Congressman Ismael Bukad knew he was a creature of fiction. If he was different from everyone else, it was only because he was conscious of it. Not everyone was.

His maker, this writer, Raymund L. Fernandez, also knew Raymund L. Fernandez was a creature of fiction. He was in a sense "real". But what you know of him is simply a story of indeterminate veracity. Is he this or that? How would you know? Just like you, the "true reality" of him is located in secrets he will not likely reveal. Indeed, he has secrets he cannot reveal even to himself. Like you, he is constructed of stories told about him. And they are always far from what is true.

And just like Congressman Bukad and his maker, you, the reader, are also a creature of fiction. It is the fiction you tell about yourself. You cannot be truly sure who you are. Philosophers and psychologists have said as much. And then there is the fact of change and of time moving forward. A person is not a fixed creature made from stone. He/she is a complex of chemicals and electricity that translate into experience and then memory. He/she is individual, unique and mysterious even to himself or herself. You are a story of fear and desire and remembrance. It is a story you tell yourself and to your self. At best it is only partly true and so must be fiction. Just like this story, which is fiction coming near as possible to truth.

Congressman Bukad thought of the Internet and saw how it has taken the place of oral sagas and epics our ancestors used to tell to remind us who we were and where we came from, the fiction of our history. He saw how it had taken the place of ancient walls which used to hold hieroglyphics telling the same thing. In time, the books of all time will be found here in the Internet and they will have to compete to be read against blogs and Facebooks. Time has changed to the same extent that the meaning of the word "fiction" has changed.

Congressman Bukad saw that the Internet is not just a field for social networking. It was also a place of social and political mobilization. He wanted to study it in the sense of technique and as a tool of power. How does one "work" it? He would have gone into that today except that he had received a request from his maker to think instead about "morality" in the context of the Web. And he, of course, agreed with him. For that is where all must start.

Logic and reason are mechanical things. Just like causality. If these events occur, this will be the consequent result. It is physics. It is the box of computer programming thus far. Logic and reason can be programmed into a robot the same way a concept of individual and social survival can be inserted, over time, into the biology of even the most simple organisms. One can admittedly assert that this is all there is to life. But for Congressman Bukad and his maker, there had to be more.

Such a model can be reduced into its simplest terms. Are we an eternal battery circuited to an eternal light bulb and then floated into infinite space? Why are we here? Are we simply waiting for that one all-powerful force that would destroy us? Are we waiting only for entropy? That was not the universe Congressman Bukad and his maker saw. Theirs was a universe half order and half chance. And at the center of it, Choice.

One may very well claim that Choice is as fictitious as this story. But Bukad and his maker assert otherwise. They did not just believe in choice they believed in the depths of their being in the fact of the "heroic" choice. Jesus Christ could have escaped death, could have passed Himself off as just another "crazy" person harmless to the Romans. That would have been the logical thing to do. Instead he did the illogical thing. He staked an undeniable claim to what He believed He was. He got himself nailed onto a Roman cross. The rest is history and religion.

Bukad and his maker liked democracy. It asserted the primacy of human choice. For better of worse, men and women choose who should lead them. Their choices may be wrong as they often are. And it is always proven by the consequence of their choice. But the consequence of choice matters not as much as what precedes it. How does a person choose? What are the mechanics of it. And in its most elementary state, where does the choice come from?

It comes from a feeling for what is right. Bukad and his maker believed together with some of the Modernist philosophers. For them this was "morality". This was "aesthetics". The "feeling" might be rationalized but that would come after the feeling itself. For his part, Congressman Bukad had a feeling for the rightness of switching to the camp of Noynoy and Mar Roxas in the coming elections. But logic and reason, so far, told him he might lose. How should he resolve this?