Reggie gazed at the employment contract sitting on the desk before him.

“Can I at least read through it?” he asked.

“Sure,” said the tall field agent. He slid the stapled paper over. “Everything is as promised.

Reggie double-checked the salary, the pension, and the fine print that could negate the field agent’s promises to him. He tried to find loopholes in the legalese, but law wasn’t his major. He came up short.

“It’s all yours,” said Bryce Desmond. “I just need to know more about them.”

Them. His friends whom he had been scraping with for years. He would be lying if he said it was his first crew, but it was undoubtedly the one he stayed with the longest. Shay, Jayson, and, of course, Andrei. He would never forget that man and how he had thrown him to the dogs.

The broad-shouldered and robust Mr. Desmond must have thought he was stoic. But Andrei didn’t like those kinds of foreigners, even if this man was half-half. He looked like he had been rolled down a hill his whole life and was only just now getting up. Did he even shower?

Mr. Desmond puffed something that could have been relief or mocking surprise. “Three of them?”

Reggie nodded.

Mr. Desmond tapped a pen on the paper. “Just need their names and a brief description. Also, how you know them.”

Reggie could only extend this charade so far. Ever since Bryce had taken him from the car park (because of his stupidity), Reggie had taken the long, slow approach with everything, retaliating through delay without being thrown into that form of solitary confinement Metamatics created for him.

He remembered that black, formless place where he couldn’t even breathe. Deep inside Metamatics, the company had created a prison within Black Fire. It set an awful precedence, and if the world didn’t know about the company’s twisted experiment, they should.

“Well,” Reggie said. “Well…” He dragged out the word, trying to stall again. Anything to keep his friends alive out there. But he couldn’t do this forever. “Well, there’s Shay,” Reggie started. “She’s our voice of reason. I wonder sometimes why she’s even with us.” He spoke in the present tense as if his friends were alongside him.

Mr. Desmond only nodded, not bothering to scribble anything in his private augment. Reggie had already counted three supposedly masked recording lights throughout the room: one in place of a bolt underneath the light switch near the front door, a second inside the table itself, and a third right underneath the smoke detector. He guessed there were four times that many, not to mention Mr. Desmond’s own vintage wearable resting on his neck, too thick for any practical use.

“That’s one,” Mr. Desmond said. “Who else?”

He breathed out. “Jayson,” he said. “He’s our leader and kind of the reason we’re all in this.”

Mr. Desmond raised an eyebrow.

Reggie didn’t have to say everything—just what Mr. Desmond wanted to hear. “He found us a spot in all this.”

The answer was truthful enough that it satisfied Bryce but also sufficiently vague for Reggie to hold something back later.

“You said three,” Mr. Desmond repeated. “That was two.”

There was really no chance of extending this anymore. Reggie had to tell him. If he didn't, Mr. Desmond might employ that Glock holstered on his waist. Reggie knew it was a Glock because Andrei had let him fire one on their first date. He still remembered how he had laughed after feeling the aftershocks of the blast behind his fingertips.

“Andrei-” Reggie stuttered as he got it out. “Big guy. Tattoos. Likes guns.”

“He knows how to use them?”

Reggie only nodded.

Mr. Desmond twirled the pen in his fingers, and Reggie was surprised the man could handle it. It seemed that his hands were the size of an orangutan’s.

Mr. Desmond smiled and handed the pen over.

“No digital signatures?” Reggie asked. “Are you all that far behind?”

“We’re not doing this because it’s our only option,” said Mr. Desmond. “We’re doing it because we don’t trust you.”

Reggie hoped they eventually would. He would need that for what would come next.

As if it had been listening, something from Reggie’s ankle beeped. He went to scratch his leg instinctively and felt the hard plastic of an electronic ankle tag worn right over his socks. If he stepped out of the Metamatics headquarters anytime soon, it would buzz and alert every field agent in the company to his escape.

He signed the contract.

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

“Herman Colose,” said the fat software engineer, “you’ll be under me for a while, young man.”

Mr. Colose looked like he would crush anyone “under” him—literally. “Pleasure, sir.”

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“You know, that’s why I like hiring Filipinos. You’re all so respectful. And you don’t complain. You never complain.”

Reggie rolled his eyes inwardly. The next thing you’re going to say is that you have a Filipina girlfriend or nanny.

“I dated a few Filipinas before. They’re just like that—very respectful. Very demure. Maria Claras, you know?”

Reggie doubted Mr. Colose knew that Maria Clara was a fictional character in a novel written by the nation’s national hero. Reggie also doubted any person—man or woman—would spend time with Mr. Colose in any romantic capacity. Reggie had no interest in being the man’s friend and barely a coworker.

However, the employment contract made it abundantly clear to Reggie which division of Metamatics he would work in. That was the first part.

“So,” Mr. Colose began, “you’re interested in drones?”

Reggie nodded. “I’ve been deeply interested in them since studying at my alma mater.”

“‘Alma’ what? Anyway, that’s cool. R&D is pumping out a dozen prototypes this fiscal quarter, but unfortunately, you won’t be working on those.”

