By Angelo R. Lacuesta
First-prize winner for Fiction, 2016 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards
CHRISTMAS in Megamall. I wanted to shout to the crowd to get a hold of itself. “You don’t need that. There are people dying.” What did I know? I was seventeen, it was the early 2000s, you texted me to be there at the fourth floor by the auto accessory store by the parking entrance, near the corridor to the restrooms, and those were always choked with people. They must have renovated a dozen times since then.
It was near the parking entrance, which means you had brought your car, your dad’s old Civic. Each time I rode, shotgun because I didn’t even know how to drive at the time, your father threatened me with stickers carefully spelled out on the glove compartment lid, his name in big raised block-capitals.
I envy myself, my old self at that moment. It was my habit to lean back, my hands in my pockets, one leg up with a foot planted on the wall, or something close to that. I could see the movie theaters and the movie posters. Remember movies in the theater? That was still a thing back then, the gimmick of choice. We took a bus or a jeep or your dad’s car when he was doing his business at home, and we chose the bad films and the odd hours, when hardly anyone was watching.
That day I had enough money left for a movie and the ride back to my dorm. If you were going to drop me off near my house, that left us with leftover change for videogames. But when you came out of the restrooms you had a weepy face and you had your hands in your pocket just like I did. You’d chide me about that, and I thought about calling you out on it, too, but you took one hand out and showed me a little white plastic thing with two red stripes on it, still warm from your pee, and I never envied that old self that was seconds younger from that moment as I did then, old unburdened self, poor but happy, worried about the ride home and nothing much else.
It’s been fifteen years, so let me skip all the sordid parts: the parts where I was aimless, the parts when I was young, the parts I missed you badly.
We made an app and we called it “Randomaiser” because we thought it was cool to give it a Pinoy twist and we didn’t want the masa to pronounce it wrong. It was small enough to install in seconds when you downloaded it from the app store. Back when it wasn’t free it was 99 cents. 99 cents! That was part of the non-negotiables because we didn’t want to give people time to think about it.
When you clicked the app the screen blacked out and a red button appeared in the middle. There was nothing to do but press it, and you didn’t know what would happen right after that. Maybe you’d get a funny joke, or your screen could lock you out for five minutes. Or you’d get a free song or a video or store credit for another copy of the app. Or your phone could call or text your mother, or your worst enemy, or that married ex-girlfriend whose husband was the president’s bagman. Sometimes it would be a bad movie, maybe something we saw during our time. Sometimes it would be pornography, the latest offering from blacked.com or one of those hard-to-find featurettes featuring Traci Lords when she was seventeen.
Our developer Marvin was seventeen when I hired him. No SSS, no TIN number. I thought I was in over my head when he asked for a feature list and informed me that he would be charging by the hour in USD—just like he did his overseas clients. For fuck’s sake. Just for laughs I asked him how much and he said two-fifty an hour. I balked but I thought again and I realized he meant 2.50. Basically I had opened a sweatshop composed of one person that would make products for, potentially, billions of people.
Remember what your dad told you when you told him how smart I was? I’m sure you don’t. “You can’t have potential all the time.” Well, I want to tell you that I took that to heart. I heard it when I thought about whether I could face him and tell him I had gotten you pregnant. I heard it in my head when I decided to quit school to start a business, because I had just gotten you pregnant and I was sickened by the thought of not having money for you, for the baby. I heard it when I closed the business when it couldn’t pick up steam after trying for ten years, long after we’d broken up. And long after I heard it so often that its meaning faded, I still heard that voice of his, saying nonsensical syllables, the disembodiment that stood for disgust and disdain. I heard it in my voice when I told Marvin that I was agreeing to 2.50 an hour, after pretending to take some time to think about it, but I think I used it the wrong way.
But I was ready for two hundred fifty, I had a backer, Paolo Roxas. We went up to him and he put up eight million, just like that, I swear. It took something like twenty minutes and no powerpoint. I didn’t even need to say one word. It was all Wacky.
