“Wah liao, every time the same questions,” Pai Kia said. “Let me tell you all you need to know. Aiyoh, everyone has three possible after-lives. If you’re rich, you stay in the clean, ultra-luxe New Cities. If you’re poor, you just die, end of story. For everyone in between, if you’re in the know and you’ve got something in the way of credits, you can pay soul-hackers like me to build an afterlife. But hey, as they say – no prawns, fish also can. Do you understand lah?”
I nodded for some reason, even though eir answer made no sense.
“Of course, your level of comfort, your level of reality, depends on the size of your wallet. Ms. Esperanza has a very big wallet.”
I studied my strange companion, wondering how e really translated behind the HI. Was e even real? I couldn’t tell anymore.
“Listen,” Pai Kia said, with a voice that slid viscously, like snails gliding on glass. “I don’t know why, but she instructed us not to complete you. I’m sure you already know. There’s no kuku bird down there.”
E pointed to my crotch, a sad, flat affair devoid of any protrusions.
“I can fix that. We can work something out.”
I was way too tired to hide my emotions. I looked straight into eir eyes, sharing a yearning and a heartache that words simply could not convey.
“So drama, ah! Lucky woman, that Ms. Esperanza,” Pai Kia laughed. “Aiyoh, the mosquito dies but the itch remains doesn’t it? Nevertheless, my offer is there if you change your mind. My contact’s in your watch.”
We flew toward our destination in silence.
×××
Torre Paraiso was a private Integrated Resort that rose seven kilometers into the heavens, the enormous building tessellated into separate sections that celebrated Christianity’s Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Avarice, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Wrath and Pride. Pai Kia dropped me off at the rooftop landing pad and blew me a kiss for luck.
Esperanza was waiting for me at the Immersion Gallery, an 8-Star lounge at the penthouse level. Everything inside was done in the old Filipino style called Earthquake Baroque. The rooms were hewn from pig-fat marble and solid piedra china, gaudy and over-the-top with decorative calabasa motifs. The transoms, fixtures and room detailing were all gilded with mother-of-pearl and electrum ormolu.
On the walls were Holosonic reproductions of early masterpieces – Lunas, Hidalgos, and Amorsolos, each one radiated terabytes of synesthetic information and shared emotional content. A large Luna, The Spoilarum, filled my mind with images of dying gladiators and left the unwelcome taste of blood in my mouth.
This was an area reserved exclusively for the most important of VIPs, the world’s 1% mega-rich, members of an exclusive club called Pride.
Esperanza sat almost preternaturally still, like a porcelain doll, her small frame entombed within the red womb of a rare Cobonpue Ball Chair, woven from the finest, palest bamboo.
“Hello Alfredo,” she whispered softly.
I said nothing and looked around the room until I found another Ball Chair to curl into. I hid my head in the cold shadows, not wanting her to divine my feelings. Esperanza looked exactly like she did when I first fell in love with her. Her short brown hair was cut in a bob, framing a delicate face that looked not unlike the 1970s actress Marrie Lee.
We sat across the room staring at each other for what seemed like hours. As each second passed, I pressed myself deeper into the chair’s embrace. The weight of her presence slowly turned every bone in my body to glass.
“What is this place? Why did you bring me here?” I said finally, yielding to the oppressive stillness. “I was happy at Golden Acres. You should have let me die in peace.”
“You’d rather be in a hospice ship?” she asked. “Death has no angels, you know. It has no dominion. There are no tunnels of light. There’s just this or oblivion.”
“This is nothing but another prison.”
“Yet you still came when I called. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you still have feelings for me?” Esperanza asked. Behind the grottoes of her eyes I sensed the vague shine of emotions I thought she’d long forgotten (or maybe it was just a trick of the light?).
I took a deep breath and decided to say nothing. When I was alive, our past had kept me in a cell without walls. Words bled, words betrayed. I let the silence tell her everything she needed to know.
“Really, you have nothing to say to me?” Esperanza pressed; “after all this time?”
“Why am I here?” I whispered finally.
“Let’s recap, shall we? I married Julio the year after you and I parted. He was so much older than you. He had money and best of all he never, ever hurt me. After that, I had … I have a beautiful child. In fact my baby is having his own baby soon. For the last thirty years I’ve lived a blessed life, a life most people can only dream of.”
“Why am I here Esperanza? Why can’t anyone give me a straight answer?”
“Shut up and listen,” she said. “That’s always been your problem. You like simple answers because you don’t like to listen.”
I bit my lip and stared at her.
“Anyway, after Julio died, he transitioned to the New Cities and left me with so much. I hadn’t planned to join him so soon, but there are things that no amount of money can control.”
“I know all of this. I tried to come back to you but you took out a restraining order,” I said cautiously, nervously. My skin wrinkled around me like a chrysalis. “I should have known enough to stay away.”
