Diaspora Ad Astra (17 page)

Ilyena tapped ash into her Alter (currently hovering in front of her at chest height) and blew out smoke. “Yes.” Her Alter was a bright pink color, so her ashtray
was a bright pink color. Very stylish. Ilyena loved it. “So?”

“You could have had it programmed to turn into a table. Or a chair. Or a television.”

“A television,” Ilyena said, and laughed. “You know how much those costs? Jesus.”

“First Alter I saw that turned into an ashtray,” Zee said. There was a
zing,
and his shield fell and he turned toward the traffic again.

Ilyena decided that she liked this 0-ender after all.

“Madness. It was like the Dark Ages. You know during the Dark Ages? People would just start dancing, or think they’re wolves? Copulate on the streets? That
end-of-the-world feel. There was a man who was pulled out of the rubble six days after the quake. He was a professor at university, had a teenage son, a lovely marriage. Perfectly sane. Six days
under the ruins, with no food and no water, no one to talk to, and he went mad. Turned feral and ate his own arm. Or tried to, the media went crazy over that one detail. Anyway, he had to be
restrained like a criminal. After a couple of days he completely lost his language. He was a brilliant, brilliant professor, wrote several papers, and he died a crazy man. Can you imagine
that?” Ilyena said, leaning forward, her cigarette almost burned to the filter. She was pumped up, but her lone audience wasn’t reciprocating. Zee stood beside her, as still as a
statue. “Jesus,” Ilyena said, disgusted. “Of course you can’t.” She leaned back, killed her stick on her Alter, and lit another one.

“There were over a hundred recorded cases of
amok,”
Ilyena said. “From virtually zero before the quake to a fucking hundred. Men just picked up
broken bottles and went on a killing rampage in evacuation centers. Women and children were eviscerated and raped right on the streets.

“Officials resigned right and left. There were suicides. Eventually, the government broke down.

“Quezon City recovered first, then absorbed whatever’s left of Manila. The other cities got up, but barely. You can say they’re still trying to get up.

“But Quezon City and Manila—they thrived. The survivors created a new city with its own administration, and a new name. Rizal.” Ilyena paused, then burst out
laughing. “God, that sounded like a tourism brochure. I should edit that part.”

Ilyena had read and watched several terabytes worth of Rizal history, and she felt that Quezon City and Manila couldn’t be any more different. Quezon City was verdant,
pristine, a place of spaces; Manila was crowded and dusty and soot-covered and proud. But she liked both cities anyway. They were living things, pulsing and evolving. That life was lost in the
merger. After the quake, things were recreated and there was nothing now but straight lines and pedestrian lanes and people working for the economy and weariness and timed meals and rules. A city
with no heart. A rich city, yes, but a city with no heart.

“After the announcement of Rizal’s autonomy, it had 2,000 people,” Ilyena said. “Med use shot up among the small population. Rizal wanted to make it on
its own, so everyone had to work hard, and the pressure became too much to bear for its constituents. Drug use became a major problem. And here you thought a group of people who survived a major
cataclysm would think twice about destroying themselves.

“When it declared independence, Rizal closed itself, placed itself under a glass dome. Like what Japan did in the 1700’s. But unlike Japan, who also forbade its
people from leaving the motherland under the threat of execution, Rizal didn’t stop its constituents from leaving. And of course almost everybody left. Who wouldn’t want to leave a
fucking mental hospital? Three years later, realizing the error of its ways, the administration of Rizal opened the city gates. The drug problem persisted—tourists brought it in from the
provinces, from the other cities—but at least now there were
more people
. The population tripled in months, factories went up, the hospitality industry became a gold mine, new tech
was created and shipped out to other countries, and Rizal became very, very rich. And very, very dirty. It came to a point where everything had to filtered.”

It took Ilyena a moment to realize that it had started drizzling. She crossed her legs and cradled her bag. The ads in the waiting shed had changed abruptly to news reports
about the weather: temperature, humidity level, wind convergence. Ilyena saw a woman pass by on the sidewalk, her Alter changing into an umbrella. Ilyena raised her eyebrows, impressed.

“Then the eco-terrorists came,” Ilyena continued. She glanced at her cigarette. “Who would probably shoot me dead right now, if they were still
functioning.”

