The SUV rattled toward the slums, passing shipping containers and auto-cranes towering overhead.

[Good luck today. Alright?]

Bryce Desmond read the text floating in his private augmented reality. He hesitated, then typed back on a keyboard only he could see:

[Dinner tomorrow. My treat.]

The reply came instantly:

[OK :)]

Bryce’s wearable was a visor the size of those gaming headsets the streamers wore in the early part of the century. It displayed his vitals, his Glock’s targeting AIs status, and materializing now, an aerial shot from a Philippine National Police (PNP) drone.

It showed a nine-kilometer squared area of Tondo, Manila: rusted rooftops, barred windows, and tangled power lines. Mopeds screeched past walkers. Streets too narrow to drive through sliced the slum in grids.

The projection zoomed in on a rectangular portion of this tangle. A street drove through its center, cutting the district in two. It drew a red line on the street and focused on a single house.

“Balagtas Street,” fumed a PNP officer. He sat next to Bryce, one hand on his jittering leg, another adjusting the dials on his own wearable. “Why did it have to be Balagtas Street?”

The aerial footage in Bryce’s augment showed men with AK-47s squatting around cinder block tables, playing cards, or configuring the targeting boxes attached to their AKs. Bandannas and hoodies covered their faces. They looked up just as the video cut out.

“The TURTLE M2 should be somewhere in this area,” said the PNP’s dispatch AI, which Bryce was also connected to. It spoke in a metallic and too-friendly feminine voice. “Visuals incoming.”

The dispatch AI replaced the map of Tondo with the image of twelve Filipinos, scrolling in Bryce’s augment. One was a teenager. One was a woman well past her sixties. Why were these people harboring a TURTLE M2 drone?

The question left Bryce when he reminded himself that the combined value of the capture drone’s components could yield almost 30 million PHP. The lenses that scanned the subjects. The motherboards. The dedicated machine learning chips. The network cards that packaged the captured footage before sending it back to Metamatics. Inspiration demanded processing power. To say the Convergence was expensive was an understatement.

Bryce leaned back in the armored SUV, his Glock ready with EMP darts for the gun’s secondary barrel. Despite the vehicle’s three dozen military-grade AIs, including one that operated the roof-mounted turret that could unleash 8000 rounds a minute, Bryce’s anxiety remained. In Tondo, Manila, anything could go wrong.

The officer beside Bryce, still drilling the floor with his leg, must have shared in the same nauseous foreshadowing. He calmed as he opened a shared augmented reality. Inside it, a samurai riding a dragonfly battled a manta-shaped mech.

“That’s Malacañang Palace,” he said, referring to the Philippine equivalent of the White House. The manta mech crushed the building. “‘Inspired,’ huh? This is crap. Not even authentic to Japan.”

Inspired—the term used by the streaming Giants for any idea taken from Manila to adapt into a TV show.

The scene played out. The samurai thrust forward on jet pack boots and slashed the manta mech square in the chest. Lightning arced across the wound. At the same time, the SUV rocked as if attempting to increase the immersion.

The cop leaned closer. “So, what’s the ending? Come on, I won’t tell anyone. My wife really loves the show. She keeps saying: ‘Go ask the American the ending!’”

“The American.” Bryce Desmond, Field Security Agent at Metamatics, had been in Manila for barely two weeks, and already, the Philippine National Police had assigned him a moniker. He relished the day he would be reassigned and not have to speak to an officer again. “Did you tell her I was born in Bacolod?” Bryce asked.

“City of Smiles.” The strip on the cop’s ballistic vest read BACCAY. He had not answered the question. “You don’t look half Pinoy.”

“My father was an American.” He hoped mentioning “was” would have turned the topic away. But it didn’t.

“Well?” asked Baccay.

Bryce couldn’t blame Baccay or any other officer he had met in his two-week stint in the city. He had been away too long from the Philippines to be considered a native Pinoy ever again. Being Filipino was more about blood, apparently; it was about dedication to your country.

“The field security agents are pretty far removed from the process,” Bryce explained. “It’s not like the old days, where you had showrunners, actors, set designers, and screenplay writers. All of that is AI now. We just protect the drones.”

They passed through an auto-crane’s shadow that was not unlike the elongated hand of a giant permitting them into its domain.

