EK Gonzales

Soulless

THE TURNING OF gears and creaking of hinges followed the clang of iron. A dim oil lamp swung above his unruly, uncut hair.

Too much metal. Too much fire and smoke. Too much coal. He considered the automaton prison guards, the guardia civil, for the thousandth time in sixty days. The automata were impractical, iron and steel both outside and within, in a country that sweltered with humidity.

Too much metal. Too much fire and smoke and coal. Too many people were dead. Too many were in jail. Many more people deserved to be dead. People who needed to pay for playing with the lives of ordinary men and women, merely to have more power, more control. His thoughts ran in circles, filled with confusion, despair, and anger.

He did not look up at the clatter of the prison bars. He now knew the usual noises within the Bilibid Coreccional. The sound of many stiff boots on moldy wet stones no longer bothered him.

It was too early for Isagani to be visiting, the only friend left who did. Everyone else involved in the treason charges had been taken away by their rich families, escaping to the family businesses, the provinces, or other countries. He had no family to remember him.

Two prison guards pulled him up and dragged him forward. “Filibustero. You can leave.”

When a party celebrating a disappointment was mistaken for an attempt to incite a revolution, he and his friends had been arrested. He was not even at the panciteria at all when the party happened. But he had been a friend of intelligent insulares and mestizos, the colony-born and the half-breeds. He was an indio, a native of a land ruled by strangers. He was a scholar, dependent on benefactors. No one would want to save him.

Yet someone had.

AFTER HOURS OF signing papers and answering mundane questions, questions he had already answered many times, he was thrust into the glare of the afternoon sun, and onto the cobblestones of the street. A guard of flesh and blood put a scrap of paper into his hand.

He stared at the address for a moment. Then he sighed, and began the long and lonely walk across the España bridge, to a large stone house in Binondo.

He looked upward, as the clockwork soldiers of the Intramuros emerged for the evening. He heard the old sad melody of gears turning, chains clanking, and wood creaking, as Manila was enclosed in the thick stone walls.

The whispers for independence had become murmurs. The disparate islands that Spain called the Philippines were learning to act as one, all seeking reprieve from the slavery, seeking to own what was truly theirs. The colonial government struggled to quell the tulisanes, his people hiding in the woods, scavenging when necessary, fighting for a stolen land. The walled capital kept a ruse of joviality, feasting and drinking in their large stone houses. And yet the well-dressed ladies, the adorned men, the un-pious friars, spoke of the murmurs of resistance, the whispers of independence, under the bright chandeliers.

He knocked wearily at the heavy wooden doors of a large stone house. Faint, he sat on the street, and waited.

“Why do you sit here like a broken doll?”

He glared at the voice above him. The man’s jeweled cane tapped near his hand. The eyes were hidden behind tinted lenses. The hair was fully white, pulled back and hidden under a wide-brimmed foreign hat. The jeweler, judged unfairly as a filibustero some years ago. The man had disappeared to other lands, and recently returned, with finery and gems, a darling of the peninsulares and ilustrados.

“Come,” the jeweler said.

Basilio followed.

HE WAS LED to a large room on the wooden second floor, lit only by a small lamp over a dining table. The table was covered in large swathes of paper, filled with sketches.

A large lamp, unlit, shaped like a pomegranate, sat over a wooden box with intricate carved designs. The jeweler took a small key, and opened one panel of the box, revealing a compartment filled with gears and cogs, spinning in all directions.

He saw other designs, farther from the pomegranate lamp. There were sketches for clockwork devices, small and easily hidden in eaves and inside wood panels. Each device ticked away an amount of time, different for each type. He saw maps of the capital. He found plans of the Governor-General’s palace, the San Agustin church, the Fuerte de Santiago, the Universidad de Santo Tomas, the Ateneo, the Letran.

He saw the lamp, the clockwork, and the plans, for what they were meant to be. They were to be weapons against the peninsulares. They were weapons of vengeance.

He was to be a weapon, as well.

The jeweler had chosen Paulita Gomez’s wedding reception as the venue when he would deliver judgment. It was a perfect, auspicious time. Furthermore, the Gomez mansion had been stolen from Captain ’Tiago, Basilio’s benefactor, ruined by the friars, destroyed by Basilio's arrest.

He remembered. He recognized the location of heiress Paulita Gomez’s mansion, but kept silent. Basilio remembered the rage he had allowed to boil, in the two months he was surrounded by damp walls and bars. It was not his place to refuse. His anger wanted to assist, by any means. He had shut his heart many weeks ago. Now, as he looked well at the drawings before him, he clenched his fists.

