The air temperature dropped seven degrees the moment Lira's car turned onto the jungle path. The green navigation light on the dashboard-the one activated by Raka's code, 44⋅18⋅79-pulsed erratically, a cold, cyan heartbeat. The path itself was less a road and more a deep, dark scar in the earth, barely wide enough for the car, flanked by bamboo and overgrown ferns that scraped the paintwork, leaving a trail of soft sighs in the silent night.
Lira gripped the wheel, her knuckles white. Her mind, trained to analyze and construct fortresses of logic, was actively being rejected by the environment. The heavy rain that had plagued Jakarta for the past week had vanished here; the air was thick, still, and smelled overwhelmingly of deep, wet earth and burnt charcoal. It was the scent of something purified.
"Semua tempat memiliki Kode mereka sendiri, Lir," Raka's voice echoed in her memory-not the spectral whisper that haunted her sleep, but the calm, human Raka from years ago, before the paranoia, before the code. "Kau hanya perlu tahu kata kuncinya (You just need to know the password)."
Lira had thought Raka's fascination with old philosophy and strange rituals was a harmless artistic quirk. Now, driving through the oppressive stillness, she realized it was preparation. Preparation for something far grander than art. It was an operation manual.
After fifteen minutes of crawling through the thick darkness, the path abruptly opened into a clearing.
The Old House: Analog Horror
The house was not old in the conventional sense. It was a modern, brutalist cube of unpainted, weathered concrete-Raka's self-proclaimed studio and retreat. It stood silent, stark, and utterly alien against the lush green backdrop. All its windows were sealed with black plywood, giving it the appearance of a data center in eternal quarantine.
Lira parked the car fifty meters away and cut the engine. The resulting silence was immediately deafening. There was no sound of cicadas, no wind, no distant traffic. Only the deep, heavy silence of an ecosystem deliberately muted.
She got out, the silver locket hot in her palm. The ground felt wrong-it wasn't soft earth, but hardened, packed clay, smooth and unnatural.
She approached the front door. It wasn't a standard door, but a massive steel slab, secured by a complex, analog lock-a series of rotating dials. Next to the lock was a small, crudely welded metal plate bearing a single engraved symbol: a perfect circle bisected by a sharp vertical line, the symbol for Transfer in Raka's private lexicon.
The digital tools Lira brought were useless. She needed an analog solution. She looked at the lock and then at the code: 44⋅18⋅79.
It wasn't a combination lock. It was a cipher.
She remembered Raka talking about the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus, mixed with Javanese numerology, a fusion Raka called The Logic of the Soil.
She tried basic addition: 4+4=8. 1+8=9. 7+9=16. She entered 8−9−16 into the dials. Nothing happened.
She tried 44⋅18⋅79 directly. Silence.
Frustrated, Lira closed her eyes, trying to simulate Raka's warped thinking. Raka often used negative numbers in his art and codes to represent absence or death.
She took the first number, 44. She associated it with the moment Raka showed her the code: the fourth hour of the fourth night of their retreat. She subtracted the second number from the first: 44−18=26.
Then the third number: 79. She associated it with the year Raka's grandmother, a spiritual healer, died. She inverted it, searching for the absence of time: 9−7=2.
And the final number, the control: 18. 1+8=9.
She slowly entered the sequence: 26⋅2⋅9.
The mechanism groaned-a loud, visceral sound of old metal grinding-and the heavy steel door hissed open, revealing a stairwell descending into total, absolute darkness.
The Archive of the Soul
The air that rushed out of the stairwell was colder than the outside, and carried a faint, coppery scent-like old blood and electricity.
Lira flicked on her phone flashlight. The stairwell was lined with raw, unpainted concrete. She descended, the only sound the hollow clack of her boots on the steps.
The chamber at the bottom was vast, circular, and utterly silent. It was Raka's studio, but stripped bare. The floor was covered with tarpaulin. The walls were lined with metal shelving, holding not art supplies, but rows upon rows of old media storage: thousands of VHS tapes, floppy disks, hard drives from the 90s, and hundreds of custom-bound journals.
This wasn't an art studio. This was Raka's Archive of the Soul.
Lira's flashlight swept across the central feature of the room: a massive drawing table, built from a sheet of thick, dark wood. It was covered in dried, flaking substances: crushed earth, dried flower petals, and something that looked suspiciously like dried, darkened blood.
On the table lay a single object, bathed in the beam of Lira's light: Raka's last painting.
