Bryce barged into the software engineering lab at Metamatics, the door crashing open behind him.

Herman flinched. “Holy hell, man! Ever heard of knocking?” He swiveled his chair to face Bryce. “Do you even sleep?”

Maybe it was the artificial buzz from the Red Bull Bryce had chugged on the way over, or the lingering guilt from swiping his girlfriend’s phone, but he shook his head. “Only when the job’s done.

Would they ever be?

“That mindset, my friend, will give you an aneurysm in ten years. Trust me, it happened to my uncle.” Herman cracked open another Red Bull, adding to the commune of cans on his desk. “So, what’s the crisis this time?”

Bryce huffed, pulling out Janice’s cell phone. “I need you to crack this open.”

Herman took the phone, dangling it like a dead house gecko. “Care to tell me why, Bryce? Or should I bill this to Ms. Reed’s cost center and keep it vague? You know, with the probe, they’re watching me closely, too.”

Bryce was still catching his breath from the sprint up to the office. “Just do it, man. It might link us to the Black Fire pushers.” He filled Herman in on Reggie’s interview and how the kid had mentioned a guy named Jayson.

“Might?” Herman raised an eyebrow. “So we’re going on a hunch?”

“Meanwhile, start pulling up everyone in Manila named Jayson. There must be... what, thousands?”

“At least.” Herman peered over his desk. That he was using a workstation PC at all meant the work he was doing probably required a lot of computing power.

Bryce followed Herman’s gaze to another workstation across the lab. In front of it, Reggie sat, headphones on, focused on one of the drone terminals.

“We got him doing quality assurance,” Herman said. “He’s pretty focused on his test cases, but we better not do this here. Come on.”

Herman led Bryce down the hall to a smaller lab with a single desk, a rack of Metamatics-issued wearables, and a couch long enough for Bryce to lie on. Exhausted, Bryce had to resist the urge to collapse on it.

“Have a seat, King Desmond, of the Drones,” said Herman, nodding outside the lab where the Q-90 pigeon drones fluttered. The other Metamatics employees had grown used to the sight, but Herman never missed a chance to tease him about it.

“Sounds awful,” Bryce muttered.

The albularyo would want Bryce to share the chika, gossiping about what happened tonight. That was the Filipino side of the AI coming out. From the looks the Q-90s gave him, they seemed ready to burst through the glass into the lab. He let them in any way.

He opened the door, and they stacked up in a tower formation in the corner.

“Nice of them to not occupy so much horizontal space,” uttered Herman, nodding at the totem pole Q-90s. He clacked the keys on the lab’s only PC and brought up a command line. From it, he accessed a web browser, typed in a URL on the company’s intranet, and pulled up a page of instructions. He turned to the phone, then to Bryce. “What?”

“You just look up instructions?”

“That’s all programming is these days. You lean on the collective knowledge of your peers. Every problem’s been solved before—you just need to know how to ask.”

Bryce, admittedly, did that as well during his early field training days at Metamatics, even relying on chatbots to create adequate code. He may not have graduated without the technique.

Herman studied the phone. “What exactly am I looking for?”

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“Location data,” said Bryce. “I need to know where this phone has been in… say… the last month.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say so?” Herman turned the phone over. “It’s an Arial Engines G-67-X, so they’ve got not just one but two dedicated Geolocation chips.”

Bryce frowned. “Why would you need two?”

“It’s usually meant for hikers. North American brand.”

“Interesting.” What would Janice be doing with a phone from NA?

Herman found a box inside a drawer next to the terminal and opened it. From it, he produced what looked like a lockpick tool, only with a sharper edge. “It was a huge security flaw. The chips, I mean, because their kernels couldn’t be updated after rolling them out. Arial Engines did a recall, but, you know, the defunct models still sold for cheap.”

Bryce folded his arms, watching Herman pry open the back of the phone. “So?”

“So whoever owned this phone likely bought it secondhand.”

Thoughts began to converge in Bryce’s head. “Maybe someone poor, then.”

“Nah, actually, quite the contrary. These things have grown in value because of the flaw. You can do some pretty weird things with them.”

Herman’s analysis only made it stranger that Janice would own such a phone.

“Strange things like?” Bryce asked.

“Like spoofing fake locations on the OS, so all the metadata in your photos and apps would point to somewhere you were not.”

Things started to make sense in a way Bryce didn’t want to. He began to consider the ramifications of dating the sister of a Black Fire pusher.

“Where did you get this anyways?” asked Herman.

“From a pusher.” The lie flowed out of Bryce—he had been rehearsing it in the Grab on the way to the office.

“The strong-arm Bryce Desmond,” Herman mocked. With a surgeon’s gentle touch, he pried the phone’s back panel off. He carefully lifted the battery out, then produced a hair-thin pair of tongs from the toolkit. Using them, he extracted a tiny chip from the phone's interior. “Small bastard, isn’t it? Hand me that adapter.”

Bryce found the device in the toolkit—a USB adapter with a slot for what looked like flash memory.

Herman inserted the chip into the slot, connected the adapter to his PC, and brought up a scripting window. He typed in a few commands and asked, “The last month?”

“Yeah.”

Herman typed something in. “Damn, it’s unencrypted too.” He read more. “Down to a kilometer’s precision, looks like, but it’s good enough.” He scrolled through comma-separated lists of what seemed to be coordinates and timestamps. “You want something usable like a Google Map overlay or something?”

Bryce didn’t hear Herman over the connecting hum as he dialed Ms. Reed’s number on his wearable.

She picked up after the third ring. “You bastard, Bryce,” she croaked. “It’s Friday night.”

“You sound like it’s Saturday morning,” Bryce quipped. “Been drinking?”

“Even I need to celebrate sometimes.” In the background, Jen & Jen played, the same song from Ayala Triangle Station. “You’re in the office? Nevermind. Of course, you’re in the office.”

Bryce tried to tune out the music while subduing his thoughts of Janice. He had to get used to the idea that she would ignore him after this. “I need your approval for something,” he asked Ms. Reed.

“Hold on, let me draft an email to the CSO.” She made clicking sounds, mimicking a keyboard. “What is it?”

“Do we still have some Black Fire cartridges?” he wondered, having run out of the stuff himself.

This sobered Ms. Reed up. “Why?” she asked, in perfect, unaccented English. “Want to take a break in the Black?”

“Just want to do some analysis,” Bryce said, keeping the explanation brief. Ms. Reed still didn’t know the albularyo had been taking him under its wing. He knew the AI would likely interrupt any show he tried to watch with Black Fire, so the cartridge didn’t matter.

Herman followed the directions to a locker on the same floor, keyed in a code Ms. Reed had told him and returned to the lab with a Black Fire cartridge.

Herman watched him come in and sighed. “Am I to play babysitter again while you go under?” he asked.

Even Bryce could see the gyrating drones and their excitement as he lay on the couch, loaded the vape, and prepared to inhale.

“By the way,” he uttered so that both Ms. Reed and Herman could hear, “she’s kind of taken a liking to me.” He looked to Herman. “I’m going to need you to connect to this stitching session and feed me the coordinates.”

Herman nodded, not bothering to question why. “Anything for Ms. Reed’s cost center.”

Bryce got one last look at the Q-90 drone hovering above him before he went under.