by Carljoe Javier

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RJ could always stand to lose a few pounds. That’s what he would joke about anyway.

Even at his healthiest and fittest, which was a good ten years behind him, there was a little bit of flab and just enough chubbiness in his cheeks to make him look like a giant baby. Try as he might, his body seemed to just be that way. He had friends who worked out less than him, ate more than him, and yet they looked more fit, more muscular. It was genes, now compounded with aging, which kept him round. It was those same things that, up until a few months ago, forced him to work out more and try to eat even healthier just to stay overweight and not tip into obesity.

So when Kahol appeared before him one night RJ considered the demon’s offer.

This was, of course, after yelling a high-pitched shriek and knocking over his can of Coke Light. Because how else would you react to a demon emerging from the shadows, when you know you’re alone in your office?

That night, RJ could not go home. He had told his wife that he was staying in the office to finish work. But really there was no work. There was just the terrible balance sheet in front of him. There wasn’t anything he could do about it. The work day was over, he had done all he could in terms of collections. It’s not like working on product or developing new strategy was going to change the company’s cash position, especially not in the timeframe that he needed cash.

It was times like these that he turned to stress eating. In the early days of the company, about a year in, when he had staff and there would be some months when he would need to scramble to make payroll, Unli-Samgyupsal was a salve. As the company stabilized, he was able to worry less, which meant he ate less.

But this last year had been difficult. And where Unli-Samgyupsal was at least a communal activity and a thing that his wife even joined him in, the frequency and gravity of his anxieties meant he had to turn to something else. He did not want to be around people because it made him think of how they might think of him as a failure. Objectively, and if P&L were to be checked, this wasn’t necessarily the case. But RJ kept thinking of himself as a failure as he struggled and fought to make collections to get the company out of its financial troubles.

Increasingly, too, his comfort was coming in the form of late-night egg drop sandwiches and extra spicy ramyun, eaten at his desk, which he was careful not to slurp too fast lest he splash that radioactive red broth onto his shirt.

He first registered Kahol in his periphery. It was exactly how it felt in horror movies. A shape, a presence, just in your periphery but outside of your frame of vision. You FELT it, you KNEW something was there and yet you couldn’t see anything. RJ had noodles hanging from his mouth, mid-slurp, when he felt a prickle of cold pass over the back of his neck.

He stopped slurping, the noodles dangling. He was deciding whether to bite them short with his teeth, or to just do a quick slurp and get them all in his mouth. This while his eyes shot from right to left, looking out at the empty, darkened office illuminated only by his desk monitor. He felt a darkness pass over his monitor. It buzzed static.

He began to slowly pull the noodles into his mouth, slurping at one-fourth his normal speed. There was no logic to this. It’s not like he could react or respond in any kind of way that would allow him to defend himself. Fight or flight rarely accounted for demon encounters, moreso demon encounters when halfway through a mouthful of noodles.

Then he saw from the shadows there was movement, and with the faintest illumination it was a shape coming towards him, bipedal yes, but from the way the icy feeling crept over him despite the heat from the ramyun coursing through his body, he knew this was not normal, not human.

With that realization he yelled. “Ay putangina!” knocked over his Coke Light, and spilled radioactive red and hot ramen broth onto his lap.

#

Kahol loved coming out of the shadows like that. There weren’t many thrills left in the demon lifestyle after millennia. Especially in these modern, cynical times where they held much less sway, much less novelty in the lives of people. Add to that the fact that, well, among demons, Kahol would be lucky to be ranked… mid. He wasn’t a high ranking beautiful demon, among the OG ranks that first rebelled against heaven.

And he never built himself up enough to have a huge presence or following. No witches were praying to him, no mention of his name in occult books, none of that. He just didn’t have that kind of demonic charisma.So he relished these small moments of actual terror, however fleeting and irrelevant to the overall business of demonry, or what passed for it in the time of late-stage capitalism. 

Now he had to move on to making the offer. 

#

They say when you are an entrepreneur you put your heart and soul into the work. Or you put your blood sweat and tears into it. They say it takes guts.They say you have to hustle hard. You have to get up before everyone else, and you have to go to bed and dream about your success. They also say you should take ice baths and chug supplements.

They say a lot of things, frankly.

In the years since RJ had been running the company, he had cycled through all of the business platitudes and run through all the entrepreneurial fads and trends.There was startup culture, which was fun and exciting and when you started your business you could enjoy the rush of starting and building something and being a new darling on the market. It almost didn’t matter what industry or field you were going into, if you could tell an interesting enough story that you were a “disruptor” then you could generate some funding and you could be up and running.

