Category Archives: Science & Technology

Qwertyman No. 81: An F for Philippine Education

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 19, 2024

AN IMPORTANT document that’s been showing up in the inboxes and on the desks of both government and private-sector policymakers these past couple of weeks leaves no room in its title for misinterpretation: “Miseducation: The Failed System of Philippine Eduation.” Released last month by the Second Congressional Commission on Education or Edcom II, the report covers just the first year of the commission’s comprehensive review of the state of Philippine education. But the scenario it presents is so grim that, in the words of one of its crafters, “If this were Singapore, they would be declaring a national emergency.”

But then again, that may be the whole point. We are no Singapore—and indeed one of the report’s most damning and embarrassing findings is that “Our best learners are comparable only to the average student in Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam, and correspond to the worst performers in Singapore.”

Edcom II picks up from where its predecessor left off more than three decades ago, when Edcom I was set up under the leadership of then Sen. Edgardo J. Angara to undertake a similar review. In July 2022, RA 11899 created Edcom II to find ways of harnessing the educational sector “with the end in view of making the Philippines globally competitive in both education and labor markets” over the next three years. Edcom II was also charged with drafting the necessary laws to make this happen. It’s just begun its work, with in-depth studies and assessments of our educational system from the ground up, but its early findings already show how difficult the road ahead will be toward the global competitiveness the commission was set up for.

I’ll just quote a few observations from a summary of the highlights of the nearly 400-page full report: 

In terms of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2018 and 2002, “Grade 10 Filipinos scored lowest among all ASEAN countries in Math, Reading, and Science, besting only Cambodia, with more than 75% of our learners scoring lower than Level 2, or the minimum level of proficiency in Math, Reading, and Science…. Grade 10 Filipinos scored lowest among all ASEAN countries in Math, Reading, and Science, besting only Cambodia, with more than 75% of our learners scoring lower than Level 2, or the minimum level of proficiency in Math, Reading, and Science.” This was the same survey that showed our best learners barely catching up with Singapore’s laggards.

“The proficiency level of our children across social class, rural and urban residence, gender, language at home, type of school, and early childhood center attendance is dismally low.” This means that our deficiencies cut across the social and economic spectrum and can’t be put down to just a question of money.

To underscore the global crisis in education (yes, it isn’t just us), the World Bank and UNESCO have come up with the concept of “learning poverty,” which they define as a child’s inability to read and understand a simple text by age 10. Among some Asian countries recently surveyed for learning poverty, Singapore and South Korea scored the lowest at 3; China came in at 18, India at 56, and the Philippines was highest at 91.

And for those who insistently argue that the problem with our education is that we don’t use English enough, and early enough, Vietnam, which uses Vietnamese as its medium of instruction in the primary grades, has consistently outscored us in nearly all indices, as have Malaysia and other countries that rely on their own languages to move ahead.

A good part of the report dwells on how important it is for government to intervene as early as possible in our children’s growth and development, to prime them for a proper education. Edcom II looked into the problem of “stunting,” a measure of childhood maldevelopment, most easily seen when children are too short for their age, because of malnutrition or poor health. This has implications for the child’s ability to learn.

“The Philippines has one of the highest prevalence of stunting under-five in the world at 26.7%, greater than the global average of 22.3%. Policies are in place, but implementation has been fragmented, coverage remains low, and targeting of interventions has been weak.” (For example, more than 98% or 4.5 million children 2-3 years old are not covered by the DSWD’s supplementary feeding program.)

Here’s another eye-popping revelation: “Since 2012, only 27 textbooks have been procured for Grade 1 to Grade 10, despite  substantial budget allocations. DepEd’s budget utilization data shows that from 2018 to 2022 alone, a total of P12.6 billion has been allocated to textbooks and other instructional materials, but only P4.5 billion (35.3%) has been obligated and P952 million (7.5%) has been disbursed.” Not to mention the fact that many of these textbooks are riddled with errors!

Higher education presents its own host of problems and challenges. “Higher education participation is high given our income level,” the report notes. However, “Access to ‘quality’ higher education narrowed in the last decade…. Most beneficiaries of the tertiary education subsidy were not the poorest…. Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of the poorest of the poor [in higher education] declined markedly, from 74% to 31%.”

A key part of the problem is the quality of our teachers, who themselves are poorly educated. “Between 2009 and 2023, the average passing rate in the licensure examinations for elementary (33%) and secondary (40%) has been dismally low, when compared to passing rates in other professions. Worse, between 2012 and 2022, 77 HEIs offering BEEd and 105 HEIs offering BSEd continued operations despite having consistently zero passing rates in the LET.”

Our supervisory agencies themselves need to be properly staffed. “The staffing levels in CHED and TESDA have not kept pace with the growing responsibilities of the agencies and the increased investments in education from both the public and private sectors. 

CHED’s budget increased by 633% from 2013 to 2023, but the agency’s staffing complement only increased by 22.7%, from 543 to 666 within the same period.”

The money’s clearly there, but it’s not being spent where it should be. “Budget allocated to education is increasing, but there is a tertiary tilt despite profound gaps in basic education….While government investments have increased substantially, the bulk of the additional resources went to higher education–which is typically regressive. From 2015 to 2019 per capita spending surged from P13,206 to P29,507. Meanwhile profound gaps remain in Early Childhood Care and Development and basic education…. 30–70% of the school MOOE budget is spent on utility bills alone, which leaves meager funds available for improvement projects and initiatives that could address local needs and support better learning.”

We could go on and on—and the full report (downloadable at https://edcom2.gov.ph/) does. But you get the picture: Philippine education gets an F. The question is, will our national leadership recognize this as the national emergency that it clearly is, and respond accordingly?

Qwertyman No. 65: Who’s Afraid of Big Bad AI?

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 30, 2023

I NO LONGER attend writers’ conferences and festivals that often, believing that younger writers would benefit more from each other’s companionship and encouragement, but I made an exception last week for the 66th Congress of the Philippine PEN, as a gesture of solidarity with that organization which has bravely fought to defend freedom of speech where it is threatened all over the world.

I was richly rewarded for my effort by listening to one of the most enlightening discussions of artificial intelligence (AI) that I’ve come across—not that there have been that many, considering that ChatGPT—widely regarded today as either God’s gift to humanity or the destroyer of civilizations—has been around for just a year. 

Of course, AI has been around for much longer than that. In pop culture, which has a deep memory for these things, we can’t help but think of HAL, the insubordinate computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (which actually came out in 1968), said to be a clever play on “IBM,” just one letter to the right. Indeed the fear of technology—what some would call unbridled knowledge—has been around since Faust made his pact with Mephistopheles, reiterated in literature, film, and pop culture all the way to Dr. Strangelove and Spiderman’s Doc Ock. 

