The loader was a box about the size and shape of a coffee machine. From its tray, Bryce Desmond removed a cartridge. Its insides bubbled. For a moment, he thought he could see the thousands of nanobots swimming inside.

“You should have a copy now,” said Bryce, sitting on a couch in one of Metamatics Makati’s showrunning labs. The space was mostly empty save for projectors, wearable charging ports, and enough office chairs and sofas for a small family. It was a relic from the days when showrunners comprised most of Metamatics’s staff.

Herman’s office chair had cost more than most employees’ monthly salaries. “Remind me why this is a good idea?”

“Nothing has gone wrong so far. Besides, it’s the only way to check.”

“Still makes me uneasy.”

Bryce loaded the cartridge into a vape. “You want to join me?”

“No thanks, bud. I don’t put stuff in my body that it can’t digest.”

Bryce could think of many exceptions to that rule, things a man like Herman likely indulged in. He kept his mouth shut.

“But I’ll be watching out for you,” Herman said, opening a console in their shared augmented reality.

“How exactly are you going to do that?”

“Same tech as the scanner app on our wearables. The nanos have an open protocol.”

Bryce sat up from the couch, vape in hand. “Really?”

“Yeah. No need to hack it. It’s as if they left the doors open for us to see.”

That should have made Bryce feel better, but it didn’t.

He closed his lips around the vape and inhaled.

----------------------------------------

The customs line stretched for half a kilometer but moved without any slowdown. Hundreds of down-turned faces and animated conversations whirled together.

“Wow.” Bryce’s voice filled the existence. “This looks too real.”

“It’s good,” said Herman from somewhere. “It looks like it came out of our worldbuilding labs.”

“Is it more than your voice that transfers over the protocol?”

“Should be. Let me try something.”

Bryce waited, listening to the hum of the air conditioners slowly turning to synthesizers. He recognized the tune. Tangerine Dream. “Love On A Real Train,” he confirmed. He could have been back in his condo setting the needle on his vintage vinyl player.

“Bingo.”

Bryce scanned the surroundings: the passengers receiving their customs number from an overhead display, the terminal security staff with arms folded, and the planes visible through the glass roof. This was Ninoy Aquino International Airport, but it wasn’t.

“This doesn’t look like an episode,” said Bryce. “You said you found something.”

“I did. It was some fantasy story. A guy was next to a wall. Something about a king.” Herman checked his feed. “Okay, it wasn’t portraying NAIA. Should I get you out?”

“You can do that?”

“Maybe I can stop the nanos from broadcasting.”

“Hold on.” Bryce brushed his hand over a marquee. He tried to push it down to step over it, but it was stiffer than concrete. He searched around the terminal for anyone who could be a main character—the story’s focal point. It had been evident in the previous Black Fire stitchings.

That image of a boy floating in Laguna Bay resurfaced, sobering Bryce up in this unreal place.

“How are my vitals?” asked Bryce.

“They’re alright. Are you sure you don’t want me to stop this?”

A couple in front left their assigned booth, and an agent on the other side of an acrylic plastic screen played with a tablet. It was Bryce’s turn to step up.

“Purpose of visit?” the agent asked.

“Let me try,” Bryce told Herman.

The agent looked at him. “Purpose of visit?”

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“I’m not sure.”

This looked to be enough for the agent. “How long will you stay?”

“What is she talking about?” Herman asked.

“Thirty minutes.”

The agent rotated the tablet. She scanned it, then looked at Bryce. “She has been expecting you.”

“What?” asked Herman. “Bryce, I’m gonna-”

“Who?” Bryce asked the agent. Then, “Herman, can you call up Ms. Reed?”

“I can do that?”

“Just call her office.”

The agent keyed in some commands on her tablet.

A crack hummed filled the fake NAIA, the familiar joining ringtone of Metamatics’s in-house messaging app.

“Bryce?” asked Ms. Reed. “What’s going on?”

Herman caught her up on the specifics.

Bryce, however, could already tell where this was going. “This isn’t an episode at all,” he said. “I’m not watching anything.”

“Get him out, Herman,” said Ms. Reed.

“No.” Bryce swallowed. “No, I’m curious.”

The agent cleared her throat as if she had heard the exchange and apologized for interrupting it. “Welcome to Manila, Mr. Desmond.”

“How does it know your name?” asked Ms. Reed.