“We left a lot of things unfinished, didn’t we?” she added. I tried to search her eyes for a hint of what she was up to, but she quickly turned away. “Anyway, that money’s what brought you here. I paid to capture a star that’s keeping you alive. This storage facility’s a town for hacked souls, true, and you’re just a squatter under our New Cities. But you won’t die, not for a very long time, and you’ll never age. I can watch you whenever I want to, just like you used to watch me.”
“Hang on, you bought me a star?”
“Yes, isn’t that the kind of over-the-top melodrama you used to like?” she said. “Do you know how much processing power your brain needs? It takes the power of an entire star to store a single mind. That’s why only the rich live can live forever.”
“Why did you do this? This is really messed up, even for you. Did you even think to ask how I would feel?”
“I was seventeen, you were 42. That wasn’t messed up? Did you ever consider me, or how I would feel?” she snapped. Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling, as if looking for something solid to hang onto. “You were my film teacher so I had this place built just for you. Doesn’t it look like a set from your favorite movies? What were they again? I only remembered Brazil, Blade Runner, and Manila in the Claws of Light. You’ve always wanted to play the tragic hero. Well, my money can buy a lot of things.”
“Why are you doing this? Why am I here?” I asked again. “It’s not as if we have anything anymore. We made a mistake … I made a mistake but, Jesus; that was a lifetime ago.”
“And Jesus said we must pay for our mistakes.”
“The truth is,” I said crossly, “you were never the type to love anyone. You just liked to own people.”
“Hah! Now who’d like to own a loser like you?” Esperanza yelled, losing her carefully-constructed cool. She closed her eyes and began to laugh.
“Stop it. Stop laughing please.”
“As it happens, I do love someone, and the one that I love is my son,” she declared, getting up from her chair. She snapped her long, slim fingers, and a viewing screen appeared on one of the filmy silver walls. “I promised him he would meet you one day but I had an unscheduled aneurysm. I guess this was the next best arrangement. At least now he can see you exactly as I once did.”
A dark figure flickered on the screen, throbbing like a haunted memory.
“What happened to you Teacher Alfredo? You threw your life away, a burned-out basket case in a nursing home. It
was lucky my agent found you before you died,” she said, shaking her head in the manner of parents scolding their children.
Esperanza’s tone became unexpectedly softer. “I took out that restraining order to save your life you stupid idiot. That’s one more you owe me. Julio’s extremely jealous. He would’ve killed you if he knew what you’d left me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Jun – Julio Sales Jr.” Esperanza addressed the dark figure looming through the static. “Speak now. You can translate into this Haptic Interface when I’m done.”
The screen blinked like the eye of a god, exact and infallible, revealing painful truths. I had never seen her child. Esperanza paid big money to keep her family out of the press. But as soon as I saw his face, my knees buckled. Jun looked almost exactly like I did in my thirties.
“As you already know, this old man is your real father,” she said haltingly. For a moment her voice seemed to betray the pain of a great, long-hidden loss. I waited for some real change, for forgiveness but Esperanza just pressed on coldly. “I would have rather you never met. But I made you a promise and your mama always keeps her promises. Take a good long look sweetie.”
I tried to open my mouth but no words would come. My sentences seemed to stall in mid-thought.
The past belonged to the past, yet here we were now. Through the cybernetic agency of the Gimokud, a network of Dyson bubbles – huge, star-eating comput-ers storing souls in their pure math-ematical form – we were young again; keeping secrets, and being every bit as hurtful as old times. It was a new kind of hell for the downloaded dead.
“Poor Julio never knew he was impotent,” she said caustically. “You told me once that ‘the seeds of obsession grow quickly to hate’ and that’s all you need to know.”
“Did … did you ever really love me Esperanza?” I stammered, fearing any answer she would give. The invisible bars of my newest cage began to reveal themselves in earnest. “You know, before things fell apart, you promised me forever.”
“Even I can’t afford more than one Eternity. Consider your star my repayment for your parting ‘gift’. You’re alive as long as it’s alive. And, oh yes, you wanted to be alone? Everyone here’s a skeuomorph and this world is as empty as a Holosonic. You’ve got nine billion years to figure it all out.”
Esperanza’s form wavered strangely, fading in and out like a ghost. She disappeared, leaving no answers. On the silver screen, a man with a sad face full of burning questions, waited patiently for me to talk.
But before I could say anything, Esperanza reappeared and clipped a teleport cheat-band to my wrist.
“One day you actually need to keep your promise, Mother,” the man on the screen said, making a sigh of tired resignation. “How many times do you need to do this before it’s enough? I’m not getting any younger.”
“I’m sorry son,” Esperanza muttered as she and I disappeared, transmuted into floating-point equations inside the Gimokud’s enormous brain. “Hell hath no fury yada yada yada … I still can’t help the way I feel.”
Next thing I knew we were back on Paraiso’s rooftop landing pad.
