‘BERTO, ON THE CORNER OF AYALA AND MAKATI AVENUE (VERSION 2.0)
By David Hontiveros
June 23, 2050.
Thursday.
Makati. Gaudy neon tiara of the painted whore that is NeoManila. Despite the apparent anatomical discrepancy, the heart of HighTown.
‘Berto stands there, at the heart of this heart, the corner of Ayala and Makati Avenue. In his melanin-adjusted skin (an aesthetic pale pink now), a fresh shave and crewcut, and decked out in fashionable barbaric chic, he feels he belongs here.
He’s at home here, this razorboy.
At home, for a job interview.
He blinks, shutter eyelids, masking crimson Matsushita implants for a mute instant. The reflected masses of Ayala Avenue disappear, then reappear, on the convex surfaces of ‘Berto’s purchased eyes. Harsh green digits flash in his lower left field of vision [17:24:02], overlaid on the scene before him, ghost numerics only he can see, with his new, high-definition vision.
Early, he thinks. Time to kill.
The jostling flocks of
sararimen migrating home from the Stock Exchange Complex, an urban menagerie of synthetic silk and wool, ebb and flow around ‘Berto in the ritualized lethargy of the end of yet another tedious workday.
Above the madding Makati crowd, a thin blanket of smog hovers in the air like a smudged film of Plastick stretched tightly across the face of God. A corporate hovertransport bearing the ubiquitous logo of the San Miguel Corporation vectors towards the landing pad atop the Shangri-La, the vehicle’s reinforced glass front lit by the garish neolux of the world-famous hotel.
‘Berto watches the transport display an insectile grace as it touches down, haloes flaring off its black chrome carapace. He watches, standing at the foot of a ten-story tall adboard for The Body Shoppe, on the spot where the old PLDT building was once, back when landlines hadn’t yet become obsolete.
Blandly curious, the razorboy turns and cranes his neck, gaze turned skyward to watch the display.
The Shoppe’s proprietress, Narcissa, in a shimmering vidgown running a fractal graphic loop, looms over `Berto, nearly a hundred feet tall. Blinking fiber-optics nestle in her scalp amidst her lavender tresses. White, faceted cyberlenses gaze blankly from her perfect, painfully sculpted face, a gigantic insect’s compound eyes.
Narcissa is gorgon-like, monstrous in her elegance.
The razorboy tightens the focus of his implants, fascinated by her gargantuan lips, by the tight, almost cruel slash of them, as she speaks of the unparalleled glories of cybertechnology.
“Man is imperfect,” the digitally reproduced voice drones. (Narcissa’s faint French accent makes the chip voice sound just a little bit more human.) “At the Body Shoppe, you can reach your full potential. Desensitization is the key to opening the doors of paradise.
“We take away parts of you, yes, making you less you. But this is not dehumanization, but rather, a reconstruction into a being far better equipped to enjoy the world that surrounds him.”
`Berto smiles drily, his smirk uglier even than Narcissa’s coldly-edged gesture. Even as he wonders how much these well-dressed parasites charge for their procedures, a male game-show voice comes on-line, spouting the requisite come-on.
“At the Body Shoppe, you can choose from a wide array of first-class, vat-grown organs, or natural implants supplied by the Shoppe’s numerous, yet meticulously screened donors. We also offer the widest range of cybernetic implants of the finest local and foreign head- and bodyware in the Asian territories. Only at The Body Shoppe, located on the 14th floor, Building C, SM Metamall, EDSA.”
Narcissa appears a final time, just a flicker really, almost like a retinal afterimage, a video phantasm, her gown’s graphic display now a programmed aurora borealis trapped for perpetuity in the flat skies of ad heaven.
`Berto snorts softly, once. A derisive sound. Standing there, at the foot of this hundred foot-tall millennial Madonna who begins her spiel again-- a video uroburos eating its own pixellated tail-- the razorboy presses the internal rewind button, time-lapsing backward, tachyon-like, remembering his own remod.
In Banaue.
Down.
Down in LowTown.
