God Mode

By Phenomenal Pen

PREPARE TO MEET THY MAKER

Whole brain emulation (WBE) tech makes it possible for human consciousness to be transferred into any organic or synthetic body. Its inventor, Augma Industries, has secretly launched illegal human trials on university campuses in the Third World. 

College sophomore Theo Bondoc has absolutely nothing going for him. He’s a hypochondriac nerd and a mama’s boy. He has no money and no connections. But his luck dramatically changes when he gets his first ever girlfriend: undercover superspy Amy Miyahara. Their peaceful student lives are interrupted by sightings of mechanical bees and a run-in with brainwashed frat boys.

The source of all the strange happenings is Beta Mu, a cult masquerading as a frat and backed by the rich and powerful. Its members are Transhumanists who believe in an ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) deity. Now Theo and Amy must uncover a grand conspiracy in order to prevent all of humanity from being enslaved by an emergent godlike being. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phenomenal pen
• Release date: Apr 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9791222402376

Book preview

PREPARE TO MEET THY MAKER

Whole brain emulation (WBE) tech makes it possible for human consciousness to be transferred into any organic or synthetic body. Its inventor, Augma Industries, has secretly launched illegal human trials on university campuses in the Third World. 

College sophomore Theo Bondoc has absolutely nothing going for him. He’s a hypochondriac nerd and a mama’s boy. He has no money and no connections. But his luck dramatically changes when he gets his first ever girlfriend: undercover superspy Amy Miyahara. Their peaceful student lives are interrupted by sightings of mechanical bees and a run-in with brainwashed frat boys.

The source of all the strange happenings is Beta Mu, a cult masquerading as a frat and backed by the rich and powerful. Its members are Transhumanists who believe in an ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) deity. Now Theo and Amy must uncover a grand conspiracy in order to prevent all of humanity from being enslaved by an emergent godlike being. 

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God Mode

Phenomenal Pen

Epigraph

Great people do things before they're ready.

They do things before they know they can do it.

Doing what you're afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone,

taking risks like that- that's what life is.

- Amy Poehler

Prologue: Operation Spider Shift

PHILIPPINE SEA

Lat: 10N 49′48″Long: 126E 42′36″

Hello, Richard. You don’t know me, but I know you, the pilot playfully announces on the PA in a superb impression of Jigsaw (from the Saw franchise). His voice is growling, breathy and mechanically distorted.

The celebrity passenger of the private jet, Richard McKnight, sniggers on his seat. 

I want to play a game, the pilot continues. Here’s what happens if you lose. Despite the illusion of safety made possible by our satellite uplink, the vehicle you’re riding is a pressurized metal tube hurtling through space. Otherwise known as a plane. When your pilot finally loses it what with your calls pinging everywhere, you’re going to drop in a raging ball of fire and twisted metal.  

Great, McKnight, the founder and chairman of Augma Industries and inventor of the world’s first artificially intelligent OS, shouts back to the closed accordion doors of the cockpit. I think Captain Ryan got left behind in Sydney and was replaced by a psychotic, superstitious Luddite. Now we have to turn around.  

There’s no need for that, Mr. McKnight, Alice Kim chimes in, looking smart in her blue business jacket and pencil skirt. If anyone can beat whatever infernal traps Jigsaw has waiting for us, it’s you. 

Alice is the flight attendant with platinum-blonde hair. Originally from South Korea, she’s now a naturalized American. 

Mr. McKnight chuckles appreciatively at her grasp of pop culture references, even those from splatter flicks. His girlfriend, on the other hand, looks offended; even disgusted. 

Alice deftly pour refills from a gold-encrusted coffee pot. Having travelled to nearly 75% of the world and being well-red, she contemplates how the coffee’s akin to ambrosia, the nectar of the ancient Greek gods, since it’s been freshly brewed from a 72,000-dollar espresso machine.

But behind her million-dollar smile, Alice is feeling just a tad jittery. She wonders if it’s an effect of the coffee, which she herself has had a cup of in the galley. She has just made light of the announcement but, the crazy thing is, she does believe Mr. McKnight when he said Captain Ryan had probably been replaced by an impostor. Alice wonders who else noticed it or if she’s just being paranoid. She’s almost certain she could discern irreconcilable differences between the announcement and Captain Ryan’s original voice.