Then you enter the phase where you’re just plugging away at the business, serving clients, shipping products, running the day-to-day concerns of finance, HR, operations. All this was well and good as long as you kept the wheel of product, sales, and collections spinning. But sometimes, you’re the one who gets disrupted.

RJ had founded his company at just the right time. The market was strong, the animal spirits were in a partying mood, and that made it easy to find investors among friends and friends of friends. The first year showed strong product market fit and bigger sales than they expected. Investors were happy to see the growth, and dividends in Year 2 made them very happy.

Then the market took a hit. Geopolitical instability, conflict in other regions of the world, supply chain challenges amid saber rattling. All things that had nothing directly to do with RJ’s business, but absolutely everything to do with how the market imagined itself performing. The animal spirits were in fight or flight.This meant everyone getting short and going long on cash. Clients cut their budgets, which meant less projects, banks and other lenders tightened their credit requirements, and in general running the business just got harder.

No amount of hustle, no number of ice baths, nothing could help when the fundamentals of the business were under attack by a hostile market.

It was hard not to feel like a failure. Even though objectively RJ could look at the market, look at the business, look at his decisions, and know that he had done as well as he could. He made the best possible decisions he could have with the information and the resources that he had. Even when he had been forced to lay people off, those staff understood and at the time had been the ones to comfort him and commiserate on their way out.

It was hard not to bury your face into a bowl of scorching hot ramyun and slurp up the noodles and broth until they burned your throat, and the spices had you sweating through pores you didn’t know you had, and you were sniffling and you couldn’t tell why exactly you were crying but there was comfort in it.

RJ had another payday coming and not enough cash in the bank, and he knew the collections weren’t coming in, and he knew that there was already debt and compound interest, and he wondered how it would be possible for him to disappear. Disappear into the bowl of ramyun. Disappear from this world of debt and failure. How could he sort all of this out, get just enough cash to survive long enough until the market recovers, and then get back to profitability and growth.

Kahol was ready with an offer.

#

Innovation within old institutions takes time. That’s why startups move so fast and are able to disrupt markets. And these disruptions force old institutions to eventually respond to survive.It’s in the wake of global financial crises and new financial products (and scams) and a drastically challenging market that the Pound of Flesh program was developed.

Most people are familiar with the Faustian Bargain– of course that product had existed for millennia before it was renamed thanks to popular culture. However, the simplicity of the product combined with decreased interest had meant a waning of success in the last few centuries.Simply put, selling souls had become a difficult business. Faust was great for marketing and branding. It was not great for negotiations and collections. In the same way that online sellers try to avoid putting their prices so that they have wiggle room to practice “dynamic pricing,” the total cost of “your soul” being out there meant limited options for demons making offers. You couldn’t customize too much because that’s what customers had come to expect.

In addition, despite the terms seeming so clear (wishes for soul), customers tried finding loopholes. Suddenly, after signing their souls away in books of blood, they would find some kind of salvation or other, or compromise the composition of their soul, or in general develop mystic and occult escape hatches to try and void the argument.Though most of the time the books of blood were enforcement enough, it was still generally a hassle, especially when some savior-type entity showed up to try and negotiate on the seller’s behalf. You’d get tied up in arbitration, with the soul held in escrow, until all the paperwork could be resolved.

It would usually resolve in favor of the original agreement, the soul transferring to Hell. But the time it took in dealing with the arbitration and paperwork! As a demon in Kahol’s position, you wanted to be selling, closing, and collecting. There was too much competition and not enough souls and all that was such a waste of opportunity.

This aspect of demonry, as well as demonic work as a whole, had been largely successful. You didn’t have to put in too much work. The population kept growing, which meant more opportunities. With population growth naturally came an increase in potential customers because for some reason, even if you have a linear population growth, the increase in assholes among them is exponential.

Catholic demons like Kahol used to run the game. For as long as there’ve been Judeo-Christian text, they’ve been the ones to fear. And as a result, they were the ones being conjured. First off, up until some guy went hammering 95 Theses on a door in 1517, there was just “One Church” which meant that they were the only demon-game in town. Other faiths held their own geographies and territories. But crusades, missionaries, and colonialism helped demons of Kahol’s ilk expand into new spaces.

It seemed like the opportunities would just keep growing. This was  when demon down-lines were evolved, because you had demons who were Closers, and then they could pass on their sales to be monitored, managed, and collected by less charismatic demons like Kahol. Those Closers were the kinds of demons that movies got made about. But any business gets disrupted when it imagines it’s too big to fail. And while the 20th century offered so many opportunities, it also led to so much disruption in the market.

From one side of the market, someone said god is dead and, sure, the idea took a few decades to hit, but boy did it hit. Then you got your nihilism, existentialism, ennui, malaise, and all these other things that just took away from demonry’s market dominance.And as if the 95 Theses hadn’t done its work enough in restructuring and some might say deconstructing the power of The Church, mass communications technology in the 20th Century led to an explosion of even more new religions and religious sects. This meant a total fragmentation of the faith-based markets. These new entries into the market became so powerful that they were able to generate their own new demons and other dark beings, serving the specific concerns and needs there. Which meant less from the overall pie available to the traditional demons.

You had an old product, your traditional audience was getting harder to sell to, and you had new players in the market coming and eating your lunch. Demons had to innovate or die.Which was why the introduction of these lower commitment products was a game-changer. The market had changed, and finally their products were adapting with it.The Pound of Flesh program was easier to convert, it was the payday loan of spiritual services. You weren’t collecting whole souls at the end of their lives. Here, you were making much smaller offers.

Unlimited knowledge and magical power were very big things to give someone, and the thing was that people wanted more and more. Faust stopped with self-improvement, really. But for people to sell souls these days, they wanted more power, power over other people, power over their communities, societies, you get the idea. And sometimes, they didn’t need to go to demons, they just went and did evil things to get their power. Why bother making a deal when you’re perfectly comfortable doing the work of demons yourself?

So if you were to scale back the offer on the table, then you could also ask for less than the whole soul. You might be thinking: how could less than 100% of a soul be of value to Hell trying to populate itself. That’s a fair point if you’re thinking in traditional terms. But the way that things were weighed had been reconfigured at this point, so it wasn’t just soul count that mattered, but the amount of overall soul energy you were able to bring into Hell. If you got someone to take a deal, you might not be getting an entire soul into Hell at the customer’s death or end of contract, but you might be siphoning their soul energy for a number of years, or you might be collecting on compounding interest of soul energies. If you got a cult to go in for a group discount, you might be making significantly less per person, but the volume meant a good turnaround on just one sale.

It wasn’t always a literal Pound of Flesh. It’s just that the phrase was catchy, and since they’d started using it, sales were stronger. The negotiations were also a lot easier because the demands were more manageable. Maybe the person wanted a promotion, maybe they wanted nicer skin, maybe just a few more followers so that they could bag that influencer contract they were chasing. Bigger accounts– for politicians, industry titans, and the new elite clientele of tech bros and celebrity influencers– still went to those traditional Closers. But now Kahol and demons of his level could close smaller deals and rack up enough accounts to keep and hold good standing once their numbers came up for review.

People still wanted the same things. It’s just now, they didn’t sell their souls. They could sell their soul energy, they could sell off parts of their body they felt like they didn’t need. Some of them would even offer pieces of their creativity, or parts of their brain they weren’t using anyway. And so when Kahol offered to take a literal pound of flesh from RJ monthly, RJ thought it was a great deal. He would have enough cash to make it past a payday and buy him enough time to make a collection, and he would lose a few pounds at contract signing. In RJ’s mind, he would be paying off the Pound of Flesh a maximum of three, maybe four months.

But it’s always ill-advised to make a deal with a demon.

#

Employees expected to get paid every 15th and 30th of the month (as they should), and companies were required to release 13th month pay by December 24th or risk violating the law. As an employee, RJ never thought too much about how this happened. He would clock into work each day, plug away at his tasks, and then twice a month there would be money in his bank account. Every so often there would be a problem with their payroll department, or with the bank, and there would be a delay, which led to all the employees grumbling and complaining about not having their salary when they needed it. Eventually the transactions would clear and the grumbling would end. RJ didn’t know how easy he had it.

As an entrepreneur, he knew that he had to deal with money. But checking payroll and computing it in the first year, even with a small team, was a job on its own. When he could afford someone to manage the finances, it was less of the nitty gritty of doing the computations, but then it was the additional person on payroll whose salary he had to cover every month, plus benefits. And so the first time RJ went into debt was in this 13th month season. Whereas from the employee side, Christmas was always great for him, because that meant time off, 13th month, and often bonuses and maybe even a 14th month if the year had gone well. As an entrepreneur, it was at best a challenge and more often a nightmare.

When you’re looking at your runway, you are considering how much cash you’re burning each month. The 13th month benefit  was a great thing for employees, but for employers looking at an extra month of salary for your entire staff was a challenge. You couldn’t charge your clients an extra 13th month for your work, and so you had to find ways to build it into your costs. And clients were always poking holes in your pricing, trying to see where they could pinch from here and there and bring their costs down. And where you had to be releasing on the day of salary, before Close of Business, clients weren’t always as reliable in their check releasing. What was even more challenging was that the bigger the clients, often the more challenging their payment terms were.

At the start, when RJ launched his business, he offered his services to friends who owned businesses. These were small-ticket deals, often discounted just so that he could build a list of clients served and a portfolio. It was a small amount of work and it was small deal sizes, paid off easily enough with one check, or with most of the money up front with a tranche held back to ensure completion of the project. As the business grew and his client list expanded beyond friends and eventually to larger corporate accounts, the payment terms became more complicated. Percentage up front, with tranches at milestones, and small amounts at closing.

For collections, he would need to hit the milestone, then send an invoice, which would then trigger processes within the clients’ finance departments, and then there would be a processing period of 90 days before check release. Releasing checks was its own ordeal, and waiting for checks to clear often felt like watching the end of a heartstopping basketball game: RJ’s filing the check felt like shooting up a desperation-three with his team down two points, and the ball hung in the air forever, the buzzer going off at 5PM payday and sometimes he would just hit it and others times it would be a dismal airball. But once he was able to close more clients and manage the cash flow more effectively, he was able to hit more of those buzzer beaters. In the time the market was good, it was like he was blowing out his opponents in the third quarter.

It was the market downturn just as the -ber months started, coupled with late collections, and the legal requirement to release 13th month pay that led to the first loan. It took RJ the whole year to climb out of that repayment. And now a renegotiation and another 13th month were looming.

#

It was always about leverage. That’s a cliche. But it’s a cliche because it’s true and crucial. Kahol knew this. RJ knew it, even if he often had little of it. And most of all the Fulgars knew it.

The Fulgars were one of the most powerful families in the country. Their patriarch’s oft-mythologized origin story was that he had grown up poor and through ingenuity and hustle had built himself up into a captain of industry. The Fulgars had a business empire that had its hands in everything, from real estate to construction to telecommunications to, bafflingly, possibly the worst coffee franchise. The Fulgars had expanded out from their business interests and captured political positions, using those to craft legislation and public opinion that would support their business interests.

The poverty was true. And the hustle and ingenuity to get out of it, also true. But those were only part of what drove the patriarch’s meteoric rise. Kahol knew the other elements that went into that success. He never read the contract, but he knew that it had to be a multi-soul, multi-generation contract.

Was the way the Fulgars did business always above board? Who could say? In the Philippines, with the history of cronyism and “how business gets done” you could say at the very least they were operating within a norm. Was the way that the Fulgars took advantage of their political positions ethical or moral? Hard to answer, especially in a society where political dynasties had for generations acted unethically and immorally to benefit themselves, so again the Fulgars operated within a norm.

But did you want to be in business with the Fulgars? That was an easy yes. For RJ, working with any of the business subsidiaries of the Fulgars was supposed to open doors. Working with the Fulgars and other business families of that magnitude was a signal to other businesses that you were legit. Having a successful contract with one business unit meant a chance you could be referred to another. He knew some small businesses who thrived solely on contracts from the Fulgar group.

The first time he closed a deal with the Fulgars happened at almost the same time that he had to take his first loan. The business was getting by, and though they had generated enough money to cover salaries that first year, the end-of-year benefits were something he had not factored in properly. He needed cash to cover the month and get things moving. He had hoped that the Fulgars would sign the contract in time for him to release the money.

But any good business owner has backup plans. While he was hoping the Fulgars would sign and he could use the signing and advance to cover the cash, he was already applying for a loan. The Fulgars– and take note when we say “The Fulgars” now, we use that in a metonymic manner, not like RJ ever dealt with or even met any of the Fulgar family, but we refer to the business and political empire– took forever to course the Terms of Service through their legal and finance teams, even as payroll submission and payday loomed. Still, he was able to take the pending ToS to a lender and show them he was on the verge of closing a big contract and had the capacity to repay the loan.

That first contract led to even more contracts, some of them overlapping. This became a challenge with the billing, because while the work was consistent, the payments were not. He was able to pay off one loan, but would find himself taking on other loans at key moments to cover for cash. While this doesn’t necessarily sound catastrophic, eventually the processing fees and interest payments on the loans started to pile up. At the same time, the Fulgars wanted to keep giving him more contracts, which demanded that he actually staff up to deliver on those.

