Lino Ilagan

  August 28, 2035

  SYNAPTIC LIFT PROTOCOL

  Her Flesh Obeys the Machine, but Her Mind Has Gone Elsewhere

  The room is not empty. Not really. It is full of humming. The low, insectoid buzz of machines dreaming behind walls. It is full of dust motes drifting in the sepia glow like tiny bureaucrats lost in perpetual paperwork. It is full of Lino's breath, which rattles like a car engine that should have died two decades ago but didn't. It is full of Maria Sanchez-Tan, reclined on a government-issue cot like a saint awaiting beatification through fiber optics.

  She lies flat as a chalk outline. On her face, a VR headset like the snout of a blind beast. Her hands hovers above a strange custom keyboard laid above her her abdomen - half QWERTY, half dead language. She types in patterns only old gods and sysadmins understand.

  The MMDA traffic grid unspools inside her head like tape from a failed cassette. Somewhere, fragments of burnt metal, a taxi's last breath, a glitch where video should be.

  James found the taxi yesterday. Or what was left of it. A blackened husk under a Quezon City flyover, like a cigarette stubbed out by God. The traffic cams nearby? All blind. Same pattern. Same silence.

  Cybercrime said they were busy choking on other mysteries. So Lino called someone older than protocol. Someone the wires still whispered about.

  "You know I can smell you, right?" Maria says without moving. Her voice is casual, like she's swiping through gossip, not digging through scorched reality. "Cigarette stink. Cheap. And the breathing? That rasp? That's not just age, Lino. That's the echo of decisions catching up."

  Lino doesn't flinch. He just blinks. Maybe once. Maybe three times.

  "You can't even see me," he mutters.

  "I sense you," Maria replies. "You're a hot smudge on the edge of the world. Like bad data."

  A pause. One of those pauses thick enough to sit on.

  "I'll live," Lino says, voice graveled like an unpaved provincial road.

  She chuckles, dry and crackling, like old LAN cables being bent the wrong way.

  "Sure you will," she says. "But for how long?"

  "You're more than ten years my senior, Maria," Lino refutes, like someone arguing with a monsoon.

  "Yes. And I'll probably outlive you, too," Maria replies. Her voice is half-spite, half-syrup. Both of them chuckle, though Lino's sounds like gravel tumbling through bureaucracy.

  A silence passes, shaped like a server cabinet.

  "This must be one hell of a case," Maria mutters, fingers fluttering over the custom keyboard like it's a lover with secrets. "For the NBI's regional director to greenlight me in such short notice."

  Lino shrugs in a way that could mean anything. The chair creaks beneath him like an old confession.

  Silence again.

  "You're still working," he says eventually, squinting at her like she's a terminal with outdated firmware. "At sixty-five. Most people your age are drinking wheatgrass in Cavite. Why are you still doing this?"

  Maria exhales, slow and deliberate, like the venting of an ancient cooling fan.

  "I love it," she says. "Honestly, I don't even think I'm working. Half the time I'm just... floating." She gestures vaguely, and in her goggles, a thousand windows ripple and close like blinking eyes. "Floating through raw data. Through infrastructure. Through the veins of this city and beyond. It's like reading entrails, but the entrails are made of light."

  "And why not abroad?" Lino asks, his tone half-interrogation, half-old friend asking why you never left the province.

  Maria snorts, sharp like a wiretap going live. "The food," she says. "The food abroad tastes wrong. Too clean. Too perfect. Too sterilized. My body needs something else. Oil. Vinegar. Smoke. It needs sentimentality. It needs the kind of garlic that clings to your fingers after a meal. My job can float anywhere in the world. My soul simply cannot."

  Lino smiles. Something rare. A break in the case that is his face.

  "A true patriot," he says.

  Maria chuckles, short and nasal, like a modem sneezing. "Don't insult me."

  More silence.

  "Huh, that's interesting..." Maria says, then promptly abandons the thought like a half-written message. She sinks back into the neural ocean. Her fingers dance. Her breath shallows. Somewhere inside her goggles, the map of Metro Manila stutters, pixelates, breathes.