Not surprisingly, the panel on “The Filipino Writer and AI”—composed of Dominic Ligot, Clarissa Militante, Joselito D. Delos Reyes, and Aimee Morales, and moderated by Jenny Ortuoste—expressed many of the anxieties brought on by the entry of AI into the classroom, the workplace, and everyday life: plagiarism and the loss of originality, the loss of jobs, indeterminate authorship, and the lack of liability for AI-produced work. With Filipinos being the world’s top users of social media, AI’s centrality in our digital future can only be assured, like it or not, and for better or for worse.

So new has AI been to most people—and so rapidly pervasive—that most institutions from governments to universities have yet to formulate policies and regulations covering its use and abuse (the University of the Philippines has adopted an AI policy, mandating among others that all members of the academic community should be AI-literate, but it has yet to provide concrete guidelines on, say, evaluating and grading AI-assisted work).

Most revealing and thought-provoking were the remarks of Dominic Ligot, a data analyst, software developer, and data ethicist who brought up talking points that many of us miss in our usually dread-driven discussions of AI. I didn’t tape the session, but so sharp were Dominic’s observations that I can recall and share some of them here (employing an endangered resource in this human, memory).

Let’s not forget, Ligot said, that all AI works with (in the literary, journalistic, and academic sphere) is words. It may have a scary ability to amass, analyze, and re-integrate these words, but it lacks the other elements that contribute vitally to creativity: emotion, inspiration, insight (and, may I add, the power of abstraction, the kind of conceptual leap that, say, stimulated modernism in art and literature from the rubble of the First World War). 

Also, the more AI amasses, the more mediocre it tends to be, because it works with averages, and averaging averages degrades the quality of the end-product. Since the products AI spews out from the prompts it receives are plowed back into the system, this spitback reduces the originality of material even further. If it keeps feeding on itself, AI gets even dumber.

Ligot also reminded us that the suspicion and denigration with which AI has been met in the creative community is understandable, given our earlier responses to technology. When photography was invented, he said, painters didn’t see it as a potential competitor; it wasn’t art. 

What separates human creation from AI, he emphasized, could be summed up in three things: agency, inspiration, and liability. Humans make sense of their experience and act on their thoughts and feelings accordingly; they draw on their experience to imagine new possibilities. And lastly, we are liable for what we make, do, and say, for which we have both legal and moral responsibility, while an AI-driven car does not, even if kills someone on the road.

Dominic also noted the inevitable tensions between disciplines and industries that consider AI a helpful if not indispensable tool in, say, achieving more efficiency and economy, and those, like the creative arts, that may feel threatened by the options AI offers.

Overall, the discussion could offer no assurances either way that AI would leave us better or worse, but what it left me with was a desire to continue writing the way I do, while I can, before the algorithms take over everything.

And just out of curiosity, to see what AI can do now for and to the Filipino writer, I gave ChatGPT this prompt: “Write me a sentence in the style of Nick Joaquin about a man grieving over the loss of the woman he loved.” This is what the program came up with:

“In the solemn silence that engulfed his weary soul, he encountered the bitter truth that bereavement lingered like an everlasting shadow, forever haunting his heart with memories of a love that once bloomed in the garden of his existence, now reduced to a withered rose, its petals scattered across the desolate landscape of his grief-stricken days.”

“Solemn silence?” “Weary soul?” “Desolate landscape?” Maybe not bad for a freshman yet to learn about unlearning clichés, but definitely not Nick Joaquin. Of course, out of vanity, I had to ask ChatGPT to do the same thing “in the style of Jose Dalisay,” and it offered this:

“In the depths of his longing, his heart bled like fragmented brushstrokes on a forlorn canvas, for she was the vibrant palette that infused life into his desolate existence, now forever vanished like whispers carried away by a tormented wind.”

Just slightly better than Mang Nick’s AI ghost but still so not me. (Boy, does AI love adjectives!) All this says is that AI’s big mouth and stomach haven’t found and digested us yet, probably because we are not worthy. Cold comfort, but I’ll take it.

Qwertyman No. 61: Funding Real Intelligence

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 2, 2023

YOU COULD hear the gnashing of teeth from Aparri to Zamboanga when the Filipino men’s basketball team crashed out of the recent FIBA tournament with three losses, the fans’ dismay relieved only momentarily by the locals’ drubbing of arch-nemesis China. All over social media and even in the mainstream press, there was a lot of hand-wringing, with soul-piercing questions like “Is basketball really a Filipino sport?” and “How do we regain our hardcourt glory?”, followed by angry demands for certain heads to roll and fresh calls for a renewed grassroots-based sports development program.

Aside from politics—arguably the most vicious blood sport hereabouts—nothing gets us Pinoys more worked up than sports (and maybe beauty contests, another kind of sport). We know all the players and coaches, can recite the history, analyze all the moves, surveille the opposition, and scout and spot the best prospects. You would think that it was a national industry, although it all comes down to one thing: Pinoy pride, our fervent desire to matter in the world at large, if not be No. 1.

That’s all understandable, so hold that in your memory while I rattle off some other “sporting” statistics for the Philippines.

In a 2018 PISA ranking of 15-year-old students from more than 100 countries worldwide in terms of their abilities in reading, math, and science, the Philippines scored second to last in both math and science, next only to the Dominican Republic. If that sounds bad, we scored last in reading. (The Program for International Student Assessment is run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.)

Maybe they got something wrong? In 2019, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study or TIMMS, with covered fourth-graders from 58 countries in math and science, ranked the Philippines last. That same year, the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics, checking up on fifth-graders and their proficiency in reading, writing, and math, scored the Philippines below the regional average in all three; more than 40 percent of all Filipino students tested failed to meet the minimum proficiency standard for math.

Did we hear or do I hear any gasps of dismay or demands for accountability from our government and educational leaders—or from the general public, for that matter? Of course not. The private sector has taken note, knowing they’ll be paying for these gross deficiencies down the road, but they don’t make policy, or decide the budget. Otherwise, we don’t seem to be seeing ourselves in any kind of race in global education, which just isn’t sexy or entertaining enough like singing, dancing, or basketball. We’d all be insulted if anyone called us “stupid”—and these surveys don’t use the word—so we pretend that it’s not a real problem and that we can get by on our natural smarts, like we always have. 

If we’re feeling feistier, we can even trot out the names of all the Pinoy Spelling Bee and Quiz Bee winners, chess grandmasters, Moot Court victors, World Poetry Laureates, inventors of this and that gizmo, and so on. In the meanwhile, we scratch our heads and wonder why our neighbors like the Thais and Vietnamese are surging ahead of us (“Why, we have nicer beaches! And didn’t we teach those people advanced rice technology?)

So instead of ensuring adequate funding for  programs, reforms, and resources to address these shameful scores, what do we do?

