Philippine Speculative Fiction 9 Read online

  Good evening Mr. Salas Mr. Salazar this shirt is best washed with Mr. Clean digital detergent. Removes vomit and all simulated organics.

  A detergent ad? I noted with surprise. I hadn’t seen real soap in decades. I decided it was probably a skeuomorph, a digital anachronism designed to make people more comfortable being digitized.

  What the hell is this place? I wondered.

  After a while, I staggered out of the toilet. Night had fallen and I looked around the deserted alley, wondering where I was supposed to go. A bicycle had been propped on a wall just in front of the lavatory entrance. As soon as I stepped towards it, the bike began to flash its lights, illuminating layers of advertising graffiti with a frail white fluorescence. The lights kept blinking until I put my hand on its bamboo handlebars. A message popped on its digital odometer.

  Thank you for choosing a Shimano Intelligent Bicycle Mr. Salas Mr. Salazar. The seat has been automatically adjusted to your height. Your route has already been pre-selected. Please climb aboard and simply pedal.

  I heaved myself up to the gel-padded saddle and kicked off. The bike guided me through the dark and narrow alleys that snaked through the labyrinth of tenements. Everything in New Tundon lay in the shadow of its sole skyscraper, the neon-lit Torre Paraiso.

  I passed through the slums like a ghost. Through the yawning windows I saw people leading seemingly normal lives—playing mah-jongg or the card game pusoy dos, eating dinner or simply gathered around their living rooms, plugged to a legion of electronic devices. This was a town of old people, permanently idled; permanently trapped in the amber of unstructured time. Not a single child was in sight.

  Somehow everyone seemed happy, or at least, content. I wondered how many of them were actual, real people, not background sims or in-memoriam programs. If they were human, I wondered if this was their idea of heaven.

  The bicycle took me away from the maze of small streets to a wide, tree-lined boulevard bustling with shops and post-modern apartments. My ride stopped in front of a garishly-lit clothing store called The Way We Wear. There, an oddly-dressed man waited for me expectantly.

  “Welcome to New Tundon, Mr. Salazar,” he said softly. The old man was wearing a circus ringmaster’s outfit. On his head was an elegant topper with large aviators that hung carelessly from its brim. A strange metal watch, encrusted with many dials, covered his left arm like an armature of eczema. I imagined it could keep time for the entire multiverse.

  “I have been asked to dress you and guide you to Paraiso.”

  “This looks like an expensive place.” I replied, as I stepped in to view his merchandise. The store smelled of spikenard, incense and myrrh, the stink of gods and rich people. “I’m not sure I have enough credits.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Salazar,” he reassured me. “Your re-skinning has already been paid for.”

  Inside the store I realized that there were no actual clothes, just an infinite library of paintings, photos and video screens displaying clothing styles from every time period and from all over the world.

  “Now then,” he announced theatrically, “This is a place where heart and mind are one. Paraiso checks for broken souls and will frown on your second-hand clothes. I will use your Nanotex canvas to craft a new outfit that will map the man you used to be. I will cut it from the cloth of your pain, that buried fabric spun from the love you’ve lost, and sew it with the dark threads of your doomed consummations. Finally, I shall embellish it with the future fruit of your final, bittersweet meeting. Does that sound about right to you? After all, our clothes are guideposts to our feelings. Now your outside will match what is inside. How are you feeling now Mr. Salazar?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. A swarm of 3D printers, buzzing like paper wasps, stripped me down to my bare Nanotex frame. There was absolutely nothing underneath.

  “You are dressing me with emotions that I have spent a lifetime forgetting.”

  “Ah, but that is who you are,” the old man said.

  The tailor’s curious machines completed me then created code by code, thread by thread, a beautiful new suite of grey merino wool—one that did not have Mr. Salas crossed out on its digital signature.

  “Perfect,” the old man exclaimed. “As they say, clothes do make a man. You are now a perfect simulation of your old self. Just a warning—the body can become young again but the soul, never. Now go please, there is a Personal Air Lifter outside, waiting to take you to Paraiso. Ms. Esperanza is already there.”

