Diaspora Ad Astra (18 page)

“Miss Santos.” The Captain sounded like he wanted to smack her. “We need to get you out of the city now.”

“Wait, I just need to talk to—“

Ilyena reached the car just as the woman with the bag settled inside. Ilyena slammed a fist on the window. The woman jerked her head up in alarm.

“Hello?” Ilyena said. “Hello? I need to talk to you.” Her heart was racing.

The car could fly.
No,
Ilyena’s head screamed when she realized this. The woman shifted gears, and without thinking twice Ilyena jumped into the nearest
vehicle—which turned out to be a Hover Cycle. The policeman it belonged to was standing just two steps away, tending and talking to some injured civilians.
“Hoy!”
she
heard him say, but she had already revved the engine and now she was up, up, up, flying at a dizzying height. Ilyena calmed herself enough to focus on the controls of the Cycle. The woman’s
car was flying fast. Too fast. Ilyena increased her speed. The wind hurt her face.
Shit,
she thought.
What am I doing? I will go to jail. Why am I doing this?
She thought of what
her father would say to her, his slow walk from the kitchen to the living room. His chipped coffee mug, the many nights of waiting.

The woman looked like her mother.

Her speed was staggering. Ilyena could see Hover Cycles following her in the rear-view mirror, but they couldn’t catch up. The car veered away from the highway. Ilyena
followed, moving the handlebars, and almost hit a building’s façade. “Fuck!” Ilyena screamed out loud, though it hurt. She was sure the wind was just minutes away from
scalping her, from peeling the skin off her face and arms. They had to stop.

There was something wrong with the light.

Ilyena took a quick glance around her. The ads displayed on the buildings were dying. Staring back at her now were dead eyes, squares of X’s. Ilyena looked down. The
screen of the Hover Cycle said, NO SIGNAL.

What?

Ilyena heard a buzz in her ear, as though the entire city had sighed, or had just taken its last breath.

The city was shutting down.

Blackout. Both Ilyena and the woman in the car landed their vehicles in darkness on an open field of cracked cement. Ilyena whipped out her Alter to power up her Locator
application, but her phone was also saying, NO SIGNAL. She alighted and looked around. Via the lights of the Hover Cycle she could see white and blue paint, corrugated metal. They were at the site
of the source station of the old train line, what was once the North Avenue Station but was now a monument to the Quake. Nothing about it was altered, nothing removed except the bodies. The railway
was left untouched after it collapsed, and Ilyena could see the train, the rusting railway, the circle of broken concrete it created when it fell. Beside it was a bronze plaque with the words that
Ilyena knew by heart:

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)

FROM THE RUINS SHALL RISE RIZAL.

Ilyena heard a car door slam through the sound of rain. “Hello?” she said, clutching her cell phone to her chest. The woman walked into the pool of light thrown by
the Hover Cycle’s headlights. She was also holding an Alter.

The woman’s Alter transformed into a gun.

“Mother?” Ilyena said, surprised.
Mother.
She burst into tears.

“What?” the woman said.

“No quick movements now,” Ilyena heard the Captain say. For a moment, Ilyena was confused. Was the Captain talking to the woman, or—

“Who the hell is she?” the woman said. Her gun was still on Ilyena.

“Put that away, Sophie.”

Sophie took a deep breath and lowered her weapon. “Why is she following me?”

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

Sophie fell silent. Ilyena could feel the woman’s eyes on her. They had her surrounded, the Captain’s and Zee’s faces shielded. Ilyena looked at them but
could only see rain.

“She shouldn’t have been near that car, one-forty,” the Captain said to Zee.

“You should have put a one-forty in that car,” Sophie said. “Not a human cop.
Jesus.
Have you seen what happened to Tony?”

“He’ll pull through,” the Captain said. “And it was nobody’s fault. It was an accident. Anyway, you do understand we have a bigger problem here.
We can’t keep Rizal frozen for long.”

“She called me ‘Mother’,” Sophie said. “What was that about?”

Ilyena was shivering.

Something dawned on Sophie. Ilyena could see it in the way she raised her shoulders, in the way her eyes widened. “Don’t tell me,” she began. Then:
“Will we have to kill her?”