The voice impression was on point with the menacing death rasp and the dark tones and resonance of the character John Kramer, The Jigsaw Killer. But some elements of the act couldn’t have been done without technology, particularly the distorted effect of lo-fi recording. The only logical explanation Alice could think of is that Captain Ryan used a voice-changing app.  

As she pushes her service trolley down the spacious aisle and serves Armand de Brignac champagne and Beluga caviar, she subconsciously assesses Mr. McKnight’s security detail. There are four of them; two ex-military and two off-duty cops. But since a fake pilot can’t infiltrate a private plane without inside help, at least one of them has betrayed Mr. McKnight. Or all of them.

The biggest threat, literally, would be Luke Gubler. Six-foot-four and 270 pounds of buffness, Gubler’s lethal in hand-to-hand combat, especially judo. He isn’t armed like the others but in a close-quarters environment like a plane where a gunshot would be avoided at all costs, the bodyguard who never carries a piece is the most dangerous. When they said Mr. McKnight had beefed up his security after the Argosgate scandal, they weren’t kidding. Gubler dwarfs the normally wide upholstery on his back and the delicate chocolate truffle in front of him. 

The second gravest threat would be Aleksandar Radić. He’s a former Russian military officer and has had Special Forces training. Before taking the current job, he also protected a high-level government official in the US. Alice has secretly christened him The Terminator on account of his type comes out of a government-issue kit. He’s leaner but still pure muscle. A small squad of him would likely be enough to topple a government. She has spotted a Glock 26 strapped to his right ankle along with a Spetsnaz combat knife on the left.

The other two are American cops and look like they’re lucky enough not to have fired a single shot in their careers thus far. They’re in it mostly for the money, which she’s guessing would be about 150 bucks an hour. Not enough to kill or die for but multiplied by 10 days, they can be a problem. Plus, if they were the ones who arranged the infiltration, they would have everything at stake and would be desperate. She figures they’re both packing .40 caliber Smith and Wessons in inside-waistband pancake holsters.

Apart from the security detail, the rest are civilians and pose no threat. Mr. Hammond’s a lawyer and would be averse to violence. Presently, he’s sound asleep on his fully reclinable VIP seat. Alice’s only colleague, June Danvers, is a sunny redhead who has a bright future both ahead and behind her. Exactly like Mr. McKnight’s girlfriend; though Alice knows full well at least one of them (read: June) doesn’t have natural assets.

Mr. McKnight’s assistant/ girlfriend, Kaye Goldschmidt, is a fiercely territorial California Gurl who guards her man like a Chihuahua. Alice wouldn’t have it any other way. Little does the future Mrs. McKnight know that Alice is actually relieved that she’s there. Mile High Club members usually have trouble keeping their hands to themselves and Mr. McKnight has too much in his plate already to even add domestic disputes.

Alice recalls their VIP passenger’s profile from a dossier she has committed to memory:

Richard McKnight. Technology mogul. Recently embroiled in a legal battle with the US government after his social networking website InterLinked – IL as it’s fondly called – had a direct hand in procuring highly classified information from an unidentified source in the NSA and then blasting it all over the Interwebz.

The exposé, also published on WikiLeaks, gives a detailed description of a mass surveillance program called the Argos Initiative, which is happening all over the world and with the full cooperation of telecom companies and several governments. Named after a Greek mythological character, Argus Panoptes a.k.a. Argus All-Eyes, a giant who had a hundred eyes, now everybody knows it as the Argosgate scandal. 

The CIA wants to hang the hippie from Silicon Valley but the rest of the world, all 2.5 billion users of the Athena OS, see McKnight as a hero championing individual privacy. His life’s mission is to provide free Internet access to Third World countries in Asia and Africa and to make Persons With Disabilities whole again through generous donations of prosthetics to various foundations such as Equality for Cyborgs and Upgr4d3_Urs3lf. Whichever side of the fence you’re on, Richard McKnight is, without doubt, a rare breed. For that reason alone, Alice wishes him nothing but good health.

