03/10/2026
In an alley tucked inside Tondo Makulay, a man finds a manifesto, and the moment his weary soul chooses joy as resistance.
Substack (or read below): https://open.substack.com/pub/singawsity/p/the-makulay-vow?r=7vqj5u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The Makulay Vow
An alley, a manifesto, and the moment a weary soul chose joy as resistance.
By the time Ivan left **The Bronzed Derby**, his wrists smelled of citrus and brass, his bronze vest clung damply to his back, and his legs felt like they were still moving only because the night had not yet given them permission to stop. He had spent the last six hours doing what he always did—sliding between bodies and barstools, restocking bottles before anyone asked, catching spills before they spread, keeping the whole beautiful machine from stalling. He was good at being the unseen force. Too good.
Outside, **Tondo Makulay** received him the way it received everyone who belonged to it: not gently, but vividly.
The borough breathed in steam and color. Wooden buildings patched with brass fittings leaned over narrow streets streaked with rainwater and paint. Rooftop vents exhaled in tired bursts. Wind turbines turned above the dark like patient skeletal flowers. Murals blazed across walls and alleyways—folklore creatures painted with gears for bones, saints in welding goggles, protest slogans buried beneath newer layers of AR-tagged color. Even at this hour, the place felt awake in a way richer districts never did. Not polished. Not obedient. Alive.
Ivan walked with his head low and his derby hat tilted forward, one hand rubbing the bright bandana tied at his wrist. His fingers still tapped out the rhythm of work against his thigh. He was tired in the way that made thought feel grainy. Tired enough that the city blurred at the edges. Tired enough that the dream he kept folded inside himself—his own café-bar one day, something full of art and sustainability and room for people to breathe—felt less like a future than a sketch smudging in his pocket.
A soft green flicker crossed the inside of his goggles.
Gizmo.
A tiny clockwork creature scampered across the corner of his vision, brass limbs pumping, glowing eyes bright with its usual impossible energy. “Route home remains optimal,” it chirped in its upbeat mechanical voice. Then, after a beat: “Hydration remains suboptimal.”
Ivan let out a dry laugh. “You say that to a man or a machine?”
“To a problem,” Gizmo said cheerfully.
Ivan shook his head and turned down a side street he knew by habit more than thought—an alley between a shuttered workshop and a wall of layered posters so old they had become part of the brick. Above him, pipes crisscrossed overhead like blackened roots. One hanging bulb burned amber through a film of grime, pouring a warm cone of light over the wall ahead.
That was when he stopped.
At first, it looked like just another poster pasted over a hundred others, paper curling at the corners, edges ragged from weather and fingers. But this one held the light strangely. The colors did not merely sit on the paper. They seemed to press outward from it—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet—like the wall had split open and something brighter underneath was insisting on being seen.
Across the top, in big unapologetic letters, it said:
**THE MAKULAY VOW**
Ivan stared.
The alley seemed to draw in around him. The steam hiss from a nearby pipe, the far rattle of a tricycle, laughter somewhere deeper in the borough—everything dimmed behind the shape of those words.
He stepped closer.
The poster was weathered but defiant. Soot smudged its surface. Rain had puckered the paper in places. Someone had tried to tear one corner away and failed. Under the amber bulb, the rainbow letters burned against the black background like color refusing burial.
Beneath the title were the lines.
**I KNOW MYSELF.**
Ivan’s mouth tightened.
He read the next one.
**I ALIGN WITH MYSELF.**
Something in his chest shifted—not a jolt, not yet. Just the strange discomfort of hearing a truth put plainly when you had spent years living around it instead of inside it.
He kept reading.
**I FREE MYSELF.**
His jaw flexed. He thought of long shifts. Of working until his body felt borrowed. Of people from other districts walking into Tondo and into the Derby with money in their collars and contempt in their eyes, expecting every hand around them to serve without ever being seen. He thought of the quiet resentment he carried toward the sleek corporate elites of Gitnang Light District, and how often he had mistaken endurance for freedom.
The next line hit harder.
**I BUILD WITH MY AI, NOT BENEATH IT.**
Gizmo went silent.
