Philippine Speculative Fiction

by Andrew Drilon

  Luckily, Ami is an expert at the gloss-and-boss dichotomy, which she has learned is not only useful for handling one’s fellow flight attendants as well as unruly pax, but extremely helpful in pursuing an inflight career path. This is one of the reasons why she—a girl from an obscure island nation smaller than some asteroids—is one of less than sixty pursers, to date, certified to lead cabin crews on off-world flights, a fact of which her father is never slow to remind family, friends, and acquaintances, not to mention inform utter strangers in money-transfer outlets and on board the GraviTransit.

  Of course, Filipinos have always been very hirable in the service industry—in the early 2000s, call centers formed a sizeable chunk of the Philippine economy, and, to this day, over a third of global seafarers are Filipino. Multiple languages help as well, which is why Ami understood every single curse word being hissed in Mandarin and Spanish, by the time she glided up to Lin and Marisol with a friendly-yet-firm smile plastered on.

  Now they all have their showtime faces plastered on and their Standard English in gear, as they welcome passengers aboard, including Mr. Tawfiq, who, of course, is the entire reason her crewmembers were squabbling. She should have known it was going to happen, from the moment she spotted his name on the passenger manifest.

  Technically, areas of responsibility are assigned as soon as or even before the crew enters the vessel, well before the ground staff hands the manifest over, not that there’s all that much actual assignment to be done on a Mars flight, since the shuttle is only large enough to carry twelve pax. With a cabin complement of three, that’s one FA for every four passengers, which is rather indulgent, but then, the kind of person who can afford interplanetary travel is exactly the kind that expects indulgence.

  The problem was that, informally, it’s understood that a senior flight attendant can always request to switch duties with a junior, the term ‘request’ being something of a polite fiction in the rigidly-hierarchical world of inflight service. Marisol, however—off-world-certified for all of two months or so—was stubbornly sticking to the manual and refusing to trade ownership of Mr. Tawfiq’s section with Lin, instead of meekly acquiescing and then appropriately plotting soy-sauce-footbath revenge.

  The simplest solution was for Ami to commandeer Mr. Tawfiq’s section for herself—traditionally, the lead FA takes the most forward and typically most elite section, but this is a moot point on a Mars flight, where all the sections are essentially interchangeable because it’s all Premier Class—so that’s what she has done, despite the fact that she, apparently alone in the TransGalactic stable of flight attendants, doesn’t much like him.

  It isn’t racism, she thinks—she takes pains to ignore her sister’s voice in her head, loudly claiming that Arab men are invariably dirty and stinky and rude—her dislike is not liberally distributed among all men of Arabic descent, but confined to Mr. Tawfiq only. Frequent flier and heavy tipper he may be—Mikaela’s flirting with him finished payment on a new hovercar last year—but he’s demanding, and handsy.

  It’s not that Ami is a prude, and she recognizes that that sort of encouraging behavior can get a girl far, even in this day and age, but she prides herself on a certain standard of professionalism, even in a job that many people still consider more of a husband-hunting pastime than an actual profession.

  AMI FINDS HERSELF having to check her cheat sheet while delivering the safety demo spiel, a thing she hasn’t needed to do since training—Mr. Tawfiq’s ‘affable’ butt-pinching greeting must have annoyed her more than she thought.

  Thankfully, she covers the miniscule lapse well enough that pax don’t seem to notice, although Marisol does, darting a quick glance back at her in the midst of the demonstration—while the cheat sheet is, in fact, officially meant to be read from, no one gets certified for interplanetary service without having studied such a fundamental speech so thoroughly that she knows it with her eyes closed.

  Ami widens her own eyes ever so slightly in response, which Marisol correctly interprets as a signal to get back to the task at hand. There was a time when airlines—which really ought to be called something else now, Ami supposes—attempted to show the demo on video instead of live, but observation quickly proved that passengers are far more likely to pay attention to a pretty girl doing pantomime than to an easily ignorable screen.

