“So many people are suffering,’ she told me. I remember those words more than all the others. She kept describing Manila to me, but I didn’t listen. She kept saying how she could solve the pollution, the traffic, the ill regard for your fellow man in a city that swallows you. She kept saying all these things, but I forgot all of those because I remembered what she said about the people.”

“She can’t help them all,” Bryce uttered, but his words sounded foul. He was tainting the conversation. He urged Pearl to continue, though he had to stop his mind from drifting to what the albularyo told him many times.

My world. My Manila.

“I know. That’s what I told her. But she wouldn’t listen. And, frankly, I didn’t want her to stop.

Bryce may as well have been looking in the mirror. Pearl was the only person he had met who could relate to his interactions with the albularyo. “How many times did you talk to her?”

A smile wrote itself across Pearl’s face. It was blissful. “Dozens, maybe? God. Fifty? Maybe not that much, but close to that.”

Around them, the Destitution had started to fill again. The bodies had been wheeled (or hovered) out. Gabriel Marcello was still, painting an imposing presence next to the bar. The police chief gave Bryce and Pearl a wide berth, but it was clear he was either listening in or intending to.

A cleaning crew had taken less than an hour to restore the place. Bryce wondered how much the establishment had paid them to turn the place around so quickly.

“She came to me often,” Pearl continued. “I never asked her to or prayed or anything. She just knew. I would forget about her, then be reminded of her, and boom, there she was. She was like… God.”

Bryce blinked, staring at the table as much as into the deep recesses of his mind. Perhaps it was Pearl’s mind as well.

“‘God,’ though,” Bryce thought out loud. “That is a dangerous place to linger.” Metamatics would claim PAL 578 was an act of God, and considering this angle, maybe it wasn’t too far off.

So… Bryce was taking down a God. He was a god killer. It sounded like some cheap knock-off Distro Premiere, Delta Reel, or one of the smaller streamers pumped out. That didn’t sit well with him. He needed to stop this thing, but the powers it could wield against him were god-like. He felt he was only scratching the surface.

“What do you want with her, anyway?” asked Pearl.

It took Bryce less than a second to answer. “To shut her down.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t that obvious? She almost crashed a plane to show she could save it. She has the power to toy with people and, worse, the desire to do it.”

“Maybe you’re just justifying the huge bounty you’ll get by killing her.”

“I don’t know how much I’ll get by killing her. Well…” He sipped on a drink. “The sum is somewhere between more than I can spend in my life and infinity.”

“Shit. Share some of that.”

“For killing your ‘God?’”

Pearl smirked. “Not my God, I don’t think. I don’t consider it as much of a religious experience as do others.” She turned to the door as if the sympathizers were still there.

Bryce wanted the chance to interrogate them, but Forensics was again keeping them behind their iron wall. There would be no way of getting at them. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to. He was sitting across from one.

Gods. Damn. “You would have loved to hear what my company was saying about that,” Bryce said.

He imagined churches. He imagined people praying. He imagined supplicants. That was a better word for this concept than ‘sympathizer.’ There was no sympathy for the albularyo, not when it could kill and save on a whim. What were they supposed to do? Trust the thing?

No way.

“Why don’t you just leave them?” Pearl asked.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“It’s a good job.”

“Is it?”

“It pays well.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s a good job.”

It was true, and he couldn’t deny feeling more separate from the company since being interviewed for his field security agent position. It seemed every time he spoke to Ms. Reed, he wanted her to shut up. She was very much to blame for this, anyway. He didn’t voice any of this to Pearl, though. Best to stick with the story.

“What else happened?” he asked.

Pearl stared off. “Baggage claim. NAIA. The city lights and… speaking to me on rooftops. Flying me around everywhere. She flew me around everywhere. I didn’t have a choice. I was just along for the ride. That was the creepy part. You felt like you were dreaming but couldn’t control it.”

Bryce’s skin turned to bumps. It was creepy to think about all this. The albularyo was pulling people into her domain at her own will. Why hadn’t she revisited him? Worse, when would she?

