Decades ago, if you had arrived on the showrunner floor, you would have seen an open-concept space filled with groups of crescent moon-shaped cubicles with low walls containing standing desks. You would have seen a hundred people conversing in cliques with their wearables, hurling code and ideas at each other, their heads down but their mouths and minds working, discussing upcoming shows in Metamatics’s premiere streaming lineup. It would not have been far off from the trading floors of old, with their PC workstations lining long desks and commodity traders screaming.
Instead, when Bryce Desmond walked into the largest floor in Metamatics Makati’s office, he found refrigerator-sized computer towers with their wires winding covertly under the floor.
“Bryce, my man!” someone said, peering from behind one of the towers. “You‘re not dead!”
Bryce swallowed. He didn’t want to be known across the company as a survivor of the Tondo Tussle and the drone attack on the agents. No one had thought of an interesting name for the latter, and he hoped they never would. “Hello, Herman. You made it, too.”
“Yeah! Chicago was a drag, right? Good to be somewhere warmer. And prettier.” He actually winked at this.
During the company's startup days, Herman Colose was one of the first people Bryce had befriended at Metamatics Chicago. The two were around the same age, but Herman’s sedentary responsibilities as a computer engineer forged for him a path straight to a dad-bod. Despite this, he bobbed around the floor with enthusiasm.
Bryce leaned against one of the boxes. “Isn’t having the cluster nodes out here less efficient?”
“I mean, yeah.” Herman tapped the box. But, you know, Human-Computer Interaction is more than just user interfaces. We get more done just by being near these things all day. They inspire us, you know? Sometimes, the I in HCI stands for intimacy. ”
“Jesus.” Bryce had to rid his mind of images of Herman making love with a sex robot.
“Serious as ever, eh?” Herman belted a laugh. “It was a joke! Let loose! You almost died, man. Twice! You have a lot to be grateful for!” Herman removed the wearable from his neck and hung it from a pin next to a server rack. “Go to Siargao sometime. Go to Baguio. Maybe it’s all the Manila pollution making you tired. You need mountain air! It does wonders. Believe me.”
Bryce took Herman’s offered fist and bumped it. “The only mountain air you’re getting is from the breath of the Benguet women you’re sleeping with.”
“Hah! Same presumptuous bastard as ever! Nah! It’s not like that anymore. I told you, man, I’m over that phase. I met a nice girl.” He leaned forward a bit. “And she doesn’t want my money.”
“Wow.” Bryce wondered if that was true. Herman looked like the perfect man for nefarious Manila women to target. “They’re not all like that, Herman.” He said it to himself as much as his old friend. Janice, he still hoped, wasn’t using him. Then again, didn’t everyone “use” each other in some way?
“I know, I know.” Herman smiled. “And, so, how’s your experience with the local cuisine?”
Bryce flicked his eyes away. He had tried to keep his relationship secret, but Herman had been a prying bastard, adopting the same interest native Filipinos had in each other’s everyday lives. It was the result of being a hypersocial culture. “She’s fine.”
“Seen her since…?”
Bryce had to suppress the urge to check his wearable and text her. He preferred human interaction to social media and texting. Damn. Couldn’t he admit sometimes that he missed her?
He just nodded.
“Lucky man, Bryce. Lucky man. Don’t lose her.” Herman flicked over something in his wearable. “Listen, Bryce. I'm happy to see you and all, but I’m scheduled for another deployment tonight. We’re going to Production with a few updates to the iOS streaming app. More people use phones here than wearables. If there’s something you want to go over, make it quick.”
Bryce noted the chip crumbs stuck to Herman’s shirt and the discarded Lays and White Rabbit wrappers in the trash bin. Even from far away, Bryce could see the shadow of an empty cursor in Herman’s wearable. “I think you have time for a special assignment from Ms. Reed herself,” Bryce told him.
“Oh?” Herman perked up. “You’re in with Ms. Reed’s good graces now?”
“Since a few days ago.” Bryce got Herman up to speed on the details of the Black Fire surge in Manila, though the man had heard most of it through the news. He didn’t mention Hannah, though. He was still the only person who knew about that.