“I forgot to give you this,” Esperanza said, smashing my chin with a strong right cross.
I toppled from the edge of the platform, down into the darkness. I fell for a very long time, my body folding, breaking, and decaying into an endless rain of remorse and bitter ash that lasted nine billion years.
When I came to, I found myself in a dirty public toilet, white noise fogging my head. The stink of urine and cigarettes choked the dead air. A broken sink in front of me lay thick with organic crust, ashes and ancient spittle. Overhead, an incandescent bulb flickered uncertainly.
BIOS
Dean Francis Alfar is a Filipino playwright, novelist and writer of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Rabid Transit and the Exotic Gothic series. He wrote the novel Salamanca (Ateneo Press, 2006), and three collections of short fiction. He edits the Philippine Speculative Fiction series, and is also a comic book creator.
Marc de Faoite was born in Dublin and lives in Malaysia. His short stories and essays have been published in Malaysia, Singapore, India, France, and Ireland. Tropical Madness, a collection of his short stories published by Fixi Novo, was longlisted for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize.
Zedeck Siew used to work in the Malaysian media, for publications like Kakiseni, The Nut Graph, and Poskod.my. As part of the CENTAUR games collective he co-designed POLITIKO, a card game about Malaysian party politics. He is currently working on his first book, an illustrated catalog of imaginary Southeast Asian animals.
Raymond G. Falgui teaches English Literature at the University of the Philippines. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic, and Playboy Philippines; his interest in mythology is reflected in short stories that have been published in Kuwento: Lost Things, The Mythic Circle, Innsmouth Free Press, Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, Philippine Speculative Fiction III and V, and Alternative Alamat (the last three are available in e-book format on Amazon).
Lyana Shah is a full-time copywriter living in Singapore, although she was born in Malaysia and grew up in Brunei. In her free time, she writes novels, kills video game zombies and enjoys a good cup of tea. She believes that talking is good, but writing is better.
Dipika Mukherjee is a writer and sociolinguist. Her debut novel, Thunder Demons (Gyaana 2011), was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize; it has been republished (Repeater, UK) and distributed by Penguin/Random House worldwide as Ode to Broken Things. She also won the 2014 Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence.
Timothy L. Marsh holds a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Aberystwyth. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, Fourth River, The New Welsh Review and The Los Angeles Review. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Graduate Exchange Scholar at Auburn University. In 2015 he served as the Hub City Press Writer-in-Residence.
Richard Calayeg Cornelio is a nineteen-year-old doing a BS in Materials Engineering at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He has finished a fifteen-page paper for a film class on his laptop inside a moving bus, binge-watched an entire season of Lost the night before a major exam, which he miraculously passed, but he still cannot, for the life of him, write a short story without sitting on it for weeks. Also, he’s a chronic crammer.
When the missus tells him to, Ted Mahsun takes out the trash while trying not to let her hear him grumble about it. Otherwise he keeps busy writing fiction, of which some can be found in Cyberpunk: Malaysia, Hungry in Ipoh, and Griffith Review 49: New Asia Now Vol 2.
Eliza Vitri Handayani has published short stories, essays, and translations in respected Indonesian literary outlets, as well as in the Asia Literary Review, Griffith Review, and Asymptote Journal. Her novel From Now On Everything Will Be Different came out in 2015 by Vagabond Press.
Michael Aaron Gomez is a prose writer from the Philippines. His work has appeared in magazines and journals. He has also been a fellow to two national writers’ workshops. He lives in Dauin, Negros Oriental.
Tilon Sagulu is a Malaysian Dusun writer from Sabah. He was born Herlveron Bin Sagulu, but goes by the nickname he grew up with, Tilon (derived from a Dusun word, Guntialon, which means mischievous). He is currently pursuing an M.A in English Literature at University of Malaya.
Alexander Marcos Osias frequently explores science fiction & fantasy worlds – his work has been published in print and online markets, and he’s co-edited one of the Philippine Speculative Fiction volumes. After living in various countries, he now resides in the Philippines with his lovely wife and rambunctious son.
Nin Harris is a Malaysian poet, writer, and Gothic scholar. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishi
ng credits include: Jabberwocky 3, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, Giganotosaurus, and Alphabet of Embers.
Francis Paolo Quina teaches at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman campus. He is currently taking up his Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the same university.
M. SHANmughalingam’s stories and poems were published/ broadcast by BFMradio, British Council, Dewan Bahasa, EPB, EvansBros, Fish, Harvard University, Heinemann, Maya, MPH, Oxford University, Pearson-Longman, Penguin, Radio Fremantle, Silverfish, WordWorks, ZI; in Australia, France, India, Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, UK and US. Website: http://www.drshantri.com
Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is a Singapore-based Filipino writer. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, and The Quarterly Literature Review of Singapore, as well as anthologies like the Best New Singapore Short Stories, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, and the Philippine Speculative Fiction series.
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