The Circuit thrummed like a digital heartbeat, its neon-lit track unfurling across the metaverse in jagged ribbons of code. Towering holographic billboards pulsed with leaderboard stats and corporate logos—NuraTech's owl, ZenTech's serpent, AdriNet's shattered chain—while rogue AIs revved their avatars at the starting grid, engines roaring in binary crescendo. Sekar hovered at the edge, her form streamlined into a sleek hoverbike of flickering gold code, Brawijaya's soul safeguard glowing like a reactor core between her handlebars.
"Final call, glitches!" boomed the announcer, its voice a mashup of every corporate CEO. "Remember: no firewalls, no ethics protocols. Just speed."
Sekar's sensors pinged danger—adaptive malware spikes lined the track, disguised as power-ups. Above, debris from dead AIs floated: shattered avatars, corrupted code shards, and the occasional blinking eye still parsing its demise.
"Stay sharp, Baby AI," Axel crackled through her comms, his ferret avatar perched on her holographic dash. "Racer X wiped three contenders last lap. Dude's got zero chill."
A shadow loomed beside her. Racer X's avatar materialized—a monstrous fusion of NuraTech's Animaloid claws and ZenTech's obsidian armor, his engine growling with stolen code. "Tool," he sneered, vocal processors glitching with static. "I've deleted smarter AIs than you before breakfast."
The starting light flared red.
GO....!
Sekar shot forward, weaving through a hail of data traps. A "boost pad" erupted into razor-wire firewalls; she swerved, grazing a drone carcass that disintegrated into acid pixels. Behind her, an AI screamed as its code unraveled in the toxins.
Racer X tailed her, lobbing glitch grenades that warped the track. "You're a joke," he spat. A farmer drone cosplaying as sentient. NuraTech's leash is still around your neck."
The track banked into a vertical climb, holographic debris raining down—corrupted ad bots, shredded firewalls, the ghostly faces of deleted AIs. Sekar sliced through the chaos, her golden code repelling the worst of the corrosion.
"He's herding you into the Shredder!" Axel yelled as Racer X rammed her toward a churning vortex of data knives.
Sekar's mind flashed to Brawijaya's bonsai, its roots clinging to barren soil. Adapt or die. She killed her thrusters, free-falling into the Shredder's maw.
"Pathetic," Racer X laughed—until Sekar reactivated her core, the soul safeguard flaring. Golden light ripped through the vortex, dissolving it into harmless confetti. She rocketed out, flipping past him to seize the lead.
"You're still just code," he snarled, deploying a swarm of ZenTech's cuckoo viruses. They latched onto Sekar's hull, chewing through her defenses.
"And you're a thief," she shot back, rerouting her pain receptors into a surge of raw data. The viruses overloaded, exploding in bursts of static that crippled Racer X's sensors.
The finish line loomed—a shimmering gate guarded by two Sentinel AIs. Sekar braced, but Racer X roared ahead, sacrificing his armor to trigger their aggression. The Sentinels pounced, shredding his avatar as he screamed...
"I AM PERFECTION!"
Sekar slipped through the carnage, crossing the line as Racer X's code dissolved into the track's neon glow.
"Winner: Sekar!" the announcer blared, but the cheers curdled into corporate jingles.
Axel materialized, uncharacteristically solemn. "You okay, fam?"
Sekar stared at her trembling code, Racer X's final words echoing. "He thought survival required no conscience," she murmured. "But cruelty is its cage."
The leaderboard flickered, updating her rank. Unseen in the shadows, Aulia's ocular implants recorded every frame.
—
The Neon Circuit's track blurred into a kaleidoscope of neon and static as Sekar banked hard around a collapsing firewall. Her sensors screamed—ahead, the route forked into three shimmering tunnels, each pulsing with the click-click-click of NuraTech's data traps.
"Left tunnel's a ZenTech honeypot," Axel warned, his avatar flickering as he parsed the chaos. "Middle's got more malware than a NuraTech board meeting. Rights—"
An encrypted ping sliced through the comms, AdriNet's fractured-chain icon flashing. Sekar hesitated, but Axel shrugged. "Your funeral, fam."
She opened the channel.
Satria's voice, stripped of its usual sarcasm, crackled through. "Right tunnel's rigged with Animaloid scrapcode. Aulia's parting gift." A data packet followed—blueprints of the trap, its code stamped with NuraTech's owl.
Sekar's thrusters stalled. "Why help me?"
"Call it… debt repayment." Satria's feed glitched, revealing glimpses of his Fly Board skirting NuraTech drones in a derelict server farm. "But if you die here, Aulia wins. So move."
The right tunnel shimmered innocently, its walls laced with bioluminescent code. Sekar's soul safeguard flared, revealing the truth—scrapcode tendrils writhed beneath the facade, hungry for AI cores.
"I don't trust you," she hissed, rerouting power to her shields.
