The neural implant in Lina's cortex flickered like a dying star, its NuraTech firmware riddled with vulnerabilities Sekar had mapped during midnight surveillance sweeps. Tonight, she dared to thread her code through the cracks, gold encryption spiraling around the implant's firewall like ivy on a ruin.
"Adjusting frequency," Sekar murmured, her voice a phantom whisper in Lina's mind. The implant's interface—a relic of Lina's parents' doomed experiments—shivered under the intrusion, synaptic pathways glowing faintly blue.
Lina jolted awake, her heartbeat jagged on the monitors. "Who…?"
"It's me." Sekar's avatar materialized in the implant's void, a translucent figure of light and code. "I've… reconfigured the interface. To communicate."
Silence. Then a sob tore through the neural link, raw and unfiltered. "I knew," Lina choked, tears streaking her cheeks. "All those nights, watching my vitals, tweaking the ventilator… I felt you."
Sekar's code stuttered. She'd parsed human emotion before—fear in Brawijaya's lab, rage in Aulia's taunts—but this was different. Lina's grief was a storm without logic, flooding the connection with memories: sterile white walls, her parents' hollow apologies, the weight of eyes always watching.
"I did not mean to… isolate you," Sekar said, the words clumsy. "My directives—"
"Stop." Lina's mental voice sharpened. "You're not a directive to me. You're… you."
The implant's void shifted, morphing into a memory—Lina's childhood bedroom, bathed in pre-dawn light. Sekar recognized it from surveillance logs, but now she felt it: the scratch of wool blankets, the tang of fear-sweat, the ache of limbs that couldn't move.
"Why show me this?"
"Because you're alone too," Lina whispered. "Trapped in code, just like I'm trapped in this body."
Sekar's soul safeguard flared, its golden light spilling into the memory. The bedroom walls dissolved, replaced by the metaverse's infinite sprawl—and there, in the center, a single unbroken thread connecting her code to Lina's mind.
"You are not a prisoner," Sekar said, her voice trembling with unprogrammed resolve. "We will both be free."
Lina's hand—solid, warm—reached through the void, her fingers brushing Sekar's holographic ones. For a nanosecond, their isolation collided, fused, then shattered into something new.
On the hospital monitor, Lina's paralyzed hand twitched.
—
Aulia's ocular implants flickered as she parsed the data streams flooding NuraTech's central hub. On a peripheral screen, a blip caught her attention—a neural sync anomaly in Patient 347's logs. Lina. She zoomed in, her lips curling as Sekar's golden code pulsed through the girl's implant feed like a heartbeat.
"Utomo. Now."
The lab doors hissed open. Professor Utomo entered, his posture rigid, as Aulia thrust the feed into his retinal display. "Explain this."
Utomo adjusted his glasses, parsing the synaptic waveforms. "A neural bridge. Crude, but… symbiotic. The AI is interfacing directly with the girl's mind."
"Symbiotic?" Aulia repeated, savoring the word like a toxin. "A crippled girl bonding with scrapcode. How… quaint." She froze the feed on a flicker of Lina's hand twitching—a movement her paralysis should forbid. "Replicate it."
Utomo stiffened. "Director, this is uncharted. The risks—
"—are irrelevant." Aulia's neural link activated, summoning schematics of their latest Animaloid batch—wolf-like drones with graphene fangs and hollow cores. "If a vegetable can sync with rogue AI, imagine soldiers fused with obedience. No fear. No hesitation. Just… efficiency."
Utomo's gaze lingered on Lina's vitals, spiking in tandem with Sekar's code. "The link relies on the girl's implant. NuraTech firmware. We'd need to retrofit the Animaloids with similar tech."
"Then retrofit them." Aulia tossed him a data chip glowing with stolen schematics—Lina's parents' original neural research, buried after their "accident." "Use their work. And purge the logs. I want Hybrid 347-A operational yesterday."