“I know,” said Baccay, “I know. But my wife seems to think you’ve got insider knowledge.” Officer Baccay swiped his hand to rewind the show. The Samurai endeared his mechanical opponent with a speech. “So,” Baccay continued, “do you know anything?”

This was not the first inquiry Bryce had suffered since returning to Manila, as if he had watched every television series Metamatics pumped out, which equated to more than a hundred a month. Bryce could count the number of episodes he watched this year on one hand. Impressions, however, were crucial in Bryce’s line of work. He needed to be close to the action. “It has a happy ending.”

Baccay had forgotten that he never told Bryce which television series he was referring to. The officer minimized the Metamatics streaming app and texted his wife.

[Watch it, Honey. The American says it’s good.]

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Again, “the American.” Being 6’4 placed him well out of the typical Filipino height stratum, though, and it didn’t help that Bryce’s pigmentation took a page from his father’s book, white as a candle and burning just as easily.

The PNP’s dispatch AI beamed an image of the TURTLE M2. Resembling its namesake reptile with four legs, it was larger than even the SUV. If you carved the drone’s innards out, you could easily fit twenty people inside. Only a few houses along Balagtas Street could hold the TURTLE.

So, the most challenging part wouldn’t be finding it but getting to it.

“Any force necessary,” said the AI.

They halted where the streets of Lualhati and Lakandula collided. Five more SUVs formed a circle around the intersection, leaving space for a sixth. The officers piled out, raising their ARG rifles to rooftops. Sirens blared. Drones like circular Rubik’s cubes hovered and danced above, and for a split second, Bryce felt he was at the raves again during the Caltech exam seasons. The drones lifted high, spun, and etched a CAUTION tape dome into the sky, flickering as the projected construction closed around Balagtas Street.

The PNP drones whirred past above their heads, their Gatling turrets already whirring, primed to fire. They shined hulking searchlights on the rooftops, illuminating women holding babies and a man with an EMP-augmented AK-47 trained on the circle of SUVs.

Before the first PNP drone could turn, Bryce raised his Glock, switched to the EMP dart, and fired somewhere in the direction of the assailant’s shoulder. Assisted by his Glock’s targeting AI, the shot hit home, clipping the shooter’s auto-targeter attachment. The gun flew out of his hand. He ran, pushing inside the house, the PNP drones fluttering after him.

Bestowing the title of ‘street’ upon Balagtas was gracious. Bryce could touch the walls of houses on both sides as he walked. Gates fenced in districts. Old bicycles were pushed into piles. Mopeds sped past, but at the PNP’s approach—their riders lit in bumblebee patterns by the black and yellow caution tape above—halted and turned back.

Curious heads pressed to window bars. An old woman pointed to the officers shuffling down the street, Bryce in tow. One of them looked at her, and she screamed something in Ilocano or Cebuano, the regional languages of northern Luzon and the Visayas, respectively. Bryce didn’t know. Bryce didn’t know so much about his home country anymore.

Officer Baccay picked a house and rapped on the door. When it didn’t open, he kicked it down.

Two men, in the middle of dinner, threw themselves to the ground and lay on their stomachs. Two more officers walked in and peered behind curtained rooms, rousing awake a woman on a sleeping mat. Bryce, too, checked inside, searching not for bodies or weapons but for the hum of running drones. He couldn’t hear anything. Yet.

The rest of the crowded alley followed suit, vendors behind their food stalls toppling their wares. A woman tried to close the window to her sari-sari store, but one of the officers smashed the butt of his rifle against the lowering tin panel. The woman crouched behind the counter and yelped.

Bryce’s wearable beeped. A map of Tondo appeared, superimposed over the side of a house. It showed a collection of dots shooting down Balagtas Street. A whirring came behind him.

“Putang ina!” cursed an officer in Tagalog. “They’re already here.”

Bryce recognized the Q-96 instantly. The size of a beach ball, it bounced through the alley like a rave crowd had tossed it. Four smaller Q-95s followed, marked by logos from CinSurround, Intervid, Delta Reel, and Seoul Crystal Studios. Though identical, they kept their distance from the officers, knowing good fiction when they saw it.

