[Originally written and posted in June 2020. Reposted in January 2021. Content warnings: flooding.]
Five days before Miles Santos dies, the sink in his bathroom breaks.
It started with a trickle of water dripping from the pipes underneath before growing into a spurting torrent that soaks his knees. This is what he gets, he muses, for not switching to water replication plumbing. He goes through his things looking for anything to fix it, but his condo is a crowded mess of wires and screens. Miles manages to find a roll of duct tape tangled within an extension cord.
With shaking hands, testaments to the sleepless nights of the past week, he wraps the leaking pipe with tape. Outside, his tablet continues playing the video he left it on. The voices drift into the room quietly, bouncing off the porcelain. Soft, pattering sounds of disaster.
“—the eye of typhoon Tomas was located, based on all available data, at 2,635 kilometers east of Southern Luzon. This is still outside of the Philippine Area of Responsibility. It has maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometers per hour and a gustiness of up to 160 kilometers per hour. It is moving west at 30 kilometers per hour. This typhoon is expected to enter PAR by Saturday—”
Water slips past his fingers and soaks his arms. It splashes against his face, sharp and cold. Miles coils tape around the pipe over and over, choking the water back in the place until finally, the pipes yield.
“—when we say super typhoon, it has to sustain a wind speed greater than 220 kilometers per hour. Typhoon Tomas is not a super typhoon, but it still has a long way to go above water before it reaches landfall and thus has the potential to, ah, acquire more strength.”
“So it’s possible for typhoon Tomas to become a super typhoon.”
“There is a possibility—”
Miles’ hands are soaked. His shirt is damp. His bathroom floor is a glorified puddle and he’s kneeling in it, an attempt for absolution. It’s a flimsy attempt at best, he thinks. He will never be clean again.
He stands up from the mess he’s made, sits down at one of his monitors. Still cold and rapidly becoming colder, he types and creates a monster.
-
Is it done?
yes
am i good now
No, you still have to install it.
We’ll also need a physical copy on a hard drive.
A team will come by next week to confiscate all your equipment.
It will all be compensated for, so you don’t have to worry.
okay
when will the payment come through
After we have the system and after you install it.
you’re sure
Yes.
I’ll text you again with details for the drop.
Stay updated.
-
Three days before Miles Santos dies, the traffic on slows to an unbearable crawl right on the bridge of Marcos Highway. Trapped from every angle, at mercy to the sheer power of unmoving vehicles, Miles has no choice but to see the river. He could keep his gaze straight, focus on every detail of the truck in front of him, but the river would snake its way into view. From his periphery into his mind, the river is there, demanding attention, until he can’t help but turn to look at it.
Already, the water is higher than usual. The surface ripples with turbulence as it rushes forth, crashing against the concrete bed that slopes down from the riverbanks. There was a time when those banks were nothing but the same earth and silt it had always been, but Miles couldn’t remember it. He was born only after they started constructing the improved channel. He grew up climbing over chain link fence with his friends, a flattened cardboard box in hand. On summer days, the river was docile. Dry. Just a trickle of water in a ditch too large. Miles and his friends would sit on the edge of the concrete slope, cardboard safely under him, and push off the edge, sliding down to the sound of laughter and a barangay tanod yelling at them to get the fuck outta here, stupid goddamn kids.
The pillars shake Miles out from his memory. On the edge of the concrete slopes, tall, grey magnetic pillars stuck out every few meters. Unactivated, they stood silently. Watchtowers over a vicious beast.
There is a barrage of beeping from behind him. Miles scrambles to step on the gas and drive forward.
The truck in front of him stops. Miles brakes. Alone in his car, he feels he can’t breathe. The river is there. A chill wells up deep in his stomach, branching out to his body. A restless energy.
Miles drums his fingers on the wheel and slowly, as the cars inch forward, rain begins to fall.
It’s hours before he gets to his mother’s house. The drive seemed like it wanted to drain the entire day away before he could live it. The house, fittingly enough, was gray and drab. The plants in the garden were alive, but slumped in lacking care. The paint of the gate was peeling, showing off the hard metal underneath. His mother’s house looks like as if all the days had drained away years ago.
His mother is much the same.
The mother he grew up with was sharp and nagging. Always scolding him for every mess and mistake, pushing him to be better, yet never showing him anything more than an absent nod for his achievements, too busy with cooking for the small carinderia she ran on her own. Now, too old to work, she sat in a house Miles got for her the moment he had enough money to, out and away from Tumana and into the quieter neighborhoods of Antipolo. Her edge had been weathered down by time into something weaker, but no less biting. Her memory was fuzzy at the edges, always calling Miles by the wrong name, or forgetting the date today, or forgetting that she had forgotten in the first place.