Ilyena ran. She needed to get out of the city. She thought of her father, his coffee, the slow walk, the long wait.
Home,
she thought.

She felt something cold hit her back. Darkness.

Ilyena woke up dry and dressed on a bed with a light-blue sheet. The bed smelled like the cough drops she used to take when she was a child.

“You’re in the hospital.” The Captain was sitting on a chair beside the bed. Sophie, now in a brown long-sleeved blouse, stood by the closed door, arms
crossed. Ilyena sat up warily. Zee was on a chair on the other side of the room, face unshielded, eyes unblinking. She thought he had been powered down, but then he moved his neck. He gave her one
brief glance before looking away again.

Sophie looked nothing like her mother. Ilyena hugged her knees. She felt numb.

“I remember your father,” the Captain said. “Used to work as a communications officer for one of the big companies here in Rizal. Good man.”

“I suppose he knows the truth, then,” Sophie said suddenly. The Captain rolled his eyes.

“No,” Sophie said. “I’m just saying maybe he’ll prefer to tell his daughter himself.”

Clearly the Captain had not thought of that. “Well,” he began, but Ilyena said, “Now.”

They turned to her.

“Now,” Ilyena said. “I want to hear it now.”

“Well, then,” Sophie said, and stared at the wall. Ilyena listened to the Captain breathe. In, out. In, out.

“If we tell you, you’ll have to take what you’ll hear to the grave,” the Captain said. “And I’m pretty sure your father will make sure of
this. He has agreed to this arrangement, years and years ago. If you speak up, it will mean death to the both of you.”

“Yes,” Ilyena said.

“There is no Lakampati,” the Captain said.

Ilyena had figured as much. “And my mother’s dead,” she said.

“That’s correct.”

The long wait. The long farce.

“The people who disappeared after the explosion at Edge Pharmaceuticals,” the Captain said, and cleared his throat. “They weren’t eco-terrorists. They
were drug addicts. They were part of a secret test group for a new pill that the scientists of Edge believed would effectively suppress addiction. Drug addiction is a big problem for this city. The
economy is hurting, and the Administration wanted to end it, once and for all.

“Addiction is an intense yearning. While the pill did suppress the test group’s drug addiction, it also suppressed the group’s other yearnings: the yearning
to eat, the yearning to drink, the yearning to sleep. After taking that one pill, none of the group members wanted to snort coke, or shoot crack into their veins, but none of them also wanted to
take a single sip of water. Of course Edge didn’t want to release them to the general public, so they kept the test group inside the building and hooked them to IV drips, hoping the pill
would wear off after a few hours. It didn’t. It was possible that it wouldn’t. All 20 subjects for the trial died the next day, as though they had OD’d on their drug of
choice.”

“My mother was a drug addict,” Ilyena said. Her mother and her “meetings”. What were those, then? Had she been going to Edge all along, to meet with the
scientists who promised a cure? What was it that finally convinced her to say yes and sign her name on the dotted line? A bleeding nose, midnight sweats, a sudden urge to kill her own daughter?
Ilyena’s mother felt distant when she started working in Rizal, but Ilyena had always thought it was just stress. Big city stress.

Let me tell you about madness.

“The explosion was used to cover up the failed trial,” the Captain continued. “They couldn’t bring the dead bodies back to their respective families
without destroying the company, so Edge blew up the building with the members of the test group inside. Folded the experiment and buried the study. But how to cover up the explosion? There had been
environmental protests before, and Edge decided to draw, let’s say,
inspiration
, from that. Lakampati was created with the backing of the City Administration.”

Ilyena knew that Edge was the biggest pharmaceutical company in the country, and Rizal’s primary City Donor. Edge was practically synonymous with the Rizal
government.

“The companies hit during the ‘attacks’,” Sophie said, “were those who failed to pay their taxes to the government, or underreported their
profits. So this is justice. Of a sort.”

“People
died
in those bombings,” Ilyena said. She couldn’t find the words to describe how horrible she was feeling. How horrible they were.

“Those were accidents,” Sophie said, looking at her levelly. “Honest mistakes. There weren’t supposed to be any fatalities.”

“Save for the test group,” Ilyena said. “How many more buildings are you planning to bomb?”