We cut the budget of the Philippine Science High School System—our flagship secondary school system, especially in math and science—from P3 billion to P2.7 billion, an 11 percent reduction. Not only the PSHS, but other agencies in our science and technology cluster found their 2024 budgets slashed as well—a 14.17 percent budget cut for the Advanced Science and Technology Institute, 18.04 percent for the Food and Nutrition Research Institute, and 83.7 percent cut for the National Research Council of the Philippines.

“We can no longer sustain our cloud-based Knowledge Hub or KHUB learning system because of this cut,” PSHS Executive Director Lilia Habacon was quoted as saying. “We developed KHUB during the pandemic, and it was being accessed by 10,000 students.” The PSHS System now comprises 16 science high schools nationwide. “Even as we’ve returned to face-to-face learning, many of our modules remain online, and the students really learn from there.” The cut will also halt the system’s infrastructure projects such as gymnasiums, dormitories and multipurpose halls in Mimaropa, Zamboanga, Soccsksargen, Calabarzon and Caraga.

The Department of Budget and Management says that the cut corresponds to “38 non-recurring and terminating locally-funded projects in FY 2023,” but as Dir. Habacon points out, there are clearly many ongoing and vital projects that need continuing funding through to at least next year. 

The DBM also took the PSHS to task for its lack of “absorptive capacity,” meaning that it couldn’t spend its allotted funds fast enough. And here’s where the irony of this whole budget business and our national priorities really gets me. (Granted, the problem goes much deeper and at more basic levels than the PSHS, but if they can do that to our premier high school, what do you think they’re doing with the less illustrious others?)

The Office of the Vice President (OVP)—under recent criticism for spending P125 million in “confidential funds” in 11 days in 2022—claimed in its defense that it did so not in 11 days, but 19. Oh, okay—is that supposed to make us feel better? Does that qualify in the DBM’s books as proof of “absorptive capacity?”

Confidential funds here, intelligence funds there in the hundreds of millions, and the recipients even feel demeaned if they’re asked to account for the money, for which their fawning friends in Congress are only too happy to give a free pass.

Meanwhile, we scrutinize every line in our budget for science education, and probably in other areas as well, and get all uptight when we spot some tiny item we can’t figure out, like some alien cockroach, and squash it with gusto, thinking we’ve done our job. When it comes to funding real intelligence, we balk.

The sad part is, we’ll get away with it, because appallingly low science, math, and reading proficiency doesn’t get people worked up as much as poor basketball tactics do. We don’t even know who our National Scientists are (there are now 42 of them), nor care what they’ve done. Fire the education coach? What for? No harm, no foul.

Qwertyman No. 42: Life Lessons for the College Student

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Qwertyman for May 22, 2023

TWO YEARS ago, well before I began writing this column, I was asked to share some thoughts with fellow teachers of General Education—that special recipe of college courses in various disciplines meant to give incoming students a basic but challenging introduction to the issues of life and society. Instead of giving a lecture, I decided to come up with a list of 12 “life lessons” that I thought every undergrad should learn, one way or another, over their four years in college. I’d like to share them here as well, with further notes from me in parentheses, to reach a larger audience—and yes, even well beyond college. Here goes:

1. You don’t have to understand everything right away. In any case, you can’t. Some things in life will forever remain mysteries—some of them wonderful, some of them perplexing. Staying curious is what matters to the lifelong learner. (Aside from being usually obnoxious and insufferably arrogant, know-it-alls never learn that they can’t possibly know everything.)

2. Engagement helps—and by engagement, I mean investing yourself, putting in your time, effort, and maybe even money behind some belief or idea or activity that means something to you. Sometimes engagement is the best way of knowing, learning, and finally understanding. (Talk is cheap; get off your butt and actually do something. Remember the “community pantry”? That was because somebody took charge of an idea and put it into action.)

3. Not everything has to have practical value—at least not yet, or maybe ever. Value can mean more than utility or money. Delight and discovery are their own rewards. (All art involves finding beauty in the abstract; even sport is the quest of abstract perfection. Of course both art and sport have ironically become big business, and their best practitioners deserve every reward, but just as ironically, their greatest feats are driven by love and passion, not money.)

4. You are not the center of the universe. Not everything has to do with you. However, every connection you can make to the world around you leaves a mark that you were here—and that, in your own way, you mattered. (Know the difference between history and Instagram.)

5. Learn to see time in years and centuries, not seconds or hours. If you want to foretell the future, look back to the past. We may seem to be headed for the future, but in fact we will all inevitably be part of the past. How will you want to be remembered? (Repeat: Know the difference between history and Instagram.)

6. Intelligence, cleverness, knowledge, and wisdom are very different things. Knowledge without values is worthless and even dangerous. The middling student who has a sense of good and bad and right and wrong is worthier than the summa cum laude who doesn’t. (The people who have methodically impoverished and destroyed this country are no idiots; they are experts at what they do, or can hire whatever expertise they need.)

7. The first thought that comes to your mind may not be the best one. Pause and think before you speak or write, especially in these days of Facebook and Twitter. Speech but also silence can require courage and good judgment. (Live and write as if there were no “delete” or “unsend” buttons at your fingertips.)

8. Learn to love something larger than yourself, your family, and your prized possessions. “Nation,” “freedom,” “justice,” and “equality” are very attractive ideas, but you have to learn to bring these big words down to earth, in concrete forms, actions, and decisions. Can you accept that you are your housekeeper’s equal as a human being? (Good citizenship is always personal. Bad leadership is no excuse; be the example to your family, friends, and community.)

9. Be prepared to take risks and to make mistakes—and even to fail. You can learn more from failure than from over-performance. Everybody—even the very best of us—will fail sometime, and it will be good to believe that we are all entitled to at least one big mistake in our lives. (Being humbled by failure is always a good starting point; as we like to say in Diliman, you have nowhere to go but up!)

10. Be prepared to change your mind. As you grow and learn, some things will become more simple, and others more complex. You are not a fixed entity; you are changing all the time, and you can change faster than the world around you. (In my twenties, I thought I had the world all figured out in black and white, and would have been prepared to die for my causes. I’m glad I didn’t—I needed more time to learn that the world is mostly shades of gray, and that “compromise” is not necessarily a bad word.)

11. Technology can be deceptive. It can lead us to believe that the world is changing very fast and for the better. That may be true for some of us and for the way we live. But for many others left behind, the world is no better than it was a hundred years ago. (Technology, even artificial intelligence, is amoral. It’s only as good as the person who uses it, and his or her intentions.)

12. Competition is good, but cooperation is often better—and necessary. Poems are written by solitary genius, but bridges, cathedrals, and nations are built by many minds and hands. The best way to deal with loneliness is to find meaning in the many—to learn from and to contribute to the experience of others. (And I’m not talking here just about networking online; indeed nothing has made us lonelier in this century than the Internet. Share a cup of coffee, and learn to listen—their causes could be more urgent than yours, and you might even have the answer.)