Remember Wacky? Sixteen, seventeen years ago? We were still talking then, before you finally said let’s be “friends who don’t speak to each other.” I mentioned him to you. I’m really bad at names and faces but the first time I met him I couldn’t forget him. I was at this friend’s house party. Her parents were architects. No matching furniture, lots of high spaces and smuggled hardwood. This guy shows up at the door, introducing himself to everybody, making niceties, shaking everyone’s hand, telling everybody his name, shopping it across the room like it was an object he was trying to sell: Joaqui, from Joaquin. Depending on whom he was introducing himseld to it was after Joaquin Phoenix, the brilliant actor, or Nick Joaquin the great fictionist, or Joaquin Cunanan the great physician. That’s why I couldn’t forget his name.
He asked my friend, who was her friend at Antioch or some religious organization like that, who was the daughter of famous architects, if he could talk to her dad. My friend said yes, sure, come over one of these days, you guys could talk about music because that’s what he’s into now. He mentioned it again, and he meant he wanted to see him right then and there. My friend was a little bit nonplussed but she had been charmed: he knew her father to be one of the greatest architects of the brutalist tradition in the Philippines, and he knew his work: the Art Theater on Reliance Blvd., the Stock Exchange Building, the GSIS complex. She walked him all the way to the end of a corridor. She knocked on the door and the old man comes out from his room, in sando and shorts, and you could hear the music that came out of the doorway from across the street. He was the first architect I ever saw in my life, and I remember wanting to so much to be like him, a guy who built these things, who built the very space he moved in, who didn’t have to shower or shave, who dressed as he pleased and came and went as he pleased.
The old man was also the type who didn’t seem to mind about house parties, who could be bothered to come out of his room during his private time, who could be approached for money. At that point I decided to call Joaqui by his homonym: Wacky, the wiry, witty guy who could walk in right out of the street and have the gumption to ask an old man he just met for two million pesos. Wacky had a story about an opportunity that had suddenly come up, a bid for derubberizing the airport runway. It had just been renamed the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and a piecemeal renovation was being rolled out. He “The airport that you built, sir,” Wacky told him, “your airport.” I saw the old man’s eyes glisten hard when he heard it. Wacky knew someone who knew someone who could do it, an old friend who had connections with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and they just needed to put together the money to bring in the expertise and the equipment. It was tubong lugaw—which was better than selling like hotcakes, better than knocking it out of the park.
The old man cocked his eyes to the upper right, and there was a pause, and I knew that in that pause he was picturing his airport in his mind.
“Let me think about it,” he finally said, and it sounded like he was really going to think about it.
I honestly don’t know what happened after that, and more honestly I don’t know want to know. Like most of the rest of my life, it was all a haze of crazy, silly hard work and not much ROI. Only one thing really stood out, and that was Wacky. You can’t forget a name when you connect it to money.
I finally found the courage to look for him on Facebook one day, some ten years later. It took all of two minutes to find someone I’d met fifteen years before, and whom I only knew by nickname. We had a couple of common friends—people I hardly knew. In his profile bust he was shirtless, his hair was wet, and aviators covered half of his face. Was that a strategy? Whatever it was, it seemed to work, and when he friended me—seconds after I sent the request—I saw from his photos how he had attained a some measure of success: a family home, vacations in Vietnam and Singapore, a wife who looked like she didn’t work, but no child yet.
When I saw Wacky again, for the first time in a decade, I was the walk-in this time, asking him not for money but for his guidance, advice and expertise: I asked him to be my partner. For 10% of my new company he would sing to the investors and the VCs based on a powerpoint I had put together quickly: a very simple, but very big idea whose time had come, supported by a market profile, product information, feature list, pricing strategy and timelines—all in 50 slides. He caught on after the fifth slide and right then and there offered to do a launch marketing plan and came up with a better name, Randomaiser, a Tagalized, bastardized version of the words that perfectly decribed the app: the random gain or loss it granted its users, and the AI that managed the process.
As soon as he signed on he changed his profile photo to one of him in a suit, slightly leaning forward, his collar and his tie loose around his throat, his elbows resting on a low table, his hands clasped under his mouth, his mouth pursed as though in mid-thought. On his business card I restored to him his real name: Joaquin. You’d have loved him. Had you met him, you might actually have fallen in love.
