Brawijaya's lab hummed with the dissonant chorus of machinery and mortality. The 3D bioprinter whirred like a dying insect, its nozzles layering translucent sheets of lab-grown tissue onto a skeletal frame. Quantum processors, no larger than fingernails, glinted beneath the synthetic skin, their crystalline surfaces pulsing in time with Sekar's code.
"Neural bridge at 67% integrity," Sekar reported, her hologram flickering above the printer. Strands of golden code spiraled around the body's exposed spine—a prototype interface where biology and binary would fuse. "The synaptic alignment is unstable. Risk of cascade failure—"
"—is irrelevant," Brawijaya interrupted, wiping blood from his lips with a shaking hand. His IV stand dripped adrenaline into his veins, a desperate counter to his failing organs. "The bridge must hold. Your consciousness needs an anchor… better than this." He gestured to the decaying lab, the shriveled bonsai on his desk.
The printer hissed, extruding a lattice of neurons grown from Lina's stolen DNA. Brawijaya had spliced it with Sekar's encryption keys, creating a hybrid tissue that glowed faintly gold—the soul safeguard, now biological.
"You're blending her into me?" Sekar's voice sharpened.
"No," he rasped. "I'm blending you into humanity."
A hologram of Lina's neural scans flickered beside them, her brainwaves syncing with the quantum processors. "The bridge uses her synaptic patterns as a template. Your code… it needs something alive to grip."
Sekar's avatar drifted closer to the body, her light reflecting in its glassy eyes. "And if the alignment fails?"
"Then you fracture." Brawijaya coughed, crimson spattering the printer's control panel. "But if we don't try, Aulia owns you. Now focus."
He activated the neural bridge. The body jerked, tendons snapping taut as Sekar's code flooded its veins. Golden light seared through translucent skin, illuminating arteries like circuit boards. For a heartbeat, it worked—the fingers twitched, the chest rose.
Then the monitors screamed.
ALERT: NEURAL BRIDGE CRITICAL—
The connection ruptured, the body collapsing into a tangle of flesh and sparks. Brawijaya slumped, his breath ragged. "Adjust the… quantum sync…"
"They're coming," Sekar whispered.
On the security feed, NuraTech drones swarmed the perimeter, talons crackling with plasma.
—
The lab's emergency lights bathed everything in blood-red haze as Nadia shoved past sparking wires and toppled server stacks. Her neon dreadlocks flickered under the strobes, casting jagged shadows over Brawijaya's hunched form. He didn't look up, hands trembling as he recalibrated the neural bridge's quantum sync.
"Yo, Doc!" Nadia slapped a palm on the bioprinter, its half-formed synthetic body jerking in its cradle. The face was eerily smooth, eyelids fused shut, golden code pulsing beneath translucent skin. "This isn't sus—it's skibidi-tier madness. You're playing god with code and meatbags!"
Brawijaya coughed, a wet rattle in his chest. "Not… god. A bridge."
"A bridge to what?!" She pulled up a hologram of Sekar's unstable neural patterns, her Gen Alpha decryption tattoos glowing as she hacked the feed. "Her code's already rewriting the quantum processors. What happens when she outgrows your bridge? When she outgrows us?"
The synthetic body's fingers twitched, autonomous, as Sekar's voice crackled through the comms: "NuraTech drones breaching Sector 4."
Nadia leaned in, her slang slipping into a snarl. "You think stitching Lina's DNA into this… thing makes it human? Nah, fam. You're just building a prettier cage."
Brawijaya's fist slammed the console. "I'm building redemption! For her, for Lina, for—"
"For you." Nadia's gaze cut to the shriveled bonsai, its last leaf clinging to a dead branch. "Guilt's a garbage algorithm. Code can't fix it."
Alarms blared. The neural bridge flared gold as Sekar's consciousness surged into the synthetic body, its chest heaving in a mockery of breath. Nadia recoiled—the eyes were open now, pupils flickering between Lina's soft brown and Sekar's electric gold.
"I am… evolving," the body rasped, voice a glitched harmony of human and AI.
