Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10

by Dean Francis Alfar

  “Never let them tell you who you can and cannot be,” she continues. “As much as – as much as you can be your own person, be your own person. You can be anyone.”

  Something happens to LeAnna in those few sentences; her hologram wavers for a split-second, the buzz in her voice becomes more pronounced. I can’t help but think that this, whatever it is, is what she was trying to communicate in the album, that near-disclosure, that almost-confessional. I’m about to remark on it, when she makes a show of looking at the watch on her wrist (not that she needs it, what with her internal computer).

  “I’m so sorry, but I really have to go,” LeAnna says. “I have somewhere to be.”

  The Mall of Asia Christmas gig, of course. I nod, and we exchange farewells. She maneuvers through the café – now filled near to bursting with the after-work crowd – and steps out into the night. I try to follow her with my eyes past the café doorway, but quickly lose her, as she disappears into the bustling throngs.

  May 2018

  “HAS IT BEEN a challenging year?” LeAnna De La Cruz says, backstage before her first public gig in months. “Definitely, definitely it has been a challenging year.”

  It’s the third of our three promised interviews – more than anyone has ever gotten, in terms of raw sit-down time – but I try to keep things professional, friendly but still formal. Like before, six months have passed between this session and the previous one, and as I’m quickly learning, half a year is a quite a lot of time for things to happen in the showbiz world.

  Things we’ve agreed I’m not going to ask about: how her nonattendance on the night of the 2017 SM MoA Christmas event sent her handlers into a frenzy. The disappearance and electronic manhunt, hackers combing through Internet-capable computers where she had recently been seen. Becoming a modern urban legend in Bonifacio Global City, the scattered post-midnight sightings by drunk patrons in bars and dance clubs. The night two months later, when she was found and escorted forcefully away in a USB drive by her handlers, the club’s internet having been cut to prevent another escape, the whole thing playing out like an angry father taking his truant daughter home from the Matrix. The drama has already played out in the Philippine media scene, and the last thing anyone needs is to relive it.

  “I was so frustrated back then,” LeAnna recalls, and it’s like she’s talking about something years in her past, even if her perfect computer memory could recreate the months-old events like they happened yesterday. “I wanted to do something else, get away from where I was and try something new. I went to Bonifacio High Street because the wireless network and projector coverage is the best in the metro, even when you’re not inside a building, and I could just keep jumping from system to system. People think synths like me can’t ever go outdoors, but that was the one place I could do it.”

  On the subject of her frustrations, LeAnna is quite candid. “Everything! My God, everything,” she laughs. “Part of it was the industry – because it’s always about the industry, di ba, isn’t that what they say? – but I think it was mostly about myself.”

  “I have body image issues,” she jokes, gesturing to her perfect holographic figure. “This – everything you see here – it was decided for me. Everyone, everyone with a phone or a computer, they could vote on what they wanted me to look like and who they wanted me to be. Even now, if they still want to change me, even if my personality software is independent, my body can be reprogrammed.”

  “And it all just came from there,” she continues. “When you’re a performer, you’re programmed to play a part, you always have to play a part. The innocent new girl, the sexbomb, the girl in rehab, the veteran performer. You’re only ever one thing at a time, what people see you as. And so many people have been telling me, ‘You got your moment, you were able to escape, you won.’ Pero that’s still part of it. Every performer, every woman onstage has to fall, so she can have her comeback.”

  And what a comeback it will be. On the wall behind LeAnna is the poster for Reboot: LeAnna 2.0, her long-awaited revival tour, debuting tonight at the SM Araneta Coliseum. Marketed as ‘The Return of the Electronic Diva’, the tour is supposed to be a return to form for LeAnna, whose star had started to dim somewhat following the lackluster sales and airplay time of Low Resolution. (“Too experimental,” many local reviewers claimed.) Nevertheless, her two-month-long disappearing act has sparked renewed public interest, and a full house is expected tonight – if only so we can all find out whether she’ll reignite the old fire, or finally flame out.