Ilyena foolishly waited for the laughter—or the disagreement (no they’re no longer functioning, no they won’t shoot you)—that didn’t come. She
glanced at Zee and raised an eyebrow.

“Huh,” she said, amused at his non-reaction. “So. Yes.” She scratched her nose and shifted in her seat. “They were a group of people in their
twenties who collectively called themselves Lakampati, after the ancient Tagalog goddess of the harvest. Lakampati was also known as Ikapati, and was considered both male and female—a he/she,
instead of a goddess. But the group chose the goddess identity, because woman can sustain life solely with her own body—produce milk, carry a child—whereas man has to use materials from
outside himself to build a shelter and make food. Lakampati is woman, just like the earth.”

Somehow Ilyena could sense that Zee was now listening closely. “Our library had copies of Lakampati’s early online campaigns, okay? They’re safe and innocent,
so innocent I could have puked all over their ‘woman this, woman that’ bullshit. No need to arrest me.”

“Lakampati is a dead group,” Zee said. “And so is the deity it was named after, seeing that she no longer has any known cults or followers.”

Zee delivered this argument in a flat voice, but Ilyena could sense that she had somehow hit a nerve. Or a memory chip. Or an embedded command that would sooner or later prompt
the robot to shoot her in the head. Ilyena decided to push, but to push lightly. “But I’m not finished yet,” she said. “Listen:

“People believed the members were from the other cities, young people who visited Rizal and saw how doomed it was despite of its industry. Because of. Whatever.
They’d picket outside company doors, demand the closure of factories on online forums, demand meetings with the bigwigs, and fail. Who’d listen to them? When the government got buried
under the ruins of the Quake, it was the private sector that swooped in to prevent complete destruction. The city of Rizal was built by
companies
. The companies darken the water and the
air with their filth, but it’s either that, or no Rizal at all.

“One late afternoon two years ago, a building exploded on New Ayala. It was owned by Edge Pharmaceuticals, a drug company accused of dumping toxic chemical waste in
roadside ditches. No casualties reported, just a fuckload of destroyed machinery and merchandise.

“Several people disappeared after the explosion. Relatives filed Missing Person reports, but these people were never found. It became clear what became of them—who
they were, really—when the explosions continued, since now the attacks come with a clue. ‘Lakampati Lives’. Spray-painted in red paint near the scene of the crime, along with
their symbol—a rice stalk, blood-red against black.

“But after a year, and five explosions,” Ilyena said, “the attacks stopped. The spray-painted words and the bloody rice stalks continued to appear around the
city every now and then, however, leading others to believe that yes, Lakampati lives,
still,
and they’re just getting ready.”

The rain was falling heavily now, drumming constantly on the roof above her head. The ads continued to monitor the weather stats. The temperature had dropped, Ilyena noticed.
She thought of her father, wrapped in his jacket, doing his slow walk from the kitchen to the living room, awaiting her return. She thought of her mother, the “meetings” she kept
disappearing to, and that one night when she realized that she would never see her mother again.

“My mother was Lakampati, Zee,” Ilyena said.

A bang so loud that even Ilyena wasn’t able to hear herself finish her own sentence. Zee jumped on his Hover Cycle in a flash and zoomed up through the traffic. Ilyena,
who had her head lowered, stepped out into the rain and looked up when she saw the robot leave.

The sound came from above, and now an air car was spiraling down the tiers, crashing into several vehicles on its way down. Zee was following closely, hoping to latch onto it
and slow its descent, if not stop it altogether. Gray skies, the twinkling lights of air traffic. Ilyena blinked away rainwater. She was having a hard time focusing.

Land traffic had frozen. Glass and screams were dropping from the sky. The car was approaching the pavement so fast that Ilyena was sure—

She found herself lying on her side on the sidewalk. The fallen vehicle had formed a shallow crater on the highway, the rain hitting its shell producing steam.

She was able to approach the wreckage before the police came. “Stay where you are,” she heard Zee say from above, but it was too late, she had already looked.

She stared wide-eyed at Zee. “Zee, the driver’s,” she began, but Zee gave her an almost imperceptible shake of the head. She closed her mouth.

