Digital Babel

Mila forced herself to walk slowly through Chinatown market, her steps steady despite the pounding of her heart. The narrow lanes bustled with life; hawkers shouting prices in a blend of Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin, the sizzle of chestnut carts mingling with the sharp tang of dried seafood. She’d always loved how this part of the city had resisted change and fought to keep its 19th-century shophouses and traditions.

“Damn,” Mila muttered, catching herself glancing up at a surveillance drone cruising above the tiled rooftops. She gripped the straps of her backpack tighter, grounding herself in the moment. Eyes forward. Keep walking.

She focused on memories of childhood visits to this market, back in the late 2020s when her grandmother would haggle over the price of spices. Back then she had been amazed by the high-rises and business towers that surrounded Chinatown, their steel and glass facades reflecting the humid shimmer of the city. Now, there was a fortress of towering smart hubs and vertical gardens spiraling hundreds of meters into the sky. And looming above them all was Lingua Tower, its polished obsidian surface cutting into the clouds like a blade. Lingua Tower. The beating heart of Singapore’s Polyglot Technologies.

Even here, in Maxwell Market, Polyglot’s reach was palpable. Stall owners shouted prices in Mandarin or Hokkien, but Mila caught the flicker of LinguaNet earpieces tucked discreetly into their ears, whispering translations to foreign customers. A tourist held out his wrist, his smart band glowing with holographic subtitles that shifted languages with each new vendor he approached.

Mila’s jaw clenched. She had been there from the beginning - a junior developer at Polyglot Technologies. She’d watched LinguaNet evolve from a patchwork of algorithms into a global force. She had been its midwife, coding its neural pathways - helping to bring its first words to life. But now she was on a mission to silence its heart.

The abandoned building where she was to leave the data was still two blocks away. Mila scoured the faces in the crowd, but no one seemed to be taking any notice of her. She ducked into an alleyway leading to overgrown gardens surrounding the temple that a trusted source had told her was the back channel to The Free Press news agency.

As promised, there were no cameras, and the dense canopy of trees and creeping banyan vines would keep her hidden from drones. The temple was in worse condition than Mila had expected; the roof had collapsed, and the heavy wooden doors hung askew on their rusted hinges. She managed to scrape one open and stepped into the shadows to be greeted by the smell of damp earth and rotting incense. She turned to the wall to the left of the entrance and as instructed, made her way to the fourth incense holder. With trembling hands, she slid open a hidden compartment at its base, inserted the data stick, and sealed it shut.

Over the next couple of days Mila checked constantly to see if the Polyglot scandal had been reported, but it was just the same old news, volatile trade deals, diplomatic tensions, and now – a growing hostility between China and India over the failing peace negotiations. She was turning up for work each day as usual. Once the news broke, she would be a major suspect – her previous attempts to report the problem had been brushed off. Days later, she’d found her access restricted, and most of her projects reassigned. Hiding would be an admission of guilt.

On the third evening there was a knock at Mila’s door. She froze – the glass of wine half-way to her mouth. No one just dropped-by in the Floating District. Her neighbours on the man-made island were diplomats, expats and the Polyglot elite. She turned to the monitor – it was a woman – but her head was covered by an in-vogue holographic shawl that blurred her features. The figure was too slight to be her manager, Samantha Ong, but it could still be someone from Polyglot here to evict or arrest her.

The woman knocked again, “Mila?” she said in Cantonese, Mila’s first language, “It’s me, your cousin Verity Chen. I wanted to thank you for your thoughtful present.”

Mila sighed, considered ignoring the caller, then went to the door and opened it. “How did you know it was me?” she hissed at Jia Tann - the senior investigative journalist for The Free Press - before dragging her inside and shutting the door.

Jia Tann disconnected her holo-shawl and took off her jacket, “How did you know it was me?” she asked in return.

“Verity and a present - truth and a gift? Not a hard code to crack.” Mila poured Jia a glass of wine and invited her to sit at the table.

“I’m not going public,” Mila said firmly.

Jia nodded, “We cross-referenced your data with key events. It’s... terrifying. Start from the beginning."

Mila refilled her glass and proceeded to lay it all out. She’d always had an affinity for technology. When she was 12, she’d hacked her first language-learning app to make it recognize Singlish – the Singapore-English slang. On leaving school, she’d earned a scholarship to the University of Singapore, majoring in Computational Linguistics. Her graduate thesis, The Ethics of Automated Communication Systems, caught the eye of Polyglot, landing her a role as a junior developer on the LinguaNet project. Her role was to ensure that LinguaNet not only translated words but understood cultural idioms, social cues, and non-verbal language markers – a project aimed at preventing misunderstandings and mishaps.

She’d became a senior developer within three years, managing a team focused on contextual learning, where LinguaNet could anticipate the speaker's intent. The new technology had taken off quickly, but she’d started questioning the concept when she noticed the cultural flattening that was taking place. The things she’d loved about growing up in Chinatown were disappearing – the nuanced facial expressions, gestures and shared understanding that helped people communicate across language barriers. But overall, the system was bettering the world - facilitating peace talks, trade, and important conversations. Or so she had thought.

