“Nineteen officers dead, thirteen wounded, only eight unscathed.” Gabriel Marcello, Chief of the Philippine National Police, pointed a shaking finger at Bryce Desmond. “And your field security agent survived?”

Opposite him at the boardroom table, Gabriel glared at Bryce before directing his ire upon a woman sitting at its head.

Francesca Thaddius Reed—known by the Economist and Bloomberg and every Philippine news outlet as “Ms. Reed”—absorbed Gabriel’s anger. The 29-year-old management wunderkind was over six feet tall, the genes of her American father overshadowing her Filipino mother. She was Metamatics’s Head of Operations in Manila, and she never let anyone forget it.

“Our agents went through the harshest training for the Convergence,” said Ms. Reed. “We consulted police officers, military and Navy SEALs.”

That last group was a stretch. Ms. Reed didn’t elaborate, which was probably a good thing.

“And you don’t think I do that with my officers?” asked Gabriel Marcello. “They were some of my best.”

“And yet, here we are.” Ms. Reed shrugged. Her complexion sat in that middle zone between caramel and cream. Her sharp nose—inherited from her father—now served as a prodding sword. “Maybe they knew you were coming.”

“Because your fucking capture drones gave our position away!” The police chief slammed the table. “You told us to go after that fucking TURTLE M2!” Gabriel could have pulled out his hair. “This harvest is ruining my city!”

Bryce remembered vividly the drones flooding down Balagtas Street before everything went to shit. Despite this reality, the Metamatics side of the room went quiet. “Harvest” was local slang for the Inspiration Convergence.

Ms. Reed addressed the room. “The TURTLE is a loss. It was one of our most profitable models. We can write it off.” She glanced at her PR rep sitting beside her, who took notes like an obedient dog.

Gabriel Marcello directed his anger at the PR rep. “You know what I think? We never should have taken the Giants into true Filipino territory. ‘Tondo is Manila’s sickly heart. It embodies the struggles Filipinos face every day.’” He turned. “Isn’t that right, Madame President?”

Alejandra Atienza—20th President of the Philippines—was twice the age of Ms. Reed. Her long gray hair collected in a bun, revealing a traditional rounded face. She remained still during Gabriel’s tirade, the energy of her being funneling into her fingers as they prattled on the boardroom table, much in the way of spider limbs. “Not exactly,” she murmured, “but close. Makati is American. Bonifacio Global City is American. Most of Metro Manila is American. Tondo, however, is Filipino. It is a slum capital, but it is ours.” The president annunciated the last word before finding Ms. Reed. “Is this going to be a military issue?”

Ms. Reed must have caught the implication. The Inspiration Convergence funding from the Giants did not pay for military operations. If Manila reached such a circumstance, the Giants would have to fork out more.

“It won’t, Madame President,” Gabriel said in an attempt to save face. The PNP would absorb this failure, too.

“I’ll address your men’s bravery at the memorial,” the President said. “But you will both subdue this. Understood?”

Ms. Reed and Gabriel Marcello nodded. The rest of the room followed suit.

Bryce, however, cleared his throat. “We have a bigger problem.”

The police staff, Gabriel himself, Ms. Reed, her PR rep, her HR advisor, two Metamatics lawyers, the President of the Philippines, and her entourage all trained their gazes on Bryce Desmond.

Bryce spoke to the officers. “I trust forensics looked at the vapes?”

“The vapes?” asked Gabriel Marcello. “You mean smoking vapes?”

A pressure in Bryce’s pocket. “Yes. Vape drugs. I found someone sprawled out in one of the homes. I saw more vapes in the debris.”

Gabriel tilted his head back, smiling far off. His sneer at Bryce wasn’t lost. Bryce was no officer, but he survived, and all because of the images of himself on the shooter’s phone. Why had they been there? More importantly, who sent them?

“Why does this matter at all?” asked Gabriel.

Before the police chief put in another lengthy tirade, Bryce pulled out a vape he had taken from the scene—or the battlefield. “I think this holds television.”

No one knew what to do with that remark, but Bryce was sure of what he saw.

“You see?” Gabriel turned to the assembled. “This happens when ignorant American companies come to our city. They think Manila is like New York, Los Angeles, or Toronto. The things that matter there don’t mean shit here.” Gabriel did not wait. With the reflexes of a seasoned cop, he snatched the vape and inhaled. “There!” He dropped the vape on the table. A bit of its plastic cover chipped off. “Now, we can move onto-”

It happened fast. One moment, Gabriel Marcello swiveled his chair to face President Atienza. The next, his head tilted toward the ceiling. His arms limped in the way a marionette would with its strings cut. He slumped. Bryce caught him before he slid off his chair.