  Then, a burst. Like a glitch becoming divine revelation.

  "You were right to call me," she says, suddenly. "No one else in the force can do this properly. They'd get lost. Or worse, think they're not lost."

  Lino exhales through his nose. Not quite triumph, not quite gratitude. Something liminal.

  "James thought it was sloppy," he mutters. "I did too. Easy case. Burnt taxi. Missing footage. Bad cover-up."

  Maria doesn't answer. She doesn't even blink. Or maybe she does, and the goggles just absorb it.

  "I'm still looking," she says eventually, like the words had to be extracted from an encrypted file sealed in salt.

  Lino shifts. The chair creaks. The dust swirls.

  "You don't seem to have much nice to say about our cyber division," he offers, tone drier than a skeleton's filing cabinet.

  "They're children," Maria snaps, quick as a whip of corrupted code. "Children on keyboards. Typing commands like prayers they don't understand. I was asked to give a seminar once. For the new ones. Thought I'd light a spark. Instead, I found a landfill."

  Her fingers stop briefly. Her voice softens, then curdles.

  "They just want the paycheck. An entry in their resume. They don't care about the ghosts in the machine. About the silence between the packets. They won't last. When I leave, they'll replace me with someone who talks about 'synergies' and types with two fingers."

  Lino leans forward, catching her profile in the glow of half a thousand status LEDs.

  "Why the loyalty, Maria?" Lino asks. His voice low, almost embarrassed to exist. "You've outlasted your bosses. Dodged promotions like bullets. Hell, the private sector would probably build a golden server room just for you. Real talent's out there, not in this concrete tomb."

  Maria doesn't answer right away. She lifts her goggles slightly, lets her eyes breathe. Then, instead of answering, she tilts her head and throws the question back like a live grenade.

  "Why do you stay, Lino?"

  He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. Just the shape of a reply that never found its words. He shrugs, vaguely.

  Maria narrows her eyes.

  "Is it because of Nancy?"

  Lino's jaw tightens. His face flickers, as if someone tried to scrub the expression from the feed but failed. He looks away, into the dusty corners of the room where forgotten case files rot.

  "I don't want to talk about that," he says.

  It's been thirty years, almost. But it's not time that makes things easier. It's forgetting. And Lino never forgets. He simply shelves.

  Maria sighs. Not out of pity, but recognition. The sigh of someone who knows where ghosts hide in operating systems. She puts the goggles back on.

  "I've got my reasons," she says quietly. "ISAFP tried. NICA too. They all came sniffing, contracts full of money. I said no. Every time. Plus, the NBI lets me be. I don't want to sit in meetings. I don't want to become a manager of people who are worse than me. I want to see through the city's skin. I want to know when the data bleeds."

  She gestures at herself. Half-machine, half-municipal myth.

  "That's why the higher ups gave me this title, Special Technical Adviser for Inter-Agency Cyber Operations. Fancy name. Means they can borrow my brain without owning it. Touched only when necessary."

  Lino nods, slowly. "Sounds like you found a way to stay in the war without having to salute."

  Maria smirks. "Exactly. Let the children run the drills. I'll still be here, in the dark, listening for when the wires scream."

  Silence, again. Not peace. Never peace. Just the absence of new noise. The room had settled into the rhythm of keys being tapped like raindrops on an iron coffin.

  Then it stopped.

  "Lino," Maria called out, not turning, not blinking. A whisper riding a cold draft. "I'm done."

  A soft ping sounded from Lino's tablet, sterile and polite, like a bellhop announcing the arrival of doom. The screen lit up with the glow of precision. A single packet, neatly wrapped. Attachments like bones arranged in reverent order. An official report signed with Maria's digital sigil, a scrawl shaped like paranoia.

  Lino stared at the tablet, thumb hovering, gratitude forming in his throat. He did not get to speak.

  "There's more," Maria said, her voice flattening like a body under data weight. "Someone hacked the MMDA grid alright. Then they built a fingerprint. Not theirs. They built one that belonged to a specific PNP officer. Planted it. Framed him like it was routine. That guy's dirty anyways, and chances are he is related to whoever it is you're investigating, just not in this capacity. They wouldn't pave a yellow brick road to this guy if it just means he'll end up being a loose end."