It wasn't a painting of Lira, or nature. It was a hyper-detailed, architectural blueprint drawn in permanent ink onto rice paper. The blueprint depicted the human body, specifically the neurological system, overlaid with circuitry diagrams.
Lira leaned closer, reading the elegant cursive script Raka used for his notes, written in the margins of the drawing:
"The body is obsolete hardware. The mind is just an operating system. To achieve true 'Abadi' (Eternal), the OS must be lifted from the damaged hardware and downloaded onto a receptive server. Lira's body is the only one with the necessary Emotional Key (Guilt). The injection wasn't termination. It was Activation."
Lira stumbled back, her hand flying to her mouth, the metallic taste of fear sharp on her tongue. Her rational mind-the Analyst-could no longer dismiss this as P-TSD. She hadn't accidentally killed Raka. She had initiated his project.
The Receptive Server
As Lira tried to process the horror of the blueprint, the silver locket in her hand suddenly burned intensely, forcing her to drop it onto the concrete floor.
The moment the locket touched the ground, the room was plunged into absolute darkness.
A sound started in the periphery-a low, mechanical whirring, like thousands of old computer fans starting up simultaneously. The sound grew, vibrating the concrete floor beneath her feet.
Lira instinctively retrieved her phone. The screen flashed, but instead of the flashlight, it displayed a message, white text on a black screen, filling her view:
ACCESSING SERVER: LIRA_HOST. CONNECTION STATUS: ESTABLISHED. TRANSFER PROTOCOL 44⋅18⋅79 COMMENCING. WARNING: HARDWARE INTEGRITY 70%. REQUIRED: 90%. INITIATING CORRECTION: THE BLOOD KEY.
From the shadows, something moved. Not a silhouette, not a whisper, but a physical presence. A sound of something heavy being dragged across the concrete.
Lira shined her phone light wildly around the room.
The tarpaulin on the floor was now being pulled away, slowly, revealing the floor beneath.
Beneath the tarpaulin, Raka hadn't built an archive. He had built a Mausoleum. A shallow grave filled with rich, dark, wet soil, centered around a small, antique brass basin.
And kneeling beside the basin, was Bima. Not Raka. Bima.
He was calmly holding a small, razor-sharp surgical scalpel. His eyes were wide and glossy, utterly devoid of recognition.
"Welcome, Lira," Bima's voice was deep, monotone, and entirely unfamiliar. It was the same voice Lira heard in the "Abadi.wav" file. Raka's voice, filtered through Bima.
"The transfer failed to stabilize at 100%. The host refused the full download," Bima-Raka said, tilting his head. "You need to contribute the remaining data. The Code requires your blood, Lir. You promised Abadi."
Lira realized the full horror: Bima wasn't Raka's accomplice; he was Raka's Beta-Test Server. And now, Raka wanted the final, stable host.
Lira instinctively reached for the only weapon she had: the stainless steel P3K box.
The Analyst vs. The Protocol
Lira's breath hitched, but her analytical mind immediately began running diagnostics. Bima. He was standing perfectly straight, a motor anomaly for an engineer who usually slouched. His movements were slow, calibrated. His eyes, oh God, his eyes. They were dark and glossy, not reflecting the light; they were absorbing it, exactly as she had seen in her apartment window reflection.
Bima was not a healthy host. He was a remotely controlled puppet.
"Integrity 70% means the transfer is incomplete. Where is the remaining 30%? Why use an intermediary host?" Lira asked, her voice steady despite the trembling in her body. Speaking was the only way to buy time and gather new data.
Bima-Raka smiled, an expression that looked foreign on Bima's rigid face. "I failed at the Finalization stage. The kernel was too fragile. I needed a bridge." He twirled the scalpel between his fingers with the expertise of an artist, not an engineer. "You are that bridge. The emotional link is the highest bandwidth."
Lira looked around. Raka left no other exit. This room, the Archive of the Soul, was designed as a trap and an operating theater. Lira shifted her focus to the drawing table. Beneath the blueprint sketch of the human-circuit body, was another stack of rice paper. On it, Lira saw a series of bizarre symbols-not language, but complex flow charts.
"You can't download the OS without the correct Key Access," Lira continued, her eyes rapidly scanning the diagrams. "I am the Access Key. But what is the password?"
