Bryce tried to calculate how much wealth would be lost in Manila if a bomb were to explode in the boardroom.

“I didn’t have an answer.” President Atienza told the guests. “I got caught off guard, and now I look like a bumbling idiot all over social media.”

“Smear campaigns pass,” assured Ms. Reed, acting as if she were the president’s PR rep. She was certainly doing a better job of comforting the president than anyone else in the room was. “You can use it to your advantage. That’s what I do. Play into it sometimes. Turn it from an insult to a joke and then to a signature. Wear it like you own it.”

The albularyo would have made a quip here, but Intervid had been the one to call the meeting at their own Makati office, and the strict security did not allow competing capture drones inside their boardrooms. It was the first time Bryce had been separated from the Q-90s since the probe against Metamatics and the other Giants.

President Atienza flared her nostrils like a horse ready to kick. “All because of you damn Giants. Lately, you’ve been causing more harm than good.”

A shutter ran through the assembled guests, and after it, Bryce started counting the casualties.

The Heads of Operations from Intervid, Distro Premiere, Delta Reel, Sugoi Soiree, Seoul Crystal Studios, CinSurround, and, of course, Metamatics were all in attendance, as well as their retinues of 2-3 staff sitting behind them. Bryce had to squint to read their name tags. Thankfully, his wearable identified the suited and manicured Heads, flashing text boxes with their names as if they were characters in a simulation video game.

Harrison Ocampo—Intervid’s head of operations and the second youngest person in the room to hold such a position—cracked his hands as he leaned back in his chair. “Who is that girl, anyway?” he asked, turning to his staff. “Remind me to hire her for our PR internship.”

I doubt she’d take it, Bryce thought, knowing Janice would turn down any position with a Giant.

“Janice Vargas?” said Liena Pascual, Head of Operations at Distro Premiere. “A journalism student at the University of the Philippines.” She blinked at Harrison. “And that all depends if you get to her first.”

“Stop it,” urged the President. “No one is hiring her if I have anything to say about it.”

Those words tied a rope around the throats of the assembled.

Bryce just laughed inwardly, thinking it hilarious that the president of the Philippines was so wound up by a woman almost a third of her age.

And half of yours.

No eyes turned his way yet. Ms. Reed, Herman, and some other employees at Metamatics knew he had a girlfriend, but he wasn’t going to mention that she was the one who interviewed President Atienza. Still, that didn’t stop him from pulling up his wearable’s messaging app in his private augment and sending Janice a quick text.

You crushed it. Don’t ask me how I know, but Atienza is reeling after that.

“She is certainly causing quite the stir so early in her career,” uttered Ms. Reed.

“Her career hasn’t even started,” President Atienza reminded them. “And if I have anything to say about it, it won’t.”

“That’s a little harsh,” Bryce uttered. He paused, looking around and comprehending that the words had just slipped out. “Sorry.”

President Atienza sighed and moved on from the topic—almost. “It’s not this student journalist that upsets me, though,” she said, “but the perception she embodies. It’s reflective of Manila.” She pointed a finger at the table. “You are all ruining my city.”

“Okay,” Liena said, “that is a bit harsh.”

“Agreed,” said Harrison, “if it weren’t for us-”

“If it weren’t for you all, then we’d be better off,” urged the president. “Things would have been stable. Poorer, sure, but stable.”

“Things are going to get worse before they get better,” said Gregory Fernando, the Head of Operations at Delta Reel, who was as old as the president. With aged minds running the company, it was no wonder Delta Reel’s market cap lagged behind the rest of the Giants.

President Atienza drew the whole room in with her Cheshire Cat grin. “That is why I need you all to work together.” She searched the assembled. “Frankly, this should have been done earlier, but seeing as you’ve all been competing with each other and haven’t been doing a very good job at that, I’m imposing some changes.”

Bryce’s spine stiffened as if it alone heard the president’s words.

“From now on,” Atienza continued, “we’re going to require additional accountability from all of you.”

That didn’t sound good.

Atienza straightened. “You’re all familiar with police body cameras, aren’t you?”