  I thanked the old man and left feeling as grey as my suit. I wasn’t really sure what he’d done, but it felt like I’d been prepped for a funeral.

  “Hello again, Mr. Salazar,” Pai Kia greeted cheerily, as I climbed aboard the sleek red aircraft. He/she was still dressed in Cleopatra Wong’s tight white jump suit. “You clean up very nicely, uncle. I could fancy someone like you.”

  I said nothing as our autogiro lifted up towards an indifferent brown sky, past the grid of wires that stretched over the slums like a garrote. The highway in the heavens was teeming with air jeeps, hover-cyclos and advertising dirigibles. Their Holosonic displays overloaded my head with hundreds and thousands of advertisements, factoids and subliminal purchasing suggestions.

  I closed my eyes to escape, letting the lights of the airborne traffic blur into hazy constellations. Every few seconds, a small group of vehicles would peel away, puncturing the smoke-choked clouds like dying meteors.

  “I don’t get it,” I asked. “If people pay to be here, why does it have so many ads? Why does it look like a dump? It’s like we went back in time, to some old Third World country. Did someone design this deliberately?”

  “Wha, so many questions, uncle,” Pai Kia said. “Let me tell you all you need to know. Everyone has three possible futures. If you’re rich, you live it up in the New Cities then come to these towns for hanky-panky. If you’re poor, you wouldn’t even know these exist. You just die, end of story. For everyone in between, if you’re in the know and you’ve got something in the way of credits, you can pay soul-hackers like me to build an afterlife. No prawns, fish also can, you know. Of course, your level of comfort, your level of reality, depends on the size of your wallet. Ms. Esperanza has a very big wallet.”

  I studied my strange companion, wondering how their really looked like behind the HI. Was he/she even real? I couldn’t tell anymore.

  “Listen,” Pai Kia said suddenly, with the voice that slid out viscously, like snails gliding on glass. “I don’t know why, but she instructed us not to complete you. I’m sure you already know. There’s no ku ku bird down there.”

  He/she pointed to my crotch, a sad, flat affair devoid of any protrusions.

  “I can fix that. We can work something out.”

  I couldn’t hide my emotions. I looked straight into their eyes, sharing a yearning and a heartache that words simply could not convey.

  “So drama, ah! Lucky woman, that Ms. Esperanza,” Pai Kia sighed wistfully. “Aiyoh, the mosquito dies but the itch remains doesn’t it? Nevertheless, my offer is there if you change your mind. My contact’s in your watch.”

  We flew towards our destination in silence.

  Torre Paraiso was a private Integrated Resort that rose seven kilometers into the heavens. The enormous building was divided into separate sections that celebrated Christianity’s Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Wrath, and Pride. Pai Kia dropped me off at the rooftop landing pad and blew a kiss for luck.

  Esperanza was waiting for me at the Immersion Gallery, an 8-Star lounge at the highest penthouse level. Everything inside was done in the old Filipino style called Earthquake Baroque. The rooms were hewn from marble and solid piedra china, gaudy and over-the-top with decorative calabasa motifs. The transoms, fixtures and room detailing were all gilded with mother-of-pearl and electrum ormolu. On the walls were Holosonic reproductions of early masterpieces—Lunas, Hidalgos, and Amorsolos, each one radiated terabytes of synesthetic information and
shared emotional content. A large Luna, The Spoliarium, filled my mind with images of dying gladiators and left the unwelcome taste of blood in my mouth.

  This was an area reserved exclusively for the most important of VIPs, the world’s 1% mega-rich that were members of an exclusive club called Pride.

  Esperanza sat almost preternaturally still, like a porcelain doll, her small frame entombed within the red womb of a rare Cobonpue Ball Chair, woven from the finest, palest bamboo.

  “Hello Alfredo,” she whispered softly. “You look… well.”

  I said nothing and looked around the room until I found another Ball Chair to curl into. I hid my head in the cold shadows, not wanting her to see my sadness. Esperanza looked exactly like she did when I first fell in love with her. Her short brown hair was cut in a bob, framing a delicate face that looked not unlike the Singaporean actress Marrie Lee.