Miles came over every other week to have lunch with her, whether she liked it or not. Today’s lunch had passed in the same old questions followed by the same old silences.
He helps his mother from the dining table back to the living room. She reclines in her rocking chair, and massages her temple. “Matt---”
“Miles,” he reminds her.
“Miles, habang nandito ka pa, ayusin mo nga yung TV,” she says. “Ang choppy ng signal ‘tas ang hina pa nga ng volume, wala na akong marinig.”
“Ma, computer science yung alam ko, hindi engineering.”
She scoffs. “Sana nag-doktor ka na lang.”
Miles doesn’t say anything. He simply stands to fix the TV if only to escape another endless circle of conversation.
He switches the TV on and watches the glitching static distort the face of a variety show host. The host’s grating laughter distorts through the speakers, an awful, terrible sound. As he unplugs and plugs different wires with barely trembling hands, the noise flits in and out. Miles manages to get the volume up higher again, like his mother wants it, and his own voice finds its own sound.
“Ma, medyo busy ako for the next few weeks, ha.” With a hard thwack to the back of the TV, the screen phases into clarity. He looks at it instead of his mother, continuing. “I won’t be able to come by for a while, but, uh, I got a really big bonus at work, and I’ll forward the money to you, okay?”
“Ha?” His mother says, squinting past him to look towards the TV. “Anong sabi mo?”
“Wala,” Miles shakes his head. “Wala, ma.”
-
11pm
MRMC Station 3, Tumana.
Don’t be late.
-
On the day Miles Santos dies, he goes back to where he used to live. He parks nearby, and walks through the rest. It was a part of the slums that had been demolished to make way for the large, hulking powerline that fed into the electric pillars of the river. Where once there was a cluster fragile houses Miles would once run and duck through, there was now just flat rubble and the metal reinforced wires trailing through, out and away.
There are a few kids kicking a ball around, scuffing dirt and laughing. One of them kicks the ball too far, rolling towards Miles’ feet, and Miles forces a smile as he bends down to toss it back to them. He tries to forget he ever saw them, but when you see one person, the rest keep coming in. A fruit vendor passes, pushing his rickety cart filled with cool pineapple. Women with streaks in their hair snickering and gossiping. A stray dog following at the heels of a young girl.
Miles used to live here, and the ache of seeing the place again after working so hard to leave it thrums through every inch of his body.
All he wanted was better.
And look where that got him.
He arrives at the drop location hours early. In his car with his silence, he sits and watches the rain engulf him.
To his left, he can see the crowded Tumana slums barely illuminated by the dusk. It was home once, when he was smaller. Houses here were small and grimy and flimsy ribcages people would live in. The streets and pathways would get narrower and narrower the deeper you went ,the ground a perpetual a slog of sticky earth and discarded garbage. The canals that ran through the barangay were as sleek and high tech as the main river, with smaller but no less advanced magnetic pillars, but all the innovation had stopped there. The ribcage houses were finally safe from the river, but weren’t safe from everything else.
To his right, the river slithers into his periphery, demanding attention. Next to one of the pillars sticking out of the concrete banks, there is a small building, STATION 3 emblazoned on the side in block letters, punctuated by frantic sprays of vandalism. The station was just one of many dotted along the length of the river. Manual control systems for the improved channels. Nobody’s used them in years.
Dusk bleeds into night. One by one, windows of the slums light up. Old school fluorescent lights mixing with the newer EMLED lights.
Miles hears it before he sees it. The undeniable thrum of energy. Miles swears he feels the earth shift when. It does, in a sense. The magnetic pillars were a revolutionary piece of technology, but it took energy to power. More energy than can be taken without a price.
The grey pillars light up, a soft, illuminated blue streaking across the center of each one. The top of the pillar beams out an arch of light connecting to another pillar on the opposite bank. Like dominoes, all the pillars buzz to life, creating an endless, unbreachable tunnel of energy. Rain that falls onto the magnetic field slides off, slipping into canals at the side that filter back into the river. Every canal and ditch is encased in a magnetic tunnel, pulsing through the roads, veins and arteries of rainwater filtering into the river. All the rain coming from the mountains, from the city gutters, from the sky mercilessly pounding rain into the earth.
The Tumana slums tremble into darkness, all the power sucked into the cages keeping the water captive.
