Project 17 (3 page)

The Internet never failed to amuse her.

Lillian opened another tab. She typed Senerex and hit Search. Nothing. She tried Neuropro. Nothing there as well.

A chat window popped up on her screen.

Lillian threw away the candy wrapper and licked her fingers before typing.

Lillian had already nodded off to sleep in front of her laptop when Max replied three hours later, the sudden ping in her earphones shaking her awake. “Son of a—” Lillian
pulled off the earphones and massaged her ears.

Lillian opened Northpoint-Pascual’s website. In the header was a photo of a family, all in white, sitting in a field dotted with white flowers.
Northpoint-Pascual. Health care and
medical research for a better world.

She clicked on Products by Category.

No Neuropro or Senerex in any of the categories. She closed her laptop and went to sleep.

Caleb was pretty much the same the next day: quiet but seething internally. Now that Lillian knew what was coming it no longer unnerved her, but she still tried her best to reach out, if only to
break the monotonous day. During lunch, she took out a pack of Candy Stripe from her bag and slid it across the table to Caleb’s elbow.

“Thanks for buying me lunch yesterday,” Lillian said. “You don’t have to, you know. Your brother gave me a card. We could use it to buy
merienda
if you
like.”

Silence for a minute or two.

“I used to be addicted to this,” Caleb said. He opened the pack and shared it with her.

That’s a start, Lillian thought.

“Do they still call them candy stripers?” Caleb asked. “The hospital volunteers?”

Lillian was a hospital volunteer once. “Yes. But I never wore the candy striper jumper.”

She waited for him to ask another question but he never did.

He was saving his questions for the next day, it turned out. “Do you live with your parents?” he asked from inside his room as Lillian sat in the chair in the hallway.

“No. I live on my own.”

“Where are your parents?”

Talking about her parents irked her. Caleb talked to her once in a blue moon, and it had to be about this. “They’re based in Ilocos, but I don’t know anymore. I divorced them
when I turned sixteen.”

Lillian knew Caleb was going to ask why.

“He cheated on her,” she said. “He came home to us maybe twice a week? And my mother just shrugged it off, believing his lie about having to work extra hours. Once I saw him at
the mall with his new girl. She was just a few years older than me. Even then my mother didn’t believe.”

It was the first time Lillian screamed in public. The girl was going to run away, but she dragged her and her father to the restaurant where she had planned to have dinner. “No,
you’re not leaving now,” she told them, and made them squirm in their seats while she ate her sushi and shook in anger.

“After that, he promised to me that he won’t do it again. But how could you trust someone after that?”

“You get paranoid,” Caleb said. “You buy him a nice shirt for Father’s Day, and you start to wonder if he’ll wear it on a date with that girl, if he’ll say,
I bought this
instead of
my son bought this.”

Lillian put down her phone.

“My brother and I didn’t legally divorce my parents but we left and never looked back,” Caleb said without turning around to face her. “We started from nothing, you know.
My father worked as a welder, then a salesman. Sold everything he could. Even if he didn’t have much he gave money so my mother’s sisters could go to school. He sacrificed a lot, you
know? Sometimes I wonder if he saw other women and took to the bottle because he thought he deserved it, after years of hard labor. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he did deserve it.”

“Maybe he should have just bought a goddamn yacht,” Lillian said, and Caleb shrugged.

“I guess what hurt was he thought we weren’t enough.”

Lillian remembered how it hurt to think that her father had looked at her straight in the eye nearly every day and said that he had to stay at work. Her own father lied to her face. “Fuck
him,” Lillian said, and Caleb nodded in solemn agreement.

After that the hours became easier to bear, but Caleb refused to volunteer any more information about himself or his brother. “Have you ever been married?” Lillian asked one time,
and Caleb only shook his head. She tried to engage him by regaling him with stories about her past boyfriends, their quirks and why they left (worked at the city, went to school abroad, realized
he’s gay), but Caleb remained silent.

On Friday, while Caleb slept in front of the TV, Lillian bit on a Candy Stripe and explored the house. If he was not going to share any more stories, then she’d look for the stories
herself. She checked every nook and cranny in the rooms downstairs, but the most interesting thing she found was a print copy of the New Yorker, dated 2012, inside an old cabinet outside the
washroom.

Caleb was still asleep. Lillian moved upstairs. The upstairs bathroom, which was right next door to Caleb’s room, has a bathtub with gold claws. She moved down the narrow corridor and
bumped into a carton box.

