Tien and Mei stood before the grandeur of Lujing Beishu as people emerged from their homes and cheered. A thousand multicolored peony lights blossomed in the sky, banishing the darkness, while dancing dragons filled the streets with sound and color, the frenetic beat of drums chasing misfortune away. And in the silent hours after, all the Tsin of Hinirang knew that they were finally reunited with their homeland.
When the first fingers of dawn broke through the morning sky, Tien awoke to the news that the Guvernador-Henerale of the Ispancialo conquerors himself was coming from Ciudad Manila to see him. He hurriedly put on his best robes and stepped out to the sound of horses.
“Vueno arao, Ser Alejandro Baltran Ignadzio du Valenzia ei Ramirez,” Tien said, bowing low as the Ispancialo leader reined in his horse, stopping just short of him.
“Vueno arao, venerable Tien Pu,” the Guvernador-Henerale spoke in a tone that warned Tien to be most careful of the words he used. “I’m sure you are aware of why I have come here today.”
“You must forgive my ignorance, Ser, but I have no idea what would bring your illustrious presence to my humble abode this fine morning.” Tien was aware of the scrutiny of the Ispancialo official. He counted a full complement of twelve mounted guardias all looking at him with interest. “Perhaps some tea?”
“No, I did not come for a social visit.” Ser Alejandro said with a wave of dismissal, his gaze thoughtful as it swept across the enclave. People emerged from their homes, trying hard not to stare at him and his entourage. He could find no actual changes — it looked to be the start of another day in the Tsin enclave — but his heart felt what his eyes could not see. A profound yet intangible change had occurred.
Finally, he returned his attention to Tien. The old man’s head was bowed respectfully, but his back remained straight and proud. “I am here because of reports of disturbances in the night. Loud explosions, and strange bright lights. How do you account for this?”
“I am sure I have no idea of what you speak, good Ser. There were no disturbances reported to me.”
“Indeed?” The Ispancialo leader looked him straight in the eye. “It would do you well to ensure that there are no further reports of the kind I spoke. Otherwise you will be getting more than simple words of warning.” Without waiting for a reply, Ser Alejandro turned his horse and galloped off, the faint scent of incense lingering in the air behind him, following him all the way to the gates of Ciudad Manila.
That night, for the first time since his youth, Tien slept in peace, dreaming in the arms of Lujing Beishu, the secret city of his homeland.
J. POCHOLO MARTIN B. GOITIA
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LUMINESCENT
J. Pocholo Martin B. Goitia was born on Halloween 22 years ago. He is currently a journalism student at the University of Santo Tomas and is the editor of one of the college magazines and its literary portfolio. He is a fellow and former president of the Thomasian Writers Guild and attended the 3rd UST National Writers Workshop a couple of years ago. He claims to be tempted by the allure of jumping on the call center band wagon one of these days for the cash to buy incredibly expensive imported novels, graphic or otherwise, at his leisure. He is currently working on and off on his first novel.
“An Introduction to the Luminescent,” a look into the Philippines of tomorrow and the people who live there, is Goitia’s first published work outside of UST.
SHE KNEW DECEMBER of 2105 was the future; there was no more looking forward, and we had nothing else but this:
We had sun-baked tiles of Marikina clay, worn by years of torrid atmosphere and cluttered footsteps, whitewashed and coat-chipped dozens of times in the last 75 years. They were wet now with gray rain, filled to look like a brick wall felled years ago by the sheer might of hyper-civilization thus epitomized by the ultrasaur of a mall standing massive across the street. The mall blocked the horizon and half the sky. Here was our last meet before Magenta’s father rocketed her family to the stars. She told me time wasn’t measured in space the way it was on Earth. There you lived forever, for as long as you wanted; you looked up time in libraries.
That Magenta lived in the mall was one of the worst things in the world. You might as well have been born in space. You weren’t an earthling in a mall. You were too hellishly rich to be a backwater-planet dweller. You were the privileged. We called you La Luminosa—not as a compliment. More of a joke.