She’s got a nagging feeling he won’t have that for long.

She pricks her ears. There’s a chime from the PA system as Captain Ryan prepares to make another speech or joke, this time in his original voice.

Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen. Right now, we’re bringing you some in-flight entertainment…

Then he starts speaking Korean.

She brings her hand to her forehead. She’s having a dizzy spell. It’s the same feeling she gets when she rises too fast from a crouch. Only a hundred times worse. 

What’s Captain Ryan saying? An old Korean pangram… a short sentence incorporating all the characters of the Korean alphabet Hanggul: 14 simple consonants, six simple vowels, four iotized vowels and…

"… ipsulkkiri mannaya hago teukbyeolhan…"

Alice sways on her feet and, through her blurring vision, sees the grim faces of Mr. McKnight’s security detail.

"… gisureun pilyochi antha."

It doesn’t make sense. What kind of game is it?

The essential condition for a kiss is that lips meet and there is no special technique required. That’s the English translation of what Captain Ryan has just said. But what did he mean by that?

The vertigo doesn’t pass. At first, it was as if her head was being spun from the inside; now it feels like everything’s spinning around her. Despite this, her eyes manage to lock on the two off-duty cops as they reach for their holsters.

Alice herself gropes inside her service trolley for a bottle of spring water. Imagine her shock when, as she takes out her hand, she sees a paring knife in it.

Her eyes widen as a tank named Luke Gubler charges at her.

Part 1: Onion Boy Meets Onion Girl

You're so wrapped up in layers, onion boy, you're afraid of your own feelings.

— Donkey, Shrek

Chapter 1: Goodbye, Cruel World!

I can already see what the inscription on my gravestone would be:

R.I.P.

Santiago Bondoc

AUG 25, 2004 – FEB 9, 2024

HE WAS A DEVOTED SON

The bit about devoted son is a euphemism for mama’s boy. A vandal would probably spray-paint over it: HE WAS A LOSER in big, red block letters. 

But you know what? Right now I don’t care. That’s the furthest thing from my mind.

Right now I’m on top of the world. Literally. I’m sitting atop a climbing wall. You know the artificial wall that simulates a rock face inside climbing gyms and sports centers? Yes, that. But the one I’m perched on is outdoors because, this weekend until Valentine’s Day, my university is holding a fair on its parade grounds.

The time is just a little past 6:00 a.m. and dawn is still just a yellow shimmer on the eastern horizon. Of course nobody’s here in the fairgrounds except me. As you can imagine, I’m breaking so many rules by being here. First, solo climbing is a big no-no. Second, climbing without a rope or harness for protection is cray. Third and last, climbing all the way to and sitting on the top is suicidal.

But since unaliving myself is the exact reason why I snuck into a holey section of the fair’s polyester fencing, I don’t care. I didn’t even mind the tricky climb and now the dizzying height, which is definitely a first for a coward like me. It would’ve been much easier to enter my college building and do the deed from the rooftop but – something I hadn’t anticipated – the gates were still locked when I checked.    

From up here, gazing out at the dim, basin-shaped parade grounds, I feel truly at peace. There are booths, bazaar tents, a concert stage, a Ferris wheel, a 20-foot skydancer and giant vertical signs floated by balloons.  Everything’s open-air except for the concert stage, which is covered by a big canopy top to protect all the expensive audio equipment that will soon be installed there. Since the gates of the week-long school fair open in the evening, everything’s deserted and the only sign of movement comes from the bobbing balloons and the tirelessly cavorting skydancer.  

Yep. I’m at peace with myself, the world and my fated place in it. As the dew-fresh, crisp early-morning air runs through my hair, all my troubles seem so remote and insignificant and the world looks like an unopened gift box full of hope. I’m almost tempted to pick up the camera constantly hanging around my neck. The camera’s a secondhand DSLR that I got as work equipment from my gig with the school paper.

