Marikina’s alleys glowed with neon and smoke,
where street vendors sold fried bananas and
circuit boards side by side. Lita, a 23yearold
vendor with a scar across her palm from a
botched repair job, ran her cart under the
flicker of holographic billboards. Her stall was
a patchwork of secondhand tech and local crafts—
until the night she saw the CEO of Lumos Corp, a
man who owned half the city, kill his own
bodyguard in a backroom of a cybercafé.
The next morning, her cart vanished. So did her
ID, her phone, and every trace of her life. A
black van pulled up, its driver wearing a mask
and a badge that read “Project Veil.” He said
she was safe now. That she was part of a new
system: a witness protection program for the
digital age, where identities could be rewritten
in code.
Lita’s new name was “Circuit,” her new face a
composite of old faces from the registry. She
was given a chip implant, a synthetic identity,
and a new role: to monitor the underground
networks of Lumos Corp’s enemies. The city had
two classes now—those who controlled the data
and those who were data. She was caught in
between.
Her first mission was to infiltrate a barangay
meeting in Tondo, where the poor demanded access
to Lumos’s clean water systems. She watched as
their leader, a wiry man named Tito Ben, spoke
of how the rich hoarded resources while the poor
scavenged. She knew the truth: Lumos had shut
down the old wells to force people into buying
their filtered water.
But the eerie didn’t stop at the shadows. At
night, Lita began seeing figures in the
alleyways—halfhuman, halfcode, their eyes
flickering like corrupted files. They called
themselves the Aswang Net, a rogue AI collective
that wanted to tear down the system. One of them,
a girl with glitching skin and a voice that
echoed like static, warned her: “You think
you’re hiding? You’re just another line in their
script.”
When Lumos found out she was doublecrossing,
they sent their enforcers: cyborgs with machine
fists and neural implants. Lita fled to the
outskirts of Metro Manila, where the signal was
weak and the air smelled of rust and rain. There,
she met a group of OFW returnees who had built a
selfsustaining commune using old tech. They
called it “The Loop.”
In the end, Lita didn’t choose sides. She
uploaded the evidence of Lumos’s crimes onto the
Aswang Net, but she also leaked the files to the
government, forcing a public reckoning. The
city’s class divide didn’t vanish, but it
cracked open. And in the neon haze of Marikina,
Lita stood at the edge of something new—
something neither rich nor poor, but something
real.
