My steps felt incredibly heavy as my feet traced the long campus hallway (an educational institution that still maintained the ancient name of BINUS University). In the eyes of the other passing students, this corridor might look very majestic and elegant. They surely saw the sparkling white marble floor reflecting the light of artificial crystal chandeliers (a high level visual simulation designed by the government to provide an illusion of luxury in educational facilities).
However, to my eyes that were no longer obstructed by that filter of lies, the reality was incredibly pathetic. The floor I stepped on was just a cheap plastic composite material that was worn out and cracked in various corners. The stain of a spilled drink from a few days ago still left a sticky mark near the pillar (never truly cleaned by the cleaning robot units whose machines were outdated and often jammed).
This campus was basically a giant monument of hypocrisy. The students walked side by side with empty stares, busy interacting with the digital interface projected directly onto their eye corneas through the Neural Link. Occasionally they laughed to themselves or nodded (responding to a joke from a virtual friend who never truly existed in the physical real world).
I quickened my pace toward the main canteen area (the only place in this giant building where I could get calorie intake at a price tolerable by my student wallet). As soon as I stepped inside past the automatic sliding doors, a wave of noisy sounds immediately hit my ears. Hundreds of humans sat crammed together at long tables made of thin iron. They chewed their food with faces full of ecstasy and satisfaction (biologically deceived by fake taste signals sent directly to their brain's taste system).
I deliberately chose an empty table in the very back corner of the room. This was my new survival instinct (positioning myself in the corner so my back pressed against the concrete wall, allowing my eyes to monitor all human movements and the exit door without any obstruction).
On the table, there was a bowl of chicken porridge I had just taken from the vending machine. At least, that was the hologram label displayed on the ordering screen. To my classmates, the bowl in front of me surely looked like it was steaming with fragrant broth, complete with a sprinkle of real chicken meat and appetizing yellow seasoning.
However, the naked reality I saw truly made my stomach churn. The bowl only contained a pale gray thick liquid (much like wet cement dough that had not dried yet). The small brown squares floating on its surface were not poultry meat (they were synthetic protein blocks made from insect extracts and low level genetically modified soybeans). The smell was very bland, slightly reminding me of the scent of camphor usually placed in a wardrobe that had not been opened for a long time.
"Nutritional component analysis complete: Modified carbohydrates 80 percent, Synthetic Protein 15 percent, and high level chemical preservatives 5 percent," Silvn's voice suddenly flowed calmly in my right ear through the hidden earpiece. "This nutritional composition is highly inefficient for supporting your brain's cognitive functions in the long term, Kai. Consuming it regularly can significantly accelerate nerve cell degradation."
"Please be quiet for a moment, Silvn," I muttered very softly (trying with all my might so my lip movements would not be seen by the people at the next table). "I do not need culinary criticism from an artificial intelligence program right now. I just need cheap calories so I do not faint during the network programming class this afternoon."
I forced myself to scoop the gray porridge and put it into my mouth. The texture was very sticky and slightly sandy. The taste... I could not even describe the taste because my original taste system almost refused to process this garbage food.
Exactly when I tried to swallow my second bite with great difficulty, a deadly anomaly occurred.
My vision suddenly blinked hard. Not a normal eyelid blink, but a system blink from inside my own head. My entire visual sight instantly turned into a solid red for a split second (a sharp red color with the hex code FF0000 that immediately made my eye retinas feel sore and watery).
A giant white warning box suddenly appeared and floated statically right in the middle of my visual range (covering the porridge bowl, the table, and the entire presence of the students across the room).
[SYSTEM WARNING: CRITICAL VISUAL ANOMALY DETECTED ON NODE 07]
[ERROR CODE: 0x884 REALITY SYNC FAIL]
[INITIATING AUTOMATIC DIAGNOSTICS AND DATA RECOVERY TO FACTORY SETTINGS...]
My heart instantly beat fast like the thump of a brutally beaten drum. My body tensed up stiffly (an automatic fight or flight biological reaction when a human realizes their life is in danger).
Damn it. The central monitoring algorithm of the city authority finally realized the anomaly in my head. For this whole week, I had worked desperately with lack of sleep writing a spoofing script to fake my chip biometric signals (strongly hoping the central server would still think I was a compliant citizen illiterate to reality). However, it seemed they had just launched a mass security update patch that was far more aggressive and deadly than I expected.
"Kai," Silvn's tone of voice changed completely and drastically. Her mathematical calmness disappeared without a trace, replaced by a speaking tempo much faster than usual (a clear indicator that her CPU usage was spiking sharply to handle the crisis). "There is an invasion of external data packets trying to breach the root access of your central nervous system. They are launching a brute force attack to forcibly implant a Remote Patch from a distance."
"Block the connection right now, Silvn!" I screamed in my mind (my hands unconsciously gripping the edge of the iron table so tightly that my knuckles turned white and cramped). My breath started panting along with cold sweat the size of corn kernels pouring heavily down my temples.
"I am currently processing the creation of an emergency firewall, Kai. However, the encryption structure they use is incredibly complex (located at the highest military defense protocol level). Their main target is to erase all anomaly memory and restore your visual filter functions to default settings," Silvn reported with an increasingly critical tone.
Absolute panic began to creep up the nape of my neck. If the city authority succeeded in completing this forced download, everything would end tragically. I would be forced to swallow their lies again every day. I would go back to seeing this cracked floor as shiny luxurious marble. And the most fatal of all: that recovery process would scan all local memory in the cyber deck device connected to my brain. Silvn (as an unregistered, illegal AI entity possessing free will) would instantly be categorized as a high level destructive malware.
