By Dominic Dayta

Pam was late to the office that morning, to everybody's surprise. As executive assistant to their division's prickly vice president, she had strived to live up to expectations right from the word "go." Not that it was a struggle: she was goody-two-shoes Pam after all, who never so much as took a second drink at company open bars. She was only on occasion late for a single consistent reason: she had tried to beat the long lines at the bus stop again by taking a colorum – a cab from an unlicensed franchise – and gotten caught. Needless to say, she was out of herself when she finally settled near the front-most row in the conference room, next to other latecomers while the day's invited speaker wrapped up their introduction.

It was another one of those seminars that made their division notorious within the vast corporate hierarchy of HappyFly Foods Corporation. They had one each time their VP got another of her bright ideas on how to improve employee welfare - outside of giving them raises of course. That day it was a seminar called "God Wants You To Invest", led by the junior pastor of an evangelical church sponsored by the VP's country club who also happened to run a small investing firm managing mostly the VP's and other club members' portfolios.

Speaking of the VP, Pam was nodding apologetically to her all the way in the back of the room, while the reverend droned on about how the world today was full of strife and suffering: families being driven into the slums, teenagers unable to afford schooling and instead taking up lives of crime, starving babies, and youths switching genders with the season and having preferred pronouns. He read a passage from the Old Testament and asked the sleepy attendees, "Through all these, what do you think God wants us to do?"

Absent-mindedly, intending it as a joke to a few of her friends in the first two rows, Pam whispered, "Give alms?"

She forgot she was within earshot of the man, however. The reverend shrugged, spun his right hand in the air. "What else?"

From a few rows behind, Isagani from Customer Care cried out, "Support charitable foundations?"

Not quite the answer he was looking for. The reverend spun his hands faster. "And…?"

This time it was Patrick from the Compliance team: "Elect non-corrupt officials?"

"What more? What's a better thing that solves all of this?" The reverend was pointing at the easel by the door bearing the seminar's title card. For some reason he had his eyes trained on Pam. She shrugged.

He tried his best to hide his disappointment. "Why, invest in the stock market, of course!" The MBAs among them, and not a few who were more doctrinally aligned, remained dubious as to whether ex-dividend dates, earnings per share and Sharpe ratios were really things that the Lord trifled with, but none voiced out a rebuttal. All the same, the reverend laid down his reasoning for all. Without a doubt, he said, God wants us to set our house in order before we turn our attention to the rest of the world. How can we give alms if we have no alms to give? How can we support charitable foundations if we are also in need of charity? And how can we discern who is corrupt, when we are corrupted by need?

The solution, the Reverend concluded, was that first we needed to become rich. And in doing so, we would become better equipped to help the world. "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven," he quoted from Ecclesiastes. If we give alms to the poor now, they might end up only spending it on drugs or, heaven forbid, birth control. If we support charitable foundations today, they can turn around and lobby the government to legalise gay marriage.

"In short, ladies and gentlemen, God wants us all to become billionaires."

And again the MBAs and the more economically literate of them, those who had at least a working definition of the term "inflation," remained skeptical, but feebly so.

It wasn't just Pam: the reverend himself was unsure as to why his attention kept redirecting to the latecomer seated in the front row. Not even the fact that she kept exchanging whispers with her seatmates instead of pretending to listen, as the others were wont to do, offended him. Indeed, he found her insolence to be a façade, her lack of attention as something measured. Which was why he was beaming down at her when he finally asked his captive audience, "Who among you knows about the stock market?"

Pam hesitated – the man was practically gawping at her. Quite the punishment for being 13 minutes late, she thought, before finally managing to spit out a response: "It goes up?"

The reverend's smile widened. "And then what happens?"

Pam looked uneasily around her. Everybody's attention seemed trained on her, not the least of it the reverend's. Though she realised the stakes weren't that high – were practically nonexistent – she felt herself starting to sweat under her blouse. She shrugged. "Sometimes it goes down."

The reverend clapped his hands together, suppressing a squeal.

"And after that?"

"It goes up again?"

Finally, it clicked, at least for the reverend. He regarded Pam with brand new eyes and saw, this time, a vast wealth of experience. Surely he was looking at a woman of means, which she tried to conceal with her knockoff athleisure jacket, and a chic white-collared blouse from Zara, un-ironed to its crisp, wrinkled elegance. And she was working as an assistant - ha, classic! Such a pity, the lengths the one percent must go through today, in a society that glamorises need.