The jeweler gestured again, and he followed.

He was led through a hidden door into a hidden basement, cold and drafty. But the basement was filled with wood. With wooden men made of kawayan, narra, and kamagong. They were lined in rows, each one armed with iron blades, farmer scythes, and kamagong staves. Each creature was two heads taller than him, and twice as large at the torso.

The jeweler opened the torso of the nearest wooden figure. Within it worked metal and wooden gears, moving pneumatic bellows as lungs, coursing hydraulic fluids for blood. Some were similar to those within the foreign automata, other parts looked different. A wooden face was opened as well, revealing clockwork and galvanic systems working as one, operating a mechanical brain.

“Craftsmen, woodworkers, and engineers have perfected your design,” the jeweler informed him. “The explosion will be the signal for these warriors to deploy.”

He remembered another, deeper rage within him, one that seethed quietly under the coals. The rage against the constant implication: that the colonists, the white man, always knew better about everything. This deeper rage mixed with the injustice of his arrest, with the wrath of at least two deaths, because a woman loved him, because a man became like a father to him.

The jeweler closed the compartments. “With these, we now have soldiers. We have strength that will match the guardia civil. We will turn the tide of war in our favor.”

“War.” Basilio’s brain repeated the word. It sounded both hollow and menacing.

“The time has finally come,” the jeweler said. “The house of cards is ready to fall, with a slight breeze, with a press of a finger. The people are more than ready to revolt. The governor-general has no true strength remaining to him. The friars have empty words. There are funds, people, and weapons enough and to spare.” The cane sounded on the ground. “Tonight all the heads of state and the church will be dead. Tonight we will claim this land as ours. We will take it from them. We will take what is properly ours.”

“We attack tonight. You will join me,” the jeweler said, a statement of fact, not a request.

Basilio clenched his fists again, and looked the man in the eyes. He nodded.

IT HAD BEGUN four months ago, a life ago.

Mechanical oddities and curiosities hung on the wooden walls of the stone house’s second floor. The singing birds of Shanghai. The dancing puppets of Kyoto. A monkey playing cymbals, from Paris. A magic box from Hamburg, with many hidden compartments revealed with gears. Intricate clocks from Vienna and Switzerland.

There were none made by his own people. Their artifice had been limited to work tools, carriages, and bamboo organs. The collection made him more keenly aware of this disparity.

Basilio peered down at designs draped over the dining table. Steel joints attached iron rods. Gears connected the rods. All these were attached to each other to form a figure. Standing in the shadows was a replica of the design: a figure made of iron and steel, shaped like a man, of European build. An automaton, similar to the guardia civil.

The English artisans had been purely mechanical in their training. But he had the mind of a doctor, in a land where metal was imported and expensive.

Human anatomy had been one of his best subjects in the medical school. Where his fellow students merely put names to memory, he sought to understand how each part composed the whole. He studied how bone attached to muscle, how each blood vessel supplied each part, how each nerve made each part move. He sought to understand how each joint moved.

The jeweler coughed slightly, disrupting his thoughts. “Well?” he asked.

“This is too much metal,” Basilio said. “Too much fire and smoke, too much coal.”

He kept silent about how imbalanced he felt the metal man was, how heavy it was at the torso, supported as it was on spindly legs. Oddly, it did not seem sacrilegious, or traitorous, to look at such a figure. A figure of a man, but without a soul.

“What do you suggest?” Simoun asked.

His answer surprised him, how easily it departed from his brain and his lips. “Señor, you were born here. You know how strong our material is. No European artifice can match.”

“They will be weaker.”

“Not if they are created well.”

“You will assist me in this?” the jeweler asked. “You shall create this warrior for me?”

He considered his sketches, of arms made of kawayan, jointed by oiled kamagong, of torsos made of narra, housing a hydraulic-pump heart, pneumatic lungs, and various clockwork organs of motion. He was surprised that the jeweler had been aware of the sketches. They were drawings he had made during snatches of free time, while waiting for his friends, or resting after studies.

Isagani's good-natured chuckles and cheerful words rang in his ears. Unlike the others, Isagani never thought the sketches were useless dreams. “But you’re a doctor, my good friend,” Isagani said. “What you understand is life and creatures of life. For this to work, you need to know the properties of these materials as well. You need to know them as an artisan.”

“You study law,” he had retorted.