  Being the new girl, Marisol is of course stuck with having to enact the actual performance, which no one likes doing because activating the Orlan collar wreaks havoc on your hair, when the pressure suit balloons out around you, and then you have to rush into the galley to fix yourself up faster-than-light, so as to be able to join the final safety cross-checks.

  Ami’s fairly gracious when it comes to this, however—especially since she just took a minute herself, before the demo, to slap another InstaBlend concealer patch over the irritating rash on her neck, and anyway, it isn’t as if it actually takes three people to make sure that twelve other people have their safety harnesses and collars attached, seats upright, and belongings stowed, so she doesn’t demand that Marisol rejoin her and Lin in time to check the cabin, only to secure the doors, which is the most important thing, after all.

  Despite Ami’s constant annoyance with her colleagues, she has to concede that it does take people of some capability to be able to handle all the bells and whistles necessary to close a shuttle door, which isn’t even really a door, in point of fact, but a hatch, except that they are forbidden from ever uttering the word ‘hatch’ in front of pax, since it is considered vaguely threatening and thus a complete marketing no-no.

  The ‘door,’ then, is formidable, not so much because it is probably thicker than the waistlines of three FAs standing side by side, but because of all the levers that need to be pulled, seals that need to be pressed, lights that need to be on in certain colors—not all the same—and, of course, the inflatable slide that needs to be armed, which Ami finds faintly ridiculous, because how much good, honestly, is the guarantee of a soft emergency landing, when separated from the vacuum of space by nothing more than the thickness of three slender flight attendants?

  It’s while she’s hoisting up the second lever that Ami realizes that, aside from the latch which arms the slide, she has no idea what any of these devices actually do, although she’s sure it’s covered in the training manual, which she used to know front, back, and sideways. Obviously, her next leave will necessitate some serious reviewing, which will annoy her mother, who seems to want nothing more from her daughter’s trips home than to engage in a comprehensive tour of every last mall in Manila.

  In the meantime, the Mars shuttle has four cabin doors, two of which are Ami’s responsibility, leaving the two at the rear for Lin and Marisol to secure. Then they will cross over and check each other’s doors, before moving forward to check hers, while she does the same in reverse, as gracefully and in as minimal an amount of time as possible.

  This, she often thinks, is the essence of inflight service: hurry up and wait, and repeat as necessary. She could really use a change, but she literally can’t afford one.

  SHE’S THINKING OF where she comes from, while she is hand-squeezing orange juice during the first meal service—as much as what she is doing can actually be called ‘hand-squeezing,’ when really, all she needs to do is grab an orange and tap it against the NectaRing on her index finger, which then emits a stream of compressed air that goes in, around, and through the fruit into a glass, delivering the revolutionary amount of half a cup of fresh, seed-free juice.

  Granted, the cup itself is not stacked on her cart the way such things used to be, but 3D-printed on the spot, along with the requisite fork, knife, and spoon—you’d think this insistence on virgin tableware would have become unnecessary, with the findings about microbes, which just goes to show that science might progress by leaps and bounds, but pax will remain finicky—yet even this is nothing more than a matter of moments, a tap of a ring and a push of a button.

  It’s these kinds of small inn
ovations—which the airlines seem to be in a race to adopt more quickly than each other, presumably thus garnering more passengers—that allow her to perform many of her duties on semi-autopilot, most of her attention elsewhere at the same time that she’s smiling, nodding, even engaging in the limited amount of chatting required beyond the time-honored “Chicken or beef?”

  It’s the orange, she supposes, that has her thinking of home, because she misses calamansi juice and didn’t get to have any on her last leave. Apparently, the humble calamansi has become the new darling of the international foodie elite—they must have grown tired of yuzu, or whatever obscure citrus was all the rage after that—with the result that there is currently no calamansi to be had in Manila for love or money, or at least not the kind of money that she is willing to spend on a fruit not much bigger than her thumbnail.