There, among the narrow alleys that smelled of motor oil and piss, where metal and plastic prosthetics hung from strung-out lengths of black plastic cord, and display windows streaked with grease and spit showcased endless rows of optical implants, dead eyes in a whole spectrum of colors that stared right back at any interested parties.
There, in Banaue, `Berto had understood, instinctively, the source of all these artificial body parts.
Illegal smuggling, of course. But others, though. Others were procured by far more dubious means.
The former owners, transgressors of some law or other of the street, chopped up, with any usable parts—technological or organic—salvaged and sold at dirt-cheap prices, the rest of them left to rot in the steaming piles of refuse called Smokey Mountain.
But they were the weak. Poor fools fallen prey while slumming on the crude edges of NeoManila’s savage urban geometry. Here, in a sprawl where victims didn’t last long, where daily life was every Darwinian’s wet dream, there was no place for the weak.
‘Berto had learned that long ago, learned it living a life where mines were buried everywhere, tiny viruses waiting to be triggered. A look. A word. A gesture. In a sprawl like NeoManila, any of these could get you killed.
Being poor just made it all worse.
If it was something `Berto had promised himself years ago, it was that he would achieve escape velocity from the unfortunate circumstances of blood and chromosomes.
He’d saved up for years, `Berto had, from the odd job here and there.
Roberto Sandoval, Secman for Hire, his plascard read, in no-nonsense Arial italics.
He’d paid for his remod in crumpled, well-worn scrip, and Nic had assured him that here in Banaue, in the steaming loins of LowTown, were the best parts for the lowest prices.
Behind a steel-accordion door chained and padlocked by two heavy-duty, industrial Yales,
`Berto had allowed Nicodemus Lazaro—he of the ratty dreadlocks and scarred countenance, also considered the best medic on the black market—to take scalpel to skin and slice deeply into his humanity. To the caustic sound of the C-Brains blasting from the mastoid implants in his head, Nic headbanged to the music only he could hear, as he gave `Berto all his hard-earned money’s worth.
And it had been a lot of money, but surely not as much as if he’d gone to The Body Shoppe. (“Located on the 14th floor, Building C, SM Metamall, EDSA,” `Berto hears in his head, the particularly virulent meme already in evidence.)
He imagines it; its climate-controlled waiting room, littered with wafer-thin laptops endlessly scrolling through the latest, hippest CD magazines, ambient muzak drifting languidly from the cleverly concealed speaker system. A delicate, fragile place, sterile, where even dust seems to weigh too much to be supported.
A dead place.
But perhaps, `Berto might have resorted to such a place, if only to shed the old `Berto, to strip off the flesh lacerated and scarred by his mother’s words and silent resentments, the `Berto he’d left behind in Banaue, the one that belonged there, in Nic’s back alley clinic.
The ‘Berto that would never have been accepted in the shining streets of HighTown.
But as much as he despises HighTown though—with its shining veneer barely masking the savage civility of its populace—he also knows that this is where the real money is.
If only for that, this razorboy must learn to like HighTown, if not love it.
In truth, he hated HighTown once, hated it because it was everything he knew he was not; all he could have been, had his mother had her way.
(And here, once more, the rewind button is pressed, farther back into the temporal distance.)
Living in the shanty that teetered precariously on mounds of wet, rank garbage, flies describing wild, erratic orbits around anything that moved, that breathed, in this matricentric prison of his youth, this strange sort of heterotopia, self-contained and hermetic, a cramped jail of pain and unarticulated frustration where Mother knew best. Where Mother knew all.
A fond little loop of memory from this period: `Berto at fourteen, buzzed on rugby, watching his now-fat mother, far too old beyond her years, in an awful, plasvid duster, screaming at him to get a job and make some decent money. Through her tirade, his eyes were riveted to the archaic bit of flash animation that skittered across the duster’s crinkled surface, some Mexican telenovela star from decades back, running across a patently fake garden, being chased by her hunky, horny suitor.
He ran that loop every once in a while, when he was perversely nostalgic.
Now though, he wanted to go even further back, to visit a pre-`Berto time, to dig up and examine fossils of events he’d only ever heard about.