“No more,” the Captain said. “After those five explosions—no more. We’re carrying out the spray-paintings simply as a means to find and arrest
potential eco-terrorists.”

“Moths to the flame,” Sophie said. “You have no idea how many ‘environmentalists’ set meet-ups via the fake online campaigns.”

“How can you keep doing this,” Ilyena said, “and not worry about lost investors? Which company would be stupid enough to work with Rizal now, with Lakampati
constantly around?”

“Which company would be stupid enough to work with a country at war,” Sophie shot back. “Which company would be stupid enough to work with a country killing
its own people.”

“And you’re proud of this?” Ilyena said. She felt cold all over. She wanted to get away from all of them. “What if the environmentalists you arrested
talked in jail?” she said.

Sophie and the Captain, unblinking, just looked at her.

“Oh my God,” Ilyena said. She covered her face with her hands. “Oh my God.”

“You think we’re monsters,” Sophie said, “but if those people were not terminated Rizal would have gone up in flames.”

“Your father was the only relative of an Edge test group subject that managed to find out the truth,” the Captain said. “Do you think it comforted him? Try
looking at a grieving mother in the eye and tell her, ‘Your daughter is a drug addict. She died trying to find a cure for herself’. At times,” he said, leaning back on his chair,
“it is more humane to feed the fantasy than to destroy it.”

“Edge should pay,” Ilyena said.

The Captain looked tired. “And allow Rizal to fall once again?”

Ilyena was curled up in the back seat of Sophie’s car, her bag her pillow. They wouldn’t let her take an air cab ride to the station alone, despite the fact that
they had already erased her Rizal pass from her visitor chip. She could write her thesis about the city, they said, but she would never be allowed to enter the city ever again. They also said they
had already informed her father, and that he was on his way to the station to take her home.

What to do now with their dinners, their idle chatter, their long silent hours in front of the television? A whole world of possibilities now lost. Her nights now emptied of
conjectures.
One day she will emerge from hiding with a new face but I’ll know it’s her and she’ll give up the fight and we can live elsewhere and we can start again. We can
start again.

Ilyena was asleep. Ilyena dreamt that she was standing in front of a white wall. The sky was gray. Ilyena thought of rain. There was a woman in black with her back turned to
her, spraying red letters on the wall’s immaculate surface. But then a horn sounded, a warning, and the woman dropped the spray can and ran away. Ilyena waited for Sophie. The Captain. Zee.
Nobody came. She approached the wall and picked up the can. LAKAMPATI, said the word on the white wall. Ilyena began spraying.

L. I. V. E. S.

END

By Katya Oliva-Llego

Astronomy News – November 18, 2013 – Astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, headquarters of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, has detected an
asteroid-like object on a trajectory towards Earth. They have designated it 2013 VK.

Astronomy News – November 19, 2013 – Astronomers at NASA’s Near Earth Object Program said that Object 2013 VK is likely artificial, possibly orbital debris.
They said it could be a rocket stage, although, they could not identify from which rocket launch.

Astronomy News – November 20, 2013 – Astronomers believe that Object 2013 VK had entered Earth’s atmosphere yesterday at 1500 Hrs GMT, over South East Asia,
even though they were not able to observe its entry despite continuous monitoring. “It should have arrived like a fireball and exploded upon atmospheric entry,” one of the astronomers
said, “But we haven’t received any reports of such.”

***

November 15, 2015, Manila, Philippines

“How did you find out about this clinic?” Elaine asked. She inserted her National ID card into the visitor scanner log of ClinMed Towers in Makati. The monitor
showed the list of offices inside the building. Elaine tapped her selection. The scanner log registered her data and ejected her card.

“From my sister-in-law,” Amanda said. “
Grabe
, you should see her. She has become a mestiza. Even her armpits are white.”

They walked towards the elevator. Amanda pressed the arrow up button. They studied their reflections on the shiny steel elevator doors. Elaine was wearing a light pink top that
brightened her light brown skin, a flared skirt, and a pair of sandals with two-inch heels, pushing her height to five feet six inches. Amanda ran her fingers through her hair to loosen the curls
and to create more volume. Her facial skin tone was lighter in contrast to her neck and chest. She had been using a facial whitening cream for a while. The elevator doors opened and they stepped
in. Elaine pushed the button for the ninth floor.