When she picked up the phone, she did not expect his voice.

“Su Lin? Is that you, Su?”

Old names, old tones: the horror of time creeps in under her skin. “Who is this?” she asks, as if she doesn’t dread the answer at all, as if five years have meant nothing, no more than a number on the clock. “Who is this? Hello? Hello?”

“Su,” the voice breathes, “I can’t believe I’m home, Su. It’s beautiful here, Su.”

A black wet ball of emotion, somewhere at the base of her chest. She ends the call, shivering as the beep of finality hits: “Su, I mi–”

Behind her, the 9 o’clock news drones: data leak at Bright Hill Crematorium affects 40,000; Singaporeans urged not to panic, or answer strange calls. Reset your breakers if hauntings persist.

At Chuan Hoe Road at old Serangoon lies one of the last stretches of this twenty-first century rarity: the overhead power line. For five months now old Mrs. Neo has been campaigning to put it underground.  There has been a humming, and old Mrs. Neo cannot sleep. But she cannot figure out which ministry to turn to – the cables belong to Singapore Power, the land belongs to the NEA, and the electricity that makes the humming belongs to (as far as she herself can gather) the inscrutable will of the Almighty up above.

Tonight the humming takes on a voice, almost a song.

“My dear, my dear,” old Mr. Neo sings, lost in space in time, echoing through the only landmark he remembers on this pale earth. “I have left a world behind for you, my dear.”

In the bedroom of her house overgrown with weeds, poor Mrs. Neo shivers, pillow around her head, clutching her crucifix, cowering from the voice that is more static than dead man.

“My dear, my dear,” sings Mr. Neo through the copper-sheathed night, his voice growing hoarser through the wires’ throbbing beat. “Where are you, where are you?”

The ministers are swamped. Meet-the-people sessions are swamped with throngs of angry voices demanding for something, anything to be done.

“More compensation,” begs a man in a blue collared shirt.

“More data protection,” screeches a woman from the back.

Spirits have disrupted the social fabric, they say. They have disconnected my Skype calls. They have distracted my children from their preliminary exams.

The ministers smile and nod. “We will take your feedback into consideration,” says one, a delta of sweat forming around the neck of his shirt. He is having a fever; he has not slept all night. “There was a gap in the crematorium’s SOP. We will send a team to audit their best practices.”

The minister’s phone buzzes. Nobody notices him when he reaches his hand into his pocket, silencing the screaming against his thigh.

On a televised panel at Bright Hill Crematorium, Braedon Tan, age 8, approaches the camera with tears in his eyes.

“Ah ma got caught in the antivirus last night,” he says. “Do you think she will die?”

The saffron-cloaked monk on screen places a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder. Dangling from his chest is a name tag, labelling him as Bright Hill’s resident cloud computing specialist.

“Death is nothing to be feared, for it is merely the end of this body,” he intones. “Above all, we are committed to the privacy and security of our clients’ personal data and will take steps with leading security firms to ensure the integrity of your loved ones.”

The boy, sniffling, is led off-stage by an usher.

Spirits on our iPhones, spirits on our billboards. Spirits on our train display screens, sandwiched between the jerkily-timed animation of the closing doors.

Some have eked out an after-living as Youtube stars. Chan Ah Mui tells her life story in Hokkien through a blackened screen for eight hours a day. She visited occasionally by her grandchildren and the odd social studies teacher, reading out the auto-generated English subtitles to her students. The Singapore Heritage Society has adopted Chan Ah Mui as its digital mascot of 2019.

Now being ghosted on Tinder takes on a whole different meaning. Dead ah kongs jostle for space alongside the amateur photographers and gym hunks, competing for right-swipes on fresh-faced SYTs. They slide into Telegrams, sound the depths of Kik; at least the dead ones don’t send badly-composed pictures of their dicks.

A dead ah ma in the MINDEF mainframe trips a mobilisation call for two hundred operationally-ready infantrymen, just so she can look at her grandson’s face from the other side of a plastic-sheeted cookhouse terminal screen.

There are support groups held across the island. Su Lin finds herself at one of them, listening to men and women like herself talk about loved ones they’d rather forget.

“We enter this space without spiritual distraction,” says the event organiser, gesturing towards the back of the room where their phones have been placed in Ziploc bags. “We are not here to hold on to our loved ones. We are all here to move on.”

Su Lin glances to her right. An eighty-something year old auntie is hunched over in her chair, hearing aid pressed into her left ear. Despite the grim atmosphere, she is smiling.

“Can you hear him speaking, auntie?” she offers.

The old woman notices Su Lin’s gaze, cradling the buzzing device by her ear.

“Yes, I can hear him just fine,” she says.

In the end, the government’s response is as nuanced as it is swift. Tissues are issued to grieving Singaporeans. Bright Hill Crematorium is fined. The monk loses his job. New laws are passed: bigger, stronger laws. Many words are said. Then another Michelin-starred hawker takes the news by storm, and the breach is swiftly forgotten.

The last ghosts, on the other hand, prove more difficult to remove.

Sometime late on Mandai Road, a lorry screeches east. It’s old, with sideboards made of wood, and the kind of radio that still has a knob. At this hour, the workers it’s ferrying are asleep; the driver has AirPods plugged into his ears.

He’s an old soul, and knows these roads like inside of his mouth, like the lines on his hands. “Shou jio go zai gan ji buey!” he sings along with his phone, through the open window, into the night.

All around him – from the electronic road signs, from the light fixtures, from the Nokias nestled in the pockets of overalls – and below him, too, for the telecom lines are all underground – springs forth the words, loud and clear, from lips long dead:

“Gan ji buey! Gan ji buey!”