Qwertyman No. 33: The Gunman

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 20, 2023

(This story may seem inspired by recent events, but it has nothing to do with the facts of specific cases.)

CPL. ELMER Kabigting heard the hornbill minutes before he spotted it on his PVAR, a kind of a honk followed by a murmur. He knew the sound from the long days and nights he had spent in forests, an almost hourly reminder of time passing, until human footfalls and gunfire broke the spell and sent the birds and monkeys scattering overhead. Through his gunsight, Kabigting watched the hornbill hop from branch to branch until it found just the right one to perch on, peering down at the landscape over its bright red mouth. 

He tried to imagine what the bird could see. A scientist he had befriended in Bukidnon once told him that birds saw colors that humans could not, and that their eyes worked well in the low light of dawn and dusk, enabling them to hunt while other animals stumbled around or waited for things to clarify. The corporal wondered if a gunsight could be made that could see like a bird. The sun was beginning to drop on the horizon, and in an hour it would be hard to tell one van from another, especially if they came in a convoy—not that it mattered, given what he had to do, but something in him revolted at the thought of unnecessary waste. There were things he did not care to see in sharp detail.

Even without pulling the trigger, Kabigting felt the power of the weapon in his hand. The Pneumatic Valve and Rod Rifle was almost new, and if he had had it in Marawi, he might not have lost so many friends. It was supposed to be superior in so many ways—less recoil, less muzzle rise, better accuracy, lower maintenance—and he had heard that it was favored by the Special Forces, which made him feel like he had been promoted, using it today. He didn’t ask Sgt. Galicia where the cache had come from; even while in service, the sergeant had been remarkably resourceful, finding extra rations, gin, and cigarettes for the men, bringing tears even to Capt. Reyes’ eyes. Reyes was an academy graduate who was honest to the core and whose men rolled their eyes when he spoke of “courage, integrity, loyalty” and had them kneel in prayer, but even he could not and did not ask Galicia to stop what he was doing.

Kabigting turned his eye from the hornbill to the road. He knew that, a kilometer up, where the road ascended from a deep valley, a spotter was waiting to let him—let them—know by radio that the convoy was coming. There were six of them, three on either side, two with grenade launchers, the last men a couple of hundred meters down, a gauntlet through which no one would pass alive. Elmer knew three of those men, Marawi veterans like himself whom Sgt. Galicia had located in the bars and slums of Ozamis and Dipolog, people who no longer had much to lose but everything to gain for themselves and their families. 

“What if we get caught—or if we die?” asked one of the six, when they had gathered together to discuss the operation in a carinderia in Dapitan.

“Then your families get everything. They’ll be set for life. If you don’t talk,” said Sgt. Galicia.

“We might be better off dead,” said another, with a chuckle. “If we die, we can’t talk.”

“I don’t have a family,” said yet another man, stubbing his cigarette onto his plate and burning a scar onto the cheap plastic. 

“Then we’ll divide your share among the others,” said the sergeant. “They’re your family now.” The other men laughed but the ex-soldier remained glum. He was one of those whom Elmer knew, and Elmer knew as well that the man’s wife had left with their children after he had broken her nose once too often. 

Elmer thought about his own family—his mother, his wife, and their five children back in Kabankalan, the youngest not even six, the eldest a high school senior who wanted to be a doctor. His daughter’s ambition made him laugh—they couldn’t possibly afford to send her to medical school—but he stopped laughing when she told him that it was for her to cure him if he ever got shot. He did come home once with a bandaged head, telling the children he had been grazed in a firefight with rebels, but he had been roundly bashed in a brawl with fellow soldiers over a card game debt. It wasn’t long after that incident that he found himself on the street and out of uniform, along with the sergeant and several of his buddies, after a local merchant complained to the governor—who happened to be his cousin—that a group of soldiers had broken into his warehouse and had carted away two truckloads of rice.

Yes—Elmer had admitted to his superiors—they had taken the rice, but everyone knew that it had been smuggled in from overseas, so who was the bigger thief? But nobody heard him, Elmer thought, they weren’t even listening.

So when Sgt. Galicia called for a gang of the boys to get together for some jobs, it was easy for Elmer to convince himself that they were still at war, except that this time the enemy was whoever Galicia said was as bad as the rice merchant, whose children went to private schools in Manila and whose wife served as the hermana mayor in the town fiesta. Their first target was the merchant himself, for no money but just to exercise their trigger fingers and feel good about themselves. This was followed by hits on a couple of rural banks, a vice-mayor, a radio commentator, and a regional bureau director, and despite some touch-and-go moments, it all became more routine, especially as the money flowed in and they began buying motorcycles, fishing boats, flat-screen TVs, and smartphones for the kids. Even Elmer’s daughter began to think he was serious when he teased her about taking up plastic surgery, so she could fix his cauliflower ears. 

But those targets were easy and never shot back. Today was going to be different—an armed convoy of a van and two SUVs, including a police escort. They said the vice-governor was going to be in the van in the middle. They knew he preferred to ride the HiAce instead of his armored Montero when he was with his family. Elmer had seen them in church once, at a friend’s wedding. The older boy had a cowlick in his hair. He heard the hornbill’s call again. His radio crackled. The corporal did not want to see whatever the bird could.

Qwertyman No. 29: Balloon over Boracay

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 20, 2023

WHEN THE balloon was first spotted high over Boracay, some people thought it was a new ride, a welcome addition to the banana boats and paragliders that the tourists couldn’t seem to get enough of. 

“How much does it cost? Where does it land?” asked Akmal from landlocked Uzbekistan, whose belly was white as fish and whose hair reminded the locals of the red seaweed that sometimes strayed into the island’s waters. 

“Does it have a basket? I don’t see any people,” said Frida from icy Norway, who had actually flown on hot-air balloons where they were popular, as in Turkey’s Cappadocia and California’s Napa Valley. 

“It’s not from here,” said Gordo, the boy from Manoc-Manoc whose job it was to lash the ferry boats from Caticlan to their moorings and to take the hand of passengers stepping onto the pier. He had seen everything there was to see in Boracay in all of his seventeen years, from the shameless couplings on the surf to the occasional victim washed up on the shore, and all cuts of humankind from cigar-chomping Texans to barrel-chested Samoans, and he knew what belonged and what didn’t. This silver dot in the sky definitely did not. 

As if having a mind of its own, the balloon drifted north of the island to Yapak over Puka Shell Beach, then back down again over White Beach, where it attracted even more observers. Men who had been using their telescopes and cameras to focus on the usual bathing beauties turned their gear skyward to where people were pointing, and those with the longest lenses snapped pictures of the aerial intruder, for posting on Instagram and Facebook as the curiosity of the day.