  The bed folded with a sigh, lifting Maria like a forgotten statue rising for inspection. Pistons clicked, tired but obedient. She did not sit up, she was raised, like a corpse being inquisitive.

  "It's perfectly imperfect," she went on. "Dirty in all the right places. Like an old crime scene rediscovered. Any analyst you send this to will pat themselves on the back. Say open and shut. Say well done. But I found things. Not evidence, not really. Shadows. Fingerprints left by gloves."

  She tapped her keyboard once. A screen blinked to life beside her, full of dead code dreaming in hex.

  "I've seen these traces before," she whispered. "They're not even anomalies. They're... hauntings. Residues that don't match any toolkit I know. No language. No country. No signature. Just the same... smell. The same itch in the algorithm."

  Her voice dropped further. The floor felt lower.

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  "I don't know if it's local. Or if we're being played by something bigger. But whoever it is, they don't want the case to disappear. They want it to end convincingly."

  She turned to Lino now, the goggles finally lifted. Her eyes were bloodshot, but sharp.

  "Be careful," she said. "This case isn't just dangerous. It wants to be solved. That's not the kind of case with happy endings."

  Somewhere in Pasay

  August 27, 2035 11:46 p.m.

  BACKSHOTS AND BLOOD MONEY

  A Tale of Two Entrances: One to Sin, One to Tondo

  The office smells like expensive cologne and factory fresh desire. LED lights shine like their purpose was given by god. Somewhere downstairs, a body sighs into another, steam mixing with breath, muscle with ghost. Water runs in the dark, unseen hands press into backs like forgotten debts.

  Up here, behind an opulent wooden door, sounds of flesh negotiating dominance echo like poorly-dubbed foreign films. The walls are thin, just enough. They remember everything.

  A knock. Then the door opens. Not kicked, not flung, just opened, like a question too tired to be rhetorical.

  A gruff man in a barong uniform enters. His face is gravel. His shirt smells of coin-operated soap and last week's violence. He does not blink.

  In front of him: a table, two bodies, and a rhythm. Two men, one sculpted by gods without a budget, the other stretched thin by sleepless years and cheap narcotics. They don't stop. Not immediately. The sculpted man rides the last wave in - ahhh - and dismounts like a cowboy bored of the rodeo. He collects his clothes onto his hands, walks past the gruff man, grinning, still slick with sweat, dripping, unbothered, a statue on loan from the museum of carnal desire.

  The man doesn't follow him with his eyes. He already knows what he'll see.

  The naked man, still hunched, still table-bound, laughs like a broken soda machine. His cheek sticks to the hardwood surface. He doesn't turn around.

  "What's the problem?" he asks, voice filtered through gauze and static.

  Outside, someone moans like a religious experience gone off-script. The walls listen. The air waits.

  The man thinks about God a lot. Not in the smiling priest way. Not in the Bible group way. In the fire licking your ankles while you keep your eyes shut way. God is fear, and fear is the only constant. He tells himself he fears God, but really, deep down in the rib-dark pit of him, he fears what the naked man over the table makes him feel. Or rather, what he makes possible.

  He hates his boss for being bakla. Not just because it's in Leviticus or because his childhood pastor once said "the flesh is weak." No, he especially hates him because he doesn't feel weak. Because the boss moves through the world unpunished, unrepentant, naked in both body and power. Because while the man beats other men in alleys and prays for forgiveness, his boss gets to fuck and be fucked by men in offices and cars and hotels, and never has to ask for forgiveness.

  The gruff man tells himself: he'll suffer more than me in hell.

  It is the only thing that makes the nights tolerable.

  But even that is a lie. Because some nights, after the rage fades and the bones crack and the silence creeps in, the man wonders if his boss will escape damnation the way he escapes everything else - grinning, untouched, beloved by devils. While he himself will be the one burning.

  Still, the boss lets him hit people. Really hit them. No holding back. No lectures after. No rules. And that freedom, that little window of holy violence, is enough to keep him chained to this place. He tells himself it's just the paycheck. But it isn't. Not really.