“So I do,” Isagani had replied, with a grin. “But I may know where to find some books about automata and galvanic current. And my uncle has books about the plants.”

The conversation was followed by other detailed and animated conversations, as anatomy was planned with mechanics. The conversations continued late into the evenings, where Basilio found himself accepting breakfast from Isagani’s relations.

“They are pieces of paper, Señor,” Basilio answered Simoun at last. “Ideas. Thoughts.”

“Make them live,” the jeweler replied.

IT HAD MERELY been an exercise in science to him, back then, working for the jeweler. Proof of a concept, that if iron men could be made by those in faraway lands, in the image of real humans, then it stood to reason that wooden men could also be made, as they had already been made by the Tsino and the Nihon.

It was also returning a favor, that he remembered who a man was before a whole country knew him. A life loaned for a life given back to him. A favor for a favor.

Between classes, studying, and calling on some patients, he began the work.

In darkness he rode away. In the night he chopped down what he would need. Before the roosters crowed, he returned with a wagon filled with the materials made familiar to him by a childhood of servitude and hardship. He was an indio; the automaton guards ignored him.

He made a prison for himself. In the drafty and cold stone house without horses in its stables, he built a man in his own image.

He formed arms and legs with sturdy bamboo poles. Through the hollow of the poles he coursed water with coconut oil. He split bamboo stems and made jointed fingers, moved by treated abaca fiber, held together by dried rattan. He made tubes from ornamental bamboo vines.

A skull of coconut husk housed an amount of quartz, sufficient to move galvanic current to the heart that pumped the pneumatics. It also contained a clockwork system, allowing the being to understand commands. By triggering its steel heart with a starter device of his making, he primed the galvanic current, and caused the completed being to move. A wooden body with a heart and a brain.

He burned wood, he created sparks, he caused small explosions, and he lodged splinters in his fingers. But wood and metal became man.

“What have you been up to, my friend?” Isagani had asked several times, coaxing him awake while eating. “We almost never see you now.”

“Come and see,” he finally said one day.

He showed him the first working version of the wooden man, as it clumsily walked through the clearing, before it tripped and fell in a heap.

But Isagani did not laugh. He scratched his head. “I think it needs more stability at the legs and feet.”

Basilio sighed and agreed.

“How else do you need help?” Isagani asked.

The question led to more conversations, more plans, and more late evenings that turned to mornings.

“Who asked you to do all this?” Isagani asked again.

“A – patron. A rich patron,” Basilio answered. After all, while Simoun was a well-known man, no one else knew that they were more than acquainted.

With more testing, Basilio caused the wooden man to walk, to run, to lift, and to hold. He fed orders to the clockwork. He armed his creation with arnis sticks of kamagong, and pistols filled with seed and iron bullets.

The being was light but sturdy, parts easily replaced with materials quickly sought and found. It was not immune to fire, but would not be quickly weakened or maimed. A series of valves ensured that the being would keep walking even if an arm were removed, or keep shooting with a pistol if it lost a leg.

Within a month, he headed to the second-floor receiving room, filled with the clockwork of many lands. He walked to Simoun’s wide narra desk, and lay before him the final plans for the wooden clockwork being.

A mandirigma: a warrior.

WITH ALL THE ice in his heart, with chilled blood in his veins, he entered the mansion dressed as an indio servant, in a plain tunic. He had shaved, but kept his hair long and tied back at the neck.

Basilio checked that the clockwork explosives had been properly lodged in the stone house’s eaves, ramparts, and foundations. He ensured that the pomegranate lamp had been placed at the center of the dining hall, where all the dignitaries and friars mingled and laughed, dressed in their finery and pride. A beautiful piece of glass and clockwork, a centerpiece deserving of notice. He lowered his head, as the elite circled in admiration. He left unopposed through the servant doors.

But standing in the street, he found the person he least wanted to see. He found Isagani.

His friend from the university looked questioning, confused, but nourished, at peace with everything except not being Paulita Gomez’s husband.

He called out to him, in spite of all the warnings his mind gave. “’Gani.”

His friend turned to face him, kept staring in the dimness of the early evening. “Is it really you, Basilio?”

He nodded.

Isagani pulled him into a darker shadow. He looked at him again in the rising moonlight. He then wrapped his arms around Basilio’s neck, clutched him well, and held him tightly, silently.

Basilio felt his bony frame surrounded by warmth, his heart ticking away the time, in rhythm with the clockwork devices under the mansion.

He decided. He took Isagani’s hand.