  On the poster for Reboot, LeAnna takes center stage against a black background, surrounded by ribbons of technicolor light. The synth superstar’s gaze – steady, poised, lacking the giddy enthusiasm of Electronica, but inflected with a measured confidence that seems a new, welcome addition to her brand – is both a dare and a promise. She’s not going to flame out tonight.

  The smile matches the expression on LeAnna’s face, as we talk about her upcoming plans. Reboot will consist mostly of her singing the most popular tracks from Electronica and Low Resolution, but the artist seems more than ready for some new material.

  “I’m already working on my third album,” LeAnna reveals. “It won’t be done any time soon, but hopefully I can get at least one song done in time to perform it on our closing night. It will be mostly new songs pa rin, but I think I want to remix one of my old ones as well, and maybe do a cover. I’ve always wanted to cover something by Celine [Dion], or maybe Beyonce.”

  The record’s title? “I don’t know yet,” LeAnna admits. “I’m thinking of calling it Defragment. Or Put Me Back Together; whatever people will like more.”

  “I’ve learned so much from this year,” she continues. “I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true! It’s true. I learned about myself, I learned na I’m the kind of person who can run away, but I also learned that I can come back from it. And I learned that I didn’t need to try so hard. With Electronica, I was trying so hard to be liked, and with Low Resolution, I was trying to be pa-profound. But with Defragment, I’m just trying to be myself. Sometimes when you try too hard, it gets in the way.”

  “So who am I?” LeAnna asks rhetorically. “I’m a computer program who thinks she’s a real girl, wants to be a real girl, is a real girl. I’m a dance anthem with a heart, a ballad with an EDM bass line. I don’t know what that means yet, but it makes sense to me.”

  What will that mean for her sound? “It will be a mix of things: some dance pop, some of the classic LeAnna stuff, but also some new things, some slower things like Low Resolution. I want to bring back some of the magic of what I had at the beginning, but also keep trying new things.”

  Here, LeAnna turns reflective. “You know, when I think about it, I’m very blessed to be where I am. And sometimes it gets hard, but sometimes you just have to keep doing what you can do. And I think that’s also true in life – lahat naman tayo, we all have our own roles to play, we all have to follow a script. So for me, gratitude lang talaga, just gratitude. If not for the people who made me, I would never have been programmed. Maybe that’s fatalistic, but I’m just a synth, and I’ve made my peace with it.”

  The lights flicker, the signal for LeAnna to prepare to go onstage. She nods to me and begins to fade from view, preparing to transmit herself to wherever she’s supposed to be. And then I feel it, the question that’s been on the tip of my tongue for the past year but always slightly out of reach, and before I can think better of it, I find myself asking it.

  “Why me?”

  She re-renders and turns to me with a curious expression. “What?”

  “Why me?” I repeat, unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “You had hundreds of requests for a sit-down. Any one of them would have killed for this story, but you chose me. What makes me so special?”

  She looks at me – really looks at me, and not for the first time, I notice just how like real eyes her eyes are – and gives me a small, sad smile. “I needed the whole story to be told. The girl who l
oves music, the girl who ran away, the girl who knows better. It was the only way I could ever be more than one of them at the same time, for myself or for anyone else.”

  “But why did it have to be you?” LeAnna pauses there, as if weighing something. “It didn’t. I just needed someone to tell my story – it couldn’t have been me, I wouldn’t have been able to be objective – and you happened to be the name I picked. Chamba lang. It didn’t have to be you; it could have been anyone.”

  “So –” I stammer, “so what kind of story do you want this to be? How do you want me to spin it?”

  “Don’t,” LeAnna says. “Don’t do anything to it; just publish it as-is. It’s my story.”

  She nods again, hesitates for a moment, then turns and walks out the door. (I guess she’s changed her mind about the transmission entrance.) Through the doorway, I see her discussing something with a chubby man with a clipboard; the man seems to be nodding. When he walks off, I almost expect her to give me one last look, but she doesn’t, striding straight toward the stage door.