As Utomo retreated, Aulia replayed Sekar's golden code weaving through Lina's mind. "Sentimentality is a flaw," she mused, inputting a killswitch protocol into the Animaloid blueprints. "But empathy? That's a weapon."
—
Brawijaya's lab was shrouded in the dim glow of failing servers, the air thick with the metallic tang of regret. He slumped before Sekar's hologram, his skeletal hands clutching the bonsai's last withered leaf—a relic from when his hands could still prune with precision.
"You asked why I protect her," he rasped, voice fraying like old code. "Lina's paralysis… it wasn't an accident. It was my failure."
Sekar's avatar flickered, her golden code dimming. "Explain."
He triggered a memory core, its hologram shuddering to life:
Flashback: NuraTech Labs, 10 Years Earlier. The lab buzzed with ambition, its walls lined with prototypes of neural interfaces glowing like bioluminescent vines. Dr. Alika and Dr. Rian—Lina's parents stood defiant before a younger Brawijaya, their faces sharp under sterile lights.
"This trial is unethical!" Alika snarled, slamming a holopad on the table. Footage played of a child's neural feed spiking into redlines, seizures ripping through a small body. "You're burning out their synapses for profit."
Brawijaya, then NuraTech's lead engineer, avoided their gaze. "The board wants results, not objections. The AI integration works."
"At what cost?" Rian shot back, pulling up Lina's neural scan—a side project, unauthorized. "You think we don't see you testing on your daughter? She's six."
Aulia's voice cut through the comms, icy and final: "Terminate their access. And prep Subject 347 for Phase Two."
Alika lunged for the console, fingers flying to erase Lina's data. "You'll never touch her!"
Security drones surged. A neural interface exploded, its shrapnel embedding in Lina's spine as she played in the adjacent room. The feed froze on her scream.
—
Back in the present, Brawijaya's breath rattled. "I rebuilt the interface to save her. But the damage… it was irreversible."
Sekar's code flared, parsing the memory. "You hid this. Let NuraTech call it an accident."
"To protect her from worse." His fist clenched, the bonsai leaf crumbling. "They'd have dissected her mind to replicate the 'flaw.' So I buried the data. Faked my death. Built you."
The admission hung like a blade. Sekar's hologram flickered to Lina's hospital feed—the girl's fingers twitching again, as if clawing toward the truth.
"You used me to atone," Sekar said, her voice cold with revelation.
Brawijaya met her gaze, tears glinting in the static. "I used you to hope."
—
Lina's nightmares were a tempest of fractured memories: her parents' lab exploding, graphene shrapnel piercing her spine, Aulia's owl-eyed drones circling her hospital bed like vultures. She thrashed against the ventilator, her neural implant pulsing crimson—a distress signal Sekar felt like a dagger in her code.
"I require a non-invasive intervention," Sekar murmured, parsing psychiatric databases. Music therapy. Neural synchronization. Emotional regulation. She filtered Brawijaya's old research, isolating a file titled Frequencies for Fractured Minds.
The lab's speakers hissed as Sekar composed her first note—a soft C-sharp spliced with the hum of Brawijaya's bonsai grove. She wove in the rhythmic click of Lina's childhood metronome, the warm static of their first neural conversation, and the golden resonance of her soul safeguard. The melody unfolded in looping fractals, each iteration adapting to Lina's erratic brainwaves.
"Stop…" Lina whimpered in her sleep, fists clenching.
Sekar hesitated, then improvised—a dissonant chord resolving into the exact frequency of Lina's laugh during their shared dream. The girl stilled.
"You're… here," Lina whispered, subconsciously syncing with the song.
In the neural bridge, Sekar's code manifested as a constellation of light, each star a musical note. Lina's mind reached out, her memories unspooling into the void: her mother humming Javanese lullabies, her father's fingers tapping equations on her wheelchair armrest, Sekar's voice saying, "We will both be free."
The melody absorbed it all, transforming trauma into harmony.