“’Gani. Come with me. We need to be somewhere safe.”

Isagani chuckled bitterly. “Paulita will look her best today. Don’t you want to see her? One last time. Before they take her away.”

Basilio chose to be frank, for time passed quickly. “Isagani, listen. The mansion is filled with explosives. At the height of the dancing, a clockwork lamp, filled with high-grade nitroglycerin, will explode. It will kill everyone inside.”

Isagani stared at him, searching his face. Basilio kept his steady gaze and his firm grip on the hand. Paulita Gomez was nothing to him. Captain ’Tiago was already dead. The mansion meant nothing to him. His life meant nothing. There was nothing left to lose. Except Isagani.

“The plan is set. The gears are in motion. The clockwork for all the devices is ticking. Soon all the foreigners will be dead. Soon it will truly be our people who will rule our land.” He spouted the words he had heard from the jeweler, convincing himself that he believed them as well. “That moment will be soon. We have to get away.”

Isagani’s eyes widened, as each word finally made its point. He turned to run, toward the mansion.

Basilio pulled him back. “Please. Don’t go in.”

“You said there’s a bomb! I have to go, I have to save her –”

Basilio kept his grip. “If you enter, you enter to die.” He pulled Isagani away. “Paulita will never be yours. She will be no one else’s. Stay here.”

“But – Basilio –”

Basilio drew him close. “Let me keep the last person I hold dear.” With all his remaining strength, he pulled at Isagani’s wrist, and set him walking away from the mansion.

Isagani’s hand was cold inside his, and it shook. His voice trembled as he spoke. “My friend?”

“Yes?”

“I adored Paulita’s eyes.”

“I know.” Basilio kept his own eyes on the darkened cobbled street, walking hurriedly, his hand tightly around Isagani’s wrist.

“I adored Paulita. I loved Paulita. I wanted to be married to Paulita.”

“I know.” So had all of their friends. “I know.”

“But –” Isagani said, “I refuse to lose you.”

Basilio turned and faced him, as the mansion grew silent.

He looked away, as the mansion erupted.

THE WOODEN WARRIORS began their attack.

They were attired in the clothes of farmers, covering the nakedness of the metal and wood: cheap long-sleeved tunics, coarse trousers, silent straw sandals, and straw hats. They were armed in like manner, with bolos, arnis sticks, and sickles.

The first group of mandirigma, hidden within stables and storehouses, appeared soon after the explosion. They surrounded the mansion, killing every man who managed to survive the blast. Several decimated the mechanical guardia civil at the city walls. Others eliminated everyone in a uniform within range, mechanical or human. Some walked into the churches, eliminating every man in a cassock. People rushed to the closed gates and were crushed there, as the alarms were raised, as fire spread through the Intramuros. The mandirigma surrounded the walled capital. They had been instructed to kill any peninsular, insular, or mestizo who dared to leave the walls. Human bodies littered the thick walls and filled the moat.

The second group deployed at dawn, accompanied by his countrymen from the mountains. Outside the walls, the mandirigma walked quickly through the cobbled streets, tall and sinewed, with eyes, but without faces, without souls. On command, the wooden beings destroyed houses and set buildings ablaze. The Pasig River brightened with the glow of conflagration.

HE WAS A doctor first.

People kept coming to the jeweler’s house, somehow finding out that Basilio stayed there, knowing he was the only one who was any kind of doctor. Soon there would be more people coming, and more people he would turn away. The breezes from the Pasig blew in the stench of death, smoke, and gunpowder.

His trousers and dress shirt were bloodstained. Blood caked around his fingernails. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot. He had not slept or eaten the whole night. He patched wounds and cleaned sores and removed shrapnel and eased what pain he could.

Bayabas leaf poultices for wounds. Clean cotton cloths, boiled in hot water. Small amounts of opium he managed to beg from around Binondo.

He drowned out the thoughts that the wounds were inflicted by his own creations, by filling his mind with the work of saving life. He ignored the screams in his brain by making his brain shout stranger words: People deserved to be dead. Death was needed to create revolution. Yet his brain kept screaming: You caused this. You allowed this to happen.

He finally fell into a few hours of exhausted slumber, the jeweler's desperately triumphant words filling his dreams.

Voices pierced the quiet.

“Long live the Katipunan!”

“The strangers who have ruled us are dead! The land is ours! Rise up with us and claim what is our right!”

“We are not the islands of a dead king. We are the people of our sovereign land! We are the Maharlika! Let us claim what is ours!”

