Professor Zaida Abdullah hates the smell of the blue chemical gel that now fills the carriage. It smells like petroleum. And she hates the way it feels on her wrinkled skin, more like burning than cooling. But she slaps it on anyway and watches her body temperature dip slightly on her wrist monitor. She leaves a voice note for her faculty secretary to let the students know she’ll be late for lecture.

This story is read by Brendon Fernandez.

Elise brushes past the politician outside Simei station. He’s handing out flyers, and a small crowd has formed around him. In her hurry, Elise notices she hasn’t caught the colour of his uniform. Is it a mixture of red and white? Or all-white? Or pastel blue, or green? Not green. If it’d been one of the Greens, she’d definitely have stopped to take a flyer, maybe even a selfie. As she waves her wrist watch over the gantry and enters the steaming hot station, she realises she doesn’t know if the Greens are even contesting in Simei. She purses her lips a little sadly. They’re made up of young university professors with socialist ideas and she thinks their angry Instagram stories about climate change are pretty cool. She’d have liked to cast her first ever vote their way in this, the hottest August in recent memory.

This story is read by Brendon Fernandez.

Dave gets on the train at Raffles Place. He’s never liked this part of town, which is full of office-shirted people in various stages of unhappiness. In the past, he’s spent a couple of sleepless nights imagining himself in the CBD, pouring off the train at 7.30am with the rest of the office rats, later in the day streaming to Amoy Street Food Centre to do battle over lunch with packets of tissue paper. These possible futures flicker in his head now, and he holds the letter in his hand a little tighter as a talisman against them. It’s his letter from the UK Visa Office which has finally, with only weeks left before his flight, given him the green light to go.

This story is read by Brendon Fernandez.