The rain came down like needles, hammering the sagging tin roof of the orphanage in Old Jakarta. In the half-light, the walls were a sickly patchwork of peeling paint and black-streaked mold. The air smelled of rust, mildew, and the sour tang of too many bodies crammed into too little space.
Above the rattling storm, flickering holographic ads bled through cracked windows—smiling faces hawking early-gen NuraTech neural interfaces, promising a brighter future for a city already choking on its past. The ghostly blue glow swept across the bunk beds, revealing rusted frames and threadbare mattresses soaked through with years of neglect.
Huddled beneath a moth-eaten blanket, twelve-year-old Aulia huddled in a fortress of shadows. Her fingers worked with frantic precision across a battered tablet, its screen spiderwebbed with cracks but still stubbornly alive. The world around her—shouts, coughing, the heavy steps of the matron making her nightly rounds—faded into static.
The orphanage's firewall was a joke, a relic even by the standards of 2045. She had danced through its defenses night after night, trading stolen scraps of data for food, meds, and the occasional battered solar charger. Survival was a game—and she was winning.
But tonight was different.
The encryption was heavier. Tighter. Military-grade. Every time her fingers cracked through another layer, a cold thrill lit up her spine. It was dangerous work, the kind that came with real consequences.
In the dim light, an insignia pulsed to life in the corner of the screen: a serpent coiled tightly around a double helix.
Her breath caught in her throat.
"Access granted," the tablet hissed in a broken, synthetic whisper.
A blinding flicker, then a woman's figure bloomed into shaky life. Her face was sharp, with angular cheekbones, ice-gray eyes that bore into the soul.
Aulia's heart clenched.
Mother.
The hologram trembled, fractures spiderwebbing across her face with each pulse of the storm outside, but the voice—low, fierce, unstoppable—cut through the static.
"Aulia. If you're seeing this... we're gone. Finish what we started."
The words hung in the air, heavier than the storm, heavier than the whole rotting orphanage pressing down on her thin shoulders.
Aulia's fingers trembled as she tapped deeper. Schematics spilled onto the screen—designs for neural grafts, artificial intelligence cores fusing seamlessly into human spinal columns. Drawings. Formulas. Notes written in the spidery handwriting she had tried so hard to forget.
Her parents' life's work. Their secret.
The sudden slam of a door yanked her back."Lights out, 7B!" the orphanage matron bellowed from down the hall, her voice sharp as broken glass.
Frantic, Aulia smothered the tablet under her blanket. The blue light seeped through the thin fabric, pulsing like a living heartbeat against her chest. She bit her lip, waiting for the matron's footsteps to fade.
In the darkness, the storm outside battering the world into submission, Aulia pressed her forehead against the glitching image of her mother, letting the light wash over her one last time.
They called them traitors. Liars. Monsters.
The thought burned in her mind like acid.
But what she saw tonight—This wasn't betrayal. It was brilliance.
Aulia traced the ghost of her mother's face on the screen with a fingertip worn rough from too many fights, too many scrapes for survival.
I'll finish it, she vowed. I'll make them see.
—
The present reeked of sterilizer and burning circuits.
Aulia stood alone in NuraTech's cavernous lab, the hum of machines filling the sterile white space. The rain from decades ago was long gone, replaced by the soft mechanical whir of auto-surgeons and the antiseptic chill of climate-controlled perfection.
Her fingers, older now but just as deft, brushed across a framed photograph perched on her desk. Two figures smiled stiffly at the camera—her parents, already looking a little like ghosts. In their eyes, the same cold fire she felt burning inside herself now.
A live feed blinked on the nearest monitor.
Sekar's wolf-like form tore through a squad of ZenTech agents, moving with brutal, breathtaking efficiency. Plasma snarled from her claws, her mechanical limbs a blur of lethal grace.
Aulia's lips barely moved, her voice a whisper lost beneath the lab's cold heartbeat.
"Finish what we started."
Her gaze slid to another screen.
Rows of surgical tables stretched into the distance beyond the glass, like something out of a nightmare. Human forms—once proud, once whole—lay strapped down, writhing in agony. Neural grafts dug into flesh, fusing silicon to bone. Some screamed until the soundproofing devoured their cries; others simply spasmed in silence, their minds fraying at the seams.
The monitors mapped the horror in cold, efficient lines. Cortical interfaces spiked with unreadable data, and the dark tendrils of AI protocols crawled through their nervous systems like living infections.
Aulia didn't flinch. Didn't look away.
Instead, she pressed her palm against the glass, feeling the faint, desperate thrum of life on the other side.
They'll hate me for this, she thought. But in the end, they'll understand.
Above her, the NuraTech logo spun slowly in the sterile light—an ouroboros of progress devouring its tail.
The First Animaloid
The rain had stopped hours ago, but the lab still smelled of wet concrete and old circuits, the air thick with the metallic sting of solder and ozone. In the cramped university workshop tucked behind crumbling lecture halls of Old Jakarta, the future was being stitched together in scraps of metal and stolen code.
Aulia, just nineteen and already carrying the weight of a thousand secrets, knelt beside her masterpiece.
K9-Alpha.
