Philippine Speculative Fiction (34 page)

Manuel wove through the dimly lit maze of tightly packed tables and made his way to his friends. Once he got there, he selected one of the two empty chairs at their table and sat down.

“I can’t believe you guys managed to find a table,” Manuel said.

“You’re telling me,” Bea said. “I almost had to pull rank. ‘Make way, stressed student politician coming through. I represent you, now give me a
table!’”

They laughed, and Manuel even managed a chuckle. The place was bursting with stressed college students, alternately celebrating and mourning the exam week that had just ended. The place was more
cacophonous than Manuel had ever heard it, with the noise and chatter drowning out even the obnoxious party music playing in the background.

A waiter arrived with a bucket of beers—all Red Horse, probably on Kevin’s insistence. Kevin popped the caps on four of the beers in turn and passed them out to Manuel, Bea, and
Jomar, saving the last (and therefore the coldest one) for himself.

“You said I’d owe you a drink if you pulled your thesis off,” Kevin told Manuel. “Never let it be said that I don’t deliver.”

“Thanks, Kev,” Manuel replied, almost smiling in spite of himself. “It’s not done yet, though. I’ve still got so much to put in, and then I need to test it and get
rid of the bugs, and then I’ve got the paper to write.”

“All the same, it’s awesome to see you like this,” Kevin said. “We haven’t seen you this focused on anything since—”

“Thanks, Kev,” Manuel repeated.

The group lapsed into companionable small talk—albeit small talk that at times had to approximate shouting in order to be heard over the tumult of the crowd. They talked about their
theses, and about the professors they couldn’t stand, and about graduation and all that came with it. They talked about their love lives too, of course, a topic to which Manuel inevitably
replied with sympathetic laughter and another gulp of beer.

“So how are you, man?” Jomar asked. “I mean, we haven’t really all talked about—what happened.” Kevin nodded in agreement while Bea signaled for another beer.
Manuel wondered why she couldn’t have just gotten the bottle still left in the bucket, but maybe Kevin had called dibs earlier.

Manuel shrugged. “Steady. Thesis year, senior year. Stressed, I guess, but aren’t we all?”

“That all?” Jomar pressed.

“Hang on, I’ve got to take this,” Bea said, just as her second beer arrived in front of her. She whipped open her iPhone in a smooth, one-handed motion and held it to her ear.
“Yeah? Yeah, we’re here. No, don’t worry, we just got here, we have a table. Just come, it’ll be fine.”

Manuel froze. He stared at Bea, at the empty chair beside him, at the one beer bottle left untouched in the bucket. “Who’s the beer for?”

Kevin and Jomar looked at each other, then at Manuel, while Bea carried on with her conversation. Jomar exhaled loudly and squinted, as if he had a headache.

“Listen, man—” Kevin started to say.

“And the empty chair,” Manuel pressed. The bar was starting to get hotter. “And this whole damn outing.”

“Look, just calm the fuck down,” Jomar said.

Something pounded in Manuel’s ears, and he was no longer sure if it was the music. “No. No, fuck you guys, no. I’m not sticking around for this. You said we were just going to
talk—”

“And you told me you were okay,” Jomar said.

“I lied. Looks like we’ve got that in common, huh?” And with that, Manuel stood up and stormed out of the bar, leaving the half-finished beer and his three thesis consultants
at the table. He didn’t look back.

The walk across the street back to the university dorm was a blur, all tunnel vision and heart-pounding, sweat-beading adrenaline. His footsteps pounded the pavement in time with the frenzied
metronome of his heartbeat, and he felt his fists ball up so tightly that his nails almost cut into his palms. Before Manuel knew it, he was at his dorm room, turning the doorknob and pushing open
the door and then pushing it closed behind him.

“Fuck this.”

Manuel paced around the room. He thought of spending the night to do more programming, but how could he? His friends didn’t understand. Three years, and not a single one of them understood
what he was going through, what he needed, what was going through his mind at the precise moment that he needed them to understand the most. “Let him in?” He had, and this was what
he’d gotten—some ham-handed intervention shit, like he was an addict. How could they expect him to “be a friend” if they weren’t doing the same for him?

He froze. A memory came unbidden—something he’d heard a long time ago from someone he hadn’t yet forgotten. Slowly, he turned towards his computer.

He knew how to teach his Eve about love.

He walked over to the computer chair, sat down, and turned on the monitor. The results of the debug had come up successful; the code was error-free.

He opened the code and started typing. It was so simple an idea in theory that it was almost laughable that he hadn’t thought of it yet. The execution, though, was long in coming; Manuel
didn’t know how long he spent typing, and no longer cared.

He fed in the same code he had used to give the creature its understanding of love, but as a function of the environment, directed towards the core human program rather than coming from it. His
creature would experience love, and maybe then it would become the human that he needed it to be.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he coded himself into the program’s awareness. Wouldn’t do to have the creature experience love—or a digital simulacrum of it, anyway—and
not know where it was coming from. He told the program that beyond the world it knew resided a being that controlled it all, someone who had created the computer, and then used that to create the
program’s environment and ultimately the program itself, shaping all of them to its will.

“Hi. I’m Manuel. I—” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence. “I made you.”