Reggie thought telling someone first what they wouldn’t be working on was a bit unprofessional. “So what have we got, then?” he asked.

“A huge directive just came in from Malakaning.”

“Malacañang Palace?” Reggie asked, correcting the pronunciation.

“Yeah, sure. The President wants all raw footage sent to their servers before we retrieve it.”

Reggie knew this already.

His confinement with Metamatics had been comfortable yet isolating. He still had access to a television that looped GMA News 24 hours a day, which was more than he could stomach in any other circumstance. In this one, he glued himself to it, looking for signs that Shay, Jayson, and Andrei were still out there.

Then again, as he thought, no news was good news. It was selfish to want to know how his friends were doing, but they probably thought he was dead, too. Reggie knew he hadn’t left a trace after Mr. Desmond took him to Metamatics. His friends wouldn’t be able to find him.

But could Reggie find them?

“We don’t have the systems for the President’s demands,” Mr. Colose continued. “We need new network cards built and programmed—all in-house. Well, in the Giants’ house.”

Reggie paused. “What does that mean? ‘The Giants’’ house?’”

Mr. Colose caught his breath against the empty tower where an enormous computer tower would be as if he had just run a marathon. “It means we’re working closely with the other Giants to meet the requirements for every drone—regardless of who owns them. If even one of us doesn’t reach the quota, we all have to pay an equal fee.”

Wow. Reggie had to tip his hat to President Atienza. That was one way to get the Giants to follow the directive.

He cracked his figurative knuckles. “I’m ready.”

Mr. Colose performed the handoff, assigning Reggie to a team of other hardware engineering interns who were all University of the Philippines graduates. They all assumed he was as well, and he didn’t correct them.

Joining this new team gave Reggie more freedom than when he was locked in a Metamatics board room for days, but he wasn’t sure how much he should divulge about his true self.

So, just like joining the scrapers, Reggie said his name was Reggie and that he was here to “get shit done.”

That hard-boiled conscientiousness, coupled with his Ilocano work ethic, drove him on through the afternoon as the team pulled apart prototype Q-95s and Q-96s in their labs, removing the chips so they could test code on them directly. The Philippine Government’s servers were archaic, and it took much longer than Metamatics wanted for the new network cards to stream the data. Without being able to change the cards themselves in time to meet the quota, the Metamatics engineers had to jump through hoops, rewriting kernel-level subroutines to force the network cards to send data 24/7.

“Open protocols,” Colose said, seeing the drastic code changes in the team’s repository and approving them. “Everything is open. Just send the footage and let the government worry about parsing it. I’m telling you, even if they have the servers to store all this stuff, it will fill up in a week if they don’t have a proper data retention plan. We’re going to be hearing from them again.”

Reggie had been thrust into these unique situations during his undergrad, but nothing quite like this, and it helped to be paid for his effort. He had taken several unpaid positions at different failing startups in Manila. When those initiatives crumbled, he could always step away.

Now, unable to go anywhere else, he should have felt chained to his work. Instead, he was elated. He pressed his entire mind and body into his tasks, thinking of his first paycheck and his friends still running for their lives.

“Quite the first day!” Mr. Colose said. Midnight had passed, and only a handful of engineers—including himself—were left in the labs. “Want to try the navigation tests now?”

Reggie had been waiting for this, purposefully staying later than the quality assurance staff, who he noticed tended to leave even while there was still work. “How do we do that?” he asked.

Mr. Colose showed him the consoles designed explicitly for the task. All the other hardware engineers were too engrossed in their chips to admit they didn’t want to test their code. Leave it up to the Day One intern to do the grunt work.

“Use this to steer the thing,” said Mr. Colose, wrapping his hand around the joystick.

The console’s screen looked through the eyes of what Reggie guessed was a standard Q-95 model, hovering somewhere in a derelict subdivision—probably Tondo. As Mr. Colose turned the joystick, the drone turned as well.

“It’s pretty sensitive,” the overweight software engineer continued, “so go easy on it. We’ll upload the networking code, and you follow the test cases. Got it?”

“Got it,” Reggie nodded.

He waited for Herman to leave before testing out the flight capabilities.

There was a delay that he had to get used to; it took about a second for the joystick’s movement to register and move the drone itself. There were also buttons beside the joystick that Mr. Colose hadn’t told him were for. Their only labels were symbols.

Two of them, a left and right arrow, interested him the most.

Reggie clicked the left arrow, and the camera blinked out. He thought he had messed everything up until the screen activated again, showing a different perspective of a capture drone looking towards an alley, where a boy squatted atop a piece of cardboard laid flat out.

Reggie received the test cases minutes later, switching back to the first drone only to perform the tests.

Mr. Colose didn’t notice anything, nor did he question leaving Reggie alone with the console and the ability to steer any number of drones he wished.

He wouldn’t overdo it, though. Just because none of the engineers noticed didn’t mean there wouldn’t be someone in support watching the movement logs of these drones and checking for anomalies.

So, like a tiptoeing child thinking of his friends escaping into the night and wishing to join them, Reggie flew on.