Bima-Raka laughed, his voice now layered-a hint of Bima's rasp dominated by Raka's melodic tone. "It's not a password. It's the Catalyst. What was missing from my 70% transfer was physical attachment and trauma. The morphine only killed the body, it didn't sever our emotional link. That trauma-the guilt of having killed me-that is the adhesive that will finalize the connection. And your blood, Lir, will be the data storage medium."
Bima-Raka stepped forward, agonizingly slow, ensuring Lira understood every approaching step of the horror.
Pulling the Data Cable
Lira pressed the stainless steel P3K box to her chest, seeking its reassuring weight. The box was empty. Raka had only left her the locket and the USB.
She looked over at the archive shelves. That was where Raka's power was stored. Thousands of obsolete hard drives, VHS tapes, floppy disks. Raka didn't trust the public cloud; he stored his memories analog and physical.
"You're not just downloading yourself, Raka," Lira concluded, her tone shifting from fear to resolve. "You're uploading the entire archive."
If Bima-Raka was the 70% filled Beta-server, the remaining data had to be stored somewhere.
"You are correct," Bima-Raka replied, now only five steps away. He raised his scalpel, directing its sharp point toward the artery in Lira's neck. "All the memories, all the art, everything that makes me, re-integrated inside you. Isn't this the Eternal Love we always talked about? Becoming one?"
Lira knew she couldn't outrun him in this solid basement room. She had to attack Raka's source of power.
With one sudden motion, Lira hurled the stainless steel P3K box toward the archive shelves behind Bima-Raka.
CLANG!
Bima-Raka's scalpel froze in the air. His black eyes blinked, showing a flicker of confusion. The box didn't hit the shelves, but it did knock a stack of old 8mm video tapes to the floor.
"Corrupted data can ruin the entire network," Lira screamed, quoting one of their favorite phrases from late-night work sessions. She grabbed an external hard drive lying on the table and threw it at the shelves on the other side.
CRASH!
This time, the hard drive hit right on a pile of floppy disks. Immediately, the emergency lights in the corner flickered. The whirring sound of the fans disappeared, replaced by a painful digital screech and loud static white noise.
"You are corrupting the repository!" Bima-Raka roared. His layered voice was now out of sync; Raka sounded panicked and Bima let out a groan of physical discomfort.
Lira realized Raka's weakness: his reliance on his physical archives. Raka's OS transfer was only 70% stable, and the remaining 30% was streaming in real-time from the physical archives in the room. Corrupt the archive, corrupt the stream.
She made her decision. The most data-destructive action. A short circuit.
Lira snatched Raka's silver locket that was still lying on the cold concrete floor. Quickly, she rubbed the locket hard against a thick power cable hanging on the wall (likely the main power for the entire archive warehouse).
Silver metal met bare copper wire. ZAT!
A massive spark erupted, piercing the darkness. Instantly, all emergency lights died. The room returned to absolute, pitch-black silence. The smell of acrid ozone stung Lira's nostrils, mingling with the coppery scent from the Mausoleum.
The Host Choice
Lira couldn't see anything, but she could hear. Bima-Raka's voice had changed. He was no longer speaking in layers.
He was gasping.
Lira turned on her phone flashlight. Bima was standing in the center of the room, but he was no longer holding the scalpel. Bima's hands were clutching his own head. His eyes were flickering rapidly between the solid black and Bima's normal brown, like a low frame rate.
"Failure... transfer... data corruption... Lira..." Raka was no longer controlling Bima perfectly.
Lira ran, not toward the exit, but toward the drawing table. She snatched Raka's bottle of permanent black ink.
"You have the wrong server, Raka!" Lira screamed toward Bima. "Bima is weak, but I am strong! Come and take me!"
Bima-Raka raised his face. Both eyes were now completely black. He grinned, Raka's horrifying smile on Bima's strained face.
"True. I chose the wrong host..."
In a split second, Bima-Raka performed an impossible movement. He leaped to the archive shelves behind him, grabbed an old single-lens reflex (DSLR) digital camera that Raka owned-the camera Raka always used to document their street art.
"You were always the most interesting data, Lir. Let's Capture our eternity," Bima-Raka whispered.
Bima-Raka raised the camera toward Lira. Lira knew it wasn't a normal camera. Raka always said, "The right lens can capture more than just light. It can capture the soul."
Lira knew she had no more time. She brandished the bottle of black ink she was holding.
She wouldn't run from Raka. She would make him invisible.
Would you like me to write Chapter 3, picking up from this climax?