That was my father’s catchphrase: stream sludge. He described most television and movies the streaming giants pumped out that way because he firmly believed they were nothing but rehashed plots and settings. “Movies and television are businesses,” he had told me once. “Businesses don’t need to be clever, innovative, or even respected. They need to make money.
To say Papa’s—my father’s—views on the matter rubbed off on me would be an understatement.
On the day of my twelfth birthday, he took my sister Janice and me to see an action movie. It showcased the new projector tech the Giants brought to Manila. I can't recall the name right now, but it was about a group of shoplifters who turned into professional heist artists and, eventually, terrorists.
The empty room as large as a cinema theater came to life with projections. Everything, from the sets to the characters, the car chases, and shootouts played before us with gigantic AI actors. They took us along for the action like we were curious flies.
Meanwhile, Janice gushed over two of the male leads. She cheered when the gang formed and cried when the Philippine National Police formed a barricade around the last man and peppered him with bullets, all to a heart-strung orchestra. She was completely immersed, and I would have been too if it were not for my father’s stone face, his lack of emotion, and his sneering not at the torture scene or explicit sex but at the exposition and the dialogue. He barely reacted throughout the film, and I had previously thought he wasn’t enjoying it.
Now, I know there was more to it.
“You know your uncle was a part of that gang,” Papa said once we found our Grab pulling itself up to the curb. The three of us sat in the back, putting our backpacks in the shotgun and driver seat.
“Uncle Joseph wasn’t in the movie,” said Janice, referring to our favorite of Papa’s six brothers. He was the only one who still spoke to us.
The Grab pulled out, following Papa’s phone directions. “I wasn’t talking about Uncle Joseph,” he said. I was referring to Uncle Nestor.”
Uncle Nestor was as distant to us as Cleopatra, both in space and time. He and his children lived in Davao City, and they seemed to enjoy life there from their Facebook posts. Then again, that’s how everyone seemed online. Not once had Uncle Nestor responded to my birthday or New Year’s greetings, and eventually, I would stop trying altogether.
He barely spoke to my father either, and when he did, their phone calls were always heated. They fought for reasons I could not discern, and these exchanges became the color of my extended family: red and orange like fire or rage.
“They never became terrorists,” Papa continued, “but they did some high-end crime during the early 2000s. Do you know he was on Duterte’s hit list?”
I shared my sister’s stupefaction. “Then why isn’t he in jail?” I asked.
Papa shrugged. “It helps to know people. It’s… essential.” He shook his head. Then, as if the conversation never happened, “Why did we see that shitty movie anyways?”
Janice could have watched someone be shot for all the shock she displayed. “Papa! Lewis Romero is a great actor!”
“I didn’t know it would be like that,” I said, siding with my father.
“Well, it was,” said Papa. “It always is. It’s more rehashed garbage from Hollywood. I predicted the plot from the beginning and tried to stay awake from then.”
He launched into a comprehensive critique of the film, its cinematography, and its clunky exposition that treated its audience like five-year-olds.
“It’s not meant to be literature,” said Janice. “It’s meant to be action.”
“But that’s all there is!” said Papa, his voice rising as if on the phone with Uncle Nestor. “It’s all romance or high-action thrillers with lots of shooting and no substance! Hollywood isn’t the medium for art.” He eyed his daughter. “No, honey, that wasn’t art. That was crap.”
I could see Janice was holding back from crying, hopelessly attached to a man on the screen she never would meet. That, or upset against Papa for disagreeing with her. She folded her arms and remained silent for the rest of the ride home.
Papa was too harsh on my sister, and I’d tell her that later, but while she watched the city crawl slowly by in rush hour traffic, I bumped my father on the shoulder. “You’re right,” I whispered.
I didn’t say it because I believed it—not entirely—I said it because of the look my father gave me, the one I felt I had to earn in other circumstances. Here, he could have been looking at another version of his past self, not the one he regretted, but the one that made all the right choices.
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He put a hand through my hair and messed it around. “Well,” he said, “maybe even the bad ones are worth watching, depending on who you watch them with.” He smiled, and my father’s approval of me made every movie obsolete.
He apologized to my sister before the car pulled into our barangay, our small neighborhood that felt like a little community. If Janice falling asleep on his shoulder hadn’t been a clear indication she had forgiven him, allowing Papa to carry her inside our house was.
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The Karen was practically apologizing before Shay wrapped up the call. She swiveled around to face me, a smirk tugging at her lips. She bowed, and Reggie and I raised our hands in mock applause.
“Hail to Ms. Supervisor,” I uttered. “Where would I be without you?”