Finally, Manuel finished typing. It had been hours. In a daze, he opened the graphics program and set the code to run and compile, then wandered over to his bed, kicking aside stacks of old test
papers and cans of Red Bull that he’d been meaning to throw away for weeks. He would rest his eyes for a bit—just a bit—then watch as his digital human came to life, at last.

He was dead asleep before his head even hit the pillow.

“
WHY ARE YOU looking at me like that, Manuel?”

“You seem bothered. Like something’s eating you. What’s up?”

“It’s just something we took up in my Philosophy of Religion class. This philosopher—he said that God, Being, the creator, the infinite, even love, are all just names we
invent to try and make sense of what’s beyond us. The next layer of the dream, the programmer who writes the code, whatever.”

“The programmer, huh? So now are you finally going to stop teasing me for my ‘sad devotion to a corpse on a stick?’”

“This is serious. It’s really messing with my head. I was so sure I didn’t believe, and now I don’t know what to think.”

“I can help, maybe talk things over with you.”

“That’s sweet. But I’m not one of your programs. You don’t need to debug me every time something goes wrong. Just listen; that’s all I need. I’ll come
around when I’m ready.”

“I’m your boyfriend and a Christian; I think I should be the one you talk to about stuff like this.”

“Let it be, babe. I’ll be fine in the morning. Good night.”

“G’night. Text me.”

MANUEL GARCIA’S SENIOR thesis project, after the hard drive on which it resided had been run through two computer shops and the university Computer Science
department’s best faculty, was declared an unsalvageable mess. Some error had occurred in the program, some stream of code that had proven so incomprehensible that it had not only frozen that
particular command, but had spread throughout and irreversibly corrupted the entire program, like a tiny sliver of doubt that had grown into all-consuming crisis. Everyone who sifted through the
files wondered openly about what kind of error could’ve caused so much damage while not being obvious enough to prevent any programmer with half a brain from running the program in such a
state.

Only one person knew, and he wasn’t telling anybody.

Strangely enough, later computer scans showed that the program file itself was still in place, and was in fact still running, although it could no longer be edited or even viewed as code.
Nothing remained that would be of any merit to a thesis defense panel—the program caused errors whenever its brainwave output was measured, like it had severed its link to the reader program.
And whenever it was viewed through the graphics engine, the screen showed an empty forest, with no sign of any digital woman anywhere. It was almost as if it was hiding, refusing to be found.

At this point, only two options remained. The first was to delete the corrupted file and start fresh, erasing all the progress on the old program but allowing for the possibility of a new one,
one which could be more carefully planned and better-controlled. The second, which the Computer Science faculty sternly discouraged, was to simply leave the program where it was and hope that it
would sort itself out on its own. They insisted that the choice of what to do, though, remained entirely with Manuel.

If anything tangible remained of the project, it was the dozens of freshly printed sheets of paper still remaining in his printer, all of which were covered with what seemed to most people to be
gibberish—streams of broken computer code, mixed in with other weirder strings of characters.

Manuel stayed in his dorm room for much of the semestral break, even after he got his computer back, and spent most of his days either asleep or in front of the computer. Kevin, Bea, and Jomar
all visited intermittently, the incident at the bar notwithstanding, because that was just what friends did when one of their own lost half a year of work in a single night. They brought food and
made small talk, trying to keep Manuel’s spirits up, and it was like talking to a man who had just lost a wife, or a child. You never talked about what actually happened, because getting back
to normal was the more important thing.

Whenever one of them did ask, Manuel would always say the same thing, and then change the subject. “Can’t be controlled. It can’t be controlled.”

One day near the end of the semestral break, when all three friends visited Manuel’s room together, they found it empty—and, for once, spotlessly clean. Manuel had actually bothered
to leave the room, but not without getting rid of his mountain of empty Red Bull cans and other piles of general clutter.

The stack of papers remained on the printer tray, though. When Kevin, Bea, and Jomar took a closer look, they saw something new scrawled in blue ballpen on the top sheet—a to-do list with
three items crossed out: “Clean room,” “Check program again,” and “Call Mitzi.”

Andrew Drilon
is a Filipino writer, illustrator and comics creator. His short fiction has been published in
The Apex Book of World SF 2, Horror: Filipino
Fiction for Young Adults, Chalomot Be’aspamia, Ladlad 3
and
Philippine Genre Stories
. His comics have been featured in various anthologies including
Top Shelf 2.0
,
No Formula: Stories from The Chemistry Set
and
Dark Horse Presents
.

He’s been a recipient of The Philippine Graphic/Fiction Award, a finalist for The Philippines Free Press Literary Award and a proud founding member of The LitCritters reading and writing
group. At nine volumes (and counting) he is the longest-running contributor to the annual
Philippine Speculative Fiction
series.

Charles Tan
is the editor of
Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology
. His fiction has appeared in publications such as
The
Digest of Philippine Genre Stories
,
Philippine Speculative Fiction
and the anthology
The Dragon and the Stars
(ed. by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi). He is a three-time World
Fantasy nominee for the Special Award, Non-Professional category.

Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 9 Copyright © 2014 Andrew Drilon & Charles Tan
Individual stories Copyright © of their respective authors
Cover art by Kevin Roque
ePub design and production by Flipside team

eISBN 978-971-9640-25-7

This e-book edition published 2014
by Kestrel DDM and Flipside Publishing Services, Inc.
Quezon City, Philippines

flipside.ph