“Deep stuff,” Herman mused. “Yeah, alright. I’ll bill to her cost center?”
“Sure.” Bryce hadn’t worked out the specifics, but he couldn’t imagine a world where Ms. Reed didn’t cover every expense for this operation. The reality was unspoken. Anything to eradicate Black Fire. Anything.
Herman typed something out in his private augment. “Consider it done. Now, what would Ms. Reed’s good graces require of me?”
Manila’s gridlocked rush hour gave Bryce an hour to consider the next steps before heading to the office. “Do you know if the Convergence searches public media?”
Herman thought about the question. “You mean like news broadcasts?”
“Not necessarily.” Bryce looked for a place to sit but took the absence of chairs as some company directive to live a more fit and active lifestyle. So he stood his ground. “What about Facebook live videos? YouTube? TikTok and Twitch streams?”
“Oh yeah. Definitely.” Herman nodded. “But usually those videos aren’t tagged.”
“But if they are?”
“Then they’d have to be tagged as somewhere in Manila.” Herman paced around, hands behind his back. “Then yeah, in those cases, we definitely look through that stuff. Every Giant does.” The man stopped. “Why?”
Bryce scratched his head. He wasn’t sure how to phrase the next part. “Do you think you could get me a list of all the shows generated since last night’s drone attack?”
Herman checked his watch. It was a fake Rolex, but Bryce knew he could afford a real one and was probably taking the stealth-wealth approach to life and hiding his net worth. “That’s not so hard to do. The results are going to be a little dry, though. Not as many new series this month. Mostly continuations. Creative’s going through a rough patch.” Creative was the division that oversaw the pillars of a series' implementation: originality, writing, AI calibration, and worldbuilding (set design). “Do you want me to check continuations as well?”
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Bryce mused on that. “Yeah. Stick to crime dramas, though.” He thought more. “Thrillers, heists, spy flicks.”
Herman typed out some details on a keyboard only he could see. “I’ll check the tags. Anything else?”
Bryce thought of other keywords. BUST. RAID. SIEGE. INVASION. HOLD THEM BACK. Herman keyed all these in and threw the results into their open augment. Thumbnails of videos hovered between them as large as sheets of paper.
Even as Bryce blinked, the results kept piling up. “How many are we sitting at now?”
“I think…” Herman finished typing, and the projections stilled. “One hundred and forty-two.”
“Shit. Only in the last 24 hours?”
“In the last 18 hours, more like. Even granting a two-hour window before the attacks.”
“I thought you said there’s a drought.”
“There is. This is slow.” Herman looked at the floating panels. In one, a fleet of Japanese battleships faced off against a stingray larger than all of them combined. In another, astronauts mined an asteroid closing in on a star. “One hundred and forty-three. By the time you sleep tonight, the results will have doubled.”
It was bold of Herman to assume Bryce would even sleep tonight. At least he wouldn’t doze off near a window. “Can we filter by particular scenes?”
“Sure. Marketing does that all the time. Just give me a description.”
Bryce shaped the crime scene: the layout of Shaw Boulevard station, the way the MRT train car interior looked after it had been smashed in six different places, the crowds of curious onlookers in the surveillance footage, the checkerboard pattern on the tiles where the car doors opened. Every detail seemed necessary, and when Bryce ran out of words, he brought up the surveillance footage and the augmented reality Domingo had shared with him, which was just about to expire. Herman fed all this and more into the search results, typing faster than Bryce could formulate his thoughts.
“I want to see all of them side by side,” said Bryce, “if possible.”
“Anything’s possible with a few scripts.” Herman pressed a floating button, and the results appeared. “I’ve got it down to forty-seven. How’s that?”
“Workable.”
“Workable? This is going to take you all night to plow through. You know we have AIs that can parse this stuff better.”
Bryce smiled, already pulling out his calling app. “No, I don’t think you do.”
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“Woah!” Ms. Baccay yelled. “I always wanted to know what happened to Ricardo Carmichael!”
“Ah!” Domingo stole the remote from his wife. “I like that one! Make Bryce watch it.”
“There’s always more to watch!” Ms. Baccay smiled at her husband. “Besides, this means you get to watch more of my shows.”