“Probably on the street.” She smiled.
I breathed a sigh of relief. For a brief moment, the weight I had been holding since the Karen called felt a little lighter.
That weight returned as soon as our boss walked in.
Virgil Smith—but no one ever called him Mr. Smith. He didn’t like to be on a “last name” basis with his employees. But I saw past his attempts to gain sympathy with us. He was one of those foreigners who seemed to embody every stereotype—pot belly, balding, and an air of entitlement that came from knowing he could exploit hard-working Filipinos for cheap labor. In short, Virgil embodied everything I hated about foreign influence on the Philippines.
“Jayson?” Virgil asked, grumbling like a frog. “Is something wrong?”
Suppressing a sigh, I shook my head and took the next call.
As the line connected, my mind drifted. There had to be more than taking calls from Karens daily, something bigger than surviving each soul-sucking shift. I had once dreamt of doing something that mattered, of making a mark on the world. Now, every day felt like a step further from those dreams.
We plowed on, and when our shift finally concluded, I met Reggie and Shay downstairs in the office’s basement car park. Self-driving cars filled the spaces, each connected to Manila’s fleet network, an artificially intelligent system controlling traffic among shared vehicles.
A low voice cut through the garage hum. “Hoy.”
I followed the sound and found a man around our age, leaning with one foot against a concrete pillar. Andrei, his name was, and his Ray-Bans were unnecessary in the dimness. The cylindrical shoulder bag hanging from his back looked weighed down by more than an umbrella. However, I took no interest in these details, instead focusing on the tattoos snaking up his neck and arms. Like the gold lanes on a silicon chip, the rivers of ink seemed to grip him.
The designs wrapping around his neck, in particular, were mostly linear, but in one spot, they turned as if avoiding a circular section of his skin. This was the tattoo artist’s attempt to cover up the real tattoo underneath. We all knew what that one was but didn’t say anything about it.
Well, Shay and I didn’t. Reggie did.
“Hoy to you too, Rusty,” he said to Andrei, smiling and glancing at the bag hanging over the man’s back. “Wait a minute, you’re never prepared for the rain. What’s in the bag?”
Andrei clenched his teeth, no doubt due to the sly reference to his past with the Kalawang Clan. Kalawang in Tagalog meant rust. So, Rust Clan. It was a gang, and I knew little about them except that they were still in Manila, dealing, stealing, running protection rackets, or doing whatever gangs do here. I never asked Andrei about it, and he never brought it up. It seemed the wisest move.
“You’ll see, dumbass,” Andrei grunted. The two went way back—further than Shay and I, at least, so they could get away with making jokes like that. I thought it better not to push.
Andrei eventually found me. “How are ya, big man?” He was at least six inches taller than me, so the comment was a joke. He looked over the selection of vehicles. “So, what’s the ride, Jayson?”
“I was just about to pick.” I scanned the options in the garage. Most were compacts, sedans, or crossover SUVs. They were too light for what we had planned. They were also connected to Manila’s auto-drive network, meaning you’d plot a destination, and the car would take you there, all orchestrated by governmental AIs. For what we wanted to do, however, we’d need full control.
It took me a few moments, but eventually, I pointed to a van. “That’s probably the best we’ll get.”
Andrei eyed the van and glanced back at me. “Looks pretty heavy.”
“That’s the point.”
He shrugged. “Fair enough. You’re leading this one, not me.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that. This had all been my idea, and the others had kind of just latched on. What began as something simple had now formed into our lifeblood. My heart rate quickened just thinking about it.
Shay and Andrei climbed in the back, myself in the driver’s seat and Reggie in the passenger seat. Reggie yawned as he helped me with the hack.
One of the few benefits of working with Metamatics was the company phones. They were standard flat-screen models, not the foldable or projection-operated kinds, but you could use them to work from home. At least, that was their intention. We thought of more fun uses.
Like deploying more scripts.
I had coined the next one MULTO, which stood for Manual Urban Logistics Transit Override. ‘Multo’ meant ghost in Tagalog, because that’s what we felt like whenever we used it.
I did the honors, yanking out my phone and connecting it to the van’s dashboard via a micro-USB cable. The screen flashed neon pink and blue as text streamed down it, MULTO taking over.
VACINE for work. SLACKER for tricking our PCs into thinking we were doing work. MULTO for hijacking cars. We had scripts for everything.
The process took two minutes.
“Done,” I said. “The city can’t see us.” I smirked at my friends. “So, ready to take on the Giants?” They nodded.
We’d survived another soul-sucking shift, but the real work was only beginning.
As I pulled the van out of the car park, I finally felt alive.