  It's the ritual. The transaction.

  Sin for sin.

  Blow for blow.

  He doesn't flinch when he speaks, voice like gravel scraped off the altar steps.

  "Binondo Crown again."

  Three words that clang like metal hitting metal. The name tastes sour in his mouth, like rust and communion wine gone bad.

  "Construction worker saw too much, said too much. Just quit tonight. On his way to Tondo now."

  The moaning from the hallway has stopped. The world listens.

  The boss snaps upright like a corpse reanimated by pure cocaine and unresolved childhood trauma. His bones crack. His eyes are twin car tail lights lost in fog: red, weeping, screaming at the dark. "Then do something about it!" he howls, voice slurred at the edges, syllables drunk and disorderly.

  The man doesn't move. He shrugs. A tectonic shrug. The kind that causes quiet earthquakes in the lower intestines of men like this.

  "There's an NBI agent," he mutters, like he's telling the weather. "Real scary kind. The type with no price tag. The kind that doesn't blink when you gut someone in the rain."

  The boss stares. Breathing. Shaking. Pacing the room like a dog searching for an exit from its own skull. The coke is still doing the talking. His pupils are moons. His tears are treason.

  "NBI?" he whispers. "NBI." The letters sound like a spell. A curse. An omen scrawled in blood on the mirror of his future.

  He crumbles. Or pretends to. It's hard to tell with men like him, where the performance ends and the panic begins. He's sobbing now. Or is it laughter? No one's sure. He blames everyone. The air. The floor. The people. The people he pays to make problems go away but somehow summon more with every peso.

  He mentions his uncle. Again. The ghost of favors already spent, chips already cashed. The uncle is power, real power, the kind with initials before the name. But the boss doesn't want to beg again. Not yet.

  The man stands still. A lamppost in a storm of cocaine and entitlement.

  The boss wipes his nose with the back of his wrist. Red smeared with white, a flag for a failed state, and gasps between hiccuped breaths, "I'll send more. I'll wire more tonight. Just.. just check your accounts, I'll double it, triple it if I have to." The promise drips from his mouth like something rotten disguised as sugar. Money is his last sacrament, the only language he speaks fluently when panic takes the wheel. In his mind, currency is holy water, and if he pours enough of it on the problem, maybe the demons will drown instead of laugh.

  "Don't worry, we'll make sure to handle the worker," the man says, voice low and even.

  The words fall like bricks into water. They make ripples, but not the kind that save you.

  Amy Rivera

  August 28, 2035

  A CRASHING OF CYMBALS IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

  An Improvised Memorial in B Minor

  The air inside the hall is thick with grief, feedback, and the scent of wilting sampaguita. The crowd doesn't speak, doesn't need to. They stand in ritualized silence, watching the storm behind the drum kit.

  Amy Rivera is a volcano in a college girl's body.

  Her hands - raw, throbbing, split open like promises - are the only real thing in the room. Skin and blood on synthetic skin and wood. The rest is dreamlike: her bandmates phantoms, the crowd wraiths, the flowers beside the mic stand whispering eulogies only she can hear. The picture of Zaira watches back.

  Boom. Crash. Tap. Boom.

  A rhythm older than prayer. Louder than God.

  Behind her eyes: Zaira, high school uniform, soda in hand, laughing at some forgotten joke. Zaira, raincoat flapping like angel wings, waving goodbye in the downpour. Zaira, in a taxi cab she was never meant to enter, like Eurydice on a detour.

  Every hit is a hallucination.

  Every memory a goddamn freight train.

  She can't stop them. They come screaming down memory lane like stolen SUVs on meth. Zaira at prom. Zaira yelling at a fascist on campus. Zaira eating fishballs with that smug look only best friends can decode.

  Then the solo starts.

  A detour from the score. A language beyond mourning.

  Amy goes off-script. The drums are crying. She is not playing them, she is them. Her hands no longer distinguish wood from flesh. One of her fingers splits. She watches the blood splash the snare like red confetti. The crowd does not flinch.

  This is the price of memory.

