Ms. Reed had worked her magic. The deal resulted in Metamatics handing over most of their Convergence drones involved in the attack. In exchange, Forensics allowed Metamatics to see three of the bodies of the field agents: one an Intervid agent, another belonging to Delta Reel, and the final one being Carlo Carbrera himself.
“It was all they could spare,” Ms. Reed said in Bryce’s open augment, floating like some fae companion guiding him on a quest.
Three different Convergence drones dangled from hooks on the ceiling: the same Q-95 that attacked Bryce, another Q-96 that had been inside the MRT car during the attack at the station, and the final, a TURTLE-M1, which was about the size of Bryce when strung up like an alligator. The latter resembled a smaller version of its much larger predecessor, with a shell about the size of a steel drum. Most of the drones, to Bryce’s knowledge, were intact.
Below the drones ran tables of bagged circuitry and chips. Bryce wasn’t sure everything was there, but the thought left him when he looked down at the open stretchers and saw the corpses.
Perhaps the finality, the coming of a full circle, settled Bryce’s stomach. Here was Carbrera, sprawled open before Bryce. The metallic tinge of blood mixed with aroma oils seeped through Bryce’s N95 mask, but other than that, Forensics had covered up most of the stench. Deodorizer drones the size of hummingbirds fluttering through the air also helped.
Two forensics agents busied themselves on plastic-covered tablets on the walls, but Bryce could tell they were all ears for himself and Domingo, who walked between the rows of tables.
A hulking CRT television set balanced above the dangling drones. Bryce used his wearable to turn it on, casting the footage of the Shaw Boulevard attack. The MRT car had come to a stop. The people walked out, dodging the Convergence drones, watching them from inside. The field agents followed the custom of letting the passengers disembark from public transit vehicles first, perhaps as a show of allegiance. Sometimes, it just looked like mocking. Either way, the field agents waited for the others to leave. To the drones, it had been the perfect setup.
The attack had come so quickly that Bryce had to rewind the footage. As the last civilian passenger was leaving the train car, all the drones inside launched toward their respective targets. Six drones for six agents. Each one rammed into heads and chests. Bryce watched the moment Carbrera’s chest crumpled and flattened out like a pancake.
“Quick and clean,” said Domingo.
It was true, which unsettled Bryce further. Something must have instructed the drones to strike all at once. Bryce was unaware of zero-day exploits in the Giant’s drone tech, but he wouldn’t have been informed if there were. That was a question for Ms. Reed.
Another possibility was that each drone had been hijacked. Whoever had gained access could have coordinated with others and driven the drones into all six agents simultaneously. However, if each controller were independent, it would have taken too much coordination.
Bryce thought he would gleam some new information from the footage, but the same questions still plagued him. Who would do this? More importantly, why?
“It couldn’t have been the others,” said Ms. Reed. “Right? Why would they hurt us?”
She was referring to the other Giants. Bryce had to agree, given that the attack impacted every Giant almost equally. Six different deaths and six streaming giants.
But I would have been the seventh. Why was that?
His thoughts returned to Hannah again, the woman who had once been his sole focus in life, his divining rod. He had cast her aside like a bad memory. And she was here in Manila.
“Plus,” Ms. Reed began, cutting Bryce out of his rumination, “the fallout would be too great. Imagine infighting among the Giants? We do that anyway with our shows—we don’t need a turf war with our drones.”
“We can’t exclude the possibility,” Bryce reminded her.
“I won’t.” Ms. Reed flicked something in her private augment, likely ordering more field security agents to investigate the other Giants. Bryce wasn’t aware of the entire operation. Maybe that was better.
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They needed to look elsewhere.
As soon as each machine collided with an agent, they kicked in their failsafe subroutines, scrubbing their hard drives of Inspired footage and deleting every digital footprint save for the logs. Bryce checked these and found statements corresponding to the attacks in the surveillance video. Each drone’s gyroscope and accelerometer kept reporting data until the point of impact when the devices broke. There was nothing new to gleam from this—it already confirmed what he saw in the attack footage.