“Hay nako!”
Bryce had set up Domingo and his wife in one of the private theaters Metamatics reserved for its focus groups. Three rows of plush seats held cup holders large enough to fit those awkward influencer water tumblers and fold-out trays large enough to accommodate a three-course meal.
“Kuya!” a voice called near the theater’s door, using the Filipino term for an older brother. “Is that you in there?”
A young woman with long, curly black hair and headphones stood at the door. She smiled as she walked past Bryce to sit next to Domingo. The officer looked back. “My sister!” he called. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Bryce was about to ask who let the woman in until Herman stood at the door. The man shrugged. “She said she was with the policeman.”
From then came Domingo’s extended family: his two brothers, his half-sister, his sister-in-law, and more until a whole row in the theater had been filled.
“Help yourself to some refreshments!” Herman put in, pointing to a corner of the theater with Coke, San Miguel, and popcorn vending machines. “Just put Bryce’s cost center in!” He read out the numbers.
From then on, the instructions were clear: find a scene in any of the forty-seven shows resembling Shaw Boulevard station or the events that took place there. Take a screenshot and save the timestamp. Bryce even sweetened the deal, granting them each 4,000 PHP for their work. He paid them upfront. “I hope you don’t mind spoiling a few of these,” he said.
Everyone seemed happy to oblige.
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They worked into the night, Domingo’s family combing through reams of television series Metamatics had produced since the drone attack. After exhausting those, Bryce expanded the search to series produced by Intervid, Distro Premiere, and Delta Reel. The youngest of the group had fallen asleep, and Bryce had called in some staff to wheel in napping pods from other floors to the theater while Bryce kept checking in.
By midnight, the Baccay focus group had searched more than sixty shows. It was enough television for a whole year.
He escorted them down to the Metamatics car park, and the kids in the group—now revivified at seeing Metamatics’s vehicle fleet assembled in one place—jumped up and down as their two EV Suburbans pulled up.
“Did you find what you’re looking for?” Domingo asked as his family climbed into one of the vehicles.
Bryce sighed. “I’m not a detective, but I think that whole attack was intentional. Too many people saw it.”
“That’s quite the spectacle. Maybe those agents just pissed off the wrong people.”
Hannah had said that. At first, Bryce considered ignoring the point. “What kind of people?”
Domingo checked the others were out of earshot. “I had a younger brother once. He was around during the Duterte administration.” The off-duty officer scratched his head. “He got in with the wrong people. Started doing drugs. Marijuana and a bit of cocaine. Not the worst stuff. But it was drugs, and you know…” Domingo shrugged. “One day, he just left the house and never came back. Not a word. Then, four days later, his shoes washed up in the Pasig.”
Bryce looked away. “I… am sorry.”
“Yeah. So, maybe those agents just pissed off President Atienza.” Domingo helped the children into the other Suburban.
Bryce followed. “The President?”
Domingo squinted at Bryce, but the judging look quickly faded. “People often go missing in this city. When you need to find someone, it’s often better going to social media than the police.” He smiled, seeming to know he was talking about himself.
Bryce hadn’t considered this until now. What would President Atienza have against Metamatics or the agents? What would she have against Bryce? At Ms. Reed's insistence, she had agreed to eradicate Black Fire.
Domingo led his wife into the back of the Suburban. He paused and faced Bryce. “Money,” he said. “That’s all you need in this city. People have done many bad things here, but rarely have they done them altruistically, nobly, or as martyrdom. Most of the time, it’s for money. So-”
“Follow the money.”
Domingo nodded. “Always.” He got in and shut the door.
Bryce waved off the Baccay family, making a mental note to check on them later.
He returned to the theater, where the vacuum drones, with their whirring turbine engines, were turning the place into a cyclone. Bryce stayed just long enough to turn off the television screens.
He returned to the showrunner floor and found Herman facing the wall.
Bryce paused. “Hey. You alright?”
Herman turned around, his eyes glued on something in his private augmented reality as his visor turned with him. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I got a match though.”
“A match?”
“Yeah.” Herman flicked the results over. “Not in our stuff, though, but in Black Fire.”