The world did not end with a bang or a whimper. For Aris, it ended with the sterile hum of a ventilator and the sight of a cracked ceiling in a crowded Jakarta public ward.
And then, it began again with a fly.
The fly buzzed near his ear, landing on a wooden headboard that shouldn't exist. Aris snapped his eyes open. The air was heavy, humid, and carried the unmistakable, sharp sweetness of a Gudang Garam clove cigarette.
He bolted upright. His chest didn't ache. His breath didn't rattle. He looked at his hands—the skin was smooth, the knuckles weren't swollen with age, and there were no ink stains from the cheap pens he'd used for decades as a freelance journalist.
"Aris! How long are you going to sleep? You'll miss the morning ceremony!"
The voice hit him like a physical blow. It was his mother. She sounded young—vibrant and full of a life that he remembered being extinguished by poverty and illness in 2005.
He stumbled out of his room into the small living area of their house in Tebet. It was exactly as it had been: the faded floral curtains, the portrait of his father in his civil servant uniform, and the calendar hanging by the kitchen door.
"August 1982"
Aris didn't scream. He didn't cry. Instead, he stood perfectly still as his mind began to sift through the data like a high-speed sorter.
1982. He was seventeen. A senior at SMA.
In the world outside these walls, President Soeharto was at the height of his "New Order" power. The streets were relatively safe, but the silence was bought with fear. The Rupiah sat at roughly 650 to the Dollar. To everyone else, this was a time of stability.
To Aris, it was a ticking time bomb.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," his mother said, placing a plate of nasi uduk on the table. She reached out and felt his forehead. "No fever. Just the usual daydreaming?"
"Something like that, Bu," Aris said, his voice sounding foreign to his own ears—higher, lighter. He took a seat and looked at his father, who was buried behind the morning edition of Kompas.
"Bah," Aris said, testing the waters. "What's the news on the oil prices?"
His father lowered the paper, peering over his reading glasses with a look of mild surprise. "Since when do you care about the state's pockets? Go study your biology. Oil is what keeps the lights on and your school fees paid. It's fine."
Aris picked up a spoon, but his mind was already miles away. It isn't fine, he thought. The global glut is coming. Mexico is about to default. By next year, the government will devalue the Rupiah by nearly thirty percent.
In his first life, Aris had been a "troublemaker" journalist. He had chased the truth, published the scandals, and got his career crushed by the weight of the "Cendana" family's influence. He had died poor, watching the 1998 riots burn the city he loved because the people at the top hadn't known when to stop stealing.
He looked at his father—an honest man who would eventually lose his pension to a bank collapse.
Not this time, Aris thought.
He didn't just want to survive. He wanted to change the trajectory of the whole damn country. But a seventeen-year-old with no money and a bicycle was nothing. In 1982, information was the only currency that didn't devalue, and he was the only man in Indonesia with forty years of it stored in his head.
"I'm going to school, Bu," Aris said, standing up abruptly.
"You haven't finished your rice!"
"I'll eat on the way," he called back, grabbing his bag.
As he pedaled his old bicycle through the streets of Tebet, dodging orange bemo taxis and seeing the city before the skyscrapers took over, he wasn't looking at the scenery. He was looking at the gaps—the empty lots that would become malls, the companies that would become empires, and the people who would eventually betray the nation.
He needed a way in. He needed to be heard, but he couldn't be seen. Not yet.