A minute into the speech, President Atienza had the audience in her clasp. She raised a hand to reach out to her fellow Filipinos, to their hearts and their minds and their past, and she said, “I was here alongside you. I lived a hand-to-mouth existence. I lived in a shack in Sorsogon when the monsoons and tsunamis came, and we had to relocate to higher ground while our homes and our dogs and our chickens drowned. I was here when the forest fires of 2032 swept through Bicol. I was here, too, when the capture drones descended.”
She paused for effect.
“And I was here when a band of small criminal operations across Manila took control of six Inspiration Convergence drones and killed six streamer security agents at Shaw Boulevard station.”
Another pause as she scanned the crowd, not to see them, but for them to see her.
“In addition to the atrocious killings of these innocent employees, the only solace we can gather from this event is that no one else was harmed in the crossfire.” President Atienza took in the largest breath of her career. “But this did not excuse this act of terrorism. This group has declared war on not just the Giants but Manila and the rest of the Philippines. These poor souls have instigated the wrath of the Filipinos, and just like when we retaliated against Marcos’s martial law and when we rose against our colonizers time and time again, we will fight back.”
This stance would define President Atienza’s reign.
Only sixteen months into her six-year term, leveraging her provincial heritage routes and new-age educational achievement at the University of the Philippines, she had already garnered the affection of the conservative older generations and the liberal younger minds. This feat was unheard of not just in the history of democracy in the Philippines but also in the world.
She knew this, and she used it.
“The Inspiration Convergence has been the most lucrative financial project Manila and the Philippines have undertaken. It is like we have discovered all of Yamashita’s gold and have learned to make more. We are the world’s stage, but we embrace it, and our economy, culture, history, and art flourish because of it.”
The presidential speech played out before me on a screen, presiding over the sea of empty couches in the Bernal palace. Every word Atienza spoke was a crank winding around my family’s throat. My mother knew it, but she did not waver.
Around me, holographic projections of our extended family stood, my uncles and aunts all taking in the president’s address. As the speech played out, Esmeralda Lane paced through the room with her ghostly council. I would never get used to the tech. It was the stuff only the Giants could afford. More than ever, I knew how wealthy my mother was.
“Listen to her bicker,” said my mother. “They’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off.” She smiled at me. “And to think, Jayson, we didn’t do it! That wasn’t us, but we’re sure to benefit from it! We’re going to remind them, constantly, how fragile the Giants are.”
Uncle Nestor’s projection followed my mother while he stood in a safe house in Mindanao. Apparently, the Bernal family had many throughout the country, but my mother didn’t get into the specifics. Siloing, then. It was safer for me to be ignorant. “Regardless,” my uncle began, “they are pissed. We have to expect a counter-offensive or a bust of some kind.”
“Let them be pissed!” shouted Esmeralda Lane. “The Giants are nothing more than fiction leeches. This is just another form of colonization. Fuck what Atienza says! We haven’t seen an ounce of that money!” She found a couch covered in plastic. “They cannibalize our very ideas, Jayson. Our literature. Not even José Rizal could pierce through this curtain draped over us. The drones would steal his stories, too! They would pacify our revolutionaries and turn us to stone, leaving our fiction as nothing more than fairy tales or telenovelas or high school romances.”
She sounded so much like my father then—her late husband. It was as if their bodies had separated, but their brains continued the marriage, united in their opinions of the Giants. But my father, through no fault of his own, never acted on his disdain for the Giants like my mother did now.
But he still did act.
I felt the weight of The Crest and Its Killers in my backpack. My father was not an Illustrado, not some revolutionary who could move people with the strokes of a pen.
At least, he wasn’t yet.
This thought led me to ask my mother: “Why wield the same weapon the Giants use against us? Why use television?”
“It is ironic,” she said. “By using their own weapons against them, we show the Filipino people exactly how they are being manipulated. We show them it’s possible to inspire change through stories. We put our fellow countrymen to sleep and then wake them up to see the harsh reality they’ve been living in all this time.”
What would my father have done if he saw her now? I hoped he would be proud of his wife’s accomplishments, seeing through the murky layer of recreational drugs to the Lady of Change on the other side. How much better it would have been if they worked together.
Maybe, then, I was my father. I was his body and his legacy. I was his soul continuing on this mortal plane. Perhaps my mother knew that as well and would leverage it.
It was hard staying at the mansion when my mother was the family’s divining rod, their funnel for thoughts, their vicarious charge, and their voice. I hardly found time to speak to my extended family directly—I didn’t have their contact information on my burner phone, and there was no way I would log into my old social media profiles. Uncle Nestor had left the Bernal palace too quickly, citing responsibilities in Mindanao. Yet, I had to trust my mother, for they took her words like gospel.
I pulled the FOTON SUV out of the garage minutes later. I wanted something larger in case I had to take the team anywhere. We wouldn’t ever be scraping fiction again, but who knows what would have happened?
I caught Ernesto smoking a cigarette beside the garage while busying himself with his burner phone. I got out. “Hoy!”
He took a drag and smiled. “What’s up, little man?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I wasn’t sure how much I liked being called “little man.” I wasn’t as tall as, say, Janice’s boyfriend, but I figured I was around average. “I accidentally deleted my Uncle Nestor’s number from my phone. Do you have it?”
This might have been too risky, but every operation had its cracks. People had time alone. People had their motivations. If there was anything I learned by scraping, it was that every crack could be exploited.
Besides, if Mother had her secrets, I could have my own.
Ernesto took another drag and nodded. “Sure.” He keyed in a few strokes, and, in moments, I had Ernesto’s and Uncle Nestor’s numbers. “Don’t be so clumsy next time, eh?”
