It was 3 AM when Bryce woke alone. He shot up and checked that she wasn’t lounging on the couch in the living room or showering. When he was sure she had gone, he plunged straight into the Black.
This first foray into immersive fiction had been a bender. To say the experience was nauseating was an understatement. The ceiling of his bedroom transformed until he looked down into an operating room, the first episode of a medical drama unfolding beneath him. The sensation of being a fixture on the ceiling churned his stomach, convincing him that he had just stepped off the twelfth roller coaster in an hour.
The Black Fire cartridge held three episodes, and by the beginning of the second, Bryce’s body adjusted to the sensation, and he learned to enjoy the show. He remembered the characters' names, dove headfirst into the plot, and found the story easier to follow than he initially thought. Taking twenty minutes to adjust to the sensation wasn’t bad, and for a price lower than Metamatics’s cheapest subscription tier, he could see why the Giants should be afraid of this stuff.
Most Convergence drones were charging at this hour, but a few buzzed outside, hovering near open windows to gaze at the people inside.
A floor-to-ceiling wrap-around view illuminated a posh interior with plants and a vinyl record player in the condo tower across from Bryce's. A couple danced in their jungle of houseplants. The woman shut the window upon seeing the peeping drone. The machine turned, sagged a bit as if disappointed, and fluttered towards Bryce’s window next.
He let it watch him as he made his pre-workout meal: four scrambled eggs, lots of pepper, and no hot sauce. The condiments detracted from the taste of the eggs, and anyone who told him otherwise had already nuked their taste buds.
His bench sat in the corner of the room, the bar free of weights. He loaded 75 kg on each side, laid down, and pushed the bar towards the ceiling. He could target his lower chest with his arms turned a certain way. Next would be the upper. 4 Sets. 10 reps, the final to failure.
The Convergence drone was a Q-95, the same that made up the majority during the Tondo Tussle. It could have been the same since the models were indistinguishable, save for the serial number on the back. Had Bryce been curious, he could have checked its underside. Instead, he cut his rest off early and pulled the bar down to his chest. He started to lift.
Moonlight cast the drone’s shadow over him. Its front face touched the glass. Perhaps its navigation subroutines had warped.
It hovered backward, still facing Bryce’s window—still facing Bryce through it—and remained about a hundred meters away.
As Bryce was about to push the last set to failure, his chest and arms giving it, the drone shot forward.
Bryce had the mind to throw the bar to the side and roll just as the drone crashed through the window. It smashed into the bench, pushing him onto the floor and landing on his cheek. Glass shrapnel lay around him. The bar rolled and bumped him in the head. He ran forward, stood, and looked down.
The Q-95 looked up at him, cushioned by the toppled couch.
Bryce ducked. It launched towards him, crashing into the ceiling and breaking a lamp fixture. He crawled backward into his bedroom through the door frame too narrow for the thing to pass through. He felt atop his bedside table and found his Glock.
The drone hovered there briefly as if sizing Bryce up before flying full tilt into the door frame.
Bryce fired. The dart’s split-second arc lit the room blue before puncturing the drone’s glass face. The spherical machine slammed into the door frame and would have tried to push further, but as the EMP charge flooded through itself, it started to sag. It waned and rested a meter away from Bryce’s bare feet.
----------------------------------------
The PNP were first on the scene. With them, Domingo Baccay.
“Are you monitoring me 24/7?” asked Bryce, and shook his hand.
“You wish, friend.” Domingo surveyed the scene. “What happened?”
The officer’s recording light on his wearable was on, so Bryce shook his head. He could have spilled the tea between friends, but on record with the PNP? He’d choose to protect Metamatics.
The criminologists came just behind the officers, suited men and women with busy visors over their eyes. Bryce surrendered his living room security camera footage and what little his wearable had been recording at his bedside table. One of them asked for his Glock, to which he smiled and told them they’d get it once he could be issued a replacement.
A call came through his wearable, and he took it. “Boss?”
“What the hell happened to you, Bryce?” asked Ms. Reed.
“Thought you’d be sleeping this late.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Yeah, thought I would be too. You’re alright?”
“I am, my condo isn’t.”
“We’ll get that fixed. What happened?”
He waited until he was outside to repeat the events for Ms. Reed—the way the drone had lost interest in the couple across the balcony, found him, and shot into the room. He had firmly set in his mind that, had he not rolled away, the drone would have crushed him.
The two blue-suited paramedics arrived next, the walking embodiment of the Convergence’s funding to Manila. They pointed at Bryce. “I think they’ve come to see me,” Bryce told Ms. Reed.
“Better go with them, Bryce,” she said. “So you don’t end up like Carbrera.”
