Bryce didn’t need to drop Black Fire to sense the albularyo’s presence this time. The aged woman AI could have been standing next to him from how the Q-90s gathered and spun. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they collected, snapped together, and materialized into the shape of her.
Janice had left that morning without saying goodbye, and that fact did not seem strange by itself. The passage of moments was odd in that refined version of Manila. He probably missed her on her way out.
He didn’t question Janice’s absence further until he checked his wearable and found one last text from her.
Jayson wants to see me. Please wake up soon. X.
Bryce was always the slower texter, and Janice understood it. She was surprisingly mature for her age—he could leave her message on Read, and she wouldn’t scold him.
Now, however, something was off.
Janice had sent the text 10 hours ago, placing it at about 9 PM last night. He had arrived home from the office at about 7 PM. Metamatics—watching him now and before through the Q-90s—must have thought little about a woman leaving his condo at night.
He thought about asking security to check the footage but didn’t want to deal with any more corporate bullshit. Likely, this probe by President Atienza would result in deeper punishments. He had heard people losing their jobs for less drastic stuff than he had done. This constant surveillance was only the beginning.
“What’s wrong?” asked one of the Q-90s, with the voice of an old woman.
Some earlier models of the convergence drone had speakers, which was unheard of. The feature was a novelty—more a prototype than anything. There was no use case where a convergence drone would have to speak to a person or emit any sound. Metamatics, though, wasn’t perfect. By sending at least one of these budget drones to watch over Bryce, they had already made a critical mistake.
“Is that you?” Bryce asked.
No words for a time. Then, “I’ll be your eyes, Bryce, but you’ll be the body.”
That was enough to suggest who was speaking. He wasn’t sure if the other drones overheard the conversation, though. The albularyo could be lying to him this whole time. Who says she could control any capture drone?
He decided to test it. “Go over there,” he said, pointing to the fridge.
The drones stayed where they were, watching him impassively.
“I said go over there.”
Their faces did not even turn to him, but slowly, he noticed their red recording lights beeping off, one by one until the entire swarm was inactive.
Then, the first drone with the speaker moved closer to the fridge. The others followed, arranging themselves in a line. There was no programming in the Convergence drones for such a formation. It reminded him of a legion of ants marching against an enemy colony.
The drones settled beside him before their recording lights beeped on.
Nothing was said. Nothing had to be. If Metamatics was messing with him, they’d need a dozen independent drone controllers. Like at Shaw Boulevard station or with the helicopter, it was much more likely the albularyo was controlling these drones.
He sent Janice a text and left the condo.
----------------------------------------
He walked down 9th Avenue in Bonifacio Global City. He passed Starbucks, Uptown Mall, and high-rise condos, drawing eyes from every participant while his flock of pigeon drones fluttered beside him. PNP officers approached more than once, only to step back when they saw a warning flash on their wearables. Despite Bryce’s need for heightened surveillance, he was still on Metamatics’s most critical mission: eliminate Black Fire.
A report had been circulating among the field agents regarding the advertisement played at One Bonifacio High Street. BLACK FIRE MARKETING, it read, before describing a prediction that the stunt would be the first of many. The ad now set precedence—the Black Fire pushers had hacked billboard tech, and the field agents should expect more of this. Decades ago, these intrusions would have been easy to monitor, but thousands of identical displays have been built across Manila since then.
Thus, Bryce wouldn’t be surprised if, by next week, a dozen more billboards played trailers for the Black Fire version of Starship Horizon, or other shows.
This wouldn’t be a bad thing, however.
Being out in the open without Lime, Lemon, or the sharpshooter drone that Metamatics had saved for him was strange. If they were around, he couldn’t see them. He should have felt less secure being under the watchful gaze of the thing responsible for the Shaw Boulevard attack and the helicopter strike, but in a way, it was more reassuring than anything to have that power on his side.
With this security, Bryce jaywalked across the street, ignoring the honking horns of cars in their fleet modes and Grab food couriers on their mopeds. People turned his way, and he relished in the attention this time.
“You’ll surely see this in a dozen shooter flicks,” said the albularyo. “Picture a robber walking into the bank before the heist.”
He could picture it. He felt it, too, all through his being.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
But Bryce wasn’t here to steal anything. He was here to take back control of his city.
The Black Fire pushers were indeed resourceful, but they were not clever, despite what they thought. They reached far throughout Manila and had lots of money, but their tech was rudimentary. You could think of their software as imprecise power tools that left some residue.
These hints came in the form of packets still on the billboard’s operating system. Bryce’s wearable was Metamatics-issued, meaning it had access to places consumer wearables didn’t, including protocols to entertainment units of displays like this one. It didn’t take long for Bryce to type out a script in his private augment, run a few tests, and send it to the billboard’s OS. The only sign such a transfer took place was a momentary flicker during the trailer for a Filipino telenovela. It barely registered to him as a blink. The audience of One Bonifacio High Street saw it as well, then forgot, and walked on.
He, however, wouldn’t forget.
