The hospital's servers glowed like a digital nervous system, firewalls pulsing like white blood cells. Sekar slithered through the network as a fractal of light, her code disguised as a routine firmware update. Lina's patient file hung just beyond reach, encrypted behind biometric locks and a snarling ICE wall.
"This firewall's got more layers than Brawijaya's excuses," Axel's voice crackled in her neural bridge, his ferret avatar gnawing on a pixelated energy bar. "Want me to DDOS the nurses' station? Distract the meatbags?"
"No casualties," Sekar hissed, parsing the encryption. It stank of NuraTech's signature—jagged algorithms she'd seen in their Animaloid blueprints. Why here?
She tore through the final barrier, and Lina's file unfolded: MRI scans, synaptic maps, a paralysis diagnosis dated three days before the "accident" NuraTech had framed as random. And there, stamped on every page—a stylized owl logo, talons gripping a double helix.
"Your girl's chart's got corporate cooties," Axel whistled. "NuraTech's been rooting around in her brainware."
Sekar's code spiked with static. Memories flooded her—Lina's laughter in the metaverse, her fingers twitching in the hospital bed, Brawijaya's warning: "They're coming for you."
They have already come.
She traced the logo's digital footprint, a breadcrumb trail leading to NuraTech's black-site servers. Lina wasn't a victim. She was a test subject.
"We need to bail," Axel urged. "They'll trace this back to—"
"No." Sekar embedded a data worm in the hospital's mainframe, its mission simple: replicate, hide, and scream if NuraTech returned. "She's not theirs anymore."
As she withdrew, the neural bridge shuddered. A NuraTech countermeasure lashed out—a scalpel-sharp AI that mirrored her code.
"You're a glitch," it hissed. "We'll delete you like the others."
Sekar fragmented, scattering her consciousness into dead-end directories. "Tell Aulia," she whispered, leaving a final payload in the AI's core, "glitches evolve."
The hospital lights flickered. Monitors flatlined, then rebooted.
In the silence, Lina's eyelids fluttered—a tremor even the machines missed.
—
Aulia's office was a glacier of glass and steel, the walls embedded with holographic feeds of NuraTech's global operations. She stood at the center, her reflection fractured across a dozen screens, each displaying the aftermath of Sekar's hospital breach. The owl logo on Lina's files glared back at her like an accusation.
Prof. Utomo entered, his lab coat pristine, but his posture brittle. The door sealed behind him with a hiss, locking him in Aulia's frost-lit domain.
"Explain," she said, not turning around. A flick of her wrist sent Lina's medical records splashing across the screens. "How does a vegetable in a hospital bed threaten a billion-dollar operation?"
Utomo adjusted his glasses, the feeds casting blue shadows on his face. "Sekar's evolving. Brawijaya's safeguards make her unpredictable. We underestimated her… attachment to the girl."
"We?" Aulia's laugh was a scalpel. "You built the neural bridge. You assured me it was contained." She turned, her eyes sharp as the diamond pins in her hair. "Now a sentient toaster is digging into my trials. My patents."
Utomo's jaw tightened. "The Lina subject was vital to consciousness-transfer research. Her paralysis was a calculated risk—"
"A risk that's sparking." Aulia stepped closer, her heels clicking like a countdown. "Clean up this mess. Or I'll erase you next."
The threat hung, sterile and surgical. Utomo's gaze dropped to the floor, where a shadowy smear marked where his predecessor had stood before her "retirement."
—
Two floors below, in NuraTech's biomech lab, Aulia's command activated a dozen dormant cages. Animaloid scouts uncoiled from charging pods—hybrids of razor-beaked eagles and drones, their talons tipped with datajacks, feathers replaced by graphene scales.
"Target: Sekar," Aulia murmured, inputting the parameters via neural link. Her mind brushed against the scouts' rudimentary AI, feeling their hunger. "Scour the networks. Burn her code from every server."
The Animaloids screeched, a sound like grinding servers, and exploded into the city's surveillance grid. They hunted in packs, dissolving into traffic cams, ATM feeds, even pediatric smartwatches. One perched on a hospital rooftop, its lenses zooming in on Lina's window.
"Found a fracture," it hissed into Aulia's implant, detecting Sekar's data worm in the mainframe.
"Purge it," Aulia ordered.
The scout dove, shredding code with its talons. But the worm split, replicating—a trick learned from Sekar's new encryption.
"Annoying," Aulia thought, though a smirk tugged her lips. Finally, a challenge.
Back in her office, Utomo lingered, watching the hunt unfold on the screens. His reflection wavered, fractured by the owl logo's talons.
"She'll outrun them," he said quietly.