I’m a photojournalist for the school paper so I’m well-acquainted with the seedy underbelly of the academe. And no, I’m not trying to sound all tough-guy as though I was in some hardboiled noir fiction or something. If you’ve seen a certain list of dares circulating on social media these days, I was the undercover whistleblower behind it. As per my editor’s instructions, I had infiltrated an elitist school org in the College of Business Administration (my college). I had to sign an NDA and everything but fuck that.

The list goes something like this:

DARE GAMES

Deadline: February 28, 6 PM

1. [PHOTO] Shave your head to look like the parted Red Sea and place a Lego Minifigure Person in the middle of the shaved area. 

2. [VIDEO] Rub someone off in your committee until they get hard (boner should be seen).

3. [VIDEO] Finish a whole bottle of 700ml Gin Bilog. Afterwards, the players who drank must walk 5 steps straight forward.

4. [PHOTO] Lick the pavement. Tongue must visibly touch the pavement in the photo.

5. [VIDEO] Touch (whole palm) a random stranger’s bald head and continue walking with your hand on their head for 10 seconds.

6. [VIDEO] Lick whipped cream off someone else’s armpit.

7. [VIDEO] Take a bite out of a bar of soap and chew it for 5 seconds.

8. [VIDEO] French-kiss 2 other pledges (with consent).

9. [PHOTO] Hug your grandmother/ mother from behind then grab her boobs.

10. [VIDEO] Buy a cake then sit on it. Have another player eat it off your ass. Show clean ass after.

There’s more. A whole lot more.

I have to say, the worst that I actually took was the General Anesthesia Dare. It might sound like a fairly easy one to others but not to me. I’d rather know and consent to whatever dehumanizing torture the seniors cook up than be completely at their mercy while I’m unconscious. But each to their own, I guess.  

As you can imagine, I have trauma from the hazing. Worse, I have something akin to Stockholm syndrome. The thing you have to understand about frats and orgs in my university, they’re a legit way for poor students like me to make connections; not just social but also economic and political. Most of the seniors are rich kids whose parents are business tycoons or government policymakers. Their reach is certainly long enough to pluck me out of the quicksand of poverty.  

At one point, I actually believed I had a shot at changing my station in life, which is looking more and more fixed every semester that I spend in uni. The seniors of the Young Entrepreneurs really got to me with their effed-up mind games. I started to believe them, that I belonged, that I had found kindred spirits and they had welcomed me with open arms.

Nope. They just saw me as a plaything. Someone whose nose they can rub in my loserville origins. Typical.   

Don’t get me wrong. As a guy, I have nothing against the French-kissing and tonsil-tennis dare with pretty co-pledges. In fact, like any college sophomore, I’m desperate to get more of such action and if I ever met a Tzuyu lookalike, I probably wouldn’t mind hours of snogging. But the thing is, one kiss can contain up to 20 million bacteria, not to mention there are canker sores in some fuckers’ mouths.

Opps, sorry. The OCD part of me just did a crosstalk. How I have such a neurotic, hand-sanitizer and bleach-loving side is a long story. But I’ve still got plenty of time so let me get you up to speed.

****

Alice must’ve blacked out because the next thing she knows, she’s having difficulty breathing and trapped in a bear hug by Gubler. Her feet, now bare except for her sheer pantyhose, are dangling several inches from the floor while her skirt has a rip on one side.

My Jimmy Choos! she thinks frantically but also dimly, since her brain’s running out of oxygen. 

Through her narrowing vision, Alice sees Gubler’s neck. Veins are bulging out of the thick, taurine appendage. She notices at this precise moment, rather belatedly, that hot coffee’s dripping and steaming all over the German’s face, which is red and contorted in murderous hate. She spies the culprit – the golden coffee pot – fallen on the handmade rug and dented for some reason. Oh, and the paring knife from the service trolley is sticking out of the side of Gubler’s neck like a motorbike’s rear-view mirror. It has just missed his carotid artery.