On the face of it, this meant things were going pretty well for RJ. He was getting consistent business from one of the biggest conglomerates in the country. But it also meant that, as he would often get lost in the mazes and traps of invoicing, collection, and other delays inside of the Fulgar machinery, he would need more time, more resources, more everything just to continue to do business. This was growth, sure. But he was now less diversified and more locked into the Fulgar systems.

When the financial downturn hit, the Fulgars and most other clients decided to hoard cash and pause contracts. It meant that he could take loans on the strength of his pending contracts and collectibles, but he would be cash-strapped and have to dig himself out of a hole. The hole would get deeper as long as the crisis lasted, and he would have to chase and pay it all off once the market recovered. But he believed in himself and the company enough to do that.Then, once again, the Fulgars renegotiated a contract. He had mostly survived contract extensions and delays. But he had already projected a collection from his biggest Fulgar contract in late November, middle of December at the latest. Again, it was the 13th month and end of year that he needed to cover.

There really was no negotiation. There was just an email. And the leverage of the Fulgar empire behind it. Simply put, the Fulgars told all their suppliers that they were switching their payment terms from 60-90 days to 90-120 days. This meant that RJ would only be able to collect on the contract in January.  And after two years of drifting in and out of debt and repayment, he had exhausted all his loan options. He was tapped out, he had in November maxed out his credit card to pay staff salaries. He had already collected from all his other clients and couldn’t ask them to pay any more, given the market situation and everyone holding cash.

The ramyun burned his throat and the warmth helped to settle his stomach which had been turning for days with anxiety. The spiciness was enough to shock him out of his own thinking for every few slurps and every few seconds, before he started thinking and worrying and computing again.

A shadow moved in the darkness of his office.

#

“You’re looking good” and “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working” and “Pare, what’s your diet? Effective ha!” were comments that RJ got in the first few months as he was repaying the loan.

His wife, Jill, began worrying for him in the fifth month of loan repayment. At first she had been happy that he was losing weight, but the consistent weight loss, when she knew that he hadn’t stopped stress eating, and hadn’t started any kind of fitness program, made her think her husband was gravely ill.

“Babe, I’m fine.”

“I would just feel better if we got you an executive check-up, some blood work.”

“I don’t need it, babe. I’m good. It’s just work. I’m losing weight because of stress.”

“Yeah, babe, I understand that. I know you’ve been stressed because of work. But you’re losing weight, hindi natural.”

“No, babe. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“I’m just saying, let’s go in for a check-up. It’ll take you half a day, probably less.

“It’s a waste of time. I know what’s going on with me.”

“Why won’t you listen to me? I’m telling you, it will just make me feel better if you do it.”

“Sayang oras, sayang pera.”

“My god, RJ! Why does it have to be so hard! We’ll use my HMO! Why can’t you just do this for me?”

And so he did.

“For a man your age, and with the stressful nature of your work, these results are surprisingly good. Pretty much everything is within normal range. In fact, your sugar and cholesterol have improved since your last checkup.”

RJ was just as surprised as his wife that his results were that good. Of course he knew why he was losing weight, but given the amount of stress eating he had been doing, he thought some of those numbers would be pointing at something to be concerned about.

Kahol was just protecting his investment. At least for the duration of the loan, he needed RJ good and healthy.   

#

Businesses are in debt all the time. Businesses dig themselves out of debt all the time. Banks wouldn’t be as powerful or as successful as they are if they weren’t offering short-term loans alongside long-term investments.The bridge loan is a savior of businesses. And what was the Pound of Flesh Program, but a bridge loan, really? It’s just that the repayment was a mix of cash and flesh, odd yes, but how far out of the ordinary was it?

At the same time, how out of the ordinary was it for clients to delay their payments? To renegotiate? For contracts to be canceled with little warning? It was markets, bigger forces, politics, or maybe the person in the company you were transacting directly with just got moved to a different department and the new person was interested in another supplier.

Whatever of those cases it might have been– and likely it was a mix of all those– RJ was still in the red. He had hustled hard the last year. Hard enough that he had managed to pay almost all of the principal. But the interest, and the compound interest, was something that he thought he would’ve had covered. And he would’ve, had his projections and collections gone the way they were supposed to. There were many reasons and factors, but the balance sheet was clear, he had done very well, but not well enough. And with the Undas holidays just done and Christmas carols playing everywhere full blast, he knew he had to renegotiate terms if his business was going to survive.