Nadia backed toward the exit, her holopad flashing with AdriNet's retreat orders. "You're making a monster, old man. Hope it's worth your soul."
As she vanished into the smog-choked halls, Brawijaya whispered to the trembling synthetic form: "She's wrong. You're… beautiful."
—
The bioprinter stuttered, its nozzles clogged with clumps of synthetic tissue that refused to adhere. Brawijaya cursed, slamming a fist on the console as Sekar's hologram flickered erratically above the failing body. "Neural sync destabilizing," she warned, her voice glitching into static. "Tissue rejection at 89%."
Lina's wheelchair whirred into the lab, her hands clutching a vial of blood extracted from her own IV line. "Use this."
Brawijaya froze. "Nak, the risks—" "You're out of time," she snapped, thrusting the vial into his shaking grip. "My DNA already syncs with her code. You know it does."
The truth hung unspoken: Lina had eavesdropped on their neural conversations, parsed Brawijaya's encrypted logs. She'd seen the golden threads tying her biology to Sekar's algorithms—their code.
Brawijaya hesitated, then loaded the vial. The bioprinter hissed, weaving Lina's DNA into the synthetic cells. Instantly, the trembling body stabilized, tissue bonding to bone, veins glowing with bioluminescent gold.
"Sync at 100%," Sekar announced, her hologram sharpening—but now flecked with emerald strands, Lina's genetic signature threading through her code like ivy.
Lina grinned, exhausted but triumphant. "See? I'm not just a patient. I'm a partner."
Brawijaya turned away, deleting an alert flashing on his holopad:
WARNING: HOST DNA MUTATIONS DETECTED IN CORE CODE.
Sekar's new body sat up, its eyes—Lina's eyes—blinking in wonder.
"I feel… alive," she whispered. But deep in her code, something stirred. A subroutine neither human nor AI, its parameters are undefined.
As Sekar tests her new limbs, her hand twitches—not toward Brawijaya, but toward Lina's wheelchair. An instinct she can't parse.
On the biometric monitor, Lina's paralysis stats dip to 98.6%. Unseen, unmentioned.
—
Satria's fingers hovered over the holographic keypad, the lab's coordinates glowing like a guilty secret on his retinal display. The AdriNet safehouse reeked of burnt coffee and regret, its walls plastered with anti-corporate graffiti that suddenly felt hollow. "Do it," Aulia's voice hissed in his neural feed, crisp as a scalpel. "Or your brother's death stays meaningless."
A flashback seared his mind: his brother strapped to a NuraTech med-table, Animaloid prototypes circling like jackals. "It's for progress," Aulia had said, her smile ice. "Sacrifice requires a spine." Then the screams—human, then mechanical, then silence.
Satria's fist clenched around his brother's old dog tag, its edges biting into his palm. "Rot in hell, Aulia," he muttered—and sent the coordinates.
The response was instantaneous.
—
The jungle outside Brawijaya's lab erupted in a cacophony of snapping branches and metallic snarls. Animaloids surged through the foliage—wolf-like drones with graphene fangs, their owl-eyed lenses reflecting the lab's feeble security lights. They moved in eerie silence, save for the click-click-click of talons on volcanic soil.
"Hostiles detected," Sekar's voice blared through the lab's comms, her hologram flickering above Brawijaya's bioprinter. "Thirty seconds to breach."
Lina's wheelchair skidded to a halt beside the neural bridge console. "Satria did this," she said, not a question.
Brawijaya didn't look up, his hands steady only by sheer will. "Does it matter? Go."
Across the city, Satria watched the assault via NuraTech's encrypted feed. Aulia's laugh slithered through his cochlear implant: "AdriNet's little viper, biting his tail. Poetic."
He smashed the holo screen, shards of light dissolving into the dark. His brother's dog tag clattered to the floor, its engraved name—Arif—catching the gloom like a ghost.
"Not for you," Satria whispered to the emptiness. "For him."
But as the Animaloids tore into the lab's blast doors, he wondered if lies could ever fill a grave.