Manila bled with starlight that night.

From the view in Metamatics Makati, Bryce Desmond thought about taking a picture as he watched the running lights of the capture drones whooshing between the glass skyscrapers surrounding the district, honing in on the interesting and the inspiring. The banks and finance center crowds of the 9-5 gave way to the club-dwelling, bar-hopping Ibiza fiends. Above them, the streaming Giants were restless. In fact, they never slept.

“It hasn’t bothered you recently, has it?” asked Francesca Thaddius Reed.

The woman was almost as tall as Bryce but was around 15 years younger. Her thirtieth birthday was fast approaching, but her relatively young age didn’t stop her from assuming Metamatics’s Head of Operations position in Manila.

“Hasn’t said a damn word,” Bryce said. “Not in six months or so. Right after the Laguna raid.”

Bryce had been thinking about that event every day since it occurred. He had joined the Black Fire raid that eventually took the life of its principal operator, Esmeralda Bernal. The woman had held two hundred hostages: Black Fire testers, the vast majority of whom had been saved. Still, there had been a lot of deaths that day.

“Any idea why?” Ms. Reed asked, standing next to Bryce.

He shook his head, feeling the weight of the woman’s questions pressing down on him. He’d rather be anywhere else than back in the company he had belonged to for over twenty years. Now in his mid-forties and with enough money to travel the world for the rest of his life, he had better things to do.

“Why are you asking?” Bryce said, taking a seat on one of Ms. Reed’s swiveling pod chairs in her office.

“Because,” said another voice, “we think it’s hiding.”

The third speaker was a man in a gray suit. He looked identical to the time Bryce had seen him more than six months ago when he had said he was sent from the Philippine government’s National Bureau of Investigation. He had come out of nowhere back then, handing Bryce an experimental assault rifle that Bryce ended up using during a Black Fire dispensary crackdown, only for it to be promptly taken away. He wanted to ask about that as well. He missed the weapon’s power in his grip, its lack of kickback, and its strange new tech. Its nanobot tracer rounds sought out targets even if he missed.

“Hiding?” Bryce asked. Then, he thought about it. “I guess that makes sense, considering she is wearing a body camera on each of her ten thousand bodies.”

“11.5K bodies, as our last estimate,” said Gray Man.

Bryce shrugged. “I never even got your name, you know. You kinda just… showed up and fucked off.”

The Gray Man smirked. “Isaiah,” he said, and nothing more.

Bryce frowned at the dismissive undertone. “So you are with the NBI?”

“R&D.”

Bryce took a moment to process the meaning of that. “Really?” he asked. “With Metamatics? Then how come I’ve never seen you around?”

“When’s the last time you ever met anyone from R&D?”

That was a difficult point to argue against. In over twenty years with Metamatics, Bryce had never met anyone who worked in its Research and Development division. That whole segment of the company always seemed like an elusive code name or a concept for a thing that didn’t exist. Despite that, Metamatics constantly innovated.

More questions plagued Bryce. “Why did you give me the gun, then?” He smirked. “I liked that thing. I want it back.”

“We’ll arrange that,” said Ms. Reed. She swiped her hand, likely throwing a request from her private augmented reality to Isaiah’s, officiating the request. “But we can worry about it later. For now, we need to talk about it.”

It. Her. The albularyo. The latter term was what the AI prescribed to itself. Even calling the thing AI seemed inadequate. It was more like a digital entity, following Bryce around six months ago, before the Black Fire raid. It had watched his every move, orchestrating events and even protecting him. Jokingly, it had assigned him as its champion, its paragon. He just played along as it took him closer to the Black Fire pushers.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can tell you,” Bryce said, “seeing as she’s ghosting me.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” said Ms. Reed, looking away. “It hasn’t contacted us either.”

Bryce frowned. “Did it ever?”

Isaiah and Ms. Reed shared a look. The man cleared his throat, but Ms. Reed took up the words. “She’s ours.”