  Initially, she was unreasonably outraged over this circumstance—another instance of foreigners waltzing in and taking as much as they want, of whatever they want, which is exactly what foreigners have done throughout Philippine history—but her mother only laughed at her and said—

  Well, her mother said something, and probably she was right, because it occurs to Ami now that she, herself, is a ‘something’ that has been willingly taken away by foreigners, as the migration of Filipino workers to other shores—even, lately, to other galactic bodies, like Luna Base—goes on and on. So she has to wonder if it is really such a terrible thing, nowadays, when the world has gotten so much smaller.

  It isn’t as if countries have ceased to matter, however—a quick glance at any passenger manifest will show you that it’s Americans and Arabs who travel most to Mars, because Mars, it turns out, is riddled with energy-rich minerals, and whoever controls the energy controls the money, but then you have to control an enormous amount of money in the first place to even manage to get to Mars.

  The exception, of course, is if you happen to be a pilot or a flight attendant. People always think that Ami must have seen so many exciting places, but the truth, she tells them, is that she mostly sees terminals. She lands from a flight; gets the sleep she needs to be alert, welcoming, and enthusiastic afterward; and then, commonly, she gets right back on board and flies off in the opposite direction.

  The only exception to this is the Mars trip, because unlike Luna Base, the Hematite terminal is still very much in a fledgling state—nanoscanners notwithstanding—so that flight turnarounds can take up to a week. Naturally, Ami has not missed the chance to have a look about, for once, even if this has necessitated a few uncharacteristic dates with a passenger—not just anyone, after all, is allowed to go gallivanting around the Mars landscape; you need a permit, or the option to go with someone who has a permit.

  But Mr. David Arnold is a very nice man, and anyway, she has always made sure to have the other girls with her—this is an ironclad rule of hers, that all cabin crewmembers on her flights can only go out in each other’s company, because she is not going to have a girl date-raped, not on her watch, and certainly not herself.

  Nevertheless, she is quite sure her father would have something to say about it, if he knew. She’s just relieved that she can’t, right now, seem to imagine what that would be.

  SHE BECOMES AWARE that Lin is saying, “Ami,” and in a quietly pointed tone of voice, so it probably isn’t for the first time. She realizes that she is blocking the aisle, and wonders why Lin doesn’t just go down the other way, which is what makes her understand that they are in the process of performing the midflight safety check, and she must have been on not just semi- but total autopilot. Where has the time gone?

  She has the benefit of extensive training and years of experience, though, so even while she herself is internally mystified, her face goes on smiling, her hand directs the glidetray, and her voice offers nuts, pretzels, coffee, or tea, pitched just so, to be audible enough without interfering with anyone’s sleep or inflight movie viewing.

  But now she needs to go back, not only to let Lin pass but to start her section over again, because the real purpose of this service is not to proffer a light snack—as passengers are encouraged to believe—but to make sure they are all still wearing their Orlan collars, which are more comfortable than the harnesses, but which pax sneakily try to take off just the same, even though it’s supposed to be for their own safety.

  In this instance, she can’t really blame them—does anyone honestly believe that an instantly-inflatable jumpsuit of Dacron, Nomex, and assorted varieties of nylon is going to save them, if anything happens in transit? It provides a whole thirty minutes of oxygen, which is all well and good if another spacecraft is going to happen by in the next half-hour, and, even then, only if the jumpsuit-wearing person has not drifted beyond anybody’s reach. What is much more likely to happen is that a rescue team will arrive far too late to do anything other than follow the built-in homing beacons to a group of corpses.

  But rules are rules, and procedure is procedure, so she backs up all the way to the bulkhead. Lin follows more slowly, moving forward, ostensibly cross-checking although she’s really checking for the first time, effectively, since Ami is starting over.

  Lin is looking at her oddly, so Ami replies with a tiny shrug. Once her own check is done, she will have to examine the cabin pressure system, which isn’t something FAs normally tinker with, but obviously something is off, because a maladjustment in cabin pressure can cause light-headedness and even hypoxia, so it’s very important that she go to the flight deck later and get permission from the captain to make a change.