The Ermita hooker (and soon-to-be mother) takes it into her head one day to succumb to her long-dormant maternal instinct, seeing her wished-for child in every disposal, edible diaper ad on the tube. Militant in her new-found calling, she refuses her weekly spermicide treatment, hoping on her scores of prayer hankies, holographic El Nino, and singular, much-beloved agimat, that her American regular, a Harrison account exec named Frank, would be the unwitting father.
She doesn’t count on her pimp, Nardo—bald, greasy, obese Nardo—raping her in a drunken rage. Nine months of weekly pilgrimages to Quiapo Church later, and `Berto is born, a squawling brown monkey in his mother’s eyes.
(And here, though the advent of `Berto has come to pass, he is still not cognizant of the events in his world, so the unearthing of bones continues.)
Up till that moment in the QC free clinic, when she first lays eyes on her infant son, seeing him as a wizened and wet tumor that has finally been excised from her body, she has held out the hope that Frank’s red, white, and blue sperm would be the stronger.
She wails at her first sight of `Berto. The doctor, thinking his patient is experiencing another bout of pain, ups her dosage of sedatives, then leaves to go about his rounds.
In the years that followed, `Berto was never allowed to forget the child he could have been. If his mother could see him now, the razorboy imagines she would approve. She would take one look at his dyed hair, his new, sparkling white teeth, his manufactured muscle tone, his baby pink skin, then sigh, knowing her son had finally arrived.
Abandoning the rewind button for the meantime, `Berto stares at a twentysomething in mirrorshades and the latest drab grey Armani. The mental image of this yumbie reaching his highrise condo unit, hooking himself up to his expensive Sega home entertainment system, and slipping in a simcart so he could temporarily be Indiana Jones or 007 (or maybe even Lara Croft, if his kinks were wired in that direction), just so he could feel good about his would-be life, makes the razorboy burst out in sudden laughter.
“There a problem?”
`Berto turns to the speaker and sees a featureless ovoid helmet atop the familiar midnight blue ensemble of AyalaSec.
In response, the razorboy flashes his left palm, displaying the barcode laser-etched onto his skin. The corpcop pulls out his reader, a hybrid of Hollywood raygun and hair dryer, a burst of crimson light shimmering as the reader is held to `Berto’s palm.
Corpcop gazes at razorboy.
“You’ve got an appointment with Sister Yana Ya Ya of the First Church of Digital Deliverance in about half an hour, Sandoval.”
If `Berto hadn’t known any better, known the corpcop was getting all this from a scrolling field of data that ran down the inside of his face mask, the razorboy would have sworn that the cop had just read his mind (or that the reader had seen all this in the lines of his palm, seeing his fate and destiny in the fine traceries of his new skin).
“Know where the Church is?”
`Berto gestures, finger pointing in the direction of the vast Greenbelt Arcology. “Just by the main entrance.”
“Sister Ya Ya doesn’t approve of tardiness. If you want to be one of her bodyguards, you’ve got to impress her first.”
The razorboy nods, mentally giving the corpcop the finger.
As `Berto abandons the recorded Narcissa-- trapped in her own self-repeating heterotopia on the adboard-- and walks down Makati Avenue, he clenches his left hand into a fist, his fingertips running over the barcode, the one most important thing in his entire existence, for it proved, in the labyrinthine bowels of the electronic beast known as The System, that he did, in fact, exist.
Before he’d had the money to purchase his code, he hadn’t existed at all, a cipher in The System, a ghost in the machine. Without an identity, his flesh and bone weren’t enough to prove he was an individual who actually lived and breathed. Now, only citizens with barcodes had rights; all others were
persona non grata.
`Berto had been there before, a non-being to both the government and his mother, sleeping in refuse, dining on the regurgitated left-overs of a mad society. He had been there and he was never going back.
Smiling, the razorboy reviews himself.
He’s got the look, he’s got the swagger, and the language lexicon is slotted neatly into his cortex, giving him an impeccable command of the English language.
Yes, `Berto thinks, he is in the heart of the heart of HighTown, and he has absolutely no intentions of ever leaving it again.
His smile deepening, the predatory flash of his teeth catching in the sodium lamplight, `Berto walks on, humming a tuneless song, while a light chemical rain begins to fall.