She was the privileged and her name was the color of the clouds. Magenta had it all: a Hyundai Exoscraper flightcart for her 18th birthyear; a fully poseable, always obedient, lobotomized (and pre-castrated) clone of herself for her sweet 16th; a stellar cruise to her Andromeda for the 13th; a Neurotech Dreamplanner 21000 for her 11th; a candle ant colony for her 8th; a white winged pony for her 5th; a pair of gravity disruptors was secured for her before she was even born. She lived in an artificially temperate climate enclosed by four walls, programmed for bearable winters and cooler summers. The acacias of her vintage playpark were evergreen in the mall, they had no ants or caterpillars. Her hair was the color of her choice. Her eyes were the same ones her mother wore, the same ones her grandmother wore during the war as a fighter pilot, preserved after death to be passed on through the generations, changing color like chameleons do whenever the mood dictates. Magenta’s DNA credit status could feed an earthling family for seven years. She was of the privileged, had a star named after her, a Neptunian gas farm to her name, and friends who were exactly like her but happy about it. She had an Enron Infrared Tracking Chip injected into her brain before her skull turned from cartilage to bone as a fetus.
The clay tiles were slippery under the rain, most especially under Magenta’s heels. Gravity disruptors never worked outside the mall. High-heels were something no earth woman had worn for over half a century. When she slipped I caught her and our wet bodies embraced.
Most earthlings thought La Luminosa were cold-blooded, not needing the fortitude of mammalian composition due to years of being pampered by the atmospheric solace of their homes. The truth was that most earthlings knew squat about them, so mythmaking was rampant.
Under the rain, Magenta didn’t look at me. From the embrace she turned to the Terrans: my people, lounging in the most expensive earthling café in the city—all wanting to be inside the building that blocked the sky. They saw what I cradled—a shard of silver, a light daemoness. They were all shocked: La Luminosa. Magenta’s eyes were the color of the clouds; her hair was silver because gray didn’t suit her. She stared them all down. She was on fire: I saw it in their faces. The fear.
“Can’t you see?” she said, her accent the song of extinct birds. “I’m with my husband, and you can drink your coffee.”
At the mention of the word “husband,” three women and a man fainted. With the new infrared eyes Magenta gave me, I saw two erections rise.
Magenta, usually as cold as her silicon fingers, made three points clear to me:
1) We humans, wherever we live, spend our lives under the notion that it’s ludicrous to make our emotions public. We’d make ourselves too vulnerable in an age wherein vulnerability could kill or drive one crazy. But the times we do show emotion, they come in gusts worthy of holoflicks. The flood-gates burst open. They inspire, and pulses hasten, hair-follicles stand, eyes swell, fists clench. We live for these short spurts. Everything else is in-between.
2) Mankind invented high-heels hundreds of years ago to make strong women fall when the tiles are wet. Heels made women look taller, but they deformed their feet and turned them dependent—which was just what men needed: spouses who couldn’t stand or run away. It became clear to me that high-heels were a crime unless gravity-disruptors—or love—were involved.
3) Magenta was still human, for all the bio-synthetics, electronics, and cybernetics. She was warm-blooded and crying. She belonged on Earth because she wanted to. And she didn’t lie when she promised she would marry me one way or another. It was fine that a pluvial blessing was the closest we could get.
&n
bsp; I wanted to tell her I saw her grow wings once, on the day we met. But the clone warriors arrived and took her away. She always wanted wings, something their scientific advancements haven’t lived up to just yet. You would have thought she’d like the idea: she’ll be joining her artificial race above the sky from now on. When I left for home, crowds parted at my approach.
*
NOBODY REMEMBERS when the socioeconomic rift started taking turns for the grossly extreme. Few people even noticed. It was something you noted when clicking through 21st century literature and archives. Few people could stand the flatscreen these days, much less paper.
My undergraduate thesis, a study of the clandestine society of La Luminosa, hypothesized that the rift started when private citizens began taking to the stars around 2023. The resources of first the moon, then Mars, then the rest of the Solar System, then 1/50th of the Milky Way, were so immense that the next quadrillion dollar stellar mining expedition became easier to achieve than the last. Technology grew by leaps and light-years but the costs were enough to keep regular consumers confined to the negative A — not even in Earth’s economic pyramid. For the better part of the last century, almost everybody under the planet’s atmosphere was ignorant of the new technologies.