Coral Cove, just off the main road in Tagaytay. You remember that day? We spent a night there on the tab of the owners who wanted us to make an ad campaign for them. It was two thousand feet above sea level and there was not a cove or a piece of coral in sight, but coral was a color, and a cove was also an architectural component, and that’s how we thought we’d make it work.
I woke up ahead of you. I was still waiting for myself to accept it, my interrupted youth, my sudden burden. Your shirt had crept up in your sleep and I studied, with a small sense of terror, how your face had gone softer and your breasts fuller. I saw something that had not been there before: a thin straight line made out of the darkened pigment of your skin, running down your belly, across your navel and into the folds of the sheets, like it had marked you so you could be easily cut in half.
Remember when we announced it to our friends? There was a pause, a beat, and then Alicia broke the silence. Alicia, the pretty one. “Look!” she said, “I’m crying!” She pointed to both her eyes with both index fingers. “I’m crying!” She was pointing out that they were tears of joy.
At the time I just couldn’t fake it as well as she could. You probably don’t remember this, but I slipped out of the reception hall while we were at your nephew Christian’s baptismal party. There were four or five parties going on at the same time. A mass wedding was going on in the church next door. Your brother was shouting at the caterer over the phone because they didn’t bring enough tablecloths. I locked myself in your dad’s car, reclined the seat, and wept tears of despair, trying hard to focus my thoughts on those bare tables, which were nothing more than badly chipped circles of plywood on rusty metal stands.
But six weeks later, at Coral Cove, I woke up that morning thinking about food. I nudged you awake to ask you if there was food in the kitchen downstairs. We were both too sleepy to rise, so we talked about food instead: longganisa, sinangag, danggit, tsokolate, balut. We spent a long time lying there, just talking about food. The food that made us remember our childhood, that made us long for our hometowns. I remember it was at that moment, for the first time since that afternoon in Megamall, that I felt happy.
We finally rose an hour or so later. While we showered together you bled down your legs, a stream of watery blood threading and branching down your skin, coloring the pool of water at your feet before it disappeared down the drain. You grasped my arms, fixed me with a terrified look and said, “what’s that?” and I immediately said, “it’s the baby!” What I don’t remember now is how I said it. Do you remember? Did I sound like I was terrified? Or did I look happy—happier now that there was a chance I could go back to my old self and my old life?
You know what the hardest part was? It wasn’t the coding and development, or the hooking up with google or Apple, or all the compliance we needed to go through with the SEC and the DTI. It was figuring out the prizes. The good prizes and the bad prizes. We must have gone through dozens of drinking sessions just trying to come up with the prizes. There were three of us on the board, myself, Wacky and Paolo. Paolo was a grade school classmate, son of a mayor and grandson of a governor, and it turned out, a friend of a friend of Wacky. And it was Wacky who had brought him in. That was how good this kid was. And that was how good I was at putting people together and getting them to do things. That’s what entrepreneurship is all about.
We huddled at Paolo’s favorite Quezon Avenue bar and we always had girls at the table. He called them “inspiration.” But it was all serious. We had our laptops out. We had excel sheets. We were taking down notes, making lists, trying to top each other with the prizes. “Load!” “Kotse!” “Mediterranean Cruise!”
We encouraged the girls to play. “Around the world tour!” they said. “A condo unit!” “House and lot!” Shrieks of laughter. Paolo knew people at every possible brand partner: PGA Cars, Princess Cruises, Ayala Land. “Let’s talk to Fern, to Fern,” he kept saying. He can give us a condo, a house and lot, no big deal. We just need to put his brand name somewhere.” It took a little while before we realized he was talking about Fernando Zobel, who happened to be his motorcycle club buddy. Paolo was on a totally different level. He had the power to go all the way to the top.
It was tough when we started thinking of the bad prizes. We needed to drink more. We needed to put on our marketing hats: we needed to stick to the customer, empathize with his pain points, exploit his fears, and dimensionalize the big idea. We were already stuck to the customers—through his mobile device. By pricing the app at 99 cents, we demolished his pain points. Nothing scared him more than missing out. And this fear would easily dimensionalize itself into a massively distributed raffle that delivered a thrill that the SEC, the ASC, the DTI and the KBP could not touch: the thrill of the unknown.