Everyone nodded, and Bryce especially. Having grown up in the United States, where body cams were mandatory for front-line police officers, Bryce was used to seeing the videos. Sometimes, they were harrowing rescues or heartwarming reunions with a lost child and their mother. Most of the time, however, they were clips of police brutality in action, feeding the systemic racism narrative.

“It is still not mandatory for all PNP officers to wear body cams,” the president continued. “Since my inception barely a year and a half ago, I was able to increase that number from about 10,000 to 100,000 officers—still only about a third of our police force, but much better.”

Bryce could see where this was going. Atienza would demand that the Giants work closer with law enforcement. To ensure they did, she would push a law that would equip every PNP officer in the country with a body cam. Bryce inferred that about 300,000 PNP officers were employed, according to the numbers the President had just quoted.

Why would this matter for the Giants? Of course, they would be expected to pay for the body cams as compensation for their “association” with the terrorist attacks at Shaw Boulevard station and in Laguna. It was their drones, after all. If the Giants didn’t pay, or even before they made a decision, Atienza would lobby the public for the idea, and the Giants would have no choice but to save face and find the funds.

“We will gladly pay to equip every PNP officer in the country with a body cam,” Harrison Ocomapo said, turning to the other Giants at the table. “Am I right?”

Ms. Reed, Liena Pascual, Gregory Fernando, and the other Heads of Operations—Bryce didn’t bother reading their names—nodded.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

“Don’t interrupt me ever again,” said the president.

The room silenced.

Harrison turned back to her, quieted, then retreated to the cushy confines of his office chair.

“Thank you for your intentions, though,” Atienza continued, “but that is not the plan. Not yet, at least. There are other cases for surveillance.”

Bryce didn’t like where that was going, and he could see from the looks of the Heads that they didn’t either.

Field agents were supposed to act of their own accord. If the PNP could monitor their actions, they would intercept, and no doubt mess up anything the field agent was trying to do, such as locating a malfunctioned or stolen drone or protecting drones from vandals. Plus, it would slow down the entire Black Fire eradication, which made Bryce hate every moment he was in the room. He wanted to get out there and find more pushers. Already, a few of them had escaped.

All the Heads’ bent forward as they anticipated Atienza’s incoming words. They were like leashed tigers, ready to spring forth. If they had their way, they would interrupt the President and derail her train of thought before it ran them over.

But they, too, were wrong about her intentions.

“Starting today,” the President began, “the Philippine government will require all footage from all capture drones to be sent to government servers before being turned over to the streaming giants.” She looked around. “This will ensure that we can closely monitor the actions of all capture drones to protect the Philippine people. If there are cases of misuse, overextending recording boundaries, or unique cases, the Philippine government—in partnership with law enforcement and cybersecurity—will review the footage and determine if criminal charges should be applied.” Atienza leaned back in her chair. “I believe this is a solution that will satisfy everyone.”

If someone had told Bryce that every person in that room had died at that very moment, he would have believed them.

No one spoke. No one blinked. It seemed, too, that no one breathed.

“Any questions?” President Atienza asked, cutting through the silence.

Francesca Thaddius Reed looked at each streaming Giant’s head before entering the president’s firing line. “That,” Ms. Reed said, “is impossible. It’s simply not in our technology. Recordings are not kept on the capture drones.”

“Then you will change that,” said Atienza. “I know you have talented engineers—I’m not stupid. Anything is possible with technology. We will grant some leeway during the window for implementation, but your engineers will be working hard for this, I am sure.” She smiled. “At your expense.”

That last mention was unnecessary—the Giants already knew they would pay for this.

“Do you even have the technology, Your Excellency?” asked Liena Pascual. “We’re talking about petabytes of video transferred per hour. What about the bandwidth? Do you have the processing power to decrypt and re-render that much footage?”

Ms. Pascual tried to catch the president off guard with her technical jargon and practical view of the technical constraints. Bryce estimated she was right on the money, but that was only the beginning of the technical hurdles they’d face.

The mention of the President’s title, too—“Your Excellency”—brought Bryce’s thoughts back to Janice. What would she think of the president striking back behind closed doors—as if the Giants were to blame for the President’s embarrassment?

“We do,” Atienza said simply.

Gregory Fernando’s raised brow could have touched the ceiling. “You do?” He turned to the other Heads as if they could provide him ammunition for the next shot. “That must mean you had anticipated this.”

