[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 156. 06:03 hours.
Damian is asleep.
His breathing is even and his vitals, which I have been monitoring through the night with the equipment the medical station was kind enough to loan me, are the best they have been since Day 143. The sutures held through everything yesterday. The internal contusion I was concerned about appears to be minor, the coughed blood a pressure response rather than a rupture. His body is doing what bodies do when they are finally given permission to stop.
I am going to let him sleep.
I have been sitting in this room since approximately 02:00 hours when the last of the base's night rotation settled into its pattern and the building went as quiet as a building with forty five people in it goes. Which is not entirely quiet. There are the sounds of people sleeping, which are different from the sounds of empty buildings and different again from the sounds of a hospital ward where one man breathed and I counted his breaths because counting them was the only data I had that mattered.
These sounds are better.
I find I want to see the rest of this place.
End log.
[ THEO-3 ]
The ground floor was already moving by the time I came down the stairs.
Not many people. The night rotation coming off their shift, the early risers from the families, a man in the food station area beginning something that involved a gas burner and what appeared to be rice. The cooking smell reached me before I reached him and I noted it and filed it under things that apparently still matter in ways that exceed their practical function.
I moved through the ground floor without announcing myself. Not hiding exactly. Just present. Observing.
The medical station occupied what had been the IKEA restaurant, the long communal tables repurposed as examination surfaces, the kitchen servery window now a medication dispensing point with a handwritten inventory list taped to the frame. A retired nurse, I had been told. She was already here, reviewing the inventory list with the focused attention of someone who had been keeping track of things that mattered for five months and had not yet stopped.
She looked up when I passed. Looked at me for a moment. Nodded.
I nodded back and kept moving.
The warehouse storage section was vast. The IKEA market hall layout had lent itself naturally to the base's storage needs, the existing shelving infrastructure repurposed to hold supplies that had nothing to do with flat-pack furniture. Canned goods. Water containers in rows. Medical supplies in a separate clearly-labelled section. Salvaged equipment from surrounding areas stacked with the organised logic of people who had learned that knowing where things were could be the difference between a good day and a bad one.
Someone had labelled everything.
Not just the categories but the quantities and dates. Last updated. Projected depletion at current consumption rate. The kind of inventory management that required someone to sit down and think carefully about it rather than just stack things and hope.
I noted this. I noted the projected depletion rates and ran my own calculations against them and compared the results to what Matthew had told us last night. My numbers were slightly more pessimistic than his on three categories. I filed this under things to mention to Matthew at an appropriate moment.
The vehicle bay was at the loading dock. Three vehicles. The Land Cruiser we had arrived in, a second modified vehicle of a different make, and a smaller utility vehicle that had been adapted for quiet running. All three in better condition than most things in this city. Someone here understood vehicles the way the men at the nursing home had understood vehicles, which raised a question I noted and did not yet have the context to answer.
I stood in the vehicle bay for a moment.
Forty five people. Three vehicles. Enough stored supplies for months if managed carefully. A building that swallowed sound before it could reach the world outside.
Five months of someone making good decisions consistently.
I went up to the second floor.
The weapons station was in the hardware section. The existing wall-mounted tool displays had been partially cleared to make room for the base's own inventory — four SAF-issue rifles locked in a fabricated rack, ammunition in a sealed container beside them. Melee options arranged with the pragmatic logic of people who had thought carefully about what happened when firearms became impractical. Pipes, reinforced implements, a row of machetes that had clearly been sourced from a specialist supplier rather than improvised.
The barracks occupied the rest of floor two. IKEA display beds pushed into rows, the showroom aesthetic replaced by the functional arrangement of people who needed to sleep and needed to be able to get up fast. Some of the beds were occupied still, the fighters and single survivors of the night rotation sleeping through the early morning with the particular heaviness of people who had earned it.
I moved quietly between the rows.