We set parameters. There was going to be one bad prize for every one thousand draws. Somewhere along the discussion we upped it to one million. Early on we knew we needed it to put it on the level of an urban legend, a chance so faint that users would actually doubt if the bad prize even existed.
“Let’s think of the legalities,” Paul said.
“What legalities?” I said. “Things are different now. Apps are global. Servers are outside jurisdiction. You can’t issue a subpoena against a server in Romania, or Russia.” What I was thinking about was feasibility. “What are the data points?” I asked.
Wacky was already on chat mode with Marvin. He read out his response. “Phone number. Apple or Google account. Facebook details. Hardly any instance of a real address. Just an email address, or a phone number at best.”
“What if we cross it against those recently leaked voting records?” I asked.
Paolo lit up. I knew he was all-too familiar with election-related stuff. “We could. But what if they didn’t register?”
“GPS?” I countered. “Location services?”
“We could,” Wacky said not taking his eyes off his phone. “But we’d get a temporary location. We can’t act that fast. Besides, how many people turn their GPS on?”
We turned quiet. By this time the girls had turned into bored children chatting among themselves, fiddling with their phones, touching up their makeup. I thought about how we could go about finding out where they lived, or how they could be served their prizes. One of them was talking about a husband in Doha who didn’t know what she did for a living. What if he had joined the app and won a prize? How would we serve him?
“Eventually,” Paolo said. “Eventually.”
We locked eyes. The user would eventually turn his GPS on, even if by accident. Even if he changed handsets, even if he changed payment plans or carriers, the GPS would show him up. And the app would know. If he won a good prize, he would be notified as soon as he pressed the button, no problem about that. If he won a bad prize, he would get what everyboy got: a cheery confirmation on his notifications bar: “Thank you for your roll!” The red button would go dark, and then, nothing. No feedback, no flash, no sound, no response. But it would quietly send out a signal if the GPS was on. If it was off, it would send the signal once it was turned on again. Hours later, weeks later, years later.
If the user restarts the app and attempts to roll again, he gets the same thank you note. But he’s won already—he could delete the app and it would make no difference. By that time, the app would already be on tracking mode. These things have infinite patience, so it didn’t matter how long they needed to wait. In fact, it wouldn’t be considered waiting. But we’d have a person on standby, waiting for the signals to come in. He’d be ready to serve the bad prize: a pail of water dumped on the head, a giftwrapped box that contained a dead animal, or fake news about the death of a loved one. It was slapstick, the stuff of noontime shows on TV. It was the kind of stuff people would pay to have done to their mother-in-law or their ex-spouse. When we thought of that angle the skies opened. Our imagination ran wild. We were in speculative territory.
Death was an ultimate bad prize, of course, and it was a useful benchmark and made for productive thought experiments. We imagined ourselves mercenaries so we could work out the mechanics behind it. It was easy to hire someone to kill someone. You didn’t even need to talk to them. You could do it online. Just go on Tor and the darknet, the same place they sold drugs and child porn. It was a sensational template, a joke that had a million punchlines, a wistful fantasy of power, all part of the spirit of the brainstorming session—“What’s the worst thing you could do to someone?” we asked ourselves.
I suddenly remembered the doctor in Cavite looking at your fresh x-rays and pronouncing our child a “blighted ovum.” Which meant, after I begged him to explain, that it never had a chance. Your hair was still wet from our shower. It would not be long before we saw our last movie, last of our shared disappointments.
We put a strange little clause in the EULA. The End User License Agreement. Which we lengthened to Eula Valdez. Which we sometimes called Basil Valdez because he sang “Ngayon at Kailanman” because it was a clause that allowed us to apply the conditions of use even beyond the existence of either the selling or the buying entity. This meant that if the winner died before their prize was served, their next-of-kin would get it. And so on, and so forth.
By this time we had found ourselves in a unique and magical place. We were high from our VC money. Our Round A produced 100 million—unheard of in this backwater of software and tech. There were more investors at our door. At this point, we were beyond any financial or legal constraints. I had never felt so free.