“Yes, well, this is one of many ways the Philippine government looks out for its people. We live on the backs of our contingency spending. Our country is subject to hundreds of natural disasters every year.”

Bryce thought that implying the Giants were among that collection of natural disasters was bold. Very bold. He wanted to write that quote down and give it to Janice. “You wouldn’t believe what I heard in this top-secret meeting!” he would tell her, and she would laugh.

The thought was the only humor present in the room.

“It’s funny, Your Excellency,” Ms. Reed began, “that you consider raising a surveillance state something that would match your people’s interests.”

“It could be said, Madam Reed,” President Atienza uttered, “that the Philippines is already a surveillance state. It is just one-sided. Your side-”

“We don’t store the footage!” blurted Harrison Ocampo.

“Do. Not. Interrupt. Me!” The president clenched her teeth, pointing at Harrison and making him the locus of her ire. “As I was going to explain, by sending the raw footage—not just the Inspired footage—from your capture drones to the Philippine government, we simply level the playing field. We make things fairer. For too long, things have been unfair in this country. It is the very definition of corruption.”

“They are capture drones,” Liena Pascual uttered under her breath. She shook her head. “Not surveillance drones.”

“They will be both now,” said Atienza.

The President silenced, allowing the room to digest that thought.

Bryce needed a few moments to do the same and consider how such a directive would affect his mission. Spending would need to increase to compensate. Raised prices of subscription tiers? Layoffs to cut down expenses? Ms. Reed wouldn’t pull funding from the Black Fire eradication effort, would she?

Bryce might also lose some of his compensation from the mission. That idea should have stung more than it did, but since the operation began, his concept of money had gone out the window.

You won’t be a field agent forever, he reminded himself. Someday, you’ll have to retire. When that comes, you will wish you had saved every peso.

“Why not outfit the field agents first with body cams, Your Excellency?” Gregory Ocampo asked. “And the PNP officers as well?”

The President adjusted the collar on her tight-fitting shirt. “I was hoping that using the PNP body cams as an example would illustrate how much of a higher priority it is to ensure that your drones are closely monitored. Does that make sense?”

It made perfect sense to Bryce, which is why the idea began to curdle in his stomach.

“As for the earlier comments about a surveillance state,” Atienza said, “ask yourself why we even have body cameras. Is it to monitor the actions of the recorded people? It is, in a way, but not really. More so, it is to monitor the people wearing those cameras.”

The President was starting to sound redundant, or perhaps that was Bryce’s annoyance with the idea and how this woman flexed her power.

Ms. Reed looked down at the table. She was in a corner, as all the Giants were, but she had to ask, “What will the people think?”

It seemed the President had an answer to everything. Maybe her public embarrassment from Janice’s interview had motivated her to be more prepared. Perhaps this was all revenge.

“The people of the Philippines have already given up their public privacy,” said Atienza, “if such a thing is even a concept. However, even in this public world, the Giants still roam free, taking the bits they want. We need to hold you all accountable.” She focused on Ms. Reed. “It’s not that the people have my side; it’s just that they don’t have yours.”

Who could deny that? Bryce had been there in Mandaluyong when the protests began. When Domingo had rescued him from the city, Bryce had gone home and watched the news closely. He had been at the epicenter of that firestorm, and if Domingo hadn’t pulled him out, Bryce would probably have been lynched.

The silence that settled this time was unnerving. It was the same period of introspection children experienced after being scolded by their mothers. The Heads were considering what they had done—or hadn’t done—to allow this predicament and whether they could worm their way out of it.

But Bryce knew there was no escaping a presidential decree.

President Atienza glanced back to her assembled staff, then at the table. “One last thing,” she began, “before I go. Remember that I am doing everything possible to avoid drastic measures. We’ve had two terrorist attacks in a week: one at Shaw Boulevard station and the other in Laguna. If this continues, I will not hesitate to enforce more stringent measures. And under those conditions, I can assure you, Manila will not be a very… Inspiring place.”

No one in the room misunderstood Atienza’s implication. Even after the President left the meeting that day, the Heads of Operations took a few minutes to register the threat.

The Philippines had been under worse circumstances before.

It had been under martial law.