The floor in the office could have fallen out at that moment, and Bryce wouldn’t have been surprised. He stared at Ms. Reed, unsure if he heard the words correctly. “‘Ours?’”

“R&D’s creation, specifically,” said Isaiah.

Bryce stared off. “What the hell?”

“I know,” said Isaiah. “It’s kind of confusing. But, really, it began as an early stage autonomous Inspiration AI that would bring the process full circle autonomously. Technically, it still is, but it has since populated, grown, and become something a lot more.”

Bryce tried to comprehend all of this. “You said you didn’t know who created it,” he told Ms. Reed.

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“I know,” she said, “and I’m sorry, but I didn’t want to risk upsetting the thing. Believe it or not, I think you acted more rationally than that thing. It didn’t seem to want to hurt you, either, so we just… observed it.” She looked at Isaiah as she said it.

“Which is why we’re concerned that it’s not speaking to you,” Isaiah added. “It has, as you’ve seen, immense capabilities.”

Bryce’s leg started to jitter. He stilled it but could not contain the words bubbling up inside him. “You’re all in deep shit. You know that?”

Ms. Reed winced. “Bryce, I still consider you part of the Metamatics family. Don’t you feel the same way?”

“Not really.”

“Is that so?” Ms. Reed leaned forward. “So, why haven’t you left the Philippines already?”

“I…” He paused. His payout had been enough. He could fly to any country he wanted and buy a comfortable home. He didn’t have to work another day in his life. “Well… maybe I should have.”

“Hmm.” Ms. Reed sat back. “You should feel some obligation towards me, Bryce. I made you rich.”

“And I brought down a drug empire for you.” As soon as he said it, though, his words fell flat. “It is gone, right?”

Isaiah exhaled. “For the most part, but there are still concentrations of it. Regardless, the albularyo doesn’t seem to care very much for it. She seems to be… disassociating herself from it.”

Bryce had told Ms. Reed that Black Fire wouldn’t vanish so quickly. It would take more than decapitating one head of the hydra to put it down.

“Let me guess,” Bryce said, putting a finger up. “The albularyo is running away. You can’t find the damn thing anymore, so that’s pissing you off. You’ve tried dropping Black Fire to return to its domain, but it’s not biting.” He remembered joining the albularyo’s engineered version of Manila, accessible only through Black Fire. “So, you can’t predict what it will do, which scares the shit out of you. Your digital footprint is all over it, after all, right?”

“We’ve buried it deep,” said Isaiah, dipping his head. “But… yes, that’s a risk.”

Ms. Reed prattled her fingers on her leg. “We’re already noticing some disturbing trends.”

Bryce perked up.

Before he could ask more, Ms. Reed opened up her private augment and presented what looked like a satellite view of Metro Manila. It zoomed out far enough to encompass all its sixteen cities. As Bryce squinted to examine the detail, tiny red dots started to blink into existence.

“These are all of our capture drones,” said Ms. Reed. “About 8,000 in Metro Manila right now.”

“Hold on,” Bryce said, doing the math and turning to Isaiah. “8,000? That’s… what? 3.5K less than the 11.5K you mentioned before?”

“It appears you are capable of sixth-grade mathematics,” said Isaiah, tilting his head to the projection.

As Bryce turned back to the map, he found more dots beyond the outskirts of Manila, with clouds concentrating around Baguio to the north and Cebu City and Iloilo City to the south. Mindanao, he noticed, was untouched. He wondered how long that would last.

It wasn’t uncommon to have some drones leading outside Metro Manila. Taal, for example, was a pretty Inspiring place. But, drones flying outside the city’s limits were generally frowned upon. He’d only been away for six months, but it seemed the entire coverage of the Giants in the Philippines was changing.

“What’s Malacañang saying about all this?” Bryce asked.

“Surprisingly little,” uttered Ms. Reed in a dismissive tone. “But watch.”

The map switched to the point of view of a capture drone, Bryce could tell. Only, maybe it wasn’t that. The curvature of the lens was correct, as were the indicators in the heads-up display, but the buildings below the drone were way too small.