Miles doesn’t do anything but breathe. The restless energy is gone, replaced instead by a deep, stinging chill that constantly scraping at the walls of who he is. He sits there, unmoving, and lets the rain and the night pass him by.
He watches the magnetic field. Hours pass. The water rises. Rises. Rises past the riverbank, the magnetic field the only thing holding the water back from overflowing and drowning the slums just meters away.
Up ahead on the road, a nondescript red car parks in front of him, the headlights still on, shining directly into Miles’ eyes. The lights blink at him. Get in. He grabs an umbrella from the backseat and exits the safety of his car, brisk walks through the torrential downpour, hurriedly opens the door of the other car, and clambers into the passenger seat.
Four is sitting behind the wheel, phone in hand, idly swiping. He looks just about as pristine as Miles knew his own self was the opposite. Four looks up, eyes scanning over Miles’ soaked frame, bored and amused at the same time
“You really had to bring all the water with you, no?” Four asks, looking at Miles with that unimpressed gaze he always has.
“There’s a super typhoon,” Miles grits his teeth. “In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Touchy. I’m just joking,” he rolls his eyes then holds a hand out. “Physical copy?”
Miles digs a small plastic ziplock bag from his pocket. Inside, a small USB stick. He hands it over to Four who doesn’t even spare it a glance, stowing it in a side compartment without looking up from his phone.
“No other copies exist?”
“None.”
“Alright then, we’re nearly done,” Four says, tapping on his phone. “I’ve queued the payment transfer to go through once news sites start blasting the breaking news headlines. You get back into your car and follow me out and—”
“I’m not going.”
Four’s typing stops. He looks up and meets Miles’ gaze. Miles can’t find any shock in Four’s eyes. If anything, the only thing that’s there is a twinkle of intrigue.
“You’re not?”
“I’m—” Miles tries to find his words, all feeling awkward and clunky. “I’m staying here. I’ll deploy the program here.”
There’s a beat of silence. The rain outside is coming down so strong, the noise blurs into a static. Everything and nothing. A held breath.
“Hm,” Four looks back to his phone. “That explains the payment thing. I wondered why the account wasn’t yours. Whose is it?”
“None of your business.”
Four actually laughs, and Miles thinks it looks like a snarl. “I guess you’re right. Do me a favor and wait til I’m out of the danger zone before you run the program, will you? The payment expires if any of my programs detect a sign of an untimely death.” Four swipes his finger across his phone and Miles hears his own phone ping. “This car’s details,” Four explains. “Watch over me while I drive.”
“Can I go now?” Miles says. He wants to get out of this car. He wants to never see Four again. He wants to never have met him in the first place.
“Sure,” Four smiles. A sneer trying to look kind. “This is good work you’re doing here. Remember that. Pleasure doing business with you, Santos.”
Miles gets out of the door and slams the door shut. Under his umbrella, he watches Four back the car up, turn, and drive away.
He pulls out his phone and taps on Four’s car details. Miles watches his GPS show Four’s car drive further and further away. His trip is made short and smooth by clear roads. Too late and too rainy for anybody to drive out. People are in their homes, sleeping soundly.
When Four passes the threshold into Quezon City, Miles closes his eyes. When he opens them, he can feel every drop of water on his skin like a knife pressing into him. In his hand, his phone feels like a grenade.
He opens his program. The pin is pulled.
Miles had created a lockpick. A universal lockpick. A program that could adapt to any system and open any doors. Untraceable, quick, and efficient. Creating the program was a long and delicate science of knowing where to make it prod and where to make it push. A balance between toeing the line and destroying it. He understands more than anybody the meaning of a breaking point and what happens when that point is pressed.
It’s child’s play now. He runs his program remotely from his phone into the servers of the Station 3. From there, he watches it frolick along tens of security measures and failsafes. He watches it weave past all of them. He watches it mangle the system to pieces.
Miles can’t watch it finish, his shaking hands dropping his phone into the muddy ground. Even if the water shorted his phone out, it was too late. His body wasn’t cold anymore. His body was an absence of everything. He’d been hollowed out and then deleted. It was over.
Miles doesn’t look up from his phone. He doesn’t have to. Through the reflection on his screen, he sees the lights of Marikina City come alive. The streetlamps, the homes, the stores. Power surges through all the lines, unbidden, rattling appliances awake, blowing out too-old lightbulbs, taking every home hostage. The night glimmers out of the darkness in chunks until the city is thrumming with electricity.
Behind him, the magnetic field flickers. Once, twice—