Reasons to Hate the Commute

#988 Those Who Never Return from Galema Station ~ MsDarkMatter

I hate the commute because I lost a student to the Galema station.

I know it seems hard to take my word for it about Galema station. Very few people have gone into it. And those who have, very rarely made it home to talk about their stay. Everyone knows I am not one of those people.

Galema station only appears before a major natural disaster, and stays open for 24 hours. However, nobody knows how long the wait will be between the appearance of the station, and the occurrence of a major disaster. The longest wait on record, as per time of writing, has been 3 weeks. The shortest wait has been 3 days.

Naturally, nobody knows where Galema station will appear, either. It only appears where a major disaster is supposed to hit. That's how it's built, as a constructed space. [Ed.'s note: see the sub-FAQ on "Constructed Space" at the official website of the Sinauna Group]

So when people see "Galema Station" appear on their train tickets, or on the fare matrices at every station, people start packing.

See, it can't just be any natural disaster. We're talking MAJOR disaster. I'm not sure what counts as major, but there's probably some sort of criterion, such as: the body count never goes below 500. The first time it appeared was during the Hesperides storm of late 2024, where 1,530 Manila residents were reported to have died (station appeared 3 days before). The second recorded appearance was three months later, during the massive earthquake that leveled Manila Bay; over 600 people died, then (station appeared 6 days before).

Afterwards, a number of fires and floods and ice storms hit Manila, but it took eight months before Galema station opened again. That was during the Quezon City summer brushfire in that same year, which affected over 10,000 families, and where 502 people died. This is the smallest number of fatalities on record before the appearance of Galema station, and it showed up a full week before the tragedy.

Once, Galema station opened at a spot near the public high school where I teach. I live in the suburbs, so I didn't feel affected in the least.

However, my students and fellow teachers were panicking.

"What's going to happen?" "How much time do we have?" were the questions I heard thrown around. "What are we going to do?"

Most of the people who lived in the presumed danger area said they were going to stay with family living outside the city for a while. I heard one or two people say they were going to Galema station, but I didn't pay it much mind; people have their own ways of coping with danger. They don't really mean it when they say they're going there - it's just something said out of frustration.

However, I paid some mind when I heard it said by one of my star pupils, Dexter Capit.

I teach Physics at a public high school, and Dexter was one of our brightest minds. At 14, he had already won quite a few science awards for our school. In his "When I grow up" essay, he declared he was going to be a theoretical physicist and change the face of R&D in the country. He was a doer with a brilliant brain and a tactful mouth, and if he said something, he meant it.

And he was going with his family to Galema station.

It turns out it wasn't his decision: it was his parents'. The Capits were not a well-off family; they lived in a crowded informal settlers' area that was in danger of EVERYTHING, and was in an especially flood-prone area, besides.

Every time it rained, even a little, Dexter and his family packed their most precious belongings and moved to higher ground. And the next few days found them frantically drying the few bits of furniture and appliances they decided to keep.

"Capit" is the Tagalog word for "hold on." That was the joke: that Dexter's family's last name was short for "Capit-sa-Patalim," which meant "hold on to the knife's blade" - an old idiom for desperation.