  To me, this all seemed to be some kind of cruel joke.

  We sat across the room staring at each other for what seemed like hours. As each second passed, I pressed myself deeper into the chair’s embrace. The weight of her presence slowly turned every bone in my body to glass.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I said finally, yielding to the oppressive stillness. “I was happy at Golden Acres. You should have let me die in peace.”

  “You’d rather be in a hospice ship?” she asked. “Death has no angels, you know. It has no dominion. There are no tunnels of light. There’s just this or oblivion.”

  “This is nothing but another prison.”

  “Yet you still came when I called. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you still have feelings for me?” Esperanza asked. Behind the grottoes of her eyes I sensed the vague shine of emotions I thought she’d long forgotten (or maybe it was just a trick of the light?).

  I took a deep breath and decided to say nothing. When I was alive, our past had kept me in a cell without walls. Words bled, words betrayed. I let it tell her everything she needed to know.

  “Really, you have nothing to say to me?” Esperanza pressed; “after all this time?”

  “Why am I here?” I whispered.

  “Let’s recap, shall we? I married Julio the year after you and I broke up. I had… I have a beautiful child. In fact he’s having his own baby soon. For the last thirty years I’ve lived a blessed life, a life most people can only dream of.”

  “Why am I here Esperanza?”

  “Julio had a lot of money. After he transitioned to the New Cities, he left me with so much. I hadn’t planned to join him so soon, but there are things that no amount of money can control.”

  “I know all of this. You took out a restraining order.” I said cautiously, nervously. My skin wrinkled around me like a chrysalis. “I should have known enough to stay away.”

  “We left a lot of things unfinished,” she added. I tried to search her eyes for a hint of sincerity but she quickly turned away. “Anyway, my money’s what brought you here. I paid to capture a star that’s keeping you alive. This storage facility’s a town for hacked souls, true, and you’re just a squatter under our New Cities. But you won’t die, not for a very long time, and you’ll never age. I can watch you whenever I want to.”

  “You bought me a star, why? Did you ever think to ask how I would feel about all this?”

  “I was so young back then. Did you ever ask how I felt?” Esperanza snapped. Her voice seethed with barely-controlled bile. “You were my film teacher. I had this place built just for you. Doesn’t it look like a set from your favorite movies? What were they again? I only remembered Brazil, Blade Runner and Manila in the Claws of Light. You’ve always wanted to play the tragic hero. My money can buy a lot of things.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why am I here?” I asked. “It’s not as if we have anything anymore. Did you even ever love me Esperanza or did you just want to own me?”

  “What I love… is my son.” She declared, getting up from her chair. She snapped her long, slim fingers and a viewing screen appeared on one of the filmy silver walls. “I promised him he would meet you one day but I had an unscheduled aneurysm. I guess this was the next best arrangement. At least now he can see you exactly as I once did.”

  A dark figure flickered on the screen, throbbing like a haunted memory.

  “What happened to you Alfredo? You threw away your life, a burned-out basket case in a nursing home. It was lucky my agent found you before you died,” she said, shaking her head. Esperanza’s tone had become a little less angry, unexpectedly softer. “I took out that restraining order to save your life you stupid idiot. That’s one more you owe me. Julio would’ve killed you if he knew what you’d left me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jun—Julio Sales Jr.,” Esperanza addressed the dark figure looming through the static. “Speak now. You can use this Haptic Interface when I’m done.”

  The screen blinked like the eye of a god, exact and infallible, revealing painful truths. I had never seen her child. Esperanza paid big money to keep her family out of the press. But as soon as I saw his face, my knees started to buckle again. Jun looked almost exactly like I did when I was in my thirties.

  “This is your real father,” she said haltingly. For a moment her voice seemed to betray the pain of a great, long-hidden loss. I waited for some real change, for forgiveness, or at least a confession of some sort, but Esperanza just pressed on coldly. “I would have rather you never met. But I made you a promise and your mama always keeps her promises. What happens next is up to you.”