Someone (most probably future Mrs. McKnight) is squealing behind Alice like a pig being dragged to the butcher’s. Through the distorted reflection in the paring knife’s stainless steel handle, Alice spots Radić’s intense face as he waits for an opening to get in on the action. And from the periphery of her vision, she registers that the two American cops have drawn their weapons. She had one of them wrongly pegged. He has a Taser gun, which is more dangerous than a paper-tiger firearm on a plane.

She places both her hands on Gubler’s hips and, with all her might, pushes and squirms away. In the space created between her and the German’s bodies, she proceeds to drive her right knee to his groin. The mountainous man oofs and his eyes pop out of their sockets. Alice delivers not only one but two, and three, knee strikes in the same sensitive spot. Gubler lets out a strangled whimper as his bear hug finally weakens.

Alice can’t remember where she learned such a violent self-defense move but she chalks it up to adrenaline rush. Wrapping her arm around Gubler’s shoulder like they’re best buds and he didn’t just try to crush the life out of her, she swings her legs and executes a helicopter kick towards the two Americans and Radić sneaking up behind her. The flurry of kicks hit their targets: the blade of her right foot smacks the hand aiming the Smith &Wesson while the instep of her left flicks the barrel of the Taser gun. To cap everything, she plants a rear horse kick squarely in Radić’s chest.

The Taser gun tumbles and floats like a volleyball in a toss, suspended in slow motion because of all the adrenaline rushing in her veins. Landing nimbly on her feet, her back turned to the staggered Radić, Alice thrusts her hand sideways and catches the Taser gun as it drops.  

She swings around and pulls the trigger of the still upside-down Taser. Both prongs attach themselves in the center of Radić’s chest even as he attempts to recover from the horse kick. The 50, 000 volts of initial blast effectively put the Russian out of commission.

Even if this was a piece, she tells herself in a highly logical, detached corner of her brain, I would fire two rounds in the body, in a tight pattern around the sternum, making sure to hit his ribs and trap the bullets inside him. 

Wait – what?How in God’s name do I know that? 

Now that the two biggest threats are incapacitated, Alice gets a breather and she’s able to mind a bigger radius of her surroundings. The first thing she does is throw away the Taser as though it was a cockroach that had flown into her hands. She’s terrified. Terrified of herself and what she’s capable of.   

What have I done? she thinks to herself. How could I be so violent? 

The shrill, now almost hoarse shriek is constant so she turns towards the source. All at once, three strange things enter her field of vision:

First, the woman screaming isn’t Ms. Goldschmidt but June. In fact, the future Mrs. McKnight is the epitome of calm. And not the I’m-too-shocked-to-say-or-do-anything calm but meh calm. Like a zoo visitor in front of a roaring lion because there’s a pane of glass between them. 

Behind Ms. Goldschmidt, what sends a chill up Alice’s spine, the cabin camera has a steady little red light to indicate that it’s recording. Such extras have proven to be a deterrent to terrorism and even air-rage incidents on both commercial and private flights. The only difference is, on the latter, the cam’s often turned off to give way to alcohol-and-drug-fueled parties and other illicit activities.

The other uncanny thing is that Mr. Hammond still hasn’t woken up despite all the racket. Alice knows he isn’t wearing any ear plugs either; only a sleep mask. 

Third and last, Mr. McKnight has his Augma Tablet out. He’s holding it like someone casually flipping through an ebook or playing a game app.

Before she can say or do anything else, a tremendous feeling of drowsiness overtakes her. It feels like she had just been shot with a tranq dart but she knows better. A potent, tailor-made tranq would still take at least 1.5 minutes to kick in and several minutes to completely knock someone out.

No, this is different. The sleepiness isn’t a soft sensation like deep water welcoming her in its undulating arms. Rather, it’s akin to the knuckles of a boxer nicknamed One-Punch. There’s nothing gentle about her going under at all. Alice is being slam-dunked into a hole that could very well double as her grave too.

****

First things first. Please allow me to introduce myself for the last time. I’m Thiago Bondoc. All my imaginary friends call me Theo. That’s my mother’s maiden name at the end of my name because she’s a single mom. My dad walked out on us when I was just a couple of months old.

I had an older brother. Had. Past tense.