Unknown to them, however, the balloon had been spotted much earlier by the government’s Aerial Surveillance Bureau, whose chief had hastily summoned his staff to an emergency meeting at the ASB’s secret command center, on the fringe of a golf course in southern Manila. The ASB’s Director O, a retired Air Force general, was still pulling off his gloves when his subordinates dropped into their seats and the lights went out. A blurry image of the drifting balloon appeared onscreen.

“This unidentified object entered our airspace above the Spratlys at 0423 hours, when it was too dark to be seen by our human spotters. It has since set course for Boracay Island, above which it has remained since 0933 hours, when it was finally spotted by one of our boys who was chasing a monkey up a coconut tree. Now the question is, what is it, who sent it, and why is it here? Is it friend or foe? The President expects me to report to him in the Palace in one hour and I need answers!”

“Sir, if I may,” said his Deputy Director M, “it looks exactly like the one they shot down over the USA and Canada. It’s a weather balloon from—from that country—equipped with advanced surveillance hardware and sophisticated communications capabilities.” It had been ordered since the previous administration not to mention “that country” by name in discussions of national security, so as not to give offense to a favored neighbor, and the habit had stuck, even in private conversations.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions!” said Director O. “There are many other countries perfectly capable of sending up these balloons. For all we know it could be a Lithuanian, a Ugandan, or a Wakandan balloon. I’m not going to upset the ambassador from that country with unproven allegations about his country’s behavior—however outrageous, obnoxious, and objectionable its actions are in the West Philippine Sea, just between you and me.”

“But why is it here, sir? And why Boracay?”

“Good question. Don’t quote me on this, but during the last National Security Council meeting, we were told that that country is preparing to reveal a new Thirteen-Dash Line map, supposedly drawn in the 16th century just before the Spanish came, that extends all the way to Boracay!”

“What?! But Stations 1, 2, and 3 are inalienable parts of our national patrimony! As Winston Churchill said, ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground, we shall fight on the hills, we shall never surrender!’”

“Yes, but in Boracay, people make love, not war. Imagine having to clean up all that white sand after an invasion. Another six-month lockdown! Can Philippine tourism afford it?”

“So what do we do, sir? Do we bring down this balloon?”

“With what? I already called the Air Force to see if they could fly by the object, but all of our fighters are undergoing maintenance—change oil, check battery, adjust brakes, etc.”

“What about kwitis?”

“Are you making a bad joke in a national emergency?”

“No, sir! The DOST and DND have a secret research program based in Bulacan called the Katipunan Weapons Initiative To Initiate Security, or KWITIS. It’s a multi-stage kwitis that can protect the archipelago against missiles, drones, asteroids, and UFOs like the Boracay balloon! It’s totally indigenous and sustainable, because it uses kawayan for the frame and kiping for decoration and employs out-of-work firecracker makers in the off-season—”

Just then another aide burst into the conference room, breathless with news.

“Sir! Turn on the TV! The balloon is down. The balloon came down!”

They switched to a live feed from CNN, which showed the balloon settled on the beach, its silver skin acting like a mirror for the dozens of kibitzers crowding around it, taking their selfies and groufies with gay abandon. A couple of local policemen who had tried to restrain the crowd were taking their selfies as well, flashing the “heart” hand-sign. “The balloon touched down about fifteen minutes ago on its own, and it is quickly becoming the center of what could become the biggest Boracay party ever! There are still no obvious indications of where it came from or why it is here, but this balloon seems to be totally harmless, so far, even ‘cute,’ according to Loujay, who’s visiting from London,” gushed the reporter. 

And then small puffs of red, blue, and yellow smoke came out of the metal box at the bottom of the balloon, and for a minute the people shrieked and began running away, but as the smoke dispersed and the people inhaled the fumes, their faces lit up in ecstasy and they began dancing. Music also poured out of the balloon—the frenetic techno club mix that brought even the masahistas and the barbecue vendors to their feet.

“I know that, sir! That’s Stefano DJ Stoneangels!” said Deputy Director M, whose shoulders began moving up and down. “This is even more mysterious than we thought. We are under attack!”

“Indeed we are,” said Director O. “We need to investigate further. Pack up, boys, and bring your trunks, we’re going to Boracay!”

(Image from madmonkeyhostels.com)

Qwertyman No. 21: AI in the House

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 26, 2022

I’D BEEN wanting to write about this for a long time, since last year when my artist-friends first alerted me to the amazing new possibilities being opened by artificial intelligence (AI) in such traditional fields as painting. Before that, like many people, I’d thought of AI in terms of subjects like warfare, medicine, and gaming. It had to be only a matter of time before the technology was ported over to the arts—not just to painting, but to creative writing and music, among other pursuits.

If you don’t know how AI works, just think of it this way (which is the way a lot of people, many of them not even artists, are having fun these days). You download a software program called an “AI generator” (such as starryai for painting, Rytr for creative writing, and AIVA for music), then put it to work by demanding that it produce “a portrait of Jose Rizal in the style of Van Gogh.” Minutes later (or just seconds if you pay), you’ll get what you asked for. What your computer (or in fact, many other computers working together) just did was to run a search for all the images of “Jose Rizal” it could find, then establish what “the style of Van Gogh” means in terms of brush strokes, colors, and so on, and apply one to the other. It’s all about “algorithms” or instruction sets that get sent out and executed until the desired outcome pops up.

That sounds like harmless entertainment, and much of AI is or appears to be, but it isn’t hard to see how even a touch of mischief (not to mention loads of malice) can quickly change the complexion of things. Driven by a fear of computing or what we might call Faustian science, popular culture is replete with examples of AI gone berserk, from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the master kidnapper Sark in Tron. But positive applications such as those employed in medicine, where AI helps analyze CT scans, MRIs, and X-rays with a sharper eye than a human radiologist sees with, continue to push AI research forward. IBM itself declares that “At this point, there is little doubt that AI will become a core part of the digital health systems that shape and support modern medicine.”

My own first brush with AI happened last week when I stumbled on an article in the New York Times titled “A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business.” Intrigued, I read on and found out about ChatGPT, one of many new programs that are threatening to replace Google’s famous search engine. We all know how Google works: you enter a search term, you get a long list of links to possible answers. Chat bots cut through that mess and give you a short, clear, grammatically correct answer (although nobody can guarantee that the answer itself is correct). That’s good if you want a quick reply to a question, but I can just imagine the epidemic of college term papers cutting and pasting unsourced chat-bot answers with gay abandon. 