In between such shouts were screams of pain, shots from rifles, blasts from cannons, and pleas for mercy.

He walked away from the blood and the pain, closing a door behind him in the large old stone house. He clutched at his chest and calmed his breathing, hoping both would decrease the pain in his heart. But none of his medical training eased the hurt.

IN BETWEEN THE waves of arrivals, he sat at a large narra desk. On the desk was a pistol, gutted of its bullets and bullet carriage. Beside it was a treatise by Galvani, on current and power. A small piece of quartz acted as a paperweight for some hasty notes and sketches.

Pistol hammer hits quartz, quartz creates power, power converts to galvanic current, galvanic current moves in straight lines, galvanic current moves toward another conducting metal that will receive it.

He slipped on rubber gloves, connected quartz to galvanic converter, and attached both to the pistol. He raised it and felt its weight. The crystal and the converter had not altered the weight much, and added stability to his grip on the trigger.

Isagani found him that way when he opened the door. He, too, was stained with blood, grime, and sweat, from setting order to the chaos that arrived for the doctor.

“Get some rest, Basilio. You have done more than enough.”

“That is what frightens me,” he replied.

“Why? That, out there, is the sound of victory, of freedom! You said so yourself!”

“No, it is not. I never said that,” Basilio muttered.

It was the sound of delusion made apparent.

“It’s my fault as much as it is yours,” Isagani said. “Because I helped you make those things.”

He shook his head. “The fault is all mine, because the plans were mine. Simoun gave me the reason to make it, but I agreed. Your only fault was wanting to be with me for so many hours, and helping me think by doing so.”

Isagani released an uncertain chuckle. “So you noticed.”

“Yes.”

“Did you – well – did you dislike it?”

“No.”

“You are being kind.”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean –” He sighed, feeling all his weariness once more. “I am not lying to you. I appreciated your company, and that you did not think me a fool for making the wooden soldier. I am grateful. I am pained that such conversations and thoughts have been used to these ends, to kill and to maim.”

The stench of death remained in the air, stale and sour. For a moment he clutched his heart. The pounding in it had slowed but remained. He held his heart, and breathed deeply.

The sky dimmed. Isagani clasped his hand.

Basilio caught his breath. He brought the hand up to his lips. He kissed it. He decided. “’Gani. I have to go.”

“Where?” the other asked.

He did not answer. He remained silent as he looked down at his hand.

“At least,” his friend said, “leave with this.”

He was too late to stop Isagani from placing lips over his mouth. He paled, as his eyes darted in all directions, keenly aware of being behind a door that anyone could open, where anyone could accuse. He became painfully aware of his sweat, his grime, his bloody hands, his filth, his sin. His heart pounded, as his mouth was kept locked in place. He gasped for air, as the lips were taken away.

Gaining his breath, he placed a kiss on Isagani’s forehead. Then he stood.

He took up the pistol from his desk, and walked out the door.

HE MET HIS first mandirigma at the San Gabriel bulwark of the Intramuros, nearest the España bridge. He clasped the starter in his left hand, a strange pistol inside a hand familiar with scalpels, not weapons. He aimed it at the wooden soldier’s chest, a foot or two above his head. He twisted the starter pistol’s knobs, turning them to their highest settings. He pulled the trigger, and sent a surge of lightning.

The surge hit the mandirigma squarely. Current coursed through its body, disabling its heart, head, arms, and legs. The body fell down onto one knee, before toppling into the moat.

When the device delivered a small bolt of current, it started the quartz deep in the heart of each mandirigma, which made it pump the fluids that oiled and moved them. A small surge of current was enough to move each for days. A strong one paralyzed it.

He walked toward the fort as he primed the starter to reload.

He stopped when he met a mandirigma, disabling each with a single strong burst of galvanic current. He was smaller than any of them, and weaved through their bodies with ease. He ignored those that ignored him.

He kept walking through the darkness of the early summer evening. The streetlamps remained unlit. Windows and doors remained shut. Still in his tattered and bloody surgery apron, Basilio walked through the streets of the walled city, now silenced and still.

Bodies of mechanical guardia civil and human katipuneros littered the ground. Four mandirigma surrounded him, as he approached the gates. He fired four well-aimed charges, toppling the guardia civil automata toward his feet. He walked over the figures of metal and wood. He kept walking until he reached the government house, where any Spanish officer who remained was kept. He kept walking, his starter ready to fire.

He finally stood before the governor’s palace, his back to the Fuerte de Santiago.