I smiled. “I won’t.”
----------------------------------------
I took the AH26 from Laguna towards Mandaluyong’s heart while enjoying the hum of the AC, which overpowered Manila’s heat. While relishing in my circumstances and good luck, I reminded myself that this could be drawn out under my feet as quickly as it came.
“Jayson?” Uncle Nestor asked me over the phone. “What is it? Is your mother alright?”
She seems more alright than ever. She is the one pulling this whole project together. But what about me? “She’s good. It’s just…” I didn’t know how to phrase it. “How’s the rest of the family?”
I was so disconnected from them, and our brief reunion felt like it was on rails. I wanted to know what everyone was up to and rebuild the structure I had spent most of my life without.
Uncle Nestor hesitated. I could tell this was a question he didn’t like to answer. “We’re fine, Jayson.”
I ventured. “I’d like to visit if that’s alright.”
“How do you expect to do that?”
I hadn’t thought this far. “Get on a plane?”
“Your passports are single-use. There’s no option for leisure. I’ve taken maybe thirty different identities while corresponding with Manila.”
He didn’t say specifically that he was corresponding with my mother, which could have implied that the operation was much larger than it appeared.
“Maybe once things die down,” he said.
Would things ever really “die down,” though? The PNP would chase my mother until she died. The Giants, too. They would not stop with her, either. Eventually, they would find us all.
Dried fish, diesel, and salt permeated my nostrils as I rolled the window down, eager to feel some connection to the city I had grown up in. “Why is it necessary to piss off the government?” I asked. “Why not tell compelling stories to earn a profit and use that money to do good? Why not work out a deal with the Giants and sell them this tech?” That last part seemed the furthest stretch, but had my mother considered these options?
“Because it was never about money, Jayson. It was about subverting the Giants and getting under their skin. You cannot enact change without building a foundation to support something greater.”
I didn’t ask what it meant. I should have.
“Your mother aims high,” Uncle Nestor continued, “and she wants you along for the ride. If it weren’t for your father, she would have taken you and Janice long ago.”
Janice. I hadn’t seen her since Uncle Nestor whisked me into this new life. I could not find her without staking out my father’s old house or visiting her school campus, though I trusted that her boyfriend kept her in good hands. I thought twice about ever doubting him.
I eventually made my way to a subdivision in Mandaluyong and parked in front of a nondescript house. Steel bars lined its windows, and barbed wiring decorated the tops of the surrounding cement walls. However, the house’s most unique feature was the biometric combo lock on its front gate.
“You are your brother’s son, truly,” said Uncle Nestor, with the phone on my shoulder, “but it doesn’t have to stay that way. My brother kept you away from your greater purpose. Now, it’s your time to shine. Think of it that way.”
After that, Uncle Nestor espoused more of his wisdom to me, but I remembered little. “What if people come looking for us?” I asked as I turned the gate aside.
“We have your back. Just keep your head down and work.”
I wanted to ask what that meant, but I figured I would get stonewalled again. So, I said goodbye to the uncle who had not spoken to me for decades and stepped inside the house.
Coaxial cables greeted me as I stepped in. They connected to old CRTs around the house and Ethernet and data transfer cords. The “house” was actually three attached homes. Instead of sealing the adjoining doors, my mother had combined them to make one larger safe house.
I saw Shay first, huddling over my father’s typewritten notes on what should have been the dinner table, but it was now basically a showrunning desk. She rifled through a separate stack of freshly printed paper and looked at me.
“Sayang! What a waste of processing power!” she exclaimed, using the Filipino expression for something wasted or regrettable. She handed a piece of newly printed paper over to me. “The screenplay engine thought Seskone was pursuing a magical arc, creating a scene where he reflects on his growing power. This is not supposed to be a cultivation story. What trash is this?”
Reading the scene over, I had to agree. Papa would have spat his drink. “Tell it to stick to my father’s chapters.”
“Oh, I did, but it’s taking creative liberties. Stubborn things. Can we get a better model?”
I made a mental note to ask Mother for an updated screenplay engine. I felt I could get anything now.
Andrei lifted himself from a couch and trounced over to us. “The second episode is good,” he said, holding a vape. “Very good. Your father is a genius storyteller. I haven’t seen anything like this before.”
“Me neither,” said Shay.
It was higher praise coming from Shay than Andrei. I knew of Shay’s background in the arts now that I had a chance to speak to her more.
Reggie chimed in next, advising us to adjust the camera panning to show off the world better. It resulted in gorgeous scenes with cross-cutting along rooftops and within homes beyond the palisade walls. Slowly, Papa’s vision began to unfold.
But we could only go so far.
The Black Fire cartridge loader looked like a blend between a modern alchemist’s construction and a centrifuge you’d find in a blood testing lab. Tubes the size of batteries could be inserted into pipes, where a tank of vapor and liquids would create the vapors. An Ethernet cable carried the stitching executables from our laptops.
“How’s the pushing going?” I asked both of them.
Andrei grunted from around the corner. “Most people believe it’s too esoteric. We can make it more accessible…”
“No,” I said. “Send the message.”
They knew I meant to preserve creative integrity.
“How about new customers?” asked Reggie. “People who haven’t used the stuff before?”
“These aren’t fun gadgets or household appliances,” said Andrei. “You can’t just present recreational drugs to someone who hasn’t tried them and ask, ‘Hey, want to take a hit?’”
“Hold on,” I said.
They all turned to me.
“What?” asked Andrei. “You’re not considering that, are you?”
I wasn’t, but there was some merit to the idea. We couldn’t just market to current users. We had to go further.
As the plan started to form in my head, I turned to Reggie and asked, “How good are you at hacking billboards?”