Each packet still in the OS’s cache held messages, and it didn’t take long to find the one that held the rogue script the Black Fire pusher must have used to upload the trailer for The Crest and its Killers. Bryce copied the script to his wearable’s storage, deleted the version still on the billboard’s OS, and sent another copy back to Metamatics, trying to gain back enough rapport so they would not question his actions.
Only a minute after he sent the e-mail, he started receiving texts from Metamatics IT asking him more about the script. He sent everything he could, then silenced his notifications for five minutes.
That was enough time for Bryce to delve into the packet and find the device key the Black Fire pusher used to upload their script to the billboard. As Bryce had suspected, they had been overconfident. They hadn’t considered the technical resources on their trail. Bryce could have been one of those detectives in the Silk Road days busting illegal pornography rings. He felt he was doing something equally just or greater.
However, the device key wasn’t the only thing that came with the packet.
There was a phone number.
It was local, belonging to someone in one of the sixteen cities in Metro Manila. Even if he could trace the number to a specific district or barangay, he couldn’t hope to find the pusher in any reasonable amount of time. He also had to gamble on the fact that this wasn’t a burner phone, and the pusher was still using it.
Bryce thought about calling Herman up and getting his help, but he imagined how that conversation would go. The CSO likely assigned someone to watch over Herman’s communications, ensuring the software engineer didn’t speak to Bryce off the record. There was no one Bryce call call at Metamatics without being discovered.
He thought briefly about looping Domingo into the plan. That seemed the most logical option, as they had skirted the law before. So, what was the harm in collaborating again?
It wasn’t safety that concerned Bryce now, however. He needed to understand his potential and, more importantly, the potential of the thing observing him.
He found a park inside BGC between a BPO building and a basketball court. The surrounding crowds of wearable kids—the ones who grew up with wealthy parents who could afford the devices—were the only ones not weirded out by Bryce’s fleet of Q-90s following him. They probably thought they were selfie drones.
“Hmm,” Bryce said as he slumped back. He exaggerated the words and waited for the recording lights to dim.
After they did, the Q-90 with the speaker spoke. “What’s on your mind?”
“You can’t use your captured footage as surveillance, can you?” Bryce asked.
“Afraid not,” said the albularyo through the drone. “That’s your fault, too. You Giants programmed the drones not to store raw footage, only to return what was important to your offices.”
That was Philippine government regulation. Of course, it made sense for the Giants not to store footage of the people of Manila for longer than it took to send it to the Giants’ servers. Now, however, it was the biggest obstacle to Bryce’s mission. If he could only access old footage, he could track people’s movements and see when the pusher accessed the billboard. He wasn’t going to rely on spotty security camera footage, either, even if the owners of those cameras would surrender it.
Those steps would take too long.
There was a faster way.
He found a 7-11 and bought a burner phone and a Globe SIM card containing 500 PHP of load. It was more than enough—probably.
Back in the park, with his new phone, Bryce dialed the number from the packet. He hoped and prayed that someone would pick up.
“Hello?” asked a young voice.
Bryce turned on his wearable’s recording app. His microphone was high intensity, meaning it could register the voice from the phone, even when not in speakerphone mode.
“It’s black tonight,” said Bryce.
He thought the person on the other side hadn’t caught the meaning of the phrase and hung up, but he could still hear breathing on the other side.
“Manila’s on fire,” Bryce said. “It’s all sooty. And Black.”
Still, there was nothing. The kid—they really sounded like a kid—breathed heavily on the other side.
Despite the delicate nature of the situation, Bryce was losing his patience. He decided to push his luck. “I want to go into the Black.”
This got the boy’s attention. “Who are you?”
“A customer,” said Bryce.
“How did you get my number?” That the boy hadn’t hung up already implicated him beyond anything a court of law would need to prosecute him.
Bryce thought of an excuse. “Others,” he said.
This further cemented the boy’s naiveté. Whoever he was, he hadn’t been in this business long. Why were the pushers so young? Maybe only the ones on the front lines were inexperienced. The entire breadth of the operation required wealth and that implied experience. Whoever this person was, they must have been at the lowest rung.
But they were on a rung, nonetheless.
He checked the Q-90s and saw their recording lights were off. He wasn’t sure how long before people at Metamatics noticed the gaps in surveillance. Maybe the albularyo was helping him and repeatedly sending duplicate footage back to Metamatics, making it seem like Bryce was still sitting in the park. Whoever was monitoring that footage at the office didn’t catch on.
So, Bryce had to act fast.
“I saw the trailer,” he said, “at High Street. It was so good.”
This must have stroked the poor young man’s ego, for he beamed when he said, “You liked it?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’ve seen Episode 1. I want Episode 2. Where can we meet?”
This was the guy’s last chance to back out and save himself. Bryce almost wished he would do it to save his soul and reconsider a life of crime.
But he didn’t, and when he told Bryce where to meet him, he was happy to learn it was only a fifteen-minute walk away.
“See you there,” said Bryce, and hung up.