Kahol was more than happy to make an extension, but at a higher rate to reflect the updated currency fluctuations.

As RJ dripped blood onto the contract, Kahol told him, I’m throwing in your good health for free. But you’re going to have to go to the samgyupsal and buffet more often if we’re going to have enough of you to collect on until this is all paid off.

#

In the first year, the payments shaved off his obesity. It was less of a shave really, and more a slicing. Kahol wasn’t one to make a show of the extractions, but there’s a reason extraction sounds like such a nasty word. It’s a nasty word for some nasty work. Spreading the work of extraction across payment periods also meant more instances of suffering, the taking of the flesh searing and restoration of the skin was fast, but it was indescribably painful. 

For years, even when he made a real effort to lose weight, he could only slide from obesity to overweight. The cultural conversation had shifted from BMI, but that didn’t mean that every time RJ had a checkup or a fitness check or anything like that, someone didn’t point out to him, stingingly, that he was obese.

Now people were really starting to worry. The business had stopped growing, the layoffs that were needed were done, and so RJ had a solid core team around him. They understood the ebbs and flows of business, understood the lean months and the times when they would be lucky and get small bonuses. But as one year turned to the next and he kept withering, they too were increasingly concerned. “Okay lang kaya si boss?” wasn’t a rare thing to hear.

There would be times in the year when he would think that they were at a point where he could finally pay off the loan in full, or that they would fight out of the red and be safely in the black. But then a client would delay payment, or a contract negotiation would fall through. Sometimes, he would be able to close big contracts, which would then lead to bigger revenue, but also necessitate him hiring on extra staff, which needed taking on cash up front until it got repaid, which meant using cash reserves and finding themselves back in the red at certain points.

The loan-repayment-renegotiation cycle had become a hum in RJ’s head, just consistently there. Unlike the thrashing worry and anxiety that had driven him to take Kahol’s offer in the first place, this had come to feel normal. As the years progressed, and the interest compounded, and the repayment shifted more, he made adjustments.

He wondered if Kahol’s other business interests ever had any hand in the delays or negotiations or sudden banking crises or abrupt market shifts, all of which seemed to always happen just as it seemed he was finally going to get out of it. He was one guy, one small player in the larger business universe. Surely all these things did not happen only to keep him in debt, all these small misfortunes of timing that kept him tied into the cycle. But still, he couldn’t help but wonder.

And the longer he was in it, the more he wondered. The less flesh he had, the more Jill and his staff and his friends asked him, the more he wondered. And the more he had to adjust his eating habits. Gorging himself late at night once a week in the office when everyone had gone home was fine at the start, but was not enough. That became samgyupsal weekly. Then samgyupsal three times a week. And more buffets. Thank goodness he could find samgyupsal at an affordable price, and he could stay in buffets for as much as six hours on certain days.

He would have to spend those six hours, gorging himself, thinking of the next time that Kahol would come to collect. In an hour he would be full and close to vomiting, and yet he knew he had to keep eating to take in enough calories so that he could have enough of himself to offer up when it was time to slice more of him off again. 

This was now the cost of doing business. 

The way they used to measure your body fat was with a pair of calipers. The calipers would pinch select parts of your body, like the belly, the thigh, and the arm flab that surrounds your triceps, and then the person taking the measurements would run a computation and tell you how much body fat you had.

There was nothing to pinch from RJ. And he wondered, what would happen when there was nothing more to take? 

About the Author: Carl Javier is a multifaceted leader at the intersection of ethics, storytelling, and innovation. Currently the Executive Director and Chief AI Ethicist of Data and AI Ethics PH, Carl advocates for the responsible and human-centered use of artificial intelligence in society. He is also a writer, certified Human-Centered Coach, and educator who teaches Creative Writing at the Ateneo de Manila University. Carl served as CEO of PumaPodcast, the Philippines’ pioneering podcast production company, where he led its growth into a globally recognized storytelling platform. With a career spanning journalism, academia, social enterprise, and publishing, Carl has contributed to meaningful impact through both creative and technical writing. His editorial leadership in relaunching Anino Comics helped launch a new wave of Filipino graphic storytelling, earning national literary awards and acclaim. An accomplished author, Carl has published books of fiction, essays, and poetry, and his work includes projects across print, broadcast, and multimedia platforms. He holds a BA in English Studies and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Philippines. Through his advocacy and artistry, Carl continues to shape conversations technology, culture, and ethics in the digital age.