And the planet was dying. The last nature-raised eagle was auctioned off in 2056, the last wildflower three years later. Neglected, sapped of its resources more potently each year, the most privileged of its inhabitants focused on breathing life into Martian deserts. But we—they—got richer. And since the ancient day Cro-Magnon eyes first sparkled at the sight of gold, that’s all that mattered.
“The mall is an ultrasaur”—verbatim from my study. Large and pre-historic. At 30-years old, it has gone through countless renovations, its first 15 floors making up the oldest non-sentient thing in the district. It was also a megamongrel of sorts: it survived the years wherein shopping centers were fitted in with residential facilities for the ludicrously wealthy, and it was bypassed until recently by the general movement to completely segregate outsider facilities from those of what was then referred to as the space monarchy or the space merchants. The result was a 2km by 1/2km structure with 32 floors, the top 27 of which were composed of luxury residential condos, schools, business centers, while the bottom five were for shopping and recreation of the general public: cheaply decorated and heavily patrolled by a security force of mindless, burly clones cultured for the purpose of sentry duty and subtle brutality.
My thesis started as a juvenile offence perpetrated from the 5th-floor ledge of the Capricorn wing with an illegally acquired pair of gravity disruptors locked around my ankles. It took Jethro Dong and me two weeks of fiddling to get them working.
My grandfather always reminded me of the times digging through garbage was looked down upon. Still is, just now it’s more profitable, if you know what to do with the junk.
The plan was to get the grav disruptors working, then make cheap replicas, then get rich. That nobody had attempted it before didn’t bother us. Jethro Dong fancied himself a mechanical genius. He had the goatee and eye-patch to prove it.
About to do something risky, illegal, and completely taboo, I tried to remember what my grandmother used to do before praying. Jethro Dong told me to touch my chin, my chest, then my two ears with my right hand. Sa ngalan ng Ama, ng Anak at ng Starship Galactikus. Alright.
Jethro Dong pushed me off and I had two minutes to test our product then leap my way to the Scorpio wing exit before the clone warriors were alerted of my activities. That is, if I didn’t fall and break my legs at first jump.
Sharp, short-lived pains shot my thighs, ankles, pelvis, and upper back, then invisible hands lifted me to the 4th floor ledge. I was adopted by waves of anti-gravity far more powerful—albeit more gentle—in those two plastic rings than in my two-ton hover engine parked outside. My veins were pumped hydrogen. I was on the moon.
I dove down to the first floor and calculated a lunar jump to the 8th. I found myself floating to the 15th utilizing as much effort it would normally take to stand up and scratch my head. I didn’t grab the ledge upon reaching the high point. While in airborne standstill for two seconds: I saw a McDonalds with crystal seats. I saw a man eating a Big Mac the size of his head. The halls were lit with fireflies with abdomens the size of macopas. There were no stairs, but there were waterfalls everywhere. And everybody was floating around leisurely like it was the easiest thing in the world. It was. I let myself float down before anyone noticed—outsiders weren’t allowed beyond the fifth. Outsiders weren’t allowed gravity disruptors.
With a little acrobatics and recycled swimming skills from high school, I torpedoed to an 8th floor wall to ricochet back to the 5th to celebrate with Jethro Dong our success and impending wealth.
Jethro Dong was running, his mouth foaming and sputtering yellow spittle—the way it did when he was terrified or high on isotopic nano-brain-stimulators injected to the temple and immediately neutralized by ingested counterbiotic pills.
Jethro Dong was frightened of a few things, which included wherever he was taking backward glances of terror over my shoulder. The clone warriors, two of them, in anti-grav packs fitted with micro-turbines, grabbed an arm each and flipped me over in midair to take an ankle and grav disruptor. We were in aerial standstill: their equipment was a step above disrupting gravity, capable of completely stopping it—which was a necessary capability when enforcing the peace in a three dimensional city.
