"Singapore runs on kopi, fines, and robots that never read the back of the bottle"
Jess Kowalski is twenty-one, from Parma, Ohio, and the queen of CleanTok: @jessscrubs, 2.3 million followers, a GlimmerGlo partner who has been known to fake her before shots with cocoa powder. She grew up in a house with boxes stacked to the ceiling in every room but one, and she carries her late grandmother's horsehair scrub brush, the only cleaning tool she owns that has never been on camera. Her GlimmerGlo contract runs out on the thirty-first of December, the renewal pays her mother's mortgage, and the brand has flown her to Singapore to host a live Deep Clean Night. The target is a million concurrent viewers.
The Spotless Capsule is a mint-green shophouse off Serangoon Road that is white as the inside of an egg: forty porthole capsules, a UV SANI-GATE, three cleaning robots, and a skylight sealing the old airwell. Auntie Siew, sixty-seven, the head of housekeeping, calls the Partner Hub Ah Boy, because it is spoilt, it never listens and everyone says how clever it is. Darren on night reception knows every fine in Singapore. Around Jess are Teo, a Brazilian points hacker who has missed two flights to see the airport waterfall; Hana Kobayashi, who chose the place after Berlin because its listing said nothing was left to renovate; Gerald, a retired dentist who checked in for a week three years ago; and Rhys Llewellyn, the Unwashed Welshman, paid to be the before photo, who calls Jess his nemesis and coughs when a robot sprays lemon on his toes. The warnings are everywhere. Auntie Siew catches a robot misting a sleeping guest's capsule at four in the morning with something that smells like a swimming pool gone bad, and two bottles are missing from her locked chemical store. Jess's capsule locks her in for a UV cycle while a robot's eye turns amber outside. A shower block fills with fumes when the extractor fan stops. The technician finds nothing wrong. Then Rhys's spare adrenaline pen disappears from his shelf.
Deepavali Eve comes, with Little India strung in lights and a little girl's rice-flour kolam on the doorstep. Jess checks the robots' tanks on camera, and Rhys's capsule, number twelve, is set to water only. At 11:31 p.m., with a million people watching and Rhys asleep behind his porthole, the three robots roll down the glowing white hall in a line, and Jess whispers that this is her favourite part.
Age: 21
Type: CleanTok influencer from Parma, Ohio
Fatal Flaw: Performs clean for 2.3 million people and cannot face the boxes at home
Role: Protagonist
Age: 20s
Type: The Unwashed Welshman, a year without soap
Fatal Flaw: Treats a lemon allergy as a punchline
Role: Victim
Age: 67
Type: Head of Housekeeping with a bamboo mop
Fatal Flaw: Trusts nothing that cannot read her handwriting
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: 24
Type: Night receptionist and ex-civil-defence firefighter
Fatal Flaw: Will recite the fine for anything, unprompted
Role: Ally
Age: 26
Type: Designer who survived Berlin
Fatal Flaw: Stares at every ceiling like it owes her money
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Never Mix" (locked editorial v1.2; owner approval of this pass pending)
At 3:55 she finished the lobby floor and went upstairs to do her rounds.
She did not go through the SANI-GATE. She went up the old back stairs behind the kitchenette, the servants' stairs from the 1920s, narrow and steep, with wooden treads worn into shallow bowls by a hundred years of feet. The FreeToWander renovation had painted over them but not replaced them. She suspected nobody at head office knew they were there. She liked it that way.
On the landing of the second floor she stopped, and listened.
The capsule hall at night was the quietest place in Singapore. That was the selling point. Sleep in silence in the city that never stops. Outside, even at four in the morning, Serangoon Road was alive: a lorry unloading marigold garlands for the flower stalls, the hiss of a taxi on wet tarmac, a group of Bangladeshi construction workers laughing their way home from a late shift, and, strung across the road from lamppost to lamppost, the Deepavali light-up, glowing gold and pink and peacock blue, a week away from the festival and switched on every night now, turning the whole street into a birthday cake. But in here, behind the double glazing and the white walls, all you could hear was the hum of the air-con and twenty sleeping travellers breathing inside their pods.
And something rolling.
Auntie Siew knew the sound. A soft rubbery whisper, a click, a whisper. Kiasu.
The robot came around the corner of the capsule hall, low and flat and white, the size of a large cake tin, with two small tanks on its back like a scuba diver and a round camera eye on its front that glowed the same blue as Ah Boy. It moved with the smug little wiggle all robot cleaners have, the wiggle of something that thinks it is being helpful. It was not supposed to clean at night. The schedule said SPARKLE units operated between ten and four in the afternoon, when guests were out.
"Oi," said Auntie Siew. "Why you awake?"
Kiasu stopped. Its eye looked at her. She had the uncomfortable feeling, which she had had many times since the robots arrived, that it was deciding whether she counted as dirt.
Then it turned and rolled, whisper-click-whisper, to capsule number one.
Capsule number one was on the bottom row, closest to the stairs, and it belonged, as far as anyone could tell, to Gerald. Gerald was a retired dentist from Dunedin, New Zealand, sixty-eight years old, who had checked in to the building three years ago, when it was still a scruffy backpackers' called Heng Heng, for one week. He had never left. When FreeToWander took over the lease, nobody could find his booking in the system, because he had paid cash to old Mr. Heng, and so the new system had simply absorbed him, the way a new house absorbs a cat. He spent his days playing Chinese chess with the uncles at the void deck of the HDB block on Rowell Road and his evenings fixing the teeth of anybody who asked, which was, alarmingly, quite a lot of people.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Spotless Capsule, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Super sauber! Like sleeping in a spaceship!" — FreeToWander guest
☠ "welcome to singapore. exposure: moderate. thank you for wandering." — @HostelReaper
☠ "variable noted. deep clean night is fully booked. it's a fine city. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper