For Lita and Benito, the weeks following the arrival of the boy they named Ani became a serene, if tense, period of rediscovery. Lita had often lamented the silence of their home, a silence compounded by their unique circumstances. In this technologically advanced era, humans were routinely engineered to live for up to 150 years, making the decision to remain childless a commitment of years. Now, suddenly, their sprawling timeline felt anchored.
Ani's presence filled the cabin with purpose. They taught him the gentle rituals of their life: the soft cadence of the rain on the nipa roof, the slow satisfaction of tending the small, defiant vegetable patch that bordered their property.
"Come here, Ani. Let's watch the neighbor's drone," Benito would suggest often, pointing toward the window.
Ani's response was always the same. He would press his back against the nearest wall, his breath catching in a silent, high-frequency squeak. His large, haunted eyes would dart towards the ceiling, searching for an escape route that didn't exist. He didn't just refuse to go outside; he seemed utterly traumatized by the very concept of the world beyond the door.
Benito, the pragmatic one, often argued for disclosure. "Lita, maybe if we just call the police in… they can come here. They can get him help."
Every time, Ani would respond with a silent, frantic head shake, his hands clamping over his mouth, sometimes letting out a muted cry of such desperate fear that it silenced Benito instantly.
The couple didn't need to see a doctor's report to know the child's history was dark. Judging from his body, he had undergone terrible physical suffering. The deep, purple-green bruises had faded over the weeks, but they revealed a chilling landscape of permanent marks. His hands, his thin legs, and the nape of his neck were crisscrossed with small, white, linear scars that looked unmistakably like cuts and punctures from needles and surgical implements.
He looked, they often whispered to each other late at night, like a survivor of the ultimate torture, a horrifying testament to the dark underside of the world's gleaming technology. This deep, shared certainty that turning him over to the authorities meant consigning him back to suffering became the main reason for their escalating secrecy.
They tried gently to coax information from him. Mother? Father? Where is home? He would simply stare, blank. If they persisted, or even innocently pointed to an object to prompt a word — a chair, a picture frame — he would sometimes erupt in an uncontrollable, silent scream, collapsing into a fetal position.
And so, months passed in this careful, quiet rhythm. One overcast afternoon, as the wet season began to deepen the moss on the roof, Lita looked at Benito and simply said, "He's ours now."
They decided to adopt him, not through any formal, governmental process that would register his existence, but through the silent, irreversible commitment of their hearts.
One sun-drenched Saturday, Lita decided she needed to accelerate his progress. Ani had mastered the basic, essential words, but his vocabulary was too small. She had scoured the restricted online marketplace for physical books — a rare, expensive commodity in a world dominated by neural downloads — and found a picture dictionary.
"It should be here today," she hummed, stirring a pot of chicken stew.
A moment later, the cabin was pierced by the distinctive, high-speed thrum of a delivery drone. It hovered briefly above their porch, a standard, government-issued transport model, its six rotor blades spinning with mechanical efficiency. It lowered the package onto the porch.
Ani, who had been sitting quietly coloring a picture of an orange rooster, looked up. His eyes, usually soft and wary, snapped into a state of chilling, focused intensity. It was an instinctive, lethal shift. He did not yell or retreat.
He sprang to his feet, covering the short distance to the door in a terrifying, silent blur. Lita barely had time to turn before Ani was on the porch, his small, thin hands lashing out. He didn't fumble; he didn't grab. He targeted the drone's rotors, tearing through the thin metal shroud with the precise, focused violence of an animal going for a throat.
The high-pitched whine became a choked, crunching shriek of metal and plastic. The drone, its navigation systems instantly destroyed, spun out of control, smashing against the porch railing before dropping harmlessly into the ferns below.
Lita cried out, "Ani! No! No!"
The command, sharp with genuine alarm, broke the trance. Ani flinched, his eyes wide, the remnants of the drone's casing still clutched in his fists. He looked terrified of his own action, dropping the debris and sprinting back inside the cabin, diving under the heavy dining table.
A moment later, a calm, automated voice cut through the air from the wreckage: "Drone Operator #419 requires maintenance report. Please confirm payload delivery status."
Benito, who rushed out, sighed deeply. He took out his smart-card and apologized to the operator interface, offering to pay triple the drone's replacement cost. They told the voice they thought the machine was a bug. The crisis passed, but the silence inside the cabin was heavier than before. They knew then that the terror that haunted Ani was not just in his mind; it was in his instincts.
Months blurred into a quiet year. Ani, using the picture books and the endless patience of his new parents, learned to speak in simple sentences. "Thanks, Ma," he would say when Lita gave him food. "Pa, what's that?" when Benito was working on a small engine part.
He spoke about his past only in fractured, simple terms, almost always in the third person. He described being "kept in a dark room," and being "in a prison." He said the people who took care of him were "not nice" and that they "made noise in his head." The minimal, clear admissions only strengthened Lita and Benito's resolve to protect him, cementing their belief that the dark scars on his body were indeed the result of systematic torture.
Three years had passed since the day he collapsed on their porch. He was a small, quiet boy of about eleven now, able to speak full language, still cautious, but happy. He saw the couple as his parents, and they saw him as their son.
They were celebrating his un-birthday — the anniversary of the day he was found. Ani blew out the single candle on a small ube cake.
As the smoke curled toward the ceiling, a sudden, heavy, authoritative pounding came from the front door.
"Benito! It's them again!" Lita hissed, assuming it was the relentless land developers. "Tell them we'll never sell!"
Benito opened the door, ready to shout. He stopped dead.
Standing there were three figures in dark, heavy composite armor, far more imposing than local police. One of them, a woman with a hard face and a uniform that bore the unfamiliar crest of the Global Child Welfare Division (GCWD), raised a large-caliber kinetic pistol.
A deafening shot was fired into the ceiling, ripping through the nipa thatch and showering the room with debris. Benito, Lita, and Ani cried out, frozen.
"Benito and Lita De Guzman," the woman's voice was cold and processed. "You are under arrest for the illegal confinement and kidnapping of a minor, identified as Subject ANI-7." She pointed toward the terrified boy. "Take the child."
The subsequent scene was a quick, violent blur of hands, shouts, and tears. Despite Lita and Benito's frantic resistance, the armored agents were professional, brutal, and efficient. Ani was ripped from the shelter of their arms and carried out, despite his silent, furious struggle.
He was transported to a silent, white, sterile facility — a government-issued interrogation room that felt far colder than the cabin. He sat alone at a table, the door his only view.
The woman who fired the gun sat across from him. She did not look at him with malice, only clinical observation. She leaned forward, placing a datapad on the table.
Her voice dropped, quiet and unnerving, piercing the sterile silence.
"Do you know who you are?"
For Lita and Benito, the weeks following the arrival of the boy they named Ani became a serene, if tense, period of rediscovery. Lita had often lamented the silence of their home, a silence compounded by their unique circumstances. In this technologically advanced era, humans were routinely engineered to live for up to 150 years, making the decision to remain childless a commitment of over a century. Now, suddenly, their sprawling timeline felt anchored.
Ani's presence filled the cabin with purpose. They taught him the gentle rituals of their life: the soft cadence of the rain on the nipa roof, the slow satisfaction of tending the small, defiant vegetable patch that bordered their property.
"Halika, Ani. Let's watch the neighbor's drone," Benito would suggest often, pointing toward the window.
Ani's response was always the same. He would press his back against the nearest wall, his breath catching in a silent, high-frequency squeak. His large, haunted eyes would dart towards the ceiling, searching for an escape route that didn't exist. He didn't just refuse to go outside; he seemed utterly traumatized by the very concept of the world beyond the door.
Benito, the pragmatic one, often argued for disclosure. "Lita, maybe if we just call the police in… they can come here. They can get him help."
Every time, Ani would respond with a silent, frantic head shake, his hands clamping over his mouth, sometimes letting out a muted cry of such desperate fear that it silenced Benito instantly.
The couple didn't need to see a doctor's report to know the child's history was dark. Judging from his body, he had undergone terrible physical suffering. The deep, purple-green bruises had faded over the weeks, but they revealed a chilling landscape of permanent marks. His hands, his thin legs, and the nape of his neck were crisscrossed with small, white, linear scars that looked unmistakably like cuts and punctures from needles and surgical implements.
He looked, they often whispered to each other late at night, like a survivor of the ultimate torture, a horrifying testament to the dark underside of the world's gleaming technology. This deep, shared certainty that turning him over to the authorities meant consigning him back to suffering became the main reason for their escalating secrecy.
They tried gently to coax information from him. Mother? Father? Where is home? He would simply stare, blank. If they persisted, or even innocently pointed to an object to prompt a word—a chair, a picture frame—he would sometimes erupt in an uncontrollable, silent scream, collapsing into a fetal position.
And so, months passed in this careful, quiet rhythm. One overcast afternoon, as the wet season began to deepen the moss on the roof, Lita looked at Benito and simply said, "He's ours now."
They decided to adopt him, not through any formal, governmental process that would register his existence, but through the silent, irreversible commitment of their hearts.
One sun-drenched Saturday, Lita decided she needed to accelerate his progress. Ani had mastered the basic, essential words, but his vocabulary was too small. She had scoured the restricted online marketplace for physical books—a rare, expensive commodity in a world dominated by neural downloads—and found a picture dictionary.
"It should be here today," she hummed, stirring a pot of chicken tinola.
A moment later, the cabin was pierced by the distinctive, high-speed thrum of a delivery drone. It hovered briefly above their porch, a standard, government-issued transport model, its six rotor blades spinning with mechanical efficiency. It lowered the package onto the porch.
Ani, who had been sitting quietly coloring a picture of an orange rooster, looked up. His eyes, usually soft and wary, snapped into a state of chilling, focused intensity. It was an instinctive, lethal shift. He did not yell or retreat.
He sprang to his feet, covering the short distance to the door in a terrifying, silent blur. Lita barely had time to turn before Ani was on the porch, his small, thin hands lashing out. He didn't fumble; he didn't grab. He targeted the drone's rotors, tearing through the thin metal shroud with the precise, focused violence of an animal going for a throat.
The high-pitched whine became a choked, crunching shriek of metal and plastic. The drone, its navigation systems instantly destroyed, spun out of control, smashing against the porch railing before dropping harmlessly into the ferns below.
Lita cried out, "Ani! Huwag! No!"
The command, sharp with genuine alarm, broke the trance. Ani flinched, his eyes wide, the remnants of the drone's casing still clutched in his fists. He looked terrified of his own action, dropping the debris and sprinting back inside the cabin, diving under the heavy dining table.
A moment later, a calm, automated voice cut through the air from the wreckage: "Drone Operator #419 requires maintenance report. Please confirm payload delivery status."
Benito, who rushed out, sighed deeply. He took out his smart-card and apologized to the operator interface, offering to pay triple the drone's replacement cost. They told the voice they thought the machine was a bug. The crisis passed, but the silence inside the cabin was heavier than before. They knew then that the terror that haunted Ani was not just in his mind; it was in his instincts.
Months blurred into a quiet year. Ani, using the picture books and the endless patience of his new parents, learned to speak in simple sentences. "Thanks, Ma," he would say when Lita gave him food. "Pa, what's that?" when Benito was working on a small engine part.
He spoke about his past only in fractured, simple terms, almost always in the third person. He described being "kept in a dark room," and being "in a prison." He said the people who took care of him were "not nice" and that they "made noise in his head." The minimal, clear admissions only strengthened Lita and Benito's resolve to protect him, cementing their belief that the dark scars on his body were indeed the result of systematic torture.
Three years had passed since the day he collapsed on their porch. He was a small, quiet boy of about eleven now, able to speak full language, still cautious, but happy. He saw the couple as his parents, and they saw him as their son.
They were celebrating his un-birthday—the anniversary of the day he was found. Ani blew out the single candle on a small ube cake.
As the smoke curled toward the ceiling, a sudden, heavy, authoritative pounding came from the front door.
"Benito! It's them again!" Lita hissed, assuming it was the relentless land developers. "Tell them we'll never sell!"
Benito opened the door, ready to shout. He stopped dead.
Standing there were three figures in dark, heavy composite armor, far more imposing than local police. One of them, a woman with a hard face and a uniform that bore the unfamiliar crest of the Global Child Welfare Division (GCWD), raised a large-caliber kinetic pistol.
A deafening shot was fired into the ceiling, ripping through the nipa thatch and showering the room with debris. Benito, Lita, and Ani cried out, frozen.
"Benito and Lita De Guzman," the woman's voice was cold and processed. "You are under arrest for the illegal confinement and kidnapping of a minor, identified as Subject ANI-7." She pointed toward the terrified boy. "Take the child."
The subsequent scene was a quick, violent blur of hands, shouts, and tears. Despite Lita and Benito's frantic resistance, the armored agents were professional, brutal, and efficient. Ani was ripped from the shelter of their arms and carried out, despite his silent, furious struggle.
He was transported to a silent, white, sterile facility—a government-issued interrogation room that felt far colder than the cabin. He sat alone at a table, the door his only view.
The woman who fired the gun sat across from him. She did not look at him with malice, only clinical observation. She leaned forward, placing a datapad on the table.
Her voice dropped, quiet and unnerving, piercing the sterile silence.
"Do you know who you are?"