Three more Hover Cycles were descending from the air traffic. Only then did Ilyena realize that police from the ground had already surrounded the destroyed car, securing its
perimeter, shooing away bystanders. She could hear overlapping ambulance sirens from somewhere.

Zee had zipped up his uniform completely, covering even his neck, a vulnerable spot. Ilyena was suddenly afraid.

“Captain,” Zee said to one of the uniformed policemen, and saluted. Ilyena couldn’t tell them apart.

The Captain grunted. “What’s this civilian doing so near the vehicle?”

“The civilian saw the contents of the car, sir,” Zee said.

There was a silence as the policemen exchanged glances. Or at least that’s what Ilyena thought they were doing. Their shields were down, and when Ilyena stared at the
captain, she only saw her own face staring back. The rain had soaked through her clothes and had plastered her hair against her face. She looked gaunt, lost.

“Let’s go to someplace dry,” the Captain said.

“Wait.” Ilyena patted herself and looked about, and expelled a sigh of relief when she saw that her Alter was still hovering beneath the waiting shed, safe and
still clearly functioning.

“I’ll get your things,” Zee said.

They ended up huddled beneath the awning of a nearby vintage store, Ilyena wrapped in one of the policemen’s extra jackets. She looked into the store’s display
window and saw hand-sewn dresses in the shadows. Lace, pearls, tulle.

The Captain was scanning the visitor chip in her palm. Her personal info hung in the air in bright-green letters:

SANTOS, ILYENA ROMERO
19 YEARS OLD
B.A. HISTORY
BULACAN STATE
STUDENT PASS
SPECIAL ACCESS TO RECORDS.

“Your city pass will expire in a couple of hours,” the Captain said.

“I was just leaving,” Ilyena said. “My cab’s late.”

“You’re in the city working on your thesis?”

“My parents used to work in this city. I’m studying Rizal history and culture.”

“Oh, dear,” the Captain said. Ilyena couldn’t see his face, but he sounded as if he were smiling. “That couldn’t be too interesting, could
it?”

“The guy in the car’s Lakampati,” Ilyena said.

Silence.

“What made you reach that conclusion?” the Captain said.

“Red paint, stencil templates of a rice stalk,” Ilyena said. “They were on his passenger seat. In a green bag. And I wasn’t imagining any of this, I had
a good look.”

Ilyena could almost hear him thinking
bomb.
But what he said was, “We’ll scour the city, as per protocol. Now let’s go find you a cab.”

“I suppose you think this is nothing,” Ilyena said, hands on her hips. “Just an ordinary night.”

“A year of spray-painted words and taunts,” the Captain said. “We do take these signs seriously, Miss Santos, but of course we won’t go as far as
evacuate every building in Rizal. That guy in the car there could be Lakampati, or just an idiot with a can of spray-paint. I’m putting my bet on the latter, if you ask me.”

Ilyena turned away from him and looked at the fallen vehicle. She expected to see people from the coroner’s pulling the lone passenger out of the totaled car, expected a
form being zipped up in a black bag, but what she saw was an ambulance, a gurney, an IV drip.

“He’s alive,” she said. In a moment she was running, shedding the policeman’s jacket, wet again in the rain. Behind her, grunts of surprise, the Captain
calling her name. Then hands pulling her back.

“He’s alive!” Ilyena said. “Which hospital are you taking him to?”

“Your city pass has expired, Miss Santos,” the Captain said.

“I just have to ask him something,” Ilyena said. The frustration was making her cry. “I want to know—”

If my mother is still alive.

She struggled against their grip.

I cannot say that. If they ever find her, she will be imprisoned. Executed.

Then I’ll have to find out where they’re taking him. I need the name of the hospital, I need to slip into his room and ask him without the police around. I need
to find a way to—

I need to—

The ambulance doors had closed. Ilyena turned toward the sound. The policemen’s grip on her had slackened, and so she shook the hands away.

There was a woman by the ambulance. She was wearing jeans and a shirt and a cap, the brim covering her eyes. She was carrying a green bag, the exact same bag Ilyena saw in the
car.

Ilyena moved forward as the woman moved away from the ambulance. The woman, her hair long and curly and full, was moving toward a car parked near the sidewalk.