“Outsiders are not permitted to ascend beyond the 5th floor,” said Clone Warrior 1 in a cold monotone.
“I know,” I said back up at him. My head was welcoming blood by the pint.
“Hindi maaaring umakyat ang mga taga-labas lampas sa ikalimang palapag,” said Clone Warrior 2, following mall security protocol to communicate with outsiders in both English and Filipino lest they don’t understand the standard former.
“Alam ko,” I replied in turn.
“Outsiders are forbidden to use Gravity Disruptor Rings,” said Clone Warrior 1.
“Bawal gumamit ang mga taga-labas ng mga Gravity Disruptor Rings,” said Clone Warrior 2. They flew me upside down to the central security office on the 6th floor. My forehead slammed on a railing. I was to be detained and “disciplined.”
“Ikukulong ka at ididisciplina,” said Clone Warrior 2. Jethro Dong was out of sight somewhere.
A section of my thesis focused on the total disregard for the laws set by the Luzon Provisional Government that the inside communities have practiced for decades. In paper, they were citizens of the Luzon Republic, but have ignored the fact since long before the Philippine Civil War—which they neither participated in nor supported. Slowly but surely, as bio-replication technology advanced, the space merchant communities’ need for earth’s failing natural resources declined, and the economy of the country became a separate entity from that of the inner communities, benefiting only through land, income and business tax. By the time the Philippine Republic turned into the Philippine Union of Independent Nations, there were fourteen esoteric space merchant communities with an independent collective economy that was later required by the government to pay tariffs when exporting goods to the outside.
Hanging upside down, with the two clone warriors silently flying me to security, I remembered from school that, “On the September of 2090, through Republic Act 3045, cloning human beings was declared a criminal offense.” Space Merchants, though, mostly through the enterprising of Pfizer Clones Inc., have been cloning humans en masse long after it became illegal. The only reason the United Earth Human Rights Committee hadn’t cracked down on them yet was because the clones produced weren’t considered human at all—the process involved human cloning, which made it illegal locally, but the products had genetically altered brains that gave them the thinking capacity of late 21st century service androids. With computing power far less than any human being ever recorded and brains easily reprogrammed at the click of a remote control, the Pfizer Clones were biological
robots at best. With the “soul” argument having been debunked generations ago, you could kill your clone and your neighbor’s dog and be detained because of the dog. And because minerals exported from space colonies were too expensive, clones were cheaper to make than androids.
“You cheap pieces of putangshet!” I shouted at the Clone Warrior. They never processed the protests of the abducted until they got to the interrogation deck. I wanted to lash at them, curse them to death, bite their heads off. They’d never know.
“Mga puke niyo bulok!” I screamed.
“Hostess niyo bakla!” I hollered.
La Luminosa stared. Children’s ears were covered. Parents shouldn’t have bothered. Most of the kids didn’t speak their people’s ancient language anymore.
“Mamatay na kayo!”
“Tae niyo itim!”
“Wala kayong TITE!” I said. They really didn’t have penises.
Clone Warrior 1, the dickless shit, told me I was disturbing the peace. I should be quiet.
“Manahimik ka,” said Clone Warrior 2. “Wag kang manggulo.”
I told them to drop dead in both languages. I screamed it from the top of my lungs. The Clone Warriors pressed shockrings against my shins and the current threatened to fry my internal organs. I was too busy being half-dead to acknowledge the pain with a scream. I knew I wasn’t cooked because of what I was saying, because of the decibel of my voice. I imagined my kidneys frizzled into prunes.
The Clone Warriors injected cellular restabilizers into my bloodstream, which hurt almost as much as the shockrings. By the time we got to security, I was fully healed and incapable of speech. By the time Magenta was brought in for destroying mall property, the Clone Warriors were in the middle of their Gestapo routine.
“We have ways of making you talk,” said Gestapo Clone Warrior 1.
“Kumanta ka na,” said Gestapo Clone Warrior 2. He didn’t mind that what he said meant he wanted me to sing. He did whatever he was programmed to do. His program dictated he shock me if ever I burst into song.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Page 17