We made money even while the project was just on the drawing board. And then we suddenly felt the pressure to go live. “Launch first, tweak later,” they said. Copycats were bound to come after us. But their reason to launch was also our reason to delay it. We wanted to put complications that would make our game sticky and always float to the top. What Marvin did was allow the app to evolve by itself. No more tweaking from our end. The app would learn, grow, and adapt, with no determined final form, but with very simple objectives: widespread downloads and instant, repeated usage. We inserted some code that forced it to favor being an r-species over a K-species. An example of an r-species: bacteria, capable of fast reproduction and in vast numbers. An example of a K-species: human beings, long-lived and deeply involved in existence, but with only a handful of offspring in a single lifetime. Quantity over quality. How the Randomaiser chose to do it was up to itself.
Within weeks of Randomaiser’s launch, it began to allow users to submit a list of candidates. The more candidates the user gave, the more chances of winning they got. The chances were multiplied but the system learned to divide the prizes. We were prepared to give out ten million pesos a day to ten winners of one million each; by the end of the month the individual prizes had gone down to one hundred thousand pesos per winner, but the DE market didn’t care. They started buying multiple cellphones off the black market. As for the bad prizes, the users thrilled to the prank phonecalls, the wiped-out theses and tax records, the unexpected stoppages at printing presses, factories and government offices. Most of these were met with a sinister joy, a sense of vindication against the system.
We never ran out of prize money. The app figured out that it could balance out the good prizes by modifying the bad prizes. It shaved off sub-peso amounts from employees’ ATM accounts. It tapped into escrow accounts. It made remittances disappear in transit. It obliterated mutual funds. It tipped foreign currency buys and stock market trades. We didn’t need to do an IPO to raise money. Our wealth soon soared, quite literally, off the charts. We harbored more cash than Henry Sy, but that was because we had access to his cash and everybody else’s. We needed to be discreet about it and allowed ourselves only one or two big luxuries: I bought a Patek Philippe, Paolo ordered a Tesla Model X, and Wacky bought an island in the Con Dao archipelago off the southeastern coast of Vietnam.
It was something you saw in movies, but nothing like those bad movies we saw, or pretended to see, our faces wet from our mouths, our hands in each other’s laps. This was The Matrix. This was The Wizard of Oz. This was A Space Odyssey.
And just like that, days after I thought about A Space Odyssey and googled it just to refresh my memory, Marvin won the bad prize. It was against the code to allow the app to choose winners, but it wasn’t against it to override electric traffic light systems and electric car transmissions.
When other deaths started happening—a disgraced Supreme Court Justice, an aging actress—we never really admitted that we caused them. Not even if we wanted to. The app had allowed us, and itself, plausible deniability. Blame it on Wacky for idly texting Marvin our speculative mechanics on that fateful brainstorming night. Blame it on Marvin for idly writing strings of code on his notepad and forgetting to delete them. Blame it on his 2.50 per man-hour pay.
I began having nightmares. I dreamt of that old security guard at the entrance to your school. Remember how you’d make me hang out there for hours to wait for a letter, or just for you to show your face and tell me something before you snuck back into volleyball practice? You would show up with your face red from the sun, sweat painted on your neck, and knees skinned from those close saves. Mang Lando was in the Philippine Constabulary during the Marcos Era. In my dream he was a Scorpion tank operator and he was leading a tank column into a Muslim village. The tank column was so long that it snaked through other villages strung by the Bukidnon-Davao road, the houses and fields burning where it passed. The tank column was so long that it disappeared into the horizon.
As Mang Lando threaded the column through the town, the women grabbed their children and pinned them to the ground and the men scattered into their homes to arm themselves. The old folks were left walking around aimlessly on the road, doddering and shouting to themselves. An old man froze in his steps. Mang Lando centered the periscope on him until his face filled his field of view, contorted itself as he wordlessly begged for mercy.
His face became my face, and I saw the eyes of Mang Lando’s younger self, peering at me from conjoined circles like they do when someone looks through binoculars in the movies. I heard myself shouting things at him, I felt tears streaming down my cheeks.