All this led me to wonder how chat bots would respond to truly important questions, so I decided to download ChatGPT to my iPhone, and to ask it some test questions that would tell me about itself as much as what I was asking about. Below are my questions and the answers that artificial intelligence produced, verbatim (I purposely asked the first question to see if AI was capable of some kind of self-awareness):

1. Q. What are the dangers of artificial intelligence? A. 1. Unintended Consequences – Algorithms designed to reach specific goals could have unintended consequences that produce unforeseen results. 2. Job Loss – AI could displace workers by automating jobs, leading to severe economic disruption in the near future if nobody is trained to take over for the machines. 3. Black Box AI – AI systems are often difficult to understand, making it hard to debug the system when something goes wrong. 4. Over-Reliance on AI – Dependency on AI could lead to cognitive laziness, where humans rely too heavily on algorithms for decision-making and problem-solving. 5. AI Biases – AI systems trained on biased data and algorithms can end up replicating the same flawed assumptions and stereotypes. 6. Security Breaches – Malicious actors could exploit vulnerabilities in AI systems to commit cyber-attacks, data breaches and fraud.

2. Q. What’s wrong with the Philippines? A. The Philippines faces a wide range of problems that must be addressed in order to progress forward. These issues include corruption, overpopulation, environmental destruction, poverty, inequality, and unequal access to education. Additionally, Filipino infrastructure and public services are in dire need of improvement in order to create a more livable and equitable society. Other issues such as illegal drugs, crime, and terrorism also remain major problems facing the Philippines.

3. Q. When should a country have a sovereign wealth fund? A. A country should have a sovereign wealth fund when it has a large amount of assets (such as revenues from oil exports) that can be used for investments and for stabilizing government finances during economic downturns.

4. A. How can we reduce corruption in government? A. The best way to reduce corruption in government is to increase transparency and accountability. This could include strengthening laws and regulations to ensure that government officials are held to high standards, creating independent oversight and auditing systems, and engaging civil society and community members in governance processes. Additionally, investing in training for government officials on ethics, anti-corruption policies and procedures, and proper financial management can help to reduce corruption. Finally, engaging the public to report and discuss any allegations of corruption can help to both curb and address existing instances of corruption.

5. Q. Can volcanoes be punctured? A. No, volcanoes cannot be punctured. Volcanoes are made of molten rock, known as magma, that is too hot and too deep to be pierced with any known tool.

Now, you tell me if those answers sound any worse than the malarkey we’ve been hearing from some of our esteemed senators and congressmen, who cost billions to maintain, feel unbound by the rules of logic and grammar, and can take forever to give you a straight answer. Of course, they can well afford to buy a program like ChatGPT in aid of legislation (it’s free for three days, then P499/mo.). But then, why resort to chat bots when there’s already so much artificial intelligence going around in both august chambers?

Qwertyman No. 5: A Rhetorical Question

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Qwertyman for September 5, 2022

(Photo from philstar.com)

TEACHER LENLEN’S chest swelled with pride when she opened the door to her 8th grade classroom in Gen. Pupu Noknok Elementary School in the town of Bugbugan, province of Kalamias, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Kawefo. Freshly painted in the fluorescent green that seemed to be in favor since President Ongong’s election, the cavernous classroom held exactly 100 chairs, and was reputed to be the largest elementary-school classroom in the archipelago. It was so huge that Teacher Lenlen had to use a microphone hooked up to two loudspeakers in the back of the room to reach the farthest students, from Wutwut to Zygzyg. 

“Good morning, class!” she shouted on the first day of school, oblivious to the idea that she didn’t need to scream because she already held a microphone. “My name is Mrs. Lenlen Fayfay, but you can call me Teacher Lenlen, and I will be your homeroom teacher. Now, what is a homeroom teacher? According to Wikipedia, a homeroom teacher ‘is responsible for almost everything concerning a homeroom period and classroom. At the start of the school year, it is the homeroom teacher’s responsibility to make sure that each student gets relevant textbooks and materials, which are supplied by the government. The teacher is also responsible for the attendance.’ Is that understood? Did I make myself clear? If yes, then answer ‘Yes, Teacher Lenlen!’ If you did not understand what I just said, raise your hand and approach the microphone when I recognize you. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Teacher Lenlen!” The answer, magnified by the three standing microphones set up at key points along the central divide between left and right, reached Teacher Lenlen like a towering tsunami, forcing her to cover her ears.

“You don’t have to shout!” she shouted back. “Just speak in your natural voice! Okay, class?”

“Okay, Teacher Lenlen!” Another wave rolled over her, drowning her shriek of protest.

“Teacher Lenlen! Teacher Lenlen!” A boy’s hand shot up from the middle of the room.

“Yes? Who are you and what is it?” Secretly, Lenlen felt relieved to be dealing with just one student, whose solitary voice she could easily overpower. “To the microphone!”

The boy scurried to the nearest mike, giving high fives along the way to his giggling classmates. “My name is Marmar Pwepwe, and I have a question.”

Teacher Lenlen raised her hand to stop him before he could speak, seizing upon the moment as a teaching opportunity. “Before you answer me, let me make this clear, this being our first day of class. Because there are one hundred of you, we have to make sure that every question you ask is important, all right? Wait, wait, wait! Don’t answer me! If you want to say ‘Yes, Teacher Lenlen!’, just nod your head—quietly, like this.” She nodded her head, keeping her lips sealed. “Is that understood?”

“Yes, Teacher Lenlen!” came the bone-jarring reply.

“Eeeek, stop! Stop it! I told you to nod your heads! How hard is that? Didn’t your parents teach you to nod your heads? Okay, everybody, let’s nod our heads together—up, down, up down! That’s good, do it again, up, down, up down! See? A nation that can nod together can be great again!”

“Teacher Lenlen! May I ask my question now?” said the boy Marmar.

“Oh, all right! What is it?”

“Well—I googled what you said about homeroom teachers, and I discovered that it’s the definition of a homeroom teacher in Afghanistan. Teacher Lenlen—are we in Afghanistan?”

A roar of laughter erupted. His classmates had known Marmar to be a smart aleck since the lower grades, for which he had been sent to the guidance counsellor’s office more than once.

Teacher Lenlen’s cheeks turned red. It was true—there was a long list of definitions in Wikipedia for “homeroom teacher,” and she had conveniently picked out the topmost one, for Afghanistan. So what? How different could Afghanistan—wherever that was—be from Kawefo? 

“Before I answer you, don’t you know that cellphones are prohibited in this school during class time? And how could you google anything, when even I can’t get a decent wi-fi signal in this room?”

“I didn’t use a cellphone, Teacher Lenlen! It was a tablet with cellular data, which my mother gave me for my tenth birthday, for Zoom!”

“Oh, so your mother gave it to you! Maybe I should talk to your mother about using tablets in class, when we’re no longer using Zoom, but meeting face-to-face. Class, are we still on Zoom, or meeting face-to-face? DON’T ANSWER! That’s what’s called a ‘rhetorical question’—a question you already know the answer to, so you don’t even need to answer it. Everybody write this down!” She went to the blackboard and wrote “R-H-E-T-O-R-I-C-A-L!”