Bryce paused, following the paramedics. “Carlo?”
“Yeah. He’s dead.”
The paramedics offered to help him inside the ambulance, but he walked in himself, still in a trance. He had seen Carlo Carbrera only hours before. Maybe Ms. Reed was right; perhaps the drones would be discouraged from attacking him again if he were in the right company or any company at all.
Bryce counted the people inside the ambulance as it lazed to St. Luke’s Medical Center: a driver, the two paramedics who led him in, and a fourth woman with her back turned. Her baggy blue EMS uniform covered a tuft of hair. Red hair. The exact same shade of red. Bryce entertained it as another coincidence.
He knew better when she turned around.
“You’ve been pissing off the wrong kind of people,” Hannah said.
The neon lights of the skyscrapers passing outside blushed against Hannah’s face. She was freckled as she had been when he was 21, her skin just as pristine. The sirens silenced. “You didn’t age a bit,” Bryce said.
“Yeah. Life’s been… rather good.” She looked down at him as the paramedics sat on the sides facing Bryce. One of them had a Glock. Hannah nodded at him. “You have a tan.”
“I was born tanned.”
She laughed through her nose, a slight huff as if holding back. She whispered something in Bisaya or Cebuano to one of them. She couldn’t shake her English accent, but even in the marriage, she only knew a handful of Filipino words. It resulted from her trying to respect his heritage even more than he acknowledged it. “You’re lucky, you know,” she said. “I see all those days at the range paid off.”
He had spent half days at the target ranges during their marriage when he was only a novice field agent. “They didn’t teach me how to roll. You still remember those times?”
“I remember everything,” she said. A black phone, cushioned with foam lining—the kind you’d bring on a camping trip when you expected to be off the grid—stuck out of her pocket. She sat across from him, her hands gloved as if to ward off finger prints. “Listen, Bryce. You’re getting wrapped up in something very large.”
Bryce sat up. There were no windows in the back of this ambulance, so they could have been taking him anywhere. “I’m guessing you are, too.” He thought back to the Tondo Tussle and the shooter. He ventured for something. “That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“You sent them my picture?” He didn’t elaborate who. Maybe he didn’t have to.
Hannah scratched her chin. She was thinner now, perhaps from athletics or diet. Or something worse. “If I said yes, what would you think?”
“I would think of asking why you’re here.”
The ambulance bumped, then slowed. Bryce thought he felt the comforting assurance of gridlock traffic.
“I was here first,” Hannah said and narrowed her eyes. “You followed me.”
At first, he thought he had done nothing of the sort. However, as soon as he started digging, he found the answer he had been burying all this time.
Women like her never needed to go to Manila. The Philippines was too far from the rest of the world to backpack, too foreign a culture, too poor, and too spread out to do anything worthwhile. It wasn’t Thailand or Malaysia. Yet Hannah had been drawn to it for reasons that didn’t make sense to Bryce until now.
“You’re with it then,” Bryce said. “Black Fire. You never got over it.”
Hannah nodded slowly. “It’s not a phase like a teenager goes through. This stuff is the future.”
Before Bryce could ask more, the ambulance stopped, and the doors flew open. They were just on the roundabout of St. Luke’s Medical Center, surrounded by a flood of other ambulances waiting for their turn to drop off their passengers. He felt that pressure against him, the sensation that he was overstaying his welcome. Hannah, his ex-wife, was in the same city as him. Maybe things could work out.
The two paramedics flooded out, leaving him alone with her for the first time in more than a decade. “Can we at least talk about things a bit more?”
She shook her head, staying inside the ambulance. “I don’t want to see you again, Bryce. Consider this closure, if you even need it.”
He looked around to the paramedics, who were now just returning. They could no doubt hear this conversation between a man and his ex-wife. He didn’t care. “I’m sorry.”
Hannah dipped her head and shook it. “Oh, Bryce. You never told me that, you know. You just left. You made a mistake, and you just… left.”
Bryce thought he could hear the next words. You should have tried to fix it. Why didn’t you try to fix it?
But those questions never came.
The paramedics moved back inside. One held the handle to the van’s door. A hundred more questions welled up in Bryce, yet none with the courage behind them to ask.
“You know what the best kind of sorry is, Bryce?” asked Hannah. “It’s going away. That’s the best sorry. Going away and never coming back.”
Bryce wanted to blurt out that she was the one to visit him in this moment of need. Instead, he shrugged. He had been the one to run away, and here he was again, speechless, ashamed and defeated. What they had was in the past. It could never be salvaged.
The ambulance sped off, and with it, Bryce’s hopes.