In this way, I made my appeal to the Randomaiser, looking directly at its eyes and recalling the way it was coded, trying out different strategies. I tried to appeal to its logic, illustrating that pushing on further would increase the chances of its being destroyed, and when that didn’t work I tried to appeal to its mercy, begging it to allow us to coexist, and when that didn’t work I tried to appeal to its sense of guilt—the kind of guilt a son mght feel for his father, a father who had spent all his money and his entire life bringing him up and putting him through school, a father who endured ridicule, insecurity, loneliness, and heartbreak. There was no response, or at least I couldn’t tell if there was. I couldn’t tell if its mouth was moving and all I saw were its eyes, and for all that can happen in people’s dreams we’re all still in that uncanny valley where you still can tell it’s a dream because some details are fuzzy and you can’t read emotions in eyes. That’s because dreams are not really memories.
And then it was Wacky’s turn to win. His newly purchased house, one of that old architect’s earlier creations, burned down, along with himself and his entire household, caused by an electric pole fire.
There was just Paul and myself now. For all our wealth, we were powerless. We tried to kill the program we hired new developers, dozens of them, hundreds of them, but by that time it had written itself into a hundred thousand other apps, distributed across more than a million users, functioning as a neural network. We thought of everything: from introducing a retrovirus to creating a parallel app that would work as an antidote. We thought of making it public. But it would only cause widespread panic. We would be arrested, or lynched. We realized that the killings would cause widespread attention anyway, once they reached critical mass.
4.2 people die of shark attacks every year around the world. That’s about 1 part per 1.2 billion. Lightning strikes? 24,000 people per year. Is that a small number or a big number? How many people fall from ladders, or die of exhaustion after playing DOTA? Nobody really knows, or cares. And I understood at that moment how that’s so much the point of all this.
I also understood that, by then, the Randomaiser could talk to weather satellites and air traffic control towers. It could control TV networks, digital streaming and distribution channels, and special effects workstations. It could manipulate social media networks. It could take over research laboratories, tech companies, and manufacturing plants.
We took a look at the news and the feeds and saw the plane crashes and the freak accidents, the derailments and the explosions, and we could no longer tell which deaths could be its doing, or even if the news was really the news. Paul and I speculated that things were happening differently beyond what we saw on the screen. That it could reach into our minds by gathering our overheard conversations and observing us at our most private moments. It could tell each of us what to think by the power of external suggestion, through what we saw on our feeds and on our screens. It could create life, breaking into seed banks and pollination chambers, by decrypting the keys to the nitrogen tanks in stem cell banks and recombination laboratories, by dispersing spores and cells into the wild. That it would soon grasp the importance of balance and continuance.
I dreamt of you, two or three weeks ago. We were naked, lying in the sand, on the curve of a nondescript beach. In my dream they called it Coral Cove, as if the maker of the dream had nothing to go on but a misleading name lodged in my memory, surfacing here and there in my daily life. I must have told a friend about it. I must have mentioned it to a girl as I remembered to her and it could only have been one of those girls at the club, because there was no other girl, really. I must have written it somewhere, as a note to myself, or in one of those stories I wrote but could never finish.
We were naked, and on your belly a tuft of hair, sharply brown and narrow, led down to a deep patch, suddenly murky, and almost pixelated in its darkness. I had forgotten what it looked like, and so I could not resolve in my dream. You drew me to you and you opened your legs, and as I looked down I saw a cloud billow into the space between us and energize the air, and I knew even in my dream that I would wake with a smear of sperm on my skin. Your face closed in on mine, and you told me you were hungry, and you wanted to eat. You asked me to meet you, mouthing the name of our meeting place.
This is why we’re here. Fourth level, Megamall. I haven’t been here in fifteen years. I haven’t seen you exactly since then. You’re here because you saw me, too—in a dream or a silly compulsion you felt after you read someone’s post, or tweet, or after you saw something on TV. They’ve renovated but the restrooms are where they’ve always been. You must be scared. Here, take this: you know what to do with it, you just pee on it. You will be scared. But something tells me we will be happy.
This story is part of the writer’s upcoming fourth fiction collection with UST Press entitled “Sustainable Strategies.”