  She sees Zaira again. Not the memory, no.

  Zaira as she must've been.

  Alone.

  Terrified.

  Tondo swallowing her whole like a python in a power outage.

  The snare rolls like thunder.

  The toms are dying animals.

  The cymbals crash like every unsaid thing.

  She doesn't stop.

  Not for the blood.

  Not for the pain.

  Not even for the truth.

  Because to stop would mean Zaira really died.

  And she's not ready for that yet.

  So she plays.

  She plays.

  She plays through the flood, through the noise, through the rupture in her soul where a friend used to be.

  Eyes blurred.

  Heart screaming.

  Somewhere in the back of her skull, a voice, her own, or maybe Zaira's, mutters:

  "This solo doesn't end. It just disappears underground."

  The song coils toward its end like a dying serpent in four-four time.

  The vocalist, that poor boy with a cracked voice and haunted eyes, belts the final chorus like it's a confession to a god he no longer believes in. Each syllable hits like broken teeth in a baptismal font. He's not singing, he's exorcising.

  Amy sees more red.

  Not metaphor. Not emotion. Blood.

  It stains her sticks like war paint, like lipstick on a love letter to the void. She blinks through it. Doesn't flinch. Her arms are trembling but her rhythm is true. The drums are crying now, weeping under each blow. They've seen too much. They've heard the truth.

  She prepares the finale.

  Not an ending.

  An execution.

  One final, perfect crack, a thunderclap wrapped in love and loathing.

  A goodbye that doesn't ask for permission.

  And then...

  Silence.

  Amy's face is a waterfall trying to punch through granite. Eyes bloodshot, throat dry, snot mixing with sweat and grief. She looks out into the crowd but sees only ghosts, mirages, and flickering heat signatures.

  They roar.

  The crowd becomes a tidal wave of noise, alive with something holy and broken.

  Online, the livestream comments scroll faster than human thought. A blur of emojis, grief, exclamation marks, and pixelated sobs.

  Thousands are typing the same name.

  Zaira.

  But Amy just breathes.

  One, two.

  She's still here.

  And Zaira still isn't.

  ***

  It's over. The noise has collapsed into birdsong.

  Amy sits on the grass like a monument someone forgot to build all the way. A broken statue of a girl who once knew how to laugh. Her hands are bandaged in napkins and tape, stolen from backstage. Her heartbeat is slow jazz now, grief in a lower register.

  And then

  a shadow, hesitant, familiar, stupid.

  Sandro.

  The guitarist.

  The ex.

  The boy who thought secrets were cheaper than honesty.

  He doesn't say anything. Just lowers himself to the grass like a criminal awaiting sentence. The sun shines down like it doesn't know what happened. The trees, those swaying green philosophers, say nothing. The birds gossip anyway.

  Amy doesn't speak.

  She's not ready for words.

  Words are what got her here in the first place.

  Words like "I'm sorry."

  Words like "It didn't mean anything."

  Words like "Zaira's dead."

  So they sit.

  Two failures in the aftermath of a miracle.

  The performance already fading like a half-remembered dream, bloody sticks, crying crowd, digital grief flickering across a thousand screens.

  Amy thinks about the night she found out.

  About the boy.

  About how her world cracked - not shattered, just cracked - like a cymbal hit wrong. And now? She doesn't want to forgive Sandro. But what does that even mean anymore? The world is absurd. Zaira is gone. The sun is out. Sandro is here.

  And she is tired.

  So. Very. Tired.

  So they sit.

  In the grass.

  Beneath the swaying tribunal of trees.

  In the courtroom of birdsong and shadows.

  Saying nothing.

  Which, today,

  might be enough.

  ***

  But then, a sound to break it.

  Of course it's Sandro.

  Of course he speaks first.

  Because silence is holy, and he has never known how to pray.

  His voice stumbles out like a drunk falling down a metaphysical staircase.

  "It doesn't erase what I did," he says.

  -Correct.

  "But I want you to see something."

  -Irrelevant, but compelling.

  He opens his laptop with the reverence of a guilty altar boy unsealing a forgotten relic. A few clicks. A mechanical hum. Then he sends her the link.