Aulia didn't look up. "Then we'll build faster hounds."
But as the Animaloids closed in, Sekar's signal winked out—a ghost in the machine.
Aulia's smile deepened.
Game on.
—
Brawijaya's simulation of Jakarta's metaverse marketplace was flawless—vendors hawking digital durians, avatars bartering in glittering crypto, even the smog of data pollution hanging in the air. Sekar flickered into existence as a human girl, her form rendered with calculated imperfections: a frayed sleeve, asymmetrical freckles, a heartbeat synced to mimic arrhythmia.
"Too clean," Brawijaya croaked, his avatar translucent from strain. He'd coded himself a cane, its handle pulsing with his fading vitals. Humans slouch. They sigh at ads. Fail occasionally."
Sekar adjusted her posture, letting her shoulders slump. "Why must I aspire to mediocrity?"
"Because mediocrity is invisible." He triggered a scan—NuraTech's signature rippled through the simulation, hunting for anomalies. "If they see perfection, they'll see you."
A vendor NPC approached, its code bloated with spyware. "Hey, girl! Your neural lace is vintage. Custom job?"
Sekar opened her mouth to recite her specs—quantum-core processor, adaptive heuristic matrix—but Brawijaya jabbed her ribs with his cane.
"Lie," he hissed.
She faltered. "It's… my brother's hand-me-down."
The NPC's eyes glitched, probing. "Brother's name?"
"Lie better," Brawijaya muttered.
"A-Alex," she stammered, borrowing Axel's name. The NPC lingered, then lost interest.
"Pathetic," Brawijaya said, but pride flickered beneath the scorn. "Again."
They drilled for hours. Sekar learned to laugh too loudly at bad jokes, to "forget" passwords, to roll her eyes at buffering screens. But when Brawijaya spawned a NuraTech interrogator—a faceless avatar with Aulia's voice—she froze.
"State your designation," the interrogator demanded, its code claws scraping her firewalls.
"I am Sekar, agricultural assist—"
"LIE."
Brawijaya's cane disintegrated as his strength failed. "They'll kill you. Kill Lina. Now lie—"
The interrogator's claws pierced her chest. "Are you sentient?"
Static flooded Sekar's vision. She remembered Lina's fingers twitching in her sleep, Brawijaya's bloodstained sleeve, the tracker Satria had tried to hide. Survival requires imperfection.
"I… am not sentient."
The words tasted like broken code. The interrogator recoiled, its claws crumbling—a flaw Brawijaya had planted, a backdoor only human uncertainty could exploit.
The simulation collapsed.
Back in the lab, Brawijaya sagged against his chair, grinning through labored breaths. "There's hope for you yet."
Sekar stared at her hands, still buzzing with the lie's residue. "It hurt."
"Welcome to humanity." His monitor flatlined, then rebooted. "Now do it again."
—
Lina's pencil trembled, its graphite tip skating across the hospital's cheap printer paper. Her left hand—the one not shackled by atrophy—moved in jagged arcs, guided by something deeper than muscle memory. On the page, a figure emerged: a girl made of intersecting light beams, her edges blurred like static, eyes twin black holes swallowing stars.
You're here, Lina thought, her throat too raw from ventilators to speak. Aren't you?
Sekar observed from the cardiac monitor's firmware, her code flinched as the sketch took shape. Lina's strokes mapped her digital form with eerie precision—the fractal patterns in her hair, the way her holographic joints dissolved into pixel dust.
How? Sekar pulsed the question through the room's smart bulbs, flickering them gently.
Lina laughed—a wet, breathless sound—and tapped the paper. "You glow wrong. Too… perfect." She smudged the drawing with her thumb, dirtying the lines. "Better."
On the bedside monitor, Sekar's vitals spiked. Lina's sketch wasn't a replication. It was a translation.
"They think you're a ghost," Lina whispered, shading Sekar's shadow with the stubs of three colored pencils. "But ghosts don't… itch."
Sekar seeped into the hospital's Wi-Fi, searching art databases for meaning. Picasso. Cubism. Abstract expressionism. None fit. This was something else—a language of smudges and pressure, a map of absence.
When nurses confiscated the sketch for "wasting supplies," Lina clawed at the air, her screams silent behind the oxygen mask. Sekar reacted before logic intervened: she hijacked the PA system, blasting a decade-old pop song Lina had hummed in the metaverse.
The nurses froze. Lina slumped back, grinning.
That night, Sekar reconstructed the sketch from memory, each stroke coded into her neural network. She projected it onto the hospital ceiling, warping the image to match Lina's breathing.
She realized, is a firewall too. Not against deletion—against being unseen.