“You ever studied computers?” Bryce asked.

“Like, those PCs?”

“Yeah, I guess, but I meant it more generally. Computers are in everything. Do you know anything about them?”

“I know how to use Word if that’s what you mean. And Chrome.”

Maybe Bryce was talking to himself. He just wanted to get his thoughts out there. “Imagine you had a file on a computer that you wanted to get rid of. The only problem was that the file kept moving around. One day it was in your C: Drive. The next, it was in your D: Drive. The next one was in your e-mail. Then, it was in all those places at once.”

“In all those… Damn. Sounds annoying as hell.”

“Yeah. That’s what the albularyo is right now.”

“She’s just a file?”

“Not exactly a file, but she has a presence on a network. Several networks. Do you know how hard that is to track down?” He sighed inwardly. Pearl lacked the knowledge to understand his problem fully. “She is… like a ghost.”

“Multo. Bah. No sense hunting ghosts then, eh? Better to let them come to you. My mother told me a story once, too. She had her own personal ghost. Called it a guardian spirit. I kept asking her, ‘Why don’t you call it a guardian angel?’ since it was more likely that. She, however, was quite adamant. ‘It is no angel, child. I’ve seen it.’” Pearl laughed. “That sent shivers up my spine. Even now. Just like this thing that calls herself the albularyo.”

A ghost, then. A multo. A multo grasping Manila, and all that stood between it—all that wanted to stand between it—was Bryce. If no one would make a move, he would. He had to.

“Wait a minute.” Bryce set his glass down. “What did you say before?”

“About my mother?”

“No, no. About letting it come to you?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Pearl made finger guns. “Like pew pew. Go into the haunted house. Go into the graveyard and find the damn thing yourself, though I don’t know how you’d swing that with an AI. You said yourself it’s everywhere.”

“Hey,” said the new bartender. They were a young woman, perhaps in her late 20s. “You’re going to be here any longer? This place is pretty grim.”

Bryce led Pearl to the opposite side of the room, closer—unintentionally—to Gabriel Marcello.

“If you get her,” Pearl continued, “take the best parts from her. She’s not all that bad, right?”

That was a difficult concept to make sense of. What was an AI to them? A multi-faceted person? “You need to stop thinking of it as a person,” he told Pearl while focusing on what she said before. “It wants you to humanize it. It helps it build a narrative and gain… well… sympathy.”

“I’m not like them,” Pearl quickly said. “They’re lunatics. Maybe that’s why she visited me more than them.”

Pearl would be a valuable resource because of that. Combined with Bryce’s previous interactions with the albularyo, they might glean her whereabouts. That is if he could trust her. She already led him to the information broker—Janice—once. It didn’t seem a stretch to trust her again.

But they were just two people. They’d need more.

“I used to have this friend,” Bryce said, almost out of nowhere. “He was into… you know… illegal stuff.”

“Drugs?”

“Yeah. Anyway, he always had this turn of phrase. I hadn’t thought about it until now. He would always say ‘If you don’t know when you’re wrong, you’ll never be right.’”

He hadn’t dredged up this story before, but this conversation had a way of pulling it out. Maybe it was the drinks. Perhaps it was the idea of chasing something that couldn’t be found.

“He would tell me that phrase over and over again when he saw someone being a poor leader. It was about humility, I think, and I didn’t think much about it until the last time he said it to me.”

“Oh.” Pearl looked down. She rubbed her drinking glass. “If I may ask…”

Bryce took a sip. “He got in with some rough folks. Came here, too. Can you believe that?” Bryce looked around. “Anyway. Humility. That’s what got me thinking. Great leaders need to understand that they could be wrong. If this thing doesn’t understand, it can be wrong; then it’s not a great leader. Simple as that.”

Pearl smirked. “Sounds like you’re talking to yourself more than me, my friend.”

Maybe he was, for Bryce had already made up his mind.

“Alright,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ll share it. Some of the ‘bounty,’ as you put it. That is if you help me.”