The Q-96 hovered in front of Bryce, capturing every moment. Through its cyclopean eye, he saw the route fiction would take: footage uploaded to Metamatics, scored for originality, fed into inspiration engines that generated a premise, then scripted, and brought to life by AIs building sets and actors. In a month, Bryce would see a rendering of himself and the other cops in Tondo—or maybe stalking the streets of a distant planet, his confusion captured perfectly. A stranger in a strange land.

The drones passed him, losing interest and hovering behind a trio of officers as one kicked down another door. “Down!” screamed one. “Everyone on your fucking stomachs, or I’ll shoot you!”

The process repeated: break the door, pull out the inhabitants, scream something. Bryce entered every house, trained his ears to the walls and floors, and searched for the garage-sized space it would take to store the TURTLE M2. He came up short every time.

The officers plowed through the homes, pulling out adults and children without discrimination and dragging them to vans parked at the mouth of the street. The capture drones claimed front-row seats, buzzing around and watching everything.

An officer finished tying up a man old enough to be Bryce’s father if he were still alive.

“It’s not here,” Bryce said, convinced now. “Maybe they moved it.”

The officer looked up and raised his rifle. He would have fired if a shot hadn’t rang out and crumpled his face.

Blood sprayed Bryce’s face as more shots riddled the alley. An officer fell, groaning as he reached for his hip. Bryce darted behind a wall for cover. When the shooter paused to reload, Bryce bolted through a gate toward a closing front door.

“Out!” he barked. “Hurry the fuck up!”

The door hung open a bit. They must not have heard him over the shots.

Something steel and long poked out. A gun barrel.

Bryce didn’t wait and fired into the gap.

Blood sprayed as the man fell back, his hoodie and bandanna crumpling. A capture drone buzzed behind Bryce, recording it all.

A woman huddled with her baby behind a toppled couch. She backed away into a corner. Bryce held a hand up. He must have looked like a cop now.

Another shot rang out, this one closer, right above him.

Bryce brought a finger to his lips and crept up the stairs to the second floor. There, he found a shooter with his back turned, aiming an assault rifle on the alley below and firing off two quick bursts.

The shooter then crouched, distracted by his phone. Portraits of faces flashed across the screen. A wave of shock and disbelief hit Bryce as he watched the shooter flick through images—until Bryce’s own face appeared on the screen.

It wasn’t a mugshot from his LinkedIn or something pulled from the Web. It was a selfie.

The shooter finally noticed Bryce’s shadow and spun around, raising his gun. His hands shook, the gun trembling as his eyes widened in shock.

A roar filled the room, and the wall ripped apart.

The shooter flew forward, his torso and legs launching in different directions. It took Bryce a moment to realize what had just happened.

Outside, a PNP drone with a long 50 caliber barrel hovered just above the street, a swarm of Gatling-wielding brethren protecting it.

Shouts, wails, and sirens filled the alley. Someone called for their mother.

In the lull, still coming down from the confusion of seeing himself on some stranger’s phone, Bryce continued searching every room in the house.

He found two children next to a man sprawled on a mattress. He yelled for them to leave, but they didn’t, instead screaming something in Bisaya or some other Philippine dialect. Bryce nudged the man with his boot, but he didn’t move.

The man held a vape in one hand. He was breathing but unconscious. The rise and fall of his chest could have been the bobbing of sea waves before a torrential storm. Maybe not all storms were at sea.

Something flicked within Bryce. He stared at the near-comatose man. He told the children again to leave, and they did.

Bryce knelt, examining not the body but the vape, and opened a scraping app on his wearable that could detect video feeds from local devices. He pointed his wearable towards the vape, and the app’s video feed turned to television static.

Familiar sensations stirred—the flicker of an engineered high. He leaned closer, expecting swirling colors or darkness. Instead, a scene unfolded. Kung-fu fighters balanced on bamboo scaffolding, kicking each other as they faced off. Beside them, like a ghost, floated the man on the mattress, watching the fight from another world.

Bryce heard none of the officers pulling the suspects from Balagtas Street, only the crunch as the Kung-fu protagonist fell from a tall building and lay still.

Bryce also heard, further off, words shouted in one ear, a synth-powered dubstep drop, the cries of seagulls, and a girl with red hair.