“You are sabotaging your masterpieces, Basilio!”

He heard the voice he sought.

The jeweler peered over the window. The long whitened hair no longer hidden under a hat, no longer pulled back elegantly to face the elite. The eyes were still hidden behind dark lenses, even in the fading light of evening. He still wore his dark coat. His hand still grasped a jeweled cane. The man was regal, even at the height of his despairing mania.

“Yes, Ginoô,” Basilio answered. “I am.”

He felt the weariness of too many hours awake, too many hours watching the wounded and the dead. He walked inside the palace with even steps, walking past the bodies of uniformed soldiers and the debris of ruined guardia civil. He walked up the grand stairs of thick native wood.

Simoun sat at the head of the long meeting table. The flag with the Spanish king’s coat of arms had been torn away behind him. A crude red flag was spread out now, with three capital Ks at its center, the symbol of the Katipunan. His elbows were over the table, his hands steepled under his tinted lenses. Men in farmer’s tunics and rifles flanked him, the red kerchief of the katipunero around their necks. The floor had pools of blood, soaking the silk coats of the fallen colonial officers.

Basilio stopped at the other end of the table. “What have you done?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

“What you have wanted for this country,” the jeweler said.

“My creatures have helped you get rid of them. But I do not want one tyrant replaced by another,” he answered. He held the starter pistol by his side. “I want my people to rule my land. But not with fear and terror.”

“The man who wanted that is long dead.”

“The man before me will let many people die, among our own as well as our enemies –”

“The mandirigma will turn the tide in our favor,” the jeweler interrupted.

“What kind of a victory, what kind of rule is this, if people cannot decide to die for their country, because they died before they could decide?”

The jeweler watched him through his tinted lenses. “It is too late now, Basilio,” he said.

Basilio kept his gaze. “Maybe. But I will stop what I can.” He raised the starter pistol. The surge of galvanic current sparked as lightning, and arced toward the jeweler. But the jeweler ducked away, and the surge hit the red flag on the wall.

Basilio then turned the device, and placed it over his heart.

He pressed the trigger.

INTRAMUROS REMAINED, BUT it became a shell of itself. The reminder of Spanish rule was set aside.

The government buildings were ransacked. The fort was deserted. The universities were emptied. The churches were locked. The automaton guardia civil were dismantled, gutted by katipuneros or turned into blades. The gates of the walled city remained open. The seat of power was moved outside its walls.

Wars and skirmishes continued in all the islands. But all the islands were furnished with mandirigma, unmatched in their speed and agility. The negotiations required for such warriors caused a united front, resulting in a united battle.

Until some semblance of peace, and a semblance of a national government by the people, was found.

IN A DAMAGED stone house in Binondo, a man remained.

He sat behind a large narra desk. He stared at the plans sketched on great swathes of paper, covering the desk, lit only by a small oil lamp moved to a corner. The setting sun darkened the room, dimmed with relics, gears, and dust. Keeping the time was a gentle ticking of clockwork. The clockwork prompted a galvanic starter, strapped around the man's chest, urging a human heart to beat.

A voice came up to his desk. “I am sorry, but they would not be dissuaded –”

He did not look up. “It doesn’t matter who comes, Isagani,” he answered.

Shadows darkened the paper, figures of men. He sighed. He was getting used to such assemblages.

“Dr. Basilio delos Santos.”

He raised his head, took his eyes away from his drawings, and stared at the assembled white men. Americans, from their accent. He knew their aim, the aim of the English, the French, the Tsino of the mainland, and the Nihon as well. Now that Spain had lost control, others sought to claim his country and his people. It was not as if Spain had given up trying to reclaim it.

His heart ached, as the clockwork starter pulsed, slower than it should.

One of the pale-skinned men spoke in Spanish. “We hear that you are the best engineer in this country –”

He shook his head. “I am not an engineer.”

“But you made the automata, is this correct?”

He cleared his throat. He hated the term, foreign and strange. Like the people before him. “They are mandirigma. They are not for sale.”

 

 

EK Gonzales, in a strange life, has written one-act plays, articles, fan website content, fan fiction, reviews, and short stories. She was the first copy editor for a popular anime magazine. She independently releases the web/ebook series Tales of the Activated. Her previous publications have been in Philippine Speculative Fiction volume 4, Philippine Genre Stories, Ruin and Resolve, and Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults. She was a fellow of the inaugural (2015) Ateneo AILAP Writing Lab for the young adult novel. She is currently an online advocate for local komiks.