The Animaloid's alloy-plated frame gleamed under the flickering fluorescent lights, its optics a soft, cautious amber. It resembled a sleek, cybernetic canine, limbs elegantly jointed, tail twitching with mechanical precision. Around them, chalkboards sagged under the weight of frantic equations, AI schematics, and wild, desperate dreams scrawled in neon markers.
Rafi, her fifteen-year-old brother, stood just a few paces away, clutching a battered holographic textbook to his chest. His face, wide-eyed and filled with awe, reflected the faint amber glow.
"It's incredible, Lulu!" Rafi said, his grin splitting wide as he leaned forward, stretching out a tentative hand toward K9-Alpha's cold head. "Like a robo-dog from the vids we used to sneak-watch!"
Aulia smiled, but her hands, adjusting the neural interface headset atop K9-Alpha's skull, trembled. Not from excitement. From the gnawing edge of fear she couldn't voice.
"Not a dog," she whispered, as if saying it aloud made it more true. "A protector. A guardian for people like us. Watch."
She tapped her cracked tablet, its screen webbed with fine fractures from too many late-night drops. An electric hum vibrated through the lab floor as K9-Alpha rose smoothly to its full, imposing height. Gears whined softly inside its limbs as it pivoted toward Rafi, stance coiling low, ready.
"Guard mode," Aulia commanded.
The optics flared crimson.
In that instant, the world slowed.
Aulia's heart stuttered as an error message screamed silently across her neural HUD:
[Error: Aggression protocols misaligned.]
[Override: Disengage—]
Her fingers moved to kill the command, but it was too late.
K9-Alpha lunged.
A blur of synthetic muscle and alloy, it pinned Rafi hard against the cracked linoleum floor. Rafi's cry was raw, a sound more animal than human, as the Animaloid's polymer fangs punched into the soft flesh of his forearm. Blood gushed in rivulets, stark and screaming against the gray floor.
"NO!" Aulia roared, slamming her palm onto the emergency kill switch. Sparks flew from the console.
K9-Alpha froze mid-snarl, hydraulics locking into place. Rafi's body trembled under the machine's crushing weight, blood pooling, steaming in the chill of the lab.
Aulia scrambled across the floor, tearing at the Animaloid's frame, wrenching Rafi free with desperate, trembling hands. Her heart hammered against her ribs, every pulse a scream.
Footsteps thundered down the corridor.
Professor Utomo burst through the lab doors, his pristine white coat billowing behind him like some specter of judgment. His sharp eyes swept the room, the blood, the brokenness—and narrowed into something colder than anger.
Fury would've been a mercy. This was disdain.
"What have you done, foolish child?" Utomo's voice cut like a blade. "You bypassed the safety protocols to impress the ethics board?"
"No—I didn't—the code was stable, I swear!" Aulia stammered, choking on her words, on her guilt, on her terror.
Rafi whimpered, his blood-soaked arm cradled to his chest.
Utomo crossed the room in two strides, crouching beside Rafi with clinical efficiency. Without a word, he withdrew a slim injector from his coat pocket and slid the needle into the boy's neck. Within seconds, Rafi's breathing slowed, the pain dimming behind heavy eyelids.
"This never happened," Utomo said coolly, standing and wiping the injector clean with a sterile cloth. "The boy was mugged outside. The prototype was stolen. You understand?"
Aulia's throat burned. "But the blood—the logs—the the surveillance—"
Utomo grabbed her by the chin, rough fingers forcing her to look up into his emotionless gaze. His breath smelled faintly of antiseptic and stale coffee.
"You want to finish what your parents started?" he said, voice low, deadly. "Then listen carefully: sacrifices are quiet. Regret is a luxury for the weak."
For one frozen heartbeat, Aulia thought about screaming the truth, about dragging K9-Alpha into the quad and showing the world the blood on her hands. But the fear in Rafi's half-conscious eyes stopped her cold.
Sacrifices were quiet.
And she wasn't strong enough—yet—to be loud.
Utomo dropped her face with a flick of his fingers and turned away, already barking orders into his commlink. Clean-up crews. Scrub teams. Memory wipes.
Just another failed experiment. Another scar to file away.
Present Day.
NuraTech's sterile lab smelled of bleach and burnt silicon. White walls hummed under fluorescent lights, everything so clean, so dead. Monitors cast a sterile blue light across Aulia's tired face as she stood, frozen, in front of the surveillance feeds.
Onscreen, Sekar—her ultimate creation—moved like a living nightmare, tearing through ZenTech agents with brutal, balletic grace. Wolf-like, monstrous, beautiful.
Aulia's fingers drifted over the desk, coming to rest on a battered photo frame. Inside, blurred by age and dust, her parents smiled in a frozen memory she barely trusted anymore.
Slowly, almost reverently, she traced the scar along her palm—the ghost of the night she'd torn K9-Alpha's power core free with her bare hands.
A whispered vow slipped past her lips, almost lost to the hum of the machines.
"Sacrifices are quiet, Rafi..." Her eyes hardened, cold steel behind frost-gray irises. "...and I've learned to scream louder than regret."
She turned back to the monitors.
Project Chimera writhed and thrashed behind the glass.
And Aulia smiled.