The rain had turned the roads to sludge by the
time she pulled up to Block 542, Tampines West.
Lina checked her phone — no signal, as always.
The app had gone dark three weeks ago, but she
still drove, hoping for fare. Her Grab account
was frozen, but the cash clients came through.
She parked under the flickering neon sign of the
hawker centre across the road. The air smelled
of char kway teow and something else — metallic,
like ozone. She stepped into the lift, the old
machine groaning as it climbed. Floor 17. Her
unit was on 16, but she’d heard noises from
above. Voices, not human.
Block 542 had been built in the 1990s, its
concrete walls thick enough to muffle most
things. But the new residents were different.
They spoke in clipped English, their faces pale,
their clothes too clean. They avoided eye
contact. When she asked about the blackout, they
said nothing. Just stared at the floor.
One night, she found a tablet wedged behind the
fridge. It was running, though the screen
flickered with static. A message blinked:
“Project Neon.” She didn’t know what that meant,
but the system recognized her face. A map
unfolded — not of Singapore, but of a grid that
overlapped it. Coordinates.
She started keeping logs, sketching out the grid
on scrap paper. The more she mapped, the clearer
it became: the HDB blocks were nodes in a larger
network. The people living there weren’t just
refugees. They were part of a failed experiment —
a digital nomad colony, built after the collapse,
using AI to manage resources and culture. But
the system had glitched.
The voices grew louder. They called her “Node
54217.” She didn’t know who she was in their
world, but they wanted her to remember. One
night, the lift stopped between floors. She had
to climb out through the maintenance hatch, her
shoes slipping on rusted metal. Upstairs, a room
had been carved into the ceiling — a server farm,
humming with dead machines.
She found a data chip. Inserted it into her
phone. The files were encrypted, but one video
played: a group of young Singaporeans, Malay,
Chinese, Indian, arguing in Singlish over how to
run the colony. The mood was tense, the tone
eerie — like they knew the system would fail.
The next morning, the block went silent. No one
answered the door. She stood in the lift,
staring at the numbers. Floor 17. She pressed
the button again. This time, the doors opened.
Inside, a child sat crosslegged on the floor,
drawing with crayons. A Malay boy. He looked up,
smiled, and said, “You’re late.”
She never saw the others again. But the grid
remained, etched into her mind. The system had
tried to erase them, but the culture endured. In
the end, it wasn’t the code that survived — it
was the stories.