She didn’t notice it on her first day because it was so dark. It looked like a collection of junk, the kind you throw into a box just to clear a room or a table. Coffee-stained mugs,
broken pens, several notepads of various sizes, three empty card holders, a stapler, two broken tumblers from Starbucks. Paper clips, rubber bands, a slim volume titled
The Feasibility of a
Fully Mechanized Police Force,
pencil stubs. Office junk.

There was a sketchpad included in the mess. She pulled it out and flipped through the pages. Industrial designs—a chair, a lamp, a table—followed by a remarkable, lifelike pencil
sketch of Caleb laughing. At the bottom was a single word:
Melancholy.

The next page showed a sketch of a man holding his face in his hands.
Self-Portrait.

The sketchpad belonged to Paul.

It was as though she had seen them naked. Lillian placed the sketchpad back in the box, and waded through the other junk.

She found a rectangular piece of plastic, cracked, stained yellow with age. An ID card.

Abe Ruiz

VISITOR

0073

Northpoint-Pascual

Lillian never understood why Jamie and Max liked to squat in her apartment unit when in their own home they lived in trust-fund-baby affluence, with their tiny chandeliers and hardwood floor.
Maybe they enjoyed nagging her to paint the walls or buy a proper bed. Maybe they needed to look at something that would hurt their eyes.

Right now Max’s multimonitor setup was hurting Lillian’s eyes, so she stood at the end of the room, hip against the ornate headboard of Max’s bed, nibbling on her favorite
candy. Jamie was sitting on the floor, watching her and looking mildly disgusted. Each of the three 25-inch monitors was on full brightness.

“It’s an old visitor’s ID,” Max said. “Maybe eight, nine years old? Around that time Northpoint-Pascual began taking photos of their visitors.”

“They print new visitor’s IDs every day?” Lillian asked.

“More or less.”

“That’s expensive.”

“It’s nothing compared to the cost of their employee IDs.” Max pointed at the center screen, on which she had blown up a high-res image of a Northpoint-Pascual company ID. The
two other monitors were running searches on Abe Ruiz.

“See this silvery band at the bottom? The band contains an employee’s compressed DNA sequence encrypted with Northpoint-Pascual’s company code and the department they belong
to.”

“That’s insane,” Lillian said.

“It’s gorgeous,” Max said.

“She’s having an orgasm,” Jamie stage-whispered.

“NP-P’s completely nuts on security,” Max said. “I couldn’t even get past their firewall. So, good old content search.” Max glanced at the rightmost screen.
“And I finally have an image match.”

Lillian nearly ran up against the monitor. “That’s him!”

“Who?”

“The guy I’m working for! Paul Dolores!”

It was a small photo of a younger Paul Dolores—
Abe Ruiz?
—possibly cropped from a group shot taken back in 2016. Even then his smile wasn’t bright, as though he already
knew what the future held for his brother.

“And he’s dead,” Jamie said, reading the leftmost monitor.

The three absorbed the list for several silent seconds.

“Maybe it’s a mis-tag?” Lillian said. “The guy in the photo’s really Abe Ruiz?”

“Afraid so,” Max said.

Lillian remembered Paul’s password—
abraham lincoln
—which all of a sudden didn’t seem like such a random password at all.

“The brothers died in the same year,” Lillian said, and air-quoted. “‘Died’. What the hell happened?”

“Oh-kay,” Jamie said. “If Ezekiel is Caleb Dolores, then maybe he and Paul are not really a couple. But I’m holding on to my ‘CEO shamed by scandal’
theory.”

But what scandal?

No Ezekiel Ruiz admitted in Mediatrix of All Graces. (
Does this mean that when Ezekiel entered Mediatrix of All Graces, he was already Caleb Dolores?
Lillian wondered.) No photo. No
record.

“Aha,” Max said, and pulled up a 2015 news article about Ezekiel Ruiz, “‘Zeke to family and friends, who graduated from high school at an accelerated age of 10, received
his college diploma in Mechanical Engineering from UP at the age of 14 under a—’”

“— ‘Northpoint-Pascual Academic Scholarship for the Sciences’” Lillian read.

“‘Only 16, he will now join the company’s Robotics Department, currently led by renowned scientist Margaret Morales. Prior to designing and programming the first Sentry
prototype, Ms. Morales became well-known in the industry for designing robots that assisted doctors in surgery and high-risk medical missions,’” Max continued. “Margaret’s
CEO now, right?”

“Boy Wonder,” Jamie remarked. “You know what they say about the thin line between genius and insanity.”

“Guys,” Max said, and pointed at the middle monitor.