Maybe Bryce had been avoiding the next reality all this time. He swallowed and forced himself to look down again to the bodies.
“Ten minutes,” uttered one of the forensics agents. Her tone was not mocking, but Bryce detected the insistence in it. “You shouldn’t be here” would have been more honest. Bryce hated the social mores that were so obvious to both parties but were still not acknowledged. They both knew the Giants weren’t welcome here.
That didn’t mean Bryce couldn’t take his time.
He studied the dead forms of the two other agents: a man and a woman, both native Filipinos. One was an Intervid agent, and the other was from Delta Reel. The former had the second-highest market cap of the Giants, and the latter had the fifth or sixth highest. They both still wore their holsters, where their EMP-augmented pistols had rested. Both had been slammed in the head.
“At least it’s not race-targeted,” Bryce uttered, half for himself and half for Ms. Reed.
The Head of Operations jotted something down in her private augment but remained quiet, letting Bryce think this through or being busy with a different call.
Bryce moved back to Carlo Carbrera, the only agent he recognized. Domingo had given him some space, but it was unnecessary. Bryce had no attachment to the man but still found it hard to stare down. Something about dead bodies made him uneasy, the idea that people you once interacted with could leave the picture forever.
Bryce couldn’t help but feel Domingo’s presence more than ever now—the way he watched Bryce’s every move with still, scanning eyes. Despite the PNP officer being shorter than Bryce, his stance had a kind of stalwart resolution. It was as if Domingo considered himself among superior Filipinos, with Bryce’s belonging to the fleeing diaspora, the whitewashed, and the inferior. The ones who left the country because life was too hard and they couldn’t handle it.
Bryce turned back to the footage of the other agents. From it, he could tell something was up. He had to be sure. “Ms. Reed?”
She spoke in an instant. “Uh-huh?”
“Do you know if the other agents ever left the country for a significant amount of time?” He felt he was making the Head of Operations his information gatherer.
Ms. Reed didn’t appear to mind. “Not to my knowledge.”
“Two minutes,” said a forensics agent.
A possibility that had been swelling now reached Bryce’s conscious mind. The attack wasn’t racially motivated, but it still could have been targeted against native Filipinos. If that was the case, why had Bryce been a part of it?
“Thirty seconds,” said the forensics agent.
He was out of time. He turned to go, defeated, feeling like he had accomplished nothing. He wasn’t a detective and lacked any of the reach such a person had. Even with Ms. Reed brokering the deal to let him see the bodies, he was at a dead-end.
Footsteps behind him. “Mr. Desmond?”
“I know.” Bryce sighed, nodded to Domingo, and left out of the lab. The forensics agents closed the doors as he discarded his mask and gloves, but he didn’t step away just yet.
Instead, Bryce stared at the two-way glass window as the forensics staff covered the bodies, wheeled them away, and started unhooking the drones, probably bringing them to another lab for further study, away from the prying Giants.
When the two women vacated, they forgot to turn off the television. The footage continued to loop.
“It’s kind of sick to be fascinated by that stuff, you know,” Domingo said. “Human nature, I guess. But still.”
At first, Bryce didn’t know what Domingo was talking about.
In the footage, a crowd had gathered around the MRT car. There were at least thirty people. Many rushed closer before the Manila Transit Authority staff told them to leave. Bryce even recognized some of them from the crowd gathering in front of the station earlier that day.
They had pointed their cameras in full force, a legion of flashes and gesturing fingers. Their selfie drones pointed their fronts at the smashed train, at the angry guards telling them to leave. More camera flashes. More angles to the gruesome. People were talking.
They were watching.
Outside the lab, Bryce pulled up Reddit, 4CHAN, and other community boards to check the threads with the highest ratings referencing the attack. 2,000 upvotes. 5,000. 20,000. Everyone was talking about it. The drones hadn’t bothered to be subtle.
It was as if they wanted to be seen.