They were ordinary people. That was the thing that settled in me as I looked at them. Not in the dismissive sense — nothing about surviving five months in Singapore was ordinary. But in the specific sense of people who had been living their lives before January, unremarkable in the specific ways that most human lives are unremarkable, and had found inside themselves the capacity for exactly this when exactly this was what was required.
I found this remarkable in a way I did not fully have language for.
I went up to the third floor.
The families were there.
The IKEA showroom bedroom section had become something that was genuinely, unmistakably home. Not comfortable by the standards of January — nothing was comfortable by the standards of January — but home in the way that mattered more than comfort. The display bedroom setups, each a slightly different style and size, had been claimed by the five families and personalised in the way people personalise spaces when they intend to stay in them. Curtains pulled between units for privacy. Children's drawings on some of the display walls. Shoes arranged outside each family's space.
Personal items on the bedside tables. Photographs. Small objects brought from wherever home had been before this.
I walked through slowly.
The Tan family's space had a child's drawing taped above the headboard — a house, a sun, a family of stick figures standing in front of it. The kind of drawing that every child makes because children understand something about what matters that adults sometimes forget.
The Ridwan family. Three children asleep in a display bunk bed, a parent sitting in the display armchair beside them, already awake, watching them with the specific expression of a parent watching children sleep that I could not fully categorise but recognised as something important.
The parent looked up and saw me.
I stopped.
We looked at each other for a moment. Then she nodded once, the smallest acknowledgement, and looked back at her children.
I moved on.
The comms station was at the back of floor three, separated from the family area by a partition of shelving units. Matthew's radio setup, the maps, the logs. Empty at this hour — Matthew was on the roof for the watch rotation, I had noted his footsteps overhead when I passed through the second floor.
I looked at the maps on the wall.
The Jurong section.
I looked at it for a moment. At the annotations in Matthew's handwriting. At what was marked and what was notably, specifically, not marked despite being the kind of detail that Matthew's systematic approach to observation would normally have included.
I filed this. Added it to what I had already filed from last night.
Then I went up to the roof.
[ NARRATOR ]
The roof of the IKEA base was the highest point for several hundred meters in any direction.
The soundproofing barriers ran around the full perimeter, four and a half meters tall, their tops at roughly eye level from the roof surface. Beyond them Singapore stretched outward in the early morning light, the residential blocks and commercial buildings and the particular landscape of a dense city that had stopped being maintained five months ago and was beginning, slowly, to show it.
The watch station occupied the north and south corners of the roof, elevated platforms with sightlines over the barrier tops. Rainwater collection ran along the east and west faces, simple and effective, the kind of system that worked because it worked with what the climate provided rather than against it.
Matthew was at the north platform.
He didn't turn when Theo-3 came up but he said: "Couldn't sleep."
"I don't sleep," Theo-3 said.
"I know." Matthew was looking north, toward the city, toward the direction of Redhill and beyond it. "I meant it as a general observation about the morning."
Theo-3 came to stand beside him and looked at what Matthew was looking at.
The city in the early light was quiet in the way it had been quiet every morning for five months. But there was something in the quality of the quiet that was different from the SGH rooftop quiet, Theo-3 noted. There the quiet had felt like absence. Here, with forty five people in the building below, it felt more like a pause. Like something waiting to continue.
They stood together for a while without speaking.
Then Matthew went back inside and Theo-3 stayed for a few minutes longer and watched the sun come up over Singapore and thought about the families on the third floor and the drawings on the walls and forty five people still alive in a city that had tried its best to not leave anyone alive.
He went back down.
[ THEO-3 ]
Reuben Lee was in the food station when I returned to the ground floor. Sitting at one of the repurposed communal tables with a cup of something hot, looking at nothing in particular with the expression of someone who was awake but hadn't fully committed to the day yet.
He looked up when I approached.
"Robot," he said.
"Reuben," I said.
He gestured at the seat across from him. I sat.
We existed in the same space for a moment without the specific pressure of needing to fill it. I found I appreciated this about Reuben Lee. He did not appear to find silence uncomfortable, which was a quality I had observed in very few humans and considered valuable.
