Philippine Speculative Fiction (4 page)

“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 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 utilize 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).