Sometimes, in the deepest and the dankest places, among piles of rubble and ruin, you find gold.

“Name,” said the clerk behind the desk. He was too young to be on his OJT, so I guessed he was running the family business. He had that forgetful face that belonged to the background of stream sludge. I wondered how far the Giants had extended. I wondered if the boy had been adapted and how many times. I wondered if he knew about it.

“Jayson Vargas.” No use practicing propriety now. “I have a container here.”

The place looked beaten down; no location where anyone would want to store their valuables. Stained concrete walls. Beads and blankets as doorways. Spent diesel permeated the air. But back then, money had been tight. Worse than tight. Janice acted quickly, and I couldn’t fault her for that.

“Uh-huh,” said the clerk boy. “Key?”

I showed him. “If you tell me where to go, I can open it myself.”

“Nah. Can’t.” The boy had been speaking English the whole time, making a concerted effort to stray from his mother tongue. His accent was full-on Filipino despite it. “Too many drones.”

“What?”

“Too many drones. They’re like flies, man. Flies everywhere. Best you hide that thing.”

I did as he said, clutching the key in my pocket as the boy stepped out from the counter, taking with him a broom, the kind you’d sweep your houses with, with its thin thistles.

“Good for flies,” said the boy, catching me staring at the broom. “What? You got a better idea?”

I didn’t want to tell him about the scripts that could take down the drones. Reggie had made me some. Though, using them would garner more attention than I wanted, and by the looks of it, this boy had been used to swatting away these flies.

He had a name tag plastered to his chest. He had scrawled with a sharpie so haphazardly that the result was unreadable. I tried anyway. “‘Copernicus?’”

“Copper nikus,” confirmed the boy, separating the name into two. “‘To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.’”

Unlike his previous attempts, the quote was in perfect English. I had to commend him for it, as even I couldn’t match his intonation. He must have rehearsed it many times, as a gatekeeper would their life-defining task.

As we left the front office, I quickly learned why he was so cautious and why he had brought—of all things—the broom. The drones were everywhere, not the beachball-sized Q models I had come to know, but a whole flutter of different kinds. Some were like doves, with their flapping wings and fat bodies. Others scurried around like rats with long tails that looked to be exposed wires but could have held some greater purpose. Others were nothing more than spiders with their eight legs clawing up the sides of the storage garages.

“They so curious,” said Copernicus. “Even just a look inside the containers can Inspire them.”

The name of the place made sense to me now. Copernicus Storage Solution. CSS. I wondered if the boy’s name was actually Copernicus or if he had just adopted the moniker. Either way, it suited him. He could have been an eccentric old man trapped inside a kid’s body.

A capture drone the size of a fly buzzed past me, but other than that, none of them paid attention. The surveillance software must not have made it this far, or Metamatics had bigger fish to fry. Bigger than Black Fire. Maybe, just maybe, AIs.

Calling the storage lockers ‘lockers’ was misleading. They were dented and cracked shipping containers that had been welded over or patched up. Some just had corrugated steel weighed over them on rocks. I hoped my father’s belongings didn’t have the misfortune of being stored in one of those.

We kept walking through the press of curious drones until we found a group of children playing basketball with makeshift hoops just outside a storage container’s door. Copernicus, with his broom held like a wizard’s scepter upon some great impasse, said nothing, yielding to me.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Please move,” I told them.

The kids didn’t. They were maybe half my age, but there were even more peering curiously from an alley between the adjacent storage containers.

“Get out of the way.”

One held out a hand. “Price?” It wasn’t a pleading gesture. They outnumbered me. They knew they outnumbered me.

I raised an eyebrow at Copernicus, who stared back. “They know you have money, bro. They can smell it on you. So can I.”

“Fuckers,” I murmured under my breath. They weren’t wrong, but I hadn’t brought as much as other times. I didn’t think I needed to. Throwing money around also brought attention to myself, which I didn’t need in a city of surveillance.

I rifled through my pockets, intending to pull out a wad of peso bills. Instead, I found air. “Shit.”

“Smart,” said Copernicus. “Made of money but doesn’t take it anywhere.”

“Smart or stupid?” said one of the kids.

“Fuck off,” said Copernicus, brushing them away with the broom as if they were flies.

But the kids didn’t budge.

“Damn it,” Copernicus uttered, raising the broom high. “Don’t make me.”

The kids, sensing the threat, emerged from the alley mouths. They threw open storage container doors. There was double their number now, twenty and growing. None were close to our age, but that wouldn’t stop the horde from trampling us.

I stepped back and onto the foot of one of the kids. There were at least half that number behind us, pressing in closer.

One reached for my pocket, and I threw him aside. My guilt flicked on only for a second as another kid charged at me, jumping onto my back. Two more ran for my pockets, and I pulled away—more like shimmying—from their snatching grips.

Copernicus batted one of the kids on my back, hitting me in the process. It was a weak gesture, more like warding insects off your porch.

I took one kid by the hand and was about to throw him aside, until my phone buzzed, its loudspeaker turning on as a result of a Reggie’s script.

[A field agent is nearby.]

The others heard it. Everyone heard it. The kids dispersed as quickly as they jumped me, scurrying away to the gaps between the containers.

“What was that?” Copernicus asked, looking down at my phone. “Is that real?”

“Is this the place?” I nodded at the container in front of us, not having time to answer.

Copernicus shook his head. “You’re on your own, man.” He hurried off, just like the rest of the kids, leaving me alone before the door.

It clicked open with Janice’s key. I had to strain to pull the door up, but it came loose, and inside, was darkness. No furniture. No appliances. No chests of secrets, only stacks of paper. Janice hadn’t bothered boxing them; most were dried up and withered from the humidity. Some were torn. She had known, though, that they would be important.

Musings on the shortcomings of the Philippine government.

Papa had written this particular title in an elegant superscript as if it would adorn the menu of an expensive restaurant. From then on, he launched into a bunch of rants against the president of the time. Janice could have written it.

Short story. Possibly. Something with sludge.

That must have been stream sludge.

The Crest and its Killers.

The next document contained notes for The Crest. He had transferred most of the details to his manuscript, with only a few exceptions. They weren’t just written words but diagrams, flow charts, and sketches. My father’s engineering came out in those scrawled passages, and I felt I was looking deep into his past.

That’s when I found it.

Musings on the Americas. Or, simply, Why the West Failed.

‘Why the West Failed.’

The West had failed? Papa was referring to North America and likely Europe as well. More often than not, he was referring to any country outside the Philippines. Never mind that the USA was closer to the east than the west. ‘The West’ was more of a fit term for Europeans, referring to the Americas.

And yet, that assertion, that statement seemed so profound.

Why the West Failed.

I wasn’t aware it had failed at all. Then again, I wasn’t aware of much outside the Philippines. Life had been hard enough here. Now, with my little security, I could afford to look outwards.

So, I destined myself to.

And that’s when I saw her, standing in the doorway of the storage container. Despite being not even a decade older than me, she looked twice that. Stress and work had robbed the woman of her youth.

“Jayson Vargas,” said Francesca Thaddius Reed.