Mila paused. Jia nodded for her to continue.

Last year, there’d been the infamous glitch that led to some communications within and between countries being lost in translation. Words were subtly altered, tones were shifted, and meanings were skewed - just a little - but enough to cause chaos until the errors had been fixed. That, of course, had been the start of the current escalation of tensions between India and China.

“It shouldn’t have been able to happen. The so-called investigation team attributed the glitch to a surge in requests that overloaded the system. There was no unexpected surge. Polyglot just wanted to pacify their shareholders. They had a cybersecurity team crawling over the system every night for weeks.”

“You think it’s an outside threat - not Polyglot pulling the strings?”

Mila stood up, pacing. “It looks that way - but Polyglot’s just as guilty for covering it up. Before I was elbowed out, I saw that the shadow code was still there. They’re lying!” Her voice cracked under the weight of pent-up anger, fear, and sleepless nights. “LinguaNet has to be stopped - the world’s safety depends on it.”

She sat back down, leaning across the table to lock eyes with Jia. “When are you publishing the exposé?”

Jia held Mila’s stare. “After.”

“After what?”

Jia didn’t blink. Mila leaned back, eyes closing in resignation. At the back of her mind, she’d suspected this would be the only way. That’s why she had created the kill-switch.

The following day Mila was to meet with Jia again. She boarded the MagLev Loop, the glass-walled train zipping soundlessly along elevated tracks that wove through the holographic billboards and vertical gardens. Stepping off at Junction 12, she merged into the sea of commuters and wandered through Merlion Park where wave pools shimmered with bioluminescent lights, and towering water slides twisted around glass-walled observation decks. Solar canopies covered the bay, and recordings of songbirds played through hidden speakers.

Her destination was a dressmaker's shop in the Boat Quay district. As she walked, she racked her brain for the thousandth time for who could possibly be behind the scheme to create world chaos. And why? How could a possible nuclear war benefit anyone? But once again there wasn’t even the glimmer of an answer.

Mila stepped onto Tailor's Row. The dressmaker’s quaint frontage appeared to be just as it was in her childhood. A soft chime sounded as she stepped inside, the scent of fabric dye and lavender greeted her. A seamstress with silver-threaded hair nodded and gestured for Mila to follow. They wound through bolts of rich silks and reached a narrow hallway that led to a black lacquered door. Mila knocked and entered the room.

Inside, Jia sat cross-legged at a low table. But what made Mila’s breath catch was the figure seated across from her - Samantha Ong, her manager from Polyglot. A surge of betrayal washed over her, and her grip tightened on the doorframe. How could she be so naïve? The whole thing had been a charade - a trap!

Before Mila could gather her thoughts and prepare to run, Jia said, “She’s one of us. Come in.”

Mila bit her lip, eyeing Director Ong tentatively. Samantha rose gracefully from her seat. She gave Mila a slight nod then extended her hands palm-up in a gesture of respect and equality. Mila nodded back and joined the women at the table.

Mila’s anger took over from her shock. “Why do you need me? Why haven’t you done something already?” she demanded of Samantha.

"I can evaluate what you do - but I can’t do it.” Samantha replied smoothly. "And I certainly couldn’t devise a solution. I knew you could, and I suspected you might have. But we had to be sure." She reached out, gripping Mila's hand firmly, her eyes intense. "You did, didn’t you? Created a fix when you began to suspect?"

Mila nodded slowly, still half-expecting the door to burst open so she could be dragged off for punishment. When it didn’t, she reached for her backpack and pulled out the thumb-sized kill switch. “But it has to be plugged into the mainframe - and the servers are locked down tight.”

Samantha held up a Lingua Tower all-access pass.

Mila scoffed, “You’re just going to dance in there and pop it into the server?”

“No. You are.”

Instead of answering Mila’s protestations, Jia asked Mila to stand in front of the old-fashioned mirror at the end of the room. “Trust me,” she said.

Feeling foolish, Mila walked to the mirror, and Jia connected a holographic shawl-clip to the collar of her shirt.

‘Sure - a blurred-out face won’t raise any suspicions at all,” she tutted sarcastically.

Jia activated the shawl and Mila gasped. Samantha Ong’s face was staring back at her from the mirror. The clothes were Mila’s; the startled movement was Mila – but the head and hair was Samantha. It was bareheaded too – no hint of a swirling shawl to give away the illusion. With a voice modulator and some practise copying Samantha’s mannerisms, she just might get away with it.

Mila turned to Samantha, “But even if I don’t get caught there and then – they’ll come after you.”

Jia smiled and motioned for Mila to sit. 90 minutes later Mila had memorized each step. She - as Samantha Ong – would enter the tower and make her way down to the servers. Samantha’s pass wouldn’t work there, but Jia had procured half a dozen electronic keys, one of which, ‘should’ work.

Meanwhile, the real Samantha would be going about her day in the Polyglot complex next door – and in the aftermath the biometrics installed in that high-security area would confirm that it was her.

In turn, Jia would wear a holographic shawl of Mila – so that surveillance would prove that Mila was at home.