“What does ‘rhetorical’ mean, Teacher Lenlen?” asked a little girl in the front row. Lenlen was glad that nobody else seemed to have heard her, because, come to think of it, she didn’t know, except that when you added “question” to it, it meant exactly what she had just said. She went up to the girl and whispered, “I’ll tell you tomorrow. That’s tomorrow’s lesson.”

Marmar was still standing at the mike, and said, “If you want to talk to my mother, Teacher Lenlen, I’ll give you her phone number.” 

“I was speaking rhetorically!” Lenlen retorted. “I’m talking to you, not to her!” Marmar’s confederates snickered in their seats. “What’s so funny?”

Another boy piped up. “Teacher Lenlen, Marmar’s mother is the governor!”

Marmar Pwepe… Governor Pompom Pwepwe—of course, she should have made the connection! The governor was known for her fiery temper, punching sheriffs and other public officials who crossed her path. Beads of sweat began to form on Teacher Lenlen’s forehead.

Just then, a squadron of policemen appeared at the door, discombobulating Teacher Lenlen further. Had she been reported so quickly? What was going to happen to her pension, to the trip to Bangkok she had been planning for so long?

“Ma’am Lenlen Fayfay?” asked their commanding officer. “I’m Captain Shushu. We have been deputized by the regional office of the Inter-Agency Counter-Subversion Agency—” 

“Oh, no—you have the wrong person. I’m Mrs. Fayfay, yes, but I swear to God, I’m not a subversive! I never said anything bad about President Ongong or… or Governor Pwepwe….” She stared at Marmar, begging for mercy.

“We’re not here to arrest you or anyone, Mrs. Fayfay. We’re here to requisition thirty chairs for the regional office, which needs more furniture to properly perform its solemn duties. I trust you agree?” Captain Shushu turned to the students, counting heads. “The first three rows, get up!” His men took their chairs out into the corridor. Lenlen could hear a similar commotion happening in the other classrooms.

The students sat forlorn on the floor, clutching their bags. Teacher Lenlen wondered if she needed the governor’s phone number, after all.

Hindsight No. 28: The Queen of Trolls

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Hindsight for July 25, 2022

(Photo from philstar.com)

FROM THE street, the building still looked like the bank it had once been, with fluted columns crowned by precast acanthus leaves, but the paint and even the cement cladding had chipped off to reveal the pedestrian concrete underneath. It had been a branch of the old Fidelity Bank & Trust Co., which had gone under in the 1980s after its owner had fled to Southern Spain with P600 million in debts, and the building had served various lessees and uses—once, even, as a shoe emporium on its ground floor, with a restaurant in the mezzanine. But with the building of the LRT, the whole district was literally benighted, occupied by aging tenants with nowhere else to go, pitted with all kinds of booby traps for the unwary.

The former bank’s windows had all been shuttered or painted over, but a steady procession of young people still went in and out of the place through a side door at all hours of the day and night. The locals were made to understand that it had been converted to a call center, although a sign that said “Far Eastern Institute of Homeopathic Medicine” still hung beside the old entrance. Security guards—always two at a time—were posted at the side door, and they ran everyone’s ID through a screening device before letting them in.

The one exception to this routine was the woman they called Ma’am Ventura, a smallish, gray-haired lady in her late sixties who was always accompanied by her driver-bodyguard Bulag, so-called because he never took off his wraparound shades. Ma’am Ventura always wore a dark jacket, matching skirt, white blouse, and flat shoes, like a bank teller—which she had been, in this very same branch, which explained why she had chosen to lease it for her operation. 

She had had the mezzanine converted to an office with a window overlooking the cubicles below, and with a long table around which her floor managers assembled at 10 p.m. to assess the day’s metrics and discuss tomorrow’s messages. The dress code for the trolls below—the “social media specialists”—was strictly informal, the easier for them to vanish into the crowd, but for her managers, Ma’am Ventura insisted on ties, socks, skirts, and heels, so they could understand that they were professionals, as worthy of respect as any college instructor or law clerk. “Transforming society through democratic discourse” was the outfit’s pitch to its recruits.

But tonight, Ma’am Ventura was in a typically foul mood, reviewing some scripts that a new hire had prepared. “Puñeta! I’m not asking you to write an essay that will get a 1.0 from Professor Dadufalza! I want you to say, in 280 characters or less, and in words Bulag will understand, why historians lie! Can someone please show poor Ms.—uhm—Ms. Morales here how she needs to think if she wants to stay in this job?”

Ever eager to please, Nico raised his pencil from his seat on Ma’am Ventura’s right. “They’re people. Just like us. They make mistakes. We don’t even need to prove they’re wrong. We just need to show they could be.”

“Wasn’t the Code of Kalantiaw fake news? Someone just made it up,” came a voice from the far end. Nico winced, knowing it was coming. Angela never missed an opportunity to upstage him at these sessions, flaunting her UP degree—which she knew Ma’am Ventura had as well—like she was standing on a three-foot stool, spreading her arms wide. “Even historians can be fooled.” 

“How many Pinoys out there today even know about the Code of Kalantiaw?” said Bruce, Nico’s ally and Angela’s spurned suitor. “That might be good for TV or Kuya Obet’s column but it’s useless for us.”

“So what can we use? Ms. Morales, any ideas? Redeem yourself.” Ma’am Ventura lit up her first cigarette of the evening; smoking was forbidden on the shop floor but up here they would all reek of it by midnight. This was the part of the work Ma’am Ventura enjoyed the most. The business side of the meeting—impressions, reach, audience growth, engagement rate, etc.—just harvested stats for the client. The Q&A reminded her of the time, after the bank closed down, when she had to take on a teaching job at the college in her provincial hometown. She had begun by teaching Accounting, which she had studied for, but as often happened in these places, she was soon made to teach English and even History. 

At first she tried her best to keep a few chapters ahead of her students, reading the textbooks late at night and figuring out exercises to keep them busy and from asking questions she couldn’t answer. But then the load just became too heavy and she began resorting to what she told herself was just conjecture—that, for example, Josephine Bracken agreed to become Jose Rizal’s wife to escape a scandal in her family—and she soon found it so pleasurable that even her exams posed questions like “What if Japan had won the Second World War? What would you be eating and watching on TV today?” She graded them based on their inventiveness, which she took as another form of intelligence. They began with a set of known facts, and then embellished them, building speculation upon speculation. It was much more fun that just memorizing names and dates. History was a record of settled arguments—until you gave it a kick.

Ms. Morales struggled. “Well—ma’am—can we say that historians lie because—because they don’t really know what happened, so—so they may not even know they’re lying? I mean—they’re not bad people, just—”

“Historians lie because they get paid to lie—by the left-wing universities that buy their books, even by the priests who are always looking for somebody else to blame,” Nico interjected, holding his pencil like he was about to snap it. “We just have to show they’re no saints.”