  I tried to open my mouth but no words would come. My sentences seemed to stall in mid-thought.

  The past belonged to the past, yet here were now. Through the cybernetic agency of the Gimokud, a network of Dyson bubbles—huge, star-eating computers keeping souls in their pure mathematical form, we were young again; keeping secrets and being every bit as hurtful as old times. It was a new kind of hell for the downloaded dead.

  “Poor Julio never knew he was impotent,” she said to me, with a renewed sense of bitterness, “and that’s all you need to know.”

  “Did… did you ever really love me Esperanza?” I stammered, fearing her true answer. The invisible bars of my newest cage began to reveal themselves in earnest. “You know, before things fell apart, you promised me forever.”

  “Even I can’t afford more than one Eternity. Consider your star my repayment for your parting ‘gift’. You’re alive as long as it’s alive. And, oh yes, you wanted to be alone? Everyone here’s a skeuomorph and this world is as fake and empty as a Holosonic. You’ve got nine billion years to figure it all out.”

  Esperanza’s form wavered strangely, fading in and out like a ghost. Then she disappeared suddenly, leaving no answers. On the silver screen, a man with a heart full of burning questions waited patiently for me to talk.

  Vida Cruz

  First Play for and by Tikbalang Triggers Uproar on Opening Night

  Vida Cruz wrote for over 10 years before she gained the courage to start sending her work out. Her fiction has been published in Heights, The Silliman Journal, and is forthcoming FableCroft Publishing’s Phantazein. When she isn’t writing fiction, she’s writing and editing journalistic Lifestyle pieces for GMA News Online. She graduated from the 51st Silliman University National Writers Workshop, the 20th Iligan National Writers Workshop, and the 2014 Clarion Writers Workshop in San Diego. She is overly fond of giraffes and the color purple.

  First play for and by Tikbalang triggers uproar on opening night

  Ma. Rosario P. Herrera, The Archipelago Daily

  NEVER BEFORE HAD the interior of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) so closely resembled the inside of a sardine can than at the Sunday opening night of acclaimed theater director Jerald Bulan’s controversial new musical Noladi.

  The play is an original adaptation of the 12,394-line epic poem of the Tikbalang (horse-headed beings) of Northern Luzon. It is the first-ever play of any kind to ut
ilize mythic beings in its cast, and its first showing will determine whether the use of mythics in a play will be either a disaster or a revolution waiting to happen.

  The epic is infamous for an array of other reasons, the most well-known of which is its satirical—and some would say downright caricatured portrayal—of human beings. This infamy is, in part, what attracted the throngs of protesters pooling outside the complex, who stopped traffic as far as Epifanio De los Santos Avenue (EDSA).

  But one look at the clean-shaven, prosperously plump Bulan—when I met him, he was standing at the bottom of the grand staircase with Madirawen, his ephemerally beautiful star, and shaking the hands and kissing the enormous rings of his guests of honor—revealed that he seemed unfazed by the riot outside. Enjoying himself, even.

  “This kind of attention is a sign that my work is being paid attention to at all,” he said, gesturing to the picketers beyond the CCP complex with the curious dancer’s grace that won him the Grand Prize at the Philippine National Ballroom Competition just last month. In fact, whether he was climbing up a flight of stairs or readjusting the trademark checkered scarf donned over his black barong, it appeared as though the eccentric playwright-director were dancing on a floor of clouds.

  Bulan had to raise his voice to be heard above chants of ‘tao lang, tao lamang!’ (‘humans only, only human!’), adding with a smile, “Of course naman, you can’t expect everyone to like what you do. Ganoon talaga ang buhay (Such is life). But you see, those people are disturbed by my work. When they are disturbed, that means they’ve heard of it. And when they’ve heard of it, then I’d say half the battle has been won. O ‘di ba (You see)?”

  The two-time Palanca winner is best known for his spectacle-heavy retellings and musical adaptations of other (human) epics around the country, such as the Ilocano Biag ni Lam-Ang, the Bicolano Ibalon, a few chapters of the Darangen of the Maranao, and most famously, the Visayan Hinilawod.