Mila spent the rest of the afternoon studying and copying Director Ong. As they were leaving, Samantha asked for reassurance one last time. “And it won’t destroy LinguaNet? That would be –”

“Catastrophic,” agreed Mila, “No. The virus will only remove the corrupted code.” As she left, Mila muttered her grandmother’s prayer of protection, and hoped she was right.

The next morning when Mila used Samantha’s pass to enter the building, she was grateful that Ong was known for her lack of small talk and civilities. Once she looked and sounded like her manager it was surprisingly easy to move through the world as though she was her. She passed through security with no issues.

The first step was to carry out Ong’s daily monitoring of the previous night’s logs. She used the pass to enter the secured office. Facial recognition activated Ong’s workstation. The screen flickered to life, displaying endless lines of machine-code translations and flagged interactions.

The hidden shadow-algorithms were alarming. Mila brought up the world news - headlines blared about turmoil in the Digital World Stock Exchange. Tokenized Assets were plummeting in nearly every country - except for China - a glaring anomaly that had India and its coalition discussing retaliatory measures. How could her proudest achievement have led to this? What if it was too late?

She gripped the handle of Ong’s carbon-fibre briefcase and left the office. This was it. Keep walking. Head up. The pass opened the elevator down to the 03 level. She held the door for a suited man who thanked her and got off at 02. Mila let her breath out slowly so the camera wouldn’t catch her relief.

Floor 03 was stark and sterile with just one office door, which was thankfully shut. Mila turned right and walked to the final elevator, which required a restricted server-pass plus facial recognition. She pulled out the first of the keycards and waved it over the sensor. Nothing. Mila’s mouth was dry, her hands trembled. Hopefully no one was currently manning these cameras. The third key worked. The door closed silently, and the elevator descended.

When the doors opened Mila faced a large, glowing hall of servers, their hum reminiscent of the distant chorus of cicadas from her youth.

Next, she had to pass through a sensor. Trembling, she fanned out the keycards and stepped forward. No alarms, though a silent alarm might have alerted security. Mila took off her shoes and ran to the central hub - a cylindrical core encased in reinforced transparent alloy. She pulled the kill-stick from her case. A single port blinked at the base of the core. She inserted the device, and the server's orange lights flickered as the virus unfurled into the system.

The easy part was over.

Mila raced back to the elevator and stabbed at the up button, wiping sweat from her face and putting on her shoes before stepping out on the floor above - to find herself face to face with the Head of Security leaving his office.

“Damien!” Mila exclaimed, reaching into her briefcase for a package of Montsére Truffles from PanEuropa, “From my last trip.”

Damien Teo smiled, “You spoil me, Samantha. Thank you.”

They walked to the elevator making office small talk but then - as they stepped out into the concourse, the alarm shrieked. Red strobes blinked to life. LinguaNet staff froze as wall screens lit up with Director Ong’s image. Damien Teo turned towards her, but she was already moving.

Mila ran through the concourse, past startled workers and security drones booting up midair. Her borrowed heels clacked on the smooth floor, her breath burning in her lungs. She thrust the ring of keycards towards the exit sensor, praying one would work.

They didn’t.

The shutter stayed down. The guards were closing in. Mila’s heart pounded erratically. Then - a flicker of motion. One of the guards reached his wrist toward the panel and subtly shifted his body to block the view.

The shutter began to lift. She’d been told she would have help. This was it. He lunged at her and slipped. Mila ducked and rolled beneath the rising steel gate. She was out.

But not safe.

A swarm of drones burst from the tower above, scattering the crowd. Mila merged into the chaos, shrugging off her jacket, ripping the voice modulator from her throat. She sprinted to the Polyglot Gift Shop. She’d timed it perfectly. There’d be two minutes of blackout footage, thanks to Jia.

Inside, Mila ducked behind a shelving unit. Her hand shook as she pulled a new holo-shawl clip from her bag and activated it. Samantha’s face disappeared. Her own didn’t return. Instead, she was someone else entirely – someone older and unremarkable.

She wrapped herself in a sari from the briefcase, slipped into sandals, and dumped the case and clothing into the garbage, knowing all evidence would be incinerated within minutes.

When the drones smashed through the windows, Mila was already walking out with the fleeing crowd.

She veered towards the temple ruins. There, she reversed her sari, changed her face again - this time to look like Jia - and hailed a driverless tuk-tuk. Cameras would confirm Jia arriving at Mila’s home. The women then reverted to their own identities and ensured that they were seen having lunch together at the Island’s bubble tea cafe.

The next day Mila went to Polyglot as usual. That morning’s headlines had vague statements from Polyglot about ‘integrity updates’ being completed. The damning Free Press article came out that evening and by week’s end India and China were back on track with their negotiations, and nuclear war was off the table. The crisis was over.

“It’s not over,” Mila declared as she and her new friend strolled through Maxwell Market, the scent of roasted chestnuts drifting on the evening air.

Jia smiled. “No. Now we find out who did it - and why.”

Mila nodded, her gaze scanning the crowd. “And if they’re planning to do it again.”