“That’s way too high,” Bryce uttered out of instinct.

“We know,” said Isaiah. “We didn’t tell it to go there. It’s way out of our flight patterns.”

“It’s not the only one,” said Ms. Reed, as she flicked through other perspectives. She stopped on one drone, whose vision was obscured as it rose.

“Holy,” Bryce murmured. “That one’s in the fucking clouds.”

“Keep watching.”

He did, and as the feed played on, more capture drones ascended into the clouds, right into the observer’s point of view. They swarmed around the sky, looking aimless, searching for nothing in particular.

“What the hell could Inspire them up there?” Bryce asked. “There’s nothing but birds and clouds.” He thought about it. “I guess the view is nice.”

“It’s too high to get an idea of what’s going on below,” said Isaiah. “Our cameras don’t extend that far.”

Bryce squinted. “So?”

“So, we don’t know. We were hoping you could tell us.”

Bryce tried to comprehend what fascination the albularyo would have in the skies. “Maybe she’s just testing her capabilities.”

“Pushing our buttons, more like,” said Ms. Reed. “Seeing how much it can get away with.”

“And is it getting away with anything?” Bryce asked.

“Oh no. Our compliance division is riding my ass right now. I’m on conference calls with Malacañang daily, literally telling them that we’re trying our best to pull the leashes of our drones back, but we can only reach so far.”

Bryce found the gray-suited man. “Maybe not ‘pushing buttons,” then, but probing weaknesses.” He pointed at the projection. “You’re telling me these things are going out of range of us?”

“Just about,” said Ms. Reed. She looked outside the office, swiveling her chair away from Bryce and Isaiah. “We’ve already lost a few.”

Bryce looked between the two. “Lost?” he asked. “How the fuck?”

“My only guess is that the albularyo has made connections through other hardware,” Isaiah explained. “Maybe telecom towers, or private networks with their own hardware. A few places in the Philippines have that.”

The ramifications of all this were too much for Bryce. “Why did you even think about creating something that can move across networks? You realize how dumb that is?”

“Believe me, if we could rewind time and contain this thing, we would.”

Bryce ran a hand through his hair, trying to comprehend the lengths the albularyo would go. Though, as he thought about it, and his time spent with the AI, her motivations seemed to quell the reach Ms. Reed and Isaiah perceived of it. Back then, the albularyo seemed more like a storyteller, pulling the strings around Bryce to tell an exciting story. If the AI wanted something more than that, what could it possibly be?

Ms. Reed swiveled her chair back over. “If I could rewind time as well,” she began, “then I wouldn’t have paid you enough to leave this fucking country, Bryce. But I did, and I know there isn’t any sum you’ll take to bring this on.” She sighed. “But I want the albularyo reigned in. We can’t have it running around like a bull from its pen.”

Bryce huffed. “Well, you’re right about the money. I said it before, and I’ll repeat it: you guys are royally fucked.”

“You are absolutely right,” said Isaiah.

The air conditioner units inside Ms. Reed’s office hummed. Bryce’s leg drilled the floor. There was no other sound.

“You’re right,” Isaiah said again. “We are… fucked. That’s it. If we don’t contain this, we’ll have to come out with our failures and tell the world.” He paused. “But it might not just be us who is in trouble.” He pointed at the projection.

Bryce tried to process the reality that Metamatics hadn’t gone public with the albularyo’s complications. As he was about to voice his concerns, he followed Isaiah’s pointing finger back to the video feed.

The drone had been swiveling around during the video, looking down at Manila. That changed when Bryce watched the camera pan to the right, across a clear sky, and towards an aircraft’s contrail. The stream of four vaporous lines hung in the air, marking the path the airplane took. The drone centered on them.

Bryce froze.

“I know money won’t make much of a difference,” said Ms. Reed, “but I’ll offer it anyway.”

Ms. Reed named a figure, and some other bonuses, but Bryce didn’t remember any of them. He could only stare at the line of jet contrails as they hung in the air, wondering why a capture drone would be so fascinated with them.