KISAH Futures Anthology
wake up one day in the grip of another wave of disease and she will have no job, like what happened to thousands post-COVID, and MYKerja will be there, with its bottomless eyes of JavaScript, waiting to replace her. “Anya,” she calls. She’s there, patiently waiting for her suit to self-sanitise, all of six years old and too small, swimming inside her suit like it’s a womb. Ida smiles down at her. “Let’s go.” They live in a self-sustaining farm, the kind that popped up after the disease mutated and tore through the kampungs, the cattle, the rural farmers. Whole plantations were destroyed under the onslaught of draught and flood and virus — all the oil palm, rubber, padi, gone — and the people had to find ways to make their own food, fast. It is small comfort that Anya loves it now, the green infrastructure the government had to invest in to boost local food production. As they walk she jumps up to touch the trailing vines, skips over the boreholes they source their unpolluted water from, until they reach the crumbling, raggedy edges of the road, where the detention centres rise up, dilapidated barbed wire and red and white plastic barriers. The homeless live in socially-distanced plastic cubicles that look like cells. There is a dead bird caught in the tangled blue of a disposable mask, the ones people use if they cannot afford the suits. Anya reaches out to touch, fascinated, and Ida says sharply, “Don’t.” Avian carriers of the mutated strain used to be electrocuted in hordes, bodies falling off the telephone wires like locusts in the desert. Ida remembers this, children playing hopscotch with dead birds before dying themselves, as they’re scanned through
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