The officers ran to their police chief. The President’s security detail formed a shield around the woman.

One of the PNP officers raised a pistol and pointed it at Bryce. It was Domingo Baccay, and he didn’t look pleased to do it. “Get up,” he called.

“Relax,” said Bryce. “Your chief’s an idiot.” He waved the gun away. “Arrest me, and you’ll lose the only person who understands this.” He pointed to Gabriel. “Think of it like a deep sleep. Not even a jackhammer can budge him.”

Ms. Reed rubbed her forehead. “What the hell’s going on, Bryce?” She turned to the others. “Let him speak.”

With the room in his grasp, Bryce nodded. “I saw this before reinforcements arrived. Thought I was hallucinating.” Bryce synced his wearable to the boardroom’s projector, pulling up a video feed.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The video began as black before transitioning to a camera panning over a blanket of stars and galaxies. It zoomed in until a sleek, needle-shaped starship appeared. The camera moved over the hull, revealing the faces of three pilots. It settled on the last: Gabriel Marcello.

“What is this?” President Atienza asked, to the room as much as Bryce. “I don’t have time for this.”

“You will,” said Bryce. “I wasn’t lying about this being television. It looks like…Starship Horizon. Season 2 or 3. Somewhere in the middle. It’s one of our highest-grossing series.”

“Cowboy Craig,” bumbled Domingo, still holding the pistol. He looked around before holstering it.

“Yeah, the MC.” Bryce nodded to Gabriel Marcello, still the focus of the shot. “I think our friend has front-row seats.”

The video settled on Gabriel in the cockpit, his eyes closed. They opened, and he could have been a coma patient waking up after a decade-long sleep. He shot forward and pressed his hands to the cockpit’s window. He steadied his breathing while his barely conscious form, in reality, slept. The other pilots flew on.

“It’s not quite the same, though,” Bryce continued. “Starship Horizon ships don’t have more than two pilots.” He watched less television than Domingo, but he knew this series. It was the highest-grossing space opera of all time. “None of this is in the show, and we didn’t make it. Whoever engineered this hallucination has taken ‘bootleg’ to the Nth degree. It looks like they’re changing sets, characters, and story structure.”

The 3-person fighter ship joined six more just like it. The shot zoomed out to show an enemy mothership shaped like a can of soup moving toward them.

“Early nanotech,” Bryce explained. “The microprocessors in these minuscule drones are as large as transistors were in the early 2000s. Qubits and quarts and all that. Subatomic computing. Essentially, nanobots in the bloodstream, eventually reaching the brain. But this level of immersion? That’s new.”

“End this,” said one of the officers, looking at their sleeping police chief. “It’s not right.”

“Afraid I can’t. Not until it’s over, which…” Bryce checked the time on his wearable, “…should be in a few minutes.”

The starship fleet fanned around the soup can mothership, spiny protrusions emerging. These cylinders retreated into the structure before shooting forward, throwing laser fire toward the fleet. The starships dodged, looped, or sparked and crunched as they collided with the shots.

The camera zoomed in on Gabriel’s needle-shaped ship again. The other two pilots looked in control, yelling orders. Callouts. Bogeys. Cries of “check your six!” and “you’re too close!” Gabriel Marcello may as well have been chained to a roller coaster. He punched the cockpit’s window and screamed, but no sound emanated in the board room.

“It’s all manufactured,” Bryce reminded them. “The planets, the stars, the ships? They’re borrowing many assets now, but it appears they can build sets and train AI actors. It’s not a stretch to say they can probably mimic our scripting engines, too, or, God forbid, write their own screenplays.”

Ms. Reed craned forward, watching the show like it was the last she would ever see. “We can’t do this yet.” She turned to her staff. “This is all on a scale more realistic and immersive than anything We can spin up.”

The collective “We” meant every Giant participating in the Convergence.

Bryce nodded. “I only knew them before as short hallucinations, but the nanobots per million—NPM—must be a lot higher in these samples.”

Ms. Reed’s inhalation was audible. “Do you know how much this stuff costs?”

He could venture a guess. He thought of the raves, the shady dealers only accepting Monero, Zcash, and other privacy crypto coins. He thought of the inhalations. He thought of a girl with red hair. “Probably less than our cheapest subscription tier.”

Ms. Reed watched the video. “Madame President, it looks like we are now competing with drugs.”

