Four Hours Before Death
Kahiramura Klein's alarm buzzed at 5 PM—the curse of the graveyard shift worker. His studio apartment in Tondo was a generous description for what was essentially a converted storage room with a mattress on the floor and a portable burner for cooking. The walls were thin enough that he could hear Mrs. Santos arguing with her drunk husband next door, and somewhere above, a baby cried endlessly.
He checked his phone while heating water for instant coffee. Three missed calls from his mother in Japan. He'd call her back after work—international rates were murder during peak hours, and he needed every peso.
The commute to Ortigas took two hours on a good day—jeepney to the MRT station, train to Ortigas if it wasn't broken down, then a fifteen-minute walk to the BPO building. He made this journey six days a week, earning 25,000 pesos monthly to handle complaints from angry Americans about their cable bills.
"Klein, my friend!" Rico called out as Klein entered the office. "You look like shit. When was the last time you ate actual food?"
"Define actual food," Klein replied, settling into his cubicle. The air conditioning was the best part of this job—ten hours of escape from Manila's suffocating heat.
"I'm serious, pre. You're skin and bones. Here." Rico pushed half of his packed dinner across the divider—sinigang and rice in a dented Tupperware. "My wife made extra."
Klein's stomach clenched with hunger, but he pushed it back. "I'm good, salamat. Ate before coming." The lie came easily. He'd gotten good at them.
[author] salamat (filipino) means thank you[/author]
"Bullshit. Eat, or I'm telling Manager Chen you're sick."
Klein accepted the food, each bite a mixture of gratitude and shame. This was survival in Tondo—accepting kindness when you couldn't afford pride, knowing you'd never be able to repay it.
The shift dragged on. Angry voices in his headset, demanding supervisors, threatening to cancel services. Klein absorbed their rage with practiced calm, his voice never wavering from the script. "I understand your frustration, sir. Let me see what I can do to help."
At 2 AM, his break finally came. He stepped onto the building's smoking area, though he didn't smoke—couldn't afford the vice. The city sprawled below, a mixture of gleaming towers and dark slums, wealth and poverty separated by streets but worlds apart.
His phone buzzed. A message from his mother: The doctors say we need to start treatment soon. I told them my son is sending money. You are sending it, right, Kahi?
He stared at the message, calculating. Rent: 8,000. Food: 3,000 if he stretched it. Transportation: 2,000. Utilities: 1,000. That left 11,000 pesos—about 200 USD. His mother needed 500 USD just for the consultation.
There were ways to make extra money in Manila. He knew guys who sold shabu on the side, though Duterte's drug war had made that suicidal. Others worked for the online scam farms, tricking elderly Americans out of their savings.
Then there was Rico's cousin Miguel, who'd approached him last week with a different offer.
"Not drugs, not scams," Miguel had said, lighting a cigarette in this exact spot. "Medical tourism. We find foreigners—the drunk ones, the ones who wander into the wrong areas—and connect them with private clinics. The clinics pay finder's fees."
"Finder's fees for what?" Klein had asked, though he already knew.
"Donors. People willing to sell a kidney, part of their liver. All legal, all voluntary. The clinic pays the donor, donor pays us a cut. Everybody wins."
"And if they're not willing?"
Miguel had shrugged. "That's not our department. We just make introductions. Fifty thousand pesos per successful connection. Clean money, no risk."
Klein had walked away from that conversation, but the offer haunted him. Fifty thousand would cover his mother's consultation and initial treatment. He'd just be making introductions. Just pointing someone toward an opportunity. What they chose to do after that wasn't his responsibility.
Except he knew it was bullshit. He knew exactly what happened to the "unwilling donors."
"Hey, Klein." Annie from the next shift appeared beside him. "You okay? You look… troubled."
Annie was one of the few genuine people in the office. Pretty, smart, kind—everything Klein would have pursued if he'd been a different man in a different life.
"Just tired," he said.
"We're all tired." She leaned against the railing beside him. "But there's tired and there's whatever you are. When did you last take a day off?"
"Can't afford to."
"Can't afford not to. You're going to burn out, and then what? Your mom still needs you functional."
She didn't know how much her words cut. Functional. As if he was anything more than a money transfer service in human form.
"Listen," Annie continued, "my church is doing a feeding program this Sunday. Why don't you come? Free breakfast, and Father Miguel is actually pretty cool. Not preachy."
"I don't really do church."
"Neither do I, usually. But sometimes…" she shrugged. "Sometimes it helps to remember there's something bigger than just surviving another day."
Klein felt something twist in his chest—not quite hope, but close. "Maybe. I'll think about it."
"Good." She smiled, and for a moment, Klein let himself imagine a different life. One where he had time for church and breakfast and conversations that weren't about cable bills or medical debts.
Before he could respond further, their supervisor's voice crackled over the intercom. "Break's over, people. Back to your stations."
2:47 AM - The Final Hour
The shift ended with the usual exhaustion. Klein's throat was raw from talking, his ear aching from the headset. His last call had been an elderly woman crying because she couldn't understand her bill, reminding him painfully of his mother.
He declined Rico's offer to share a Grab taxi—couldn't justify the expense—and walked toward the jeepney station. But the last jeep had already left. He checked his wallet: 200 pesos until payday, still three days away. A taxi would cost 150 at this hour.