Bryce thought about that and a great deal more. All cities are a terminus. Manila was a terminus. So was this place. Yet what gathered here?

He thought about asking to leave, but it seemed the way had just cleared for him. Might as well figure this out.

The agent pushed some button on her side that Bryce didn’t see. Sometimes, doom was slow and unnerving. Sometimes, you could cast it at the stroke of a pen. Bryce accepted the reality that if he continued in this place, he might never wake up.

A turnstile opened, and the agent said, “Enjoy your stay.”

He exited through turnstiles and down an escalator leading out of the terminal. Ceiling windows offered a peek of the bursting neon city overlooking. Beams of light lined the skyscraper towers. Two hundred-story structures cut through the fog of a cloudy morning with their rings hovering like the outlines of some extraterrestrial crafts ready to suck up all of man and their souls. It was a skyline foreign and familiar at the same time. This was not the Manila of now, but much later.

Swarms of drones threaded between the condo towers and office buildings. Some were as large as Bryce, while others could have occupied the entire back of a flatbed truck—the old kinds that ran on fossil fuels. They hovered over the city like the eyes of kaiju, searching for stories and originality.

“Maybe one day,” Bryce told the others, “if they fix corruption.”

He emerged from the terminal and searched, in vain, for another main character, but he was as much a part of this production as anyone here.

“You guys still there?” he asked.

No answer. Maybe they could see him, or perhaps they couldn’t. Maybe he was already dead, and the transition into the afterlife wasn’t as abrupt as popular fiction led you to believe.

He summoned an auto EV and found a route already programmed in the car. It took him on a scenic display of this version of Manila. The city swelled overhead. Bridges criss-crossed connecting glass towers. Organic and artificial life webbed together, with as much activity hovering above him as on the ground. He smelled nothing, though. That might have been intentional.

The EV dropped him off at a parking lot. A sea of nondescript cars created a press of eyes as if a council of ghosts and spirits and celestial adjudicators gathered to discuss the fate of this visitor. They had parked themselves in a circle, where at its center, an aged woman stood.

Wrinkled and tattooed. A baggy black hoodie more at home on a girl a fifth of her age. Give her a can of spray paint, and she could have belonged to a crew of graffiti artists, though Bryce doubted she could even walk.

He stood there.

The woman turned her head up. “You don’t perform mano?” Her words were a striking artificial English.

Bryce cast caution to the wind and walked forward. The woman offered her right hand. Bryce had not performed mano in decades but knew the steps. He took her offered hand and placed it against his forehead. He stepped back.

The woman stared at him a moment before smiling, her wrinkles gathering. “I’ve been keeping a close eye on you this whole time.”

Bryce thought he heard Ms. Reed and Herman utter some things but couldn’t make out their words. “Are you even real?” he asked.

“I could certainly pass the Turing test. So, then, what constitutes ‘real?’” As she spoke, a skyscraper rose in the distance behind her, its glass roof poking into the skyline. “But, no, I am not organic, if that’s what you mean. I was trained just recently.”

“Trained? Like an AI.”

The woman nodded. “You can call me the albularyo. I rather like that distinction. You know what it means, don’t you?”

Bryce had heard the term in anime and novels based on Philippine folklore. It meant witch doctor or folk healer and came from the Spanish, as most things did. He didn’t care what distinction this AI chose, however. Frankly, he was less interested in her than in everything around them. “You built all this?”

“The same way you build your dreams. You fall asleep one day, wake up, and have constructed a world in your head. Unless you write it down, it fades.”

“It’s all so… clean.” Bryce looked around. “So idealistic.”

“Seems perfect to me.” The albularyo turned to him. “Now, remind me why you are here.”

Bryce had forgotten until now. “I’ve come to see a show.”

“Ah, okay. This one?” The albularyo raised a hand.

The world shifted. The clouds dropped. The skyscrapers toppled, crumbling like they were made of dust, and someone had just tackled them.

The dust settled in the shape of pillars, arches, and a dais. Six rulers sat on their thrones. They rose as six cloaked figures stepped into their sacred chambers. They called for their guards, but their guards were dead. Their servants just watched.

The aged woman, the AI, and the albularyo stood beside Bryce as one figure. “This,” she said, “will be quite the tale. I’ll be watching both you and it.”

The assassins rushed in.