  For now, though, she has to wait, resisting the urge to fidget with her scarf and the rash beneath it, until Lin is done, otherwise they’ll crowd the aisle, and passengers have the notorious tendency to absolutely need the lavatory right at the very minute when flight attendants are in the middle of a duty round.

  She can’t cross over to the other aisle, either, because first of all that’s not how the procedure goes, and anyway, what’shername is currently performing the preliminary check on that side, which Ami will need to cross-check, not only because Ami is the purser but also because she’s willing to bet that Lin and Marisol are experiencing some symptoms too, only they will never tell her because then she would make them redo their tasks, and it would not surprise her at all if they would rather have hypoxia than extra work.

  Lin is certainly taking her time, which gives Ami time to notice that she is actually not pretty at all, with those gangly limbs and that unruly hair all over the place and that ungainly lump of a nose. You could drive a hovertruck through her pores. Ami will have to reprimand her, as soon as they have a quiet moment, for not adhering to uniform standards, and really, there is so much that she needs to do as soon as possible that it only makes sense for her to skip informing the captain about the cabin pressure, because it is such a minor issue that he would no doubt only be irritated with her for bothering him.

  No, that’s not right—she needs to let the captain know, because an indicator light will start blinking on his console, and she might get in trouble for bending the rules, and Ami, of all people, is a stickler for the rules.

  AMI’S REAL NAME is ‘Amihan,’ which is a lovely Filipino word that means ‘breezy season,’ but which she no longer uses because foreigners—especially white people—are prone to mispronouncing it as some kind of uncomfortably familiar term of endearment: “Amy, hon.”

  So now her nameplate reads just ‘Ami,’ which some passengers are thoughtful enough to call her, when they are thoughtful enough to thank or speak to her at all, which isn’t terribly often, not even when she is serving them a delicious second meal of either beef rendang or chicken cacciatore.

  She’s heard it said that airplane food once used to be quite dreadful, but this is no longer true, not on planet-side airplanes and most especially not on off-world shuttles, which ought to be the ultimate in luxury travel—given the staggering cost of a ticket—except that the 3D printers aren’t capable of producing real silver flatware just
yet.

  But the silver-coated polymer is an amazing facsimile, and, in all other respects, shuttle service really is above and beyond first class, as the marketing campaigns say. Ami is a fan of the beef rendang, so much so that she is admittedly guilty of subtly urging pax to choose the chicken, so that there will be surplus zapfrozen beef for her to take home to her apartment, or sometimes to Manila, where her little brother—

  Her younger brother, who of course is not in the least bit little at all anymore, and is of course named David, is a devotee of not just the rendang but any inflight food, while his young daughter, Ami’s favorite niece, always appreciates a new, if used, pair of headphones, given that they’re designed to biodegrade in under six months.

  It’s their gratifying appreciation that keeps Ami going, even though the job really is steadily wearing her down. It isn’t the work itself, but the people: the passengers, who are so demanding and entitled, and her colleagues, who can be so stupid and lazy and even—to call a spade a spade—slutty. Up here—which isn’t exactly ‘up,’ actually, but no one seems to be able to help thinking of it that way—it’s easy to forget that there are other, better types of beings in the worlds. She needs to get back home to remind herself, and she hasn’t been there in, apparently, much too long.

  That’s undoubtedly why it takes every ounce of her self-control to restrain herself, when Mr. Tawfiq says, “Is this chicken as tasty as you, hon?” and oh-so-casually slides his hand up her arm while she’s passing him his glidetray. The effort of not slamming the tray down onto his sleazy head causes her hand to jerk, and she ends up spilling cacciatore sauce all over him.

  She blurts something apologetic—she’s not sure what—and rushes off to the galley for osmosis wipes to clean him off with, but thankfully Lin is not slow to spot her chance, and beats Ami to it, cooing at Mr. Tawfiq solicitously as she dabs at his lap.