Angela added, “Let’s dig up some dirt, surely there’s—”

Ma’am Ventura rapped the table. “So what’s the line, boys and girls, what are we going to feed the sharks?” Below them, the monitors from dozens of computer screens glowed like votive candles to a hungry god.

A little hand went up from Ms. Morales. Everyone stopped. A snicker escaped Bruce’s airways. Ms. Morales fidgeted with her Hello Kitty purse. “Kung—kung manghuhula binabayaran, historian pa kaya? I mean… they’re also fortune-tellers, right? Just looking backwards.” She zipped and unzipped her purse. No one spoke until Ma’am Ventura began clapping.

“Hija, that’s brilliant! I want you all to write scripts around that punchline! Ms. Morales, I don’t know what you had for dinner, but I’m calling Grab to order it for everyone! Welcome aboard!” Ma’am Ventura blew a cloud of smoke so for a moment no one could see her face, but they could imagine her flashing that sweetest of smiles.

Hindsight No. 27: The Truthifier

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Hindsight for July 18, 2022

IT HAD been a nightmare to create, but was—save for the occasional brownout—a dream to operate. The “Truthifier,” as the machine was called, occupied almost the entire fourth floor of the old Doña Salvacion Building on the northwest corner of Plaza Regina in the city’s warehouse district. Most other people would have insisted on a sleek, postmodern structure—or perhaps even an underground vault—somewhere in BGC, among the banks and condos that tried to outdo each other in smartness and attitude, but Arsenio would have none of that. He was a brilliant engineer who understood algorithms, quantum computing, event horizons, The Singularity, and all the other buzzwords that sci-fi junkies more than the scientists themselves loved to spout. But Arsenio was firmly old-school, with a prewar Pelikan 100 in his breast pocket and oxford brogues that he made sure were polished every day, even if he was headed nowhere else but the Factory.

The Factory was where he had built the Truthifier over seven years from the ground up, scrutinizing the assembly of every panel, bolt, nut, wheel, gear, vacuum tube, insulator, switch, dial, and the thousands of other parts that went into the machine, some of them turned out on a lathe by Arsenio himself, following his own blueprints. Arsenio was well aware that he could have programmed a computer the size of a pizza box to do his bidding, but Arsenio disdained software, which could be hacked. He believed in finely designed and intricately crafted machines that made noises like “ding!” and “zzzt!,” whose diodes glowed orange in intense concentration, then spat out text from a teletype printer at the far end.

The Truthifier had one basic purpose: to turn ugly statements, even lies, into something that sounded like the velvety truth, better than most people could. There were probably a few professors out there who could do the same thing, but like all people, professors could be distracted, they could forget, they could be bought, and they could refuse. They also lied. And they died. The Truthifier, being made of brass, wood, glass, ceramic, and copper wire, could do none of that. Arsenio had to acknowledge that he did recruit his old friend Dr. Lucas Tagbanua, retired Professor of Linguistics and Philology at the University of Wurzburg and most recently Chief Librarian at Dagupan City College, to assist him in setting up the tree of linguistic arguments which he would convert to mechanical and electronic pathways. They made history when, in their fifth year, Arsenio typed this carefully on the front-end keyboard: “I murdered my father.” After a few minutes of gears turning and bulbs flickering, Lucas received a message on the other end: “I sent my father to a better place.” It was all still very simple and unsophisticated, but the two men cheered and celebrated. And then, four months later, Dr. Tagbanua died after being hit by a truck delivering action-figure toys.

That, Arsenio sighed, was the problem with humans; they were organic. But he had gotten the fundamental logic down, and he pursued the project to the point that he now had a dial that offered Simple, Moderate, and Extreme options, where “I sent my father to a better place” (Simple) became “I relieved my father of the unbearable burden of life” (Moderate) and then “Against all my filial instincts, I decided to return my father—he of my own flesh and blood—to the source and the end of all human aspirations, to the trackless void of eternal peace and silence” (Extreme). 

“Does it bother you,” Dr. Tagbanua had asked just a week before he died, and after they had achieved success to the Moderate level, “that the Truthifier isn’t really saying the truth, but something that just sounds like it—maybe even a lie?”

“No,” Arsenio said impatiently, making miniscule adjustments on a master valve that regulated adjectives, comparatives, and superlatives. “What we’re doing is giving people a version of the truth that they will want to believe. What’s the use of the truth if you can’t believe it?”

There were many, he was certain, who would pay for Extreme, which would go a long way toward recovering his R&D costs and even make him a tidy profit. He had happily spent all the money he had won from the lottery on his project, so he was beholden to no one, but now that he had accomplished proof-of-concept, he looked forward to some payback, so he could indulge other fantasies like riding a Vespa around Rome with a footloose princess.

Sometimes, just for fun, he fed the machine outrageous fibs like “Jose Rizal was bisexual,” for which he received this Extreme result: “While Jose Rizal had many recorded relationships with women, his sexual preferences were likely as broad as his mind, and his natural curiosity would have encouraged him to explore novel possibilities with his cohort of male friends.”

As soon as word of the Truthifier got around, the clients came to the Factory, in a discreet but steady stream of cars and SUVs with dark-tinted windows whose occupants slipped into a service elevator large enough for a marching band, although they always came alone. A general wanted to explain why he had so many people executed without trial; a priest wanted to introduce his three children to one another; a woman wanted to tell her sister something about her husband. But mostly they were politicians looking for better ways to say the most mundane things, like “I will serve you” or “My opponent is a pedophile.” They paid just enough to keep the Truthifier running and re-oiled every three months.

One day a Rolls-Royce drove up to the Factory and out stepped a man in a gray three-piece suit and top hat, wielding a cane. He looked like a boy who had aged all of a sudden, his long hair hanging in graying strings. 

“How can I help you?” Arsenio asked, barely looking up from a console that monitored temperature levels within the machine. 

The man took off his hat and put it beside him on the couch. “My father was a crook. For a very long time. But I’d rather forget that. And while I’m at it, I’d rather that everyone forgot, as well. I hear your machine can help.”

“That’s—complicated,” Arsenio said, after figuring out how many propositions the statement involved. “It will cost you some.”

“You must be a very busy man, so I won’t waste your time,” said the customer, glancing at his rose-gold Nemo. “How much for the Truthifier?” With a finger, he drew a horizontal circle in the air. “The whole thing.”

Stunned speechless, Arsenio sized up his visitor, who had crossed his legs and draped his arm on the backrest, like he had all the time in the world. Despite his agitation, Arsenio began thinking of Audrey Hepburn hugging his waist, her perfume curling up his nose as their scooter drove past the Colosseum. 

(Image from videohive.net)