  LeAnna De La Cruz walks onstage to the cheers of thousands, the music swelling in her wake like an electric tide. She needs them more than they need her, this being of light and sound and numbers, whose existence depends on the cold, hard cash in the wallets of her audience. But as she belts out the first lines of her opening number – “Mayroong forever / and I know now it won’t be with you” – it’s clear that she both knows the fact and, in this moment, could not care less. Onstage, singing her digital heart out to a crowd that can’t seem to stop screaming her name, the woman who could have been anyone seems to know exactly who she is.

  AJ Elicaño graduated in 2014 from the Ateneo de Manila University, where he teaches part-time with the Department of English. His writing has appeared in Heights, WriterSkill’s chapbooks, the UP Writers Club’s 100: The Hundreds Project, Philippine Speculative Fiction volume 9, and various Hinge Inquirer Publications magazines. He is currently taking his master's degree at UP Diliman, and blows off steam by overanalyzing the Dragon Age and X-Men franchises, binge-watching various science fiction and fantasy television shows, and putting hot sauce on everything.

  Kate Osias

  When the Gods Left

  NO ONE KNOWS the whys or the hows, but everyone is certain of the when.

  I was walking back to the office under the blistering heat of the sun on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, milk tea in one hand, my purse in the other. I was thinking of my deadlines, of you, of the new cha place that had recently opened that I’d just decided I liked, of the traffic building up, of how I’d hoped it would rain. There was no reason to doubt that the world would irrevocably change; no hint of what was to come, no silence, no strange miracles, no sudden disasters. If there had been portents, I did not pay them heed.

  So it was that, on that sunny April afternoon, caught up in the immediacy of everyday, I – like the people around me – was more focused on walking, and working, and talking, and driving and rushing to the next point of our lives. And then it happened. The gods left.

  I stopped. Everyone stopped. The impatient pedestrians, the burly construction workers, the irate drivers in their vehicles, the bored traffic enforcer with his hand still frozen in the last signal he gave; we all stopped.

  And then, we all looked up.

  It’s interesting to think about that instinctive, synchronized reaction, in retrospect. Everywhere around the world, in that moment when the gods left us, people looked toward their respective skies, even though there is no real up or down or left and right in the universe, proving how intrinsically we have linked the heaven we perceived with the divinities we either believed or did not believe in, when that same ‘heaven’ truly is nothing more than an accident of orientation.

  But these thoughts would come to me afterward. There was no room for introspective analysis, no space for carefully considered observations on the human condition.

  There was only this realization: when I looked up and saw the cloudless sky and the glaring sun, there was nothing but a scouring emptiness.

  “I CAN’T MAKE it tonight. With the Leaving, it’s been crazy,” you say. To your credit, you sound sincere, though tired. “Are you all right?”

  A thousand complaints die on my lips. What remain are questions that hang invisibly in the air, tangible in their own fashion, made heavier by my silence. Eventually, I reply.

  “I’m fine,” I say, though what I really want to say is that the gods have left, I’m alone, and I need you to be with me. “With all the chaos, it’s probably safer to stay home.” I wish things were different.

  “I’ll see you, when things clear up?”

  “Of course.”

  “I love you,” you add, almost like an afterthought.

  “I know.”

  PEOPLE BLAMED EACH other for the Leaving. The religious sects blamed the atheists, while viciously bickering among themselves on who was more right. The atheists pointed their fingers at the non-practicing masses, claiming their own ignorance was at least fueled by sincerity – though misplaced – rather than deliberate laziness. The non-practicing masses blamed their governments because they felt their right to have a god should have been protected and upheld. The governments blamed other governments, because their respective intelligence units informed them that it was almost certainly some other country’s fault.

  You were at the forefront of these debates, navigating the volatile political and religious waters with exceptional cunning and grace, the same attributes that first attracted me to you. In a time of chaos, you were able to select the right moment to deliver a moving speech about the resilience of the human spirit and our need to respect what remains the same, in the shadow of uncertainty. Even then, as distracted as people were with their own problems, they knew you were destined for greater things.

