes. The stacked floors flickered before me in succession, a jittery film that showed the vertical world of my childhood: the halls, fields and suburbs, once designed and built as a testament to human ingenuity, now the cluttered shelves of a musty broom closet.

The tube began to slow. The high pitch of my rushing glass vestibule lowered and softened until it came to a complete stop. At the edge of the platform a long red carpet led to the enormous double-doors of my father’s office. The walls of the lobby were lined with dark wood. The tube hissed open and I stepped out and onto the soft red carpet.

I approached the front door. It was an old-fashioned door: no blinking lights, glowing palm-plates, or numbered keypads. My father locked it with an old-fashioned key when he left the room. When he was inside, however, it was usually left unlocked.

I took a deep breath and realised: I had absolutely nothing to say to my father. Why had I even bothered going all the way up there? What was I hoping to accomplish? Besides, my father had never shown any interest in me. Why should this change now? My mind raced with indignant questions all trying to block the fear that was beginning to return. All I was looking for was a good reason for turning around, going back down the tube, and returning to my room for the next sixty to seventy years of my life.

The first thing I saw was the enormous glass wall. I saw the expansive blue of the sky, my eyes relishing the rare chance to flex out into infinity.

The door opened wider and the scent of the wooden panels in the lobby faded completely, replaced by stark marble floors and walls. At the end, I could just about see one lone desk in the distance.

But my father was not sitting there. He was standing in front of the wall of glass, his hands behind his back, staring at the endless rolling cloudscape before him.

I had never seen him simply stand and do nothing. Something was different. Something was wrong. He must have heard the doors open and the pat-pat-pat of my shoes as I walked along the hard floor towards him, but he did not turn around. He didn’t move at all. I finally reached the far end of the room and stood alongside him. As always he was wearing his immaculate grey suit, the unwrinkled maroon tie around his neck. His head was like a concrete block, his thin hair slicked and combed to the side. His eyes were narrow, his lips tight on his mouth, as if he was biting them closed from the inside.

I squinted through the glass. Outside, the sun struck the surface of the clouds, casting restless shadows in its constantly moving nooks.

We were wrong, he said. We were so wrong. How could we have been so wrong? And now, because of it—a miscalculation—everything’s lost. Everything’s finished.

I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to me or to himself. His head didn’t move, his eyes didn’t blink, but his lips were trembling a little. He went on:

Idiotic. Pathetic. That we thought we could control it. We thought we knew what we were doing. But we had no idea … have no idea what we’re doing. We’ve never known. We’re fools, and soon we’ll be even greater fools. Everything … every last thing we’ve ever learned and acquired will be gone. And we’ll be like animals again. Animals. Stupid, useless animals.

Chang’e 11, he said. Chang’e 11 came back … it came back to us. A Trojan horse. We thought it was a gift—our lost cat had found its way back home—but it came back with something else … and soon everything will be gone. Our memories. Our identities. Wiped away. He got inside my head and he showed me. He showed me his plan to end us all. Whispers in my dreams. Whispers and laughter. A picture of an empty world. Everything we’ve ever worked for will be gone, everything we’ve done, and we’ll have to start again … like stupid, stupid animals …

A tear oozed from his eye and ran over his cheek to the right corner of his mouth. A man makes a life. He makes his choices. He lives with his choices. He paves his fate. He makes something of his life and all he wants is for his name to go on—to be remembered. That, above all. But now? This? A waste, he said, softly, and then, louder, a waste! A waste of time! It’s all been a waste of time!

I wanted to say goodbye. Goodbye father, I’m leaving. But it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have heard me. He was still screaming that everything was lost and that it had all been a waste of time when I turned and walked quickly towards the doors of the hall. With his voice booming behind me, I picked up speed until I was sprinting to the exit.

I slammed the doors shut behind me and fell to my knees. I was panting heavily and wanted to retch. I pressed my hands against the soft red carpet and closed my eyes. Then under my breath, I said it: Goodbye.

That was the last time I saw my father—and those were the last words I heard from him, those screams behind me: that we’d all go back to being animals again. Animals. Stupid, useless animals.

It was the last time I stepped into that ridiculously capacious room. I needed to leave immediately and I couldn’t waste another minute. In my head and my heart, it was finished. I, the daughter of a Huang, was finished.