Walking it was, then. Through Ortigas, past the closed malls and sleeping guards, into the progressively darker streets as he moved toward Tondo. He'd done this walk before when desperate. It took three hours, but three hours of walking beat being broke.
He thought about Annie's invitation as he walked. Church. Community. Something bigger than survival. And he thought about Miguel's offer. Fifty thousand pesos for one introduction. His mother's face when she'd told him about the cancer, trying to sound brave.
I'll figure something out, he'd told her. Don't worry, Mom. I'll take care of it.
But how? By selling out some drunk foreigner to organ harvesters? By watching someone else's mother lose a son so his could live?
Klein stopped walking, standing alone on an empty street corner in the pre-dawn darkness. He pulled out his phone and opened his messages. Miguel's number was there, saved but never called.
His thumb hovered over it.
One call. That's all it would take. One introduction, fifty thousand pesos, his mother's life saved.
He thought of the elderly woman from his last call, crying over a bill she couldn't understand. Someone's mother. Someone's grandmother.
Klein deleted Miguel's number.
"I'll figure something else out," he whispered to the empty street. "I have to."
He didn't know it, but in that moment, he had made the choice that would define his entire existence. It wasn't a single weight that tipped the scales, but the final, definitive expression of a life spent navigating the gray areas, a life of difficult compromises and small acts of integrity in the face of overwhelming need.
Klein put his phone away and continued walking toward Tondo. As he entered the narrow alleys of his neighborhood, he made a decision. He'd go to Annie's church. Not for God—he still wasn't sure about that—but for the free meal and the reminder that there were still good people in the world.
He'd figure out his mother's treatment somehow. Legally. Honestly. Even if it took longer.
He never heard the attacker approach.
The blade came from behind—a broken bottle, jagged and crude. It punctured his kidney with brutal efficiency. Klein collapsed to the dirty concrete, his blood pooling warm beneath him.
"Wallet. Phone. Now." The voice was young, desperate, high on something.
Klein tried to speak, but only a wet gurgle emerged. He managed to pull out his wallet—200 pesos and an expired credit card—and his cheap smartphone. The mugger snatched them, then paused.
"Fuck. This is all you got?" The kid's voice was sharp with frustration and chemical rage. He looked down at Klein's bleeding form, his dilated eyes darting from the blood to the cheap phone. The aggression fractured into something messy and confused—not clean remorse, but a drugged, panicked realization of the pointless violence. "Shit… shit, man, I didn't mean to…" His voice cracked, slurred. He backed away, then turned and ran, leaving Klein to die alone in the alley.
But Klein was already dying. The bottle had severed something critical. He could feel his consciousness fragmenting, the world going gray at the edges.
Mom, he thought. I'm sorry. I tried.
His last thought wasn't of pain or fear or regret. It was a strange kind of relief. At least he'd died without compromising. At least that final choice had been the right one.
As darkness claimed Kahiramura Klein, his soul should have entered the overwhelmed cosmic queue, destined to float in limbo for centuries like billions of others. But something else happened.
In the space between spaces, the Godfather's protocol activated.
Sensors that had never been needed detected a soul hovering at the precipice of perfect balance. Ancient code, written into reality itself, executed its primary function. It intercepted Klein's soul, pulling it from the broken classification system before it could be lost.
The scales appeared, ancient and absolute, weighing his soul with perfect precision.
On one side: Every kindness shown despite poverty. Every temptation resisted. Every lie told to protect others. His devotion to his mother. His refusal to profit from suffering even when desperate. That final choice to delete Miguel's number—the culminating expression of his integrity.
On the other: Every lie told to survive. Food stolen when starving. Rage harbored against life's unfairness. The moment he'd seriously considered Miguel's offer. Small cruelties born of exhaustion. Customers cursed under his breath.
The scales trembled. Swung back and forth. Tipped left, then right, oscillating with increasing speed as every deed, every thought, every choice was measured against its opposite.
And then, for the first time in the history of creation, they stopped.
Perfectly level.
Perfectly balanced.
In the cosmic throne room, alarms that had never sounded began to wail. Reality itself seemed to hold its breath.
"Illumi!" God's voice carried urgency. "What is that sound?"
"I don't know, my Lord. The classification system is—it's freezing. There's a soul that—" Illumi's light flickered in confusion. "It won't categorize. It's neither rising nor falling. It's just… suspended."
In Hell, the Demon God looked up sharply, feeling the same disturbance. "Impossible."
But it wasn't impossible. It was inevitable.
In the space between spaces, the Godfather opened eyes that had never known sight. Ancient protocols activated.
[CONDITION MET: Soul Balance = Perfect Equilibrium]
[PROTOCOL OVERRIDE: Neutral Protocol initiating…]
[STATUS: Soul Kahiramura Klein intercepted from standard classification queue]
[NOTE: Standard processing overwhelmed. Contingency protocol activated.]
[Emotional Dampening Field: Online]
For the first time, Klein's consciousness—now fully separated from his body—experienced the Neutral trait. The sheer, overwhelming terror of death and the unknown crashed over him, but then… it flattened. It was still there, sharp and cold, but it no longer controlled him. It was like watching his own fear through soundproof glass.
"Finally," the Godfather whispered, his voice the sound of possibility itself. "After all this time. Welcome, Kahiramura Klein. Let me show you what exists beyond binary thinking."
The age of absolutes had ended.