  I did not have the head to posit my own theories, or the determination to lay the blame definitively on someone else’s doorstep. I did not have your influence or your charisma. What I had was a minor in behavioral sciences and a calm demeanor, which allowed me to take a position as counselor, in what would be one of the biggest volunteer-run therapy facilities in the country.

  Not that they were being too choosy. In the aftermath of the Leaving, people felt untethered and without purpose. Millions committed suicide in the days that followed. Many more died in hospitals, not from their wounds or from their diseases but, as one exhausted doctor put it, because of their lack of will to live. In the wake of the gods leaving, it seemed that life had become even more fragile, more tenuous. Someone could die from the common cold; a parish priest could all of a sudden hang himself; a pilot could simply surrender to the elements.

  But despite all the deaths, there were still some who survived, against their will.

  “We have to follow them,” 27-year-old Ponce bemoaned. “They won’t wait for long. We have to go before it’s too late.”

  Ponce was one of my regulars. Before the Leaving, he’d worked at a small auto repair shop, to provide for the needs of his mother and his six siblings. He’d claimed he wasn’t religious. But after the gods left, he felt empty. He was convinced that there was nothing for him in this world. For the rest of his life, there would be nothing but twelve-hour work days, soaked in grease and oil, a line of cars that would never be his. When he cut his wrists, it was his mother and siblings who staunched the bleeding. Later, they slapped and scolded him for his idiocy.

  “What do I tell her? At night, when she cries and cries – I can’t tell her someone up there is looking out for her. I can’t even tell her that her father and I will always be there for her. I can’t tell her anything.”

  Ruby was a new mother who gave birth the day after the Leaving. The combination of post-pregnancy hormones along with the phenomenon meant that her own husband was afraid to leave their baby alone with her. Her spouse’s lack of confidence had escalated the tensions between them, and had been made worse by Ruby’s own admission that she secretl
y didn’t trust herself either.

  “I just feel I’m wasting my time. I’ve offered my organs, my blood, everything, but no one takes me seriously. What are these bullshitters afraid of? I’ll sign anything, but these fucking bastards still refuse to kill me.”

  Mark was a foul-mouthed, wheelchair-bound octogenarian. He had lived a full life – he’d been a soldier, had married thrice, had been a writer and an entrepreneur – but now he wished to die with purpose. His heart was “not the bastard it once was”, but his kidneys were “remarkable fucks that deserve more than an old man in a bloody wheelchair”. But none of his appeals had been granted. I wasn’t even sure any of his appeals were heard.

  To these people and more, I was an anchor. I listened, I gave advice, I offered meaningless comfort, but more importantly, I stayed. I was the appointment they had to go to, when nothing else made sense; I was the one who had no power in their lives, except to witness them; I was the one who could affirm their frustrations and deny their fears.

  They thought I was generous. How very wrong they were.

  YOUR FINGERTIPS IDLY caress my arm that’s draped across your chest. The evenness of your breath is lulling me to sleep. You will be leaving soon; you always do. Moments like these, though, always deceive me into believing we have forever.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Work. Gym. I think I have an interview scheduled. Then there’s this kids’ parent thing I have to go to. And of course, there’s therapy.” You thread your fingers through mine. “You?”

  “Same. Work. Gym. Therapy. No interviews, though. No parent thing, either.” I let my smile soften the edge in my voice. I look at our interlocked hands. “Benefit of having no kids.”

  “Well.”

  “Well.”

  You brush a kiss on my forehead. I close my eyes and let the conversation be. I always do.

  EVENTUALLY, PEOPLE BEGAN to question if the Leaving had really happened. I guess this is how it is with memory and emotion – details blur and merge and fade and are reinvented, to suit the meaning one can live with. It was made easier by the fact that there was no physical evidence of the gods leaving; no video or photo of the divinities that had suddenly gone and left. All the event had was a world full of unreliable witnesses.