As for Pam, if asked now, she would no longer be able to explain exactly what went on in her mind that morning when the reverend asked her if she by any chance already held some stocks? Pam for some reason said yes. In fact – and here she chose a company recently abuzz in the news and some ridiculously high number to go along with it – she said she had 894,000 shares of MaxiMedia in her portfolio at the moment. Also, she was late because she found out she was down three percent this morning, instead of the usual one percent. Pam heard a suppressed guffaw behind her, from Patrick.

If the reverend's smile widened even a millimeter more he would have distended his jaw. She expected him to laugh now, to call her out on her obvious lie, maybe throw in a few punchlines himself before moving on with his presentation, leaving her be. Instead he put his hands together in the manner of prayer, pressed against his nose, and walked around the makeshift podium looking up at the ceiling.

"God bless your portfolio," he said.

"What?" Pam said.

"Of course you were affected by the news this morning? And for it to have broken just before the market opened!" He had his right hand to his chest now, as if grasping at a pain in his heart, while with his left he extended an open palm at her. Pam didn't know it, but over the last week MaxiMedia had been in hot water over allegations that devices from their newest line of smart home products, developed in collaboration with a budding tech startup, were secretly recording sound and video of their customers and sending them out to data centers in Shanghai. That morning, reporters surfaced a clipped recording from an unaired podcast episode in which the company's CTO quipped that they had always been doing this, hence the company's motto, "We listen!"

"My dear child, you must have been suffering!"

"Sorry, I don't think you understand."

"I do," he shot back. "Eight hundred ninety-four thousand shares – that puts you at nought-point-15 percent ownership, just next to the lowest ownership share among the top one hundred holders at nought-point-thirty. As a major shareholder, you hold a majority of the company's pain as well."

Pam didn't know if she was supposed to laugh. A 0.15 per-cent ownership of the country's largest multimedia conglomerate? Surely, the reverend must know she was joking by now. That percentage was only slightly larger than the interest rate on her savings account, in which she kept just the minimum balance. If he was turning the joke right back at her, he betrayed no indication of it. With a grave face, he asked everyone to excuse the sudden interruption to their program, bow their heads a moment, so they could pray.

"For Ms Pamela here, and the executives over at MaxiMedia, Inc. God has put a burden on their souls, but with our faith, I'm sure they can weather it."

Over the next two weeks, a congressional hearing would be called to investigate the potential national security threat posed by MaxiMedia's uncontrolled scraping and sending of domestic customer data to China. The sessions, lasting three hours each, would be aired live via the official government sponsored channel, as well as in two-hour segments accompanied by "expert commentary" on MaxiMedia's own station just before primetime. Daily hour-long podcast episodes available exclusively to MM+ subscribers gave even more in-depth breakdowns of what hosts deemed were the most incisive inquiries posed by representatives, and how deftly and expertly the people at MaxiMedia fielded them.

Throughout the first week and the earlier part of the second one, the nation sat enthralled in their respective living rooms as the controversy unfolded, right until a new one exploded from the sidelines. It turned out that a big-name representative from Metro Manila who capitalised on his image as a conservative family man lamenting the loss of traditional Christian values in society (his campaign slogan: "Marriage should be happy – not gay!") had been propositioning men in the underground sex worker spaces on Twitter – and that he was also something of a bottom. This led to said representative abstaining from the rest of the sessions, until for some reason the rest of congress decided to just not hold them anymore.

By that time Pam had forgotten all about her misfired joke during the investment seminar, could not even remember the password to the online brokerage account that the reverend opened for them for a minimal fee of 2,000 pesos. Walking towards the bus stop already overflowing with commuters waiting to ambush the next one that makes the mistake of stopping there, she contemplated making a right turn into the narrow alley where her favourite colorum was still taking passengers. She ultimately decided against it, not wanting to risk being late more than once within the same month and earn the VP's wrath. They had a big day ahead of them, with lots of important calls lined up – at least the VP did, but she was going to do all the dialling.

Yet she would still end up late, would actually not make it to work at all for the entire day, because two blocks from the bus stop she would be waved over by someone inside a black Mercedes, looking luxuriously wet in the six o'clock dew. It took a few seconds for the face to register to her memory, because at that time Pam had forgotten all about him as well. The reverend, however, had not. The reverend had not thought of anyone else for the last two weeks, and now he was opening the door to the car and gesturing for her to hop in.

"Why don't you ask your chauffeur to drive you to work?" the reverend asked while they drove past the swelling fray at the bus stop.

"I like to keep myself humble."