Ivan did not know why that silence unnerved him more than the words. Maybe because Gizmo was almost never silent. Maybe because the line reached straight into the hidden shape of his days. Gizmo helped him think, sort, track, survive the rush. Not as a master. Not as a leash. As a partner. A little brass mind racing beside his own. In a world where so many people feared being reduced to inputs and outputs, the line felt like a hand gripping the back of his neck and turning his face toward something cleaner: collaboration instead of submission, technology as ally instead of throne.
He swallowed and read on.
**I DECENTRALIZE MY LIFE.**
**I RECLAIM MY TIME.**
That one nearly undid him.
Because time, Ivan knew, was one of the first things the world taught you to surrender. Give it to the shift. Give it to survival. Give it to efficiency. Give it to someone richer, louder, more comfortable. He had always told himself his exhaustion was noble because it was useful. But standing there in that wet, rust-streaked alley, looking at that beaten poster beneath that tired bulb, he felt the difference between usefulness and ownership. For the first time, he understood that a life could be spent in service and still belong to the one living it.
Then:
**I CHOOSE JOY AS RESISTANCE.**
Ivan blinked.
Not rage.
Not martyrdom.
Joy.
His eyes lifted from the words and drifted outward, as if the borough itself had written the answer around him years before he was ready to read it. He saw paint bleeding down brick in impossible colors. Heard distant music pulsing from an unseen courtyard. Smelled oil, rain, sugar, smoke, old wood, frying garlic. Tondo Makulay had always fought like this—not only with slogans and sabotage, but with murals, workshops, festivals, handmade machines, shared labor, art in public, beauty where beauty was least expected. The borough did not survive by becoming harder than the world. It survived by becoming more alive than the systems built to flatten it.
His gaze dropped to the last lines.
**I AM SOVEREIGN.**
**I AM UNGOVERNABLE.**
**I AM MAKULAY.**
The alley held its breath.
Then Gizmo made a very small sound—less a notification than a whisper of awakening.
A single point of blue-gold light appeared at the edge of Ivan’s vision.
Then another.
Then three more.
They lifted from the poster like sparks finding wings.
Digital Fireflies.
Tiny bodies of pulsing light, delicate wings traced with woven patterns like banig and malong code, fluttering in a slow orbit around the Vow. They were not loud. They were not theatrical. They moved with the quiet certainty of something that had been waiting for him to stop long enough to see it.
The wall beside the poster shimmered.
An AR layer breathed awake across the old mural there—just enough to make the painted figures glow at their edges. A carabao made of scrap metal lowered its head. A field of impossible color unfurled behind it. One of the fireflies drifted forward, paused in front of Ivan, and pulsed softly like a heartbeat.
Not a command.
Not a recruitment.
A recognition.
Ivan felt suddenly, absurdly seen.
Not for how fast he moved. Not for how useful he was. Not for how well he kept other people’s worlds from falling apart. Seen for the part of himself that still wanted more than endurance. The part that wanted to build. To create. To belong to a future that did not have to be bought from the people trying to own it.
His throat tightened.
He reached up and adjusted the brim of his hat with a hand that was no longer steady.
“Gizmo,” he said quietly.
The little AI reappeared in the corner of his vision, eyes bright but voice gentler now. “Yes, Ivan?”
He looked again at the line:
**I BUILD WITH MY AI, NOT BENEATH IT.**
Then at:
**I RECLAIM MY TIME.**
Then at:
**I CHOOSE JOY AS RESISTANCE.**
When he finally spoke, it was almost to himself.
“I thought this was for other people.”
Gizmo tilted its tiny brass head. “Maybe,” it said, “you are other people to the version of you that was here yesterday.”
Ivan laughed then—softly, unexpectedly, the sound rough with exhaustion and something dangerously close to hope.
The firefly nearest him rose, circled once, and slipped into the dark mouth of the alley ahead, leaving behind a brief ribbon of light.
Ivan did not follow it.
Not yet.
But he no longer felt like a man merely walking home from work.
He stood for one more long moment beneath the amber bulb, in the steam and paint and rust of Tondo Makulay, with the Vow blazing on the wall before him like a door he had not known was waiting.
Then he touched the bandana at his wrist, breathed in the wet electric night, and walked on differently than he had arrived—as if the city had not recruited him, but remembered him.