President Atienza drummed her fingers. “How does this affect the Inspiration Convergence?”

“We can’t have junkies taking our audience,” said Ms. Reed. “This will affect not just Metamatics but Intervid, Distro Premiere, Delta Reel, Sugoi Soiree, but all of us.”

The space battle reached its crescendo, the last surviving starship dodging a fleet of twenty behind it. Gabriel screamed in his passenger cockpit, along for the ride.

“How many industries do you know that have to compete with drugs?” the President asked her assembled.

Bryce thought about that. Pharmaceuticals? For treatment, but not recreational drugs. Other than that, nothing. No. The Giants had no allies. They were alone in this.

“Mr. Desmond?” asked the President.

Bryce perked up. “Madame?” He had forgotten to address her as “President.”

She didn’t notice. “What do you call this thing?”

There were only a handful of enemy starships left. Gabriel’s passenger cockpit was still intact, but one of the other pilots—the real yet not real ones—had to evacuate.

“Black Fire,” Bryce said. A silence settled. “I’ve tried it.”

This admission to using recreational drugs would not have gone well in any other circumstance. Now, it placed Bryce as the subject matter expert.

Gabriel’s starship floated in space alone. This was not a part of Starship Horizon because all the characters were dead at this point in the actual series.

Ms. Reed understood this, too, shaking her head and seeing the greater picture. “Imagine that you are not just watching the last surviving pilot, but that you are the last surviving pilot.”

A giant allied ship warped in, capturing the police chief’s crippled ship in its hold. Ten crew members helped Gabriel out of his cockpit, all AI actors and all in character.

The scene ended with a shot of his face, looking up into the camera as if intentionally. He panted heavily. He was relieved to be alive.

Then, Bryce looked down and found Gabriel’s eyes open in reality. He did not spring out of his seat or cringe at the sight of Bryce. Instead, he rubbed his eyes and sat up. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.

“I’m still asking myself that,” said President Atienza. She stood to address the room. “Squash this immediately. If it’s a problem for the Inspiration Convergence, then it’s a problem for the Philippines.” She found Gabriel. “Get as many men on this as you can. Work with Metamatics or whoever you need to.”

Ms. Reed brought down her wearable and typed out action items in the air. She flicked them to her reps and Bryce.

The PNP presence left the Metamatics headquarters in Makati shortly after the President. Ms. Reed kept her reps and Bryce behind.

With everyone assembled, the youngest woman to ever grace the Head of Operations position splayed her hands on the table and looked at Bryce dead on. “Are we going to be alright?”

Bryce thought about it. “Is it even possible to eradicate a recreational drug? Heroin? Crystal Method? That stuff’s still around.” With President Atienza and the PNP now absent, he spoke freely. “This could be another War on Drugs.”

One of the managers spat their coffee.

The War on Drugs had been a tumultuous time in the early 2000s, during President Rodrigo Duterte’s reign. It wasn’t just dealers and pushers that “disappeared,” but users and recovering addicts. No one was safe from the crackdown.

“My thoughts exactly,” said the PR rep. “Everyone’s going to be talking about it like that. There’s nothing we can do to sway that perception, and frankly, I’m unsure if we should intervene.”

“I won’t be seen as a tyrant,” Ms. Reed said, “We’ll do this by the book as best we can.”

Bryce suppressed the words he was thinking of saying. If they wanted to rid Black Fire from Manila—and quickly at that—they would have to skirt the law. The PNP would be on their side, but that might not be enough.

“We’re dealing with files here,” said the Chief Information Officer of Metamatics Manila. “Digital eradication is never possible.

“We don’t have to,” said Ms. Reed. “Eradicate it locally. I want to nip it in the bud so it doesn’t grow while we create countermeasures. Worms, right? Zero-days? We can do all that. The PNP will let us. President Atienza will let us.” Ms. Reed smiled as if sharing some secret with the CIO. Her PhD in quantum computing shined through. “We can fight back.”

“It’s going to be expensive,” Bryce said.

“Losing business to this is going to be expensive.”

From this, Francesca Thaddius Reed launched into the specifics. The matter became Priority Zero. Budgets would be reallocated. Metamatics would need more IT security staff and agents to develop the countermeasures. Bryce wondered what his place was in all this until a budget to fund a comfortable life until his 150th birthday appeared in his inbox.

After everyone flooded out, his wearable beeped.

[Hey.]

He sighed. He hadn’t checked his texts since before the Tondo Tussle.

He typed back:

[Hey. I’ll see you tonight.]