  A Word document.

  A collaborative class note.

  Amy blinks at it.

  This is what he dragged her back into the waking world for?

  Comparative Politics?

  A graveyard of bullet points and unsubmitted readings?

  But she opens it.

  Because why not?

  Nothing matters anyway. The birds are singing about imperialism and the sun is roasting her grief like an egg on a tin roof.

  The document loads.

  And then...

  There she is.

  Zaira.

  Not in body.

  But in footnotes.

  In comments tagged "Z. Navarro." In the margins, in the highlighted questions, in the underlined names.

  Her voice, preserved like a mosquito in amber:

  "Interviewed 3 workers at San Miguel site. One fell from the 8th floor. No harness."

  "Check this: same contractor as Pasay accident. Foreman Alcaraz. Sketchy guy."

  "Find link between Calvin Uy's company and gov't permits."

  Amy scrolls. Faster.

  Zaira's curiosity is radioactive. It buzzes in her bones.

  The grief dissipates, not like fog, but like smoke making way for fire.

  This wasn't just research.

  It was a mission.

  Zaira didn't just die. She was on to something. And now.. now it's hers.

  Amy looks up. Her eyes, swollen reservoirs of unshed war, meet Sandro's.

  He looks like a kicked puppy wearing a human costume.

  She hugs him.

  Not because he's forgiven.

  But because he delivered her a sword from beyond the grave.

  They are not lovers.

  They are not friends.

  They are co-conspirators now.

  Zaira's torch has passed.

  And Amy?

  She's about to burn the whole machine down.

  Lino Ilagan

  That afternoon, Lino sat across from James and Sarah Borja - another of Lino's deputies, another set of eyes crawling over Manila's fevered skin - beneath the flickering fluorescence of institutional fatigue. The NBI office hummed like a tired insect hive, full of aircon wheeze and stale coffee ghosts. Everyone looked like they'd slept in their chairs for ten years.

  James spoke first. His voice carried the dry edge of someone who had seen too much rubber and not enough justice.

  "Tires were popped," he said. "Before the fire. Techs found trauma on the rims. Burned rubber lies. Metal remembers."

  Lino nodded slowly. He liked that. Metal remembers. He would steal that for later.

  "It wasn't random," James continued. "The taxi was stopped. Intercepted. Fire logs say a unit was already there when the department arrived. But no one knows which unit. No flashy paint job. No oversized ladder like the ones that look like carnival rides. Just another ghost in uniform."

  Sarah scratched at something unseen on the table. Maybe a memory. Maybe a layer of grime.

  "PNP said it was accidental," James finished. "We ran our own forensics."

  He looked up. His face was all unfinished sentences.

  "It was a performance. Someone staged combustion. Made it look bored and believable."

  Sarah spoke next. Her voice carried the calm weight of someone used to following people through crumbling alleyways and half-lit truths.

  "The boy didn't spot us," she said, "but others were following too."

  She paused. Something dark flickered behind her eyelids.

  "Not amateurs. Clean movement. Tactile. Paramilitary, maybe. They moved like smoke pretending to be shadows. Stayed outside the slums."

  She folded her arms. The motion felt final, like a file being sealed.

  "We paid locals to watch his door. Make sure he got inside. He did. The others stayed out."

  Silence followed. Thick. Municipal.

  Lino didn't speak. His mind twisted like wire through old case notes. He saw the burnt taxi. The missing footage. The framed PNP officer. The boy in the slums. Threads danced, but refused to knot.

  Zaira could have been taken by someone else. The world had many hunters. But the scent from the construction site kept rising like heat from a closed grave.

  "Get your men to keep watching the slum," he said finally. "They're interested in the boy. Don't let him vanish. Meanwhile I want you to look into someone in the PNP, I'll send you the details later."

  He turned to James. His eyes were slow scanners.

  "Find that fire unit. The one no one remembers. Might be the only thing that leaves a footprint."

  Then he leaned back. Let the chair creak beneath his weight. Thoughts crept in like mold. Maria's words echoed, hollow and cold.

  "It wants to be solved."