The reverend nodded proudly. Pam wondered if it was just a wet morning, but the old man's eyes were moist.

"Listen," Pam started, "I think I might have misled you."

"I know, I know," the reverend said, cutting her off. "I got you wrong."

"Great," said Pam. She sat back on the leather couch and watched the highway hurtle past outside the window. This wasn't so bad, she thought to herself, certainly better than wrestling to get on and off the packed buses that plied the highway at half speed. Too bad her fiction of being filthy rich was just that.

The reverend kept on: "Of course you're not headed to the office. You're headed to the shareholders' meeting."

Pam's jaw was on the floor. By now she was dumbstruck as to what else she could say to disabuse him of her unfortunate jesting. He was nodding enthusiastically as he spoke, his fist opening and closing in the air as if he's unlocked some great mystery in the universe, and he was this close to exploding for being the only one that knew: "Point 15 percent, you've got to be. Why do you try so hard to hide among the masses?"

"Because I am. I've got, like, 80,000 in my savings – and only because payday was yesterday."

"Of course you do," the reverend winked. "You wouldn't liquidate your stocks. The capital gains in this country, right? Just highway robbery, out in the open."

"I'm under soul-crushing debt."

"And Bill Gates isn't? The Sy brothers? It's all a game of hot potato, isn't it? Look, I perfectly understand you want to keep your holdings a secret. You like to feel like you're part of the working class. You want to stay grounded, like Jesus. It's noble and I admire it. It's not like I'm going around telling everyone. I certainly haven't told Mrs Alcazar" – he was referring to her boss – "at least not since the seminar."

Pam gave up. There was no point arguing with the man. What else was she going to do – ask to be let off less than halfway to the business district, where the buses are even more full, and the competition more brutal? At least she was getting a free ride to wherever, hopefully somewhere within a quick cab transfer to the office. Whether Alcazar too thought she was some nouveau riche in disguise, she was about to cash in a huge check of her rage if she didn't get there soon. Where was this shareholder meeting anyway?

Half an hour would pass before her question could be answered. Making a turn before the flyover, they entered Ortigas and navigated to the ballroom entrance of one of the swankier hotels in the area. A wave of relief washed over Pam. She was 10 minutes away from the office. She could get off here and hightail it to work. But when she looked over beside her, intending to thank the reverend for the ride, he had already just slammed his door behind him. He walked around to Pam's side to open the door for her. He had a devious smile on his face.

"I did tell a few people though," he said, reaching his hand out to her. "But I promise this is the last time."

The reverend guided her through the revolving doors and into the ballroom, and along the way a number of men and women in black ties, satin lapels, and subdued beadwork worth 10, a hundred times her annual pay and carrying brand names she only ever heard from rap songs shook hands with the two of them. They all knew her name, for some reason, referred to her by the last name that Alcazar only ever used in a shouting voice whenever she made a grievous error in some memo or another.

Twice, the men pulled her aside and asked a roaming photographer to take some with her. The flash dazzled her eyes, adding to her confusion. The loud, corporate-friendly muzak throbbing from the speakers all around and above her lent the entire thing a surreal air, like some rich girl in a movie was dying and she was watching the supercut of her memories before everything faded to white. Able to keep herself upright only through a tight grip on the reverend's arm, she continued on towards one of the tables near the stage, where cards set on top of the chargers spelled out her and the reverend's names.

For the longest time MaxiMedia, Inc had been partially owned by a mysterious, unknown investor who worked only through an intermediary law firm. This mystery investor's shares had been just below majority status for their identity to really matter, until the recent circus pushed various executives to liquidate parts of their holdings. Now that their share put them right at the 100th spot, there was considerable interest in pulling this shadowy figure into the light. It had been the reverend's great pleasure to announce before the board of directors that she was making her very first public appearance at the meeting.

"I know I violated your secrecy, but after all the tribulations the company has been through, I realised it was my calling to get you to accept your role within the company. Being a shareholder is a major burden, but it's one you should accept. For God. For the company. For the health of the economy."

Pam was only half-listening as the reverend recounted in between spinach quiches and sips of Don Perignon the serendipitous tale of her unmasking. At the time, the only thing she had in mind was how they got hold of a photo of her at the beach during their division's ghost-hunting cum team-building activity in Baler, and how stupid her face looked cropped and exploded to 10 times in size like that and projected on the stage, along with the rest of the faces that made up MaxiMedia's majority shareholders.

"Do you accept?"

Pam, still stunned, took a sip from her Perignon and nodded. Maybe. Maybe she could accept it. Why not?

_____