He died when he was ten and I six. But let’s not dwell on that. I don’t. I just want to explain to you how my brother’s death led to my having an OCD streak. So bear with me with our Gen-Z micro attention span please.

Have you ever heard of spider derby? It’s a cross between dog fighting and Pokémon battles, but instead of fighting in an underground pit, the contenders fight on a stick. And instead of collecting cute virtual pocket monsters, trainers collect eight-eyed and eight-legged freaks.

At least that’s what I recall from my hazy memory of traditional street games in my country. These days, almost every game I know comes through a screen and the kids who play them are zombies with piles of bags under their eyes.

Time was Filipino kids were more active. We played more or less the same games as kids in other countries did: leapfrog, prisoner’s base, kites, hopscotch, marbles, jump rope, hacky sack, spinning tops, duck on a rock, stilts, hide-and-seek... Now that I think of it, it prolly isn’t just my country that has changed for the worse. The only saving grace of hailing from a developing country – and a rural village of said country at that – my peers and I were exposed to the temptations of the Internet and modern gadgets much later.

There was one game that was unique to Filipino kids though: spider derby. Like I said, we catch the arachnoid warriors and put them on opposite ends of a stick, usually broken off of a reed broom; basically the dried midrib of a coconut leaf. The trainers prod their fighters to crawl upside down and meet in the middle of the stick. The spiders size each other up and then grapple with their legs, so the longer the appendages the better. The winner is the one who manages to deliver a paralyzing bite to his opponent and web him up with the spinnerets on his butt. Or, if the opponent tries to dangle away on a strand of web, the winning spider cuts it and the opponent is injured on the fall.

Did I say his? That’s not accurate because the best spider gladiators were in fact female. And don’t worry, this sport was harmless because all the spider species found in my hometown were non-venomous. Now, I realize we might have been guilty of animal cruelty or something but I can prolly argue that we were operating in a gray area. I mean, I didn’t write the rules that make dolphin-fishing illegal but allow any God-fearing housewife to empty a can of Baygon on a gentle creepy-crawly.

Besides, I was six years old. Sue me.

From all this you can infer that my bro didn’t really die from playing the derby itself. No, it happened way before the game: the catching part.

My older brother’s name was Jacob and I called him Kuya Jake (Big Bro Jake) while he called me Chiao. Like all younger brothers, I worshipped him and thought he was the coolest and smartest kid in the world. He knew so many things, especially about Marvel trading cards, paper planes, kites and gladiator spiders. I remember his dream was to be a policeman and catching and taming bugs was strictly just his hobby. 

One of Big Bro Jake’s factoids that really stuck with me is how spiders aren’t really insects. They belong to a completely different class of animals, Arachnida, which is demonstrated by the fact that they have eight legs instead of an insect’s six. At the time, my brother was on fifth grade while I was on first. Apart from being a bully deterrent, he was a god in my eyes because public school teachers were too underpaid and outnumbered to give customized quality education, and most of what Big Bro Jake knew was from self-study and online searches at the solitary Internet café in town. This in spite of the fact that our visits to the hotspot were few and far between. 

Big Bro Jake knew, for instance, how to distinguish spider species based on their color, the pattern on their backs or the amount of hair on their bodies. I remember he also taught me spiders that had strong webbing were great fighters while those that were jet black or red in color had high endurance.

I tried hard to be like Big Bro Jake. After I emptied a matchbox in the kitchen to use as spider stable, placing all its original contents chaotically in one of the drawers (and later earning a licking from Ma), I tied a reed broom to the handle of a mop and caught a house spider that I had been eyeing under a corner of our bungalow’s eaves.

We were latchkey kids in those days. Ma was juggling nursing classes and a part-time job at the only Jollibee within a 35-kilometer radius.  I guess the restaurant’s mascot resembled an ant in her eyes because of the double whammy of fast food and the extra-sweet Filipino tooth. But like most kids, Big Bro Jake and I didn’t care about our health and longed for the day when Ma would forget the risk of cavities, obesity and diabetes and bring home a Super Meal. She never did, not even as a bribe, even though Big Bro Jake and I were