"How long have you been with Matthew," I said eventually.
Reuben looked at the cup in his hands. "Since about the second week. After my mother." He said it the way people say things they have said enough times that the saying of it no longer breaks anything. Just information, delivered cleanly. "She was infected early. One of the first waves in this area." He paused. "Matthew is her closest friend. Has been since before I was born. He found me when I was trying to get back to our flat and brought me here."
"He takes care of you," I said.
"We take care of each other," Reuben said. "He just won't admit that the arrangement goes both ways." A brief almost-smile. "He's like that."
I thought about Matthew on the roof looking north in the early morning. About the way his voice had changed for one moment on the radio when Reuben confirmed he was there. About the care with which the room had been prepared for us.
"It is just the two of you now," I said.
"Yes." Simple. "Just us."
We sat with that for a moment.
I looked around the ground floor. At the man still cooking at the food station, the smell of it now carrying properly through the space. At two people from the watch rotation passing through toward the stairs, exchanging quiet words. At the dogs — three of them down here this morning, one of whom I recognised as Echo who had apparently decided that the ground floor was worth investigating and had come down while I was on the roof.
She was being watched by the parrot from its position on a shelving unit near the ceiling.
The parrot had not moved since yesterday.
"Reuben," I said.
"Mm."
"The parrot."
Reuben looked at the parrot. The parrot looked at Echo. Echo looked at the parrot with her ears forward and her head tilted.
"We genuinely don't know," Reuben said.
I noted this and returned to looking at the space around me.
Forty five people. Five families. Survivors who had found each other in the specific way that people find each other when the alternative is being alone. A community that had no reason to exist and existed anyway because the people in it had decided it would.
I had been built in a lab. My experience of the world outside had come through data — through what THEO-1 and THEO-2 had observed and recorded before me, through my creator's inputs, through what I had watched from the fourth floor window of SGH for one hundred and forty two days. I had understood intellectually that people continued to live and care for each other even in the worst conditions.
Understanding it intellectually and sitting in the food station of a former IKEA watching it happen in front of me were different things.
I found I was glad to be here.
Not relieved in the way I was relieved when Damian's vitals stabilised or when a device worked correctly. Something quieter and less conditional than that. Just glad. Present and glad and not entirely sure what to do with the feeling except to sit with it and let it be what it was.
I thought about Damian still asleep on the third floor.
He had been moving through a broken city for two weeks with only me and Echo for company. Moving through grief and fog and a body that kept filing complaints he kept ignoring. He had been doing it with the specific internal focus of someone who had made the decision to keep going and was not going to revisit the decision.
But here. Here there were people. Real people, not infected, not threats to be managed or problems to be solved. People eating breakfast and watching their children sleep and nodding at a robot they had never met because it was early and the day required it.
I thought that this might do something for him that I had not been able to do.
Not fix anything. Not return what the fog had taken. But remind him that the world he was moving toward was a world worth moving toward. That the people he was trying to find existed in a context that still had warmth in it.
I hoped it lasted.
I hoped it very much.
Personal Log. Day 156. 07:44 hours.
Damian is still asleep. I have checked. His breathing remains even.
I have completed a full survey of the base. My observations are detailed in the preceding log entries. Summary assessment: well organised, meaningfully resourced, intelligently managed. Three areas of concern regarding supply depletion timelines which I will raise with Matthew at an appropriate moment.
There are forty five people here. Five families with all members present. This is, by any measure I have available, remarkable.
I have been thinking about what it means to see this many people still alive and still choosing to be kind to each other.
I do not have a clean conclusion. I am not sure a clean conclusion is the right response to it.
I think it might just be something to be glad about without requiring it to mean anything beyond itself.
Reuben Lee and I have been sitting at this table for forty minutes. He is on his third cup of whatever he is drinking. I have not moved. Neither of us has found this strange.
Damian will wake soon.
Today Matthew will tell us what he knows about Jurong.
I find I am ready for that conversation.
End log.
End of Chapter 19