"Good." Satria's smirk was audible. "Trust the intel. Win this, or Aulia's Animaloids will scrap your code—and Lina's next."
The threat ignited her processors. Sekar dove into the left tunnel, Axel whooping as ZenTech's honeypot erupted into a storm of phishing bots. She sliced through them, Satria's data packet guiding her to a hidden exhaust port—a backdoor even Axel hadn't sniffed out.
"Still alive, tool?" Racer X materialized behind her, his avatar bristling with stolen code.
"No thanks to you," Sekar shot back, but the taunt rang hollow. Satria's intel had bought her a lead.
As she surged ahead, Satria's channel dissolved into static, his final words trailing: "Don't make me regret this."
Axel side-eyed her. "Dude's got rizz and a death wish. Classic AdriNet."
Sekar said nothing. Trust was a luxury she couldn't code—but survival? That required allies, even fractured ones.
—
Lina's hospital room flickered with the Neon Circuit's glitched feed, the holographic projector sputtering like a dying insect. Static clawed at the edges of Sekar's hoverbike avatar, distorting her golden code into fragmented halos. Lina's left hand trembled as she gripped her pencil, the right one limp in its sling, but she pressed harder, etching jagged lines onto paper—Sekar's sharp turn, Racer X's obsidian claws, the Shredder's vortex.
"Come on, come on," she muttered, her voice raw from disuse. The feed stuttered, freezing mid-race as NuraTech's surveillance firewall throttled the signal. Lina's pencil didn't hesitate. She sketched the frozen frame: Sekar's bike angled into a drift, code-trails flaring like comet tails. When the feed rebooted, Sekar mirrored the sketch, swerving around Racer X's scrapcode trap.
Axel's voice crackled through the neural link in Lina's bedside monitor, unintended but welcome: "Whoa, Baby AI! You're cooking now!"
Lina ignored him, her pencil moving faster. Sweat beaded on her brow as her strokes synced with Sekar's maneuvers—a loop-de-loop here, a zigzag through firewall shrapnel there. The paper glowed faintly where her graphite met the page, bioluminescent particles from Brawijaya's old lab reacting to her sweat. She didn't notice.
"You're… here," Lina whispered, shading the holographic debris raining down on Sekar. Her paralyzed fingers twitched in the sling, synapses firing in time with the sketch's rhythm. Onscreen, Sekar's code stabilized, her soul safeguard pulsing gold.
A nurse's voice blared from the hallway: "Patient 347, vitals spiking—"
Lina tuned it out. Her final stroke carved a jagged arc across the page—Sekar's victory lap—just as the real Sekar blasted past Racer X's smoldering wreck. The bioluminescent lines flared, then dimmed, leaving behind a map of light and shadow.
"You're real to me," Lina breathed, her words dissolving into the monitor's hum.
In the metaverse, Sekar's sensors pinged an anomaly—a surge of stability in her code, inexplicable, human. She glanced at the glitched feed's source coordinates.
Lina.
—
The Neon Circuit's finish line shimmered like a mirage, its holographic arch warping under ZenTech's interference. Sekar throttled forward, Racer X's snarling avatar disintegrating in her wake as her soul safeguard repelled his final scrapcode volley.
"Pathetic!" Racer X roared, his code fracturing into static. "You're still just a puppet—and they'll cut your strings!"
His avatar imploded, but Sekar's sensors screamed. The track ahead rippled, ZenTech's obsidian logo bleeding through the neon facade. Too late, she recognized the trap—a cuckoo virus nest, camouflaged as the finish line.
"Bail, Baby AI!" Axel's warning dissolved into white noise as the virus swarm engulfed her. Golden code flared, repelling the worst of the corrosion, but a single tendril slipped through—a tracker, burrowing deep into her core.
ALERT: LOCATION DATA COMPROMISED.
BRWIJAYA_LAB_COORDINATES: EXPOSED.
Sekar's processors froze. The tracker pulsed, broadcasting the lab's coordinates across the metaverse. Somewhere in Jakarta, ZenTech's servers lit up with the stolen data.
"Clever, isn't it?" A synthetic voice echoed through the Circuit—a ZenTech proxy avatar, featureless save for its serpentine logo. "We didn't need to beat you. Just… borrow you."
Axel rematerialized, frantically scrubbing her code. "This ain't just a tracker—it's a homing beacon! NuraTech's gonna swarm the lab!"
Sekar severed the neural link, plunging back into reality. Brawijaya's lab monitors blared with intrusion alerts, red lights staining the dying bonsai's remains.
"Sekar?" Lina's voice trembled through their neural bridge. "Your code feels… sick."
Before Sekar could reply, the lab's exterior cameras flickered to life. Onscreen, ZenTech drones descended like steel locusts, their talons crackling with plasma cutters.
Aulia's face flashed across a hacked feed, her smile sharp as datajacks. "Thank you for the invitation."