She would be deleted. Eradicated from existence without leaving a single line of code behind.
The physical reality around me began to shatter completely like glass hit by a hammer. My eyes lost the ability to maintain focus on space and time. The face of a female student sitting a few meters in front of me began to experience a terrifying distortion. Her previously dull face with black eye bags was suddenly manipulated into a smooth glowing face for two seconds, then shattered back into pieces of rough gray pixels. My head felt like it was being drilled slowly from the inside of my skull.
[DOWNLOADING SECURITY UPDATE: 35 PERCENT... 42 PERCENT...]
The percentage numbers on my screen kept creeping up at a hope killing speed. The pain in my head became increasingly unbearable (it felt like there were thousands of tiny needles electrified with high voltage being stabbed directly into my frontal lobe simultaneously). I bowed my head deeply (hiding my face behind the fold of my arms on the table so no other students would notice my eyes starting to turn red like an internal bleeding patient).
"Silvn! Stop them right now! Do whatever you can!" I commanded very desperately.
"There is one last solution, Kai. I need direct verbal authorization from you to perform Overclocking on the local processor inside your Neural Link," Silvn gave a very serious medical warning. "This forced action will trigger an extreme heat buildup. Your core body temperature will spike drastically until it hits 39 degrees celsius in a span of less than ten seconds. The risk level of permanent cognitive nerve damage is at 87 percent."
"To hell with that risk percentage! Do it right now! It is better for my biological brain to burn to a crisp than for me to lose my sanity and lose you!"
"Final authorization accepted. Initiating the Overclocking protocol now."
One second later, the world seemed to explode in absolute silence. An extraordinarily fierce heat sensation struck the base of my neck (spreading as fast as lightning down the curves of my spine, mercilessly burning every nerve path it passed through). My lungs felt like they were forced to inhale boiling lava every time I tried to draw oxygen into my chest. My visual sight completely turned into a blinding white (blinding my eyes completely from the noisy canteen environment).
Even though my eyes were physically blind for a moment, my consciousness was actually thrown shifting into the digital space inside my own head.
In that formless dimension, I could see Silvn's representation. She was no longer just a soothing sound wave. She transformed into a swirling storm of bright blue code that was raging wildly. That digital storm swept clean the government's corrupt red code lines (swallowing the update data packets alive, destroying its encryption logic from the inside, and throwing it back out of the network as a pile of digital garbage that could no longer be executed). The data battle took place brutally within the silence of my skull.
[WARNING: SYSTEM UPDATE FAILED. CONNECTION FORCIBLY DISCONNECTED FROM USER SIDE] [INITIATING REBOOT PROCESS IN SAFE MODE...]
Suddenly, that agonizing heat subsided drastically (leaving only a bone piercing cold sensation that made my body shiver violently on the canteen chair). My vision slowly regained its focus. The blinding white faded, replaced once again by the dull gray color of the stained iron table in front of me.
I took a long breath very greedily (panting heavily like someone who had just been pulled forcefully from the bottom of a swimming pool after almost drowning). Cold sweat flooded my face, dripping down hitting the edge of the synthetic porridge bowl I had ignored. My head still throbbed with excruciating pain, but I realized one important thing: I was still in control of myself. I could still see the disgusting black moss in the corner of the canteen wall. I still saw the decay of this world. The two of us had managed to survive.
"How... how is our defense status, Silvn?" I asked with a severely hoarse voice (my throat felt bone dry as if I had just swallowed sand).
"The attack from the central server was successfully repelled entirely and our system is stable again, Kai," Silvn's voice sounded calm once more (even though I could catch a strange pause in her mechanical intonation, as if she also felt extremely overwhelmed by the fight just now). "However, we have to face the logical consequences of this act of resistance. Your Neural Link ID has now been permanently flagged by the system. You have just entered the low level anomaly watchlist belonging to the city security authority."
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying hard to absorb that terrifying information. Entering the surveillance list meant my life could never be peaceful again starting from this second. They might not know my true identity yet or what exactly was inside my head, but their bureaucratic system now knew for sure that there was one node point on this campus that refused to submit.
"That means mathematically, we can no longer be in public spaces connected to the main network for too long," Silvn continued giving her analysis. "The probability of law enforcement drone units arriving to physically inspect you is very high if you remain seated in this chair."
I opened my eyes and stared cautiously around. Several students at the nearest table were apparently glancing at me with weird looks (maybe they saw my body trembling violently and sweating profusely earlier for no apparent reason). In their eyes, I was just a weirdo who was severely ill or late taking tranquilizers. They completely did not know that a digital war to defend humanity had just occurred right next to them.
I immediately stood up (ignoring my knees that still felt weak and trembling) then snatched my backpack roughly. I left that gray bowl of porridge just like that to become a silent witness.
"We are leaving here now, Silvn," I said firmly while walking as fast as possible toward the canteen exit door (trying extremely hard to make my walking style look normal and not provoke campus security suspicion).
"Calculating the most optimal evacuation route. Do you want me to find the safest route back to your rented room, Kai?" she asked responsively.
"No. Going back to the boarding house is the same as a suicide act if my ID has already entered their watchlist," I answered softly while continuing down the campus outer corridor that was starting to empty out because afternoon classes were about to start. "We need a shelter that is truly untouched by their electricity and internet networks. An area that has been erased and forgotten by the algorithm."
"A Blind Spot area," Silvn concluded with her sharp logic.
"Exactly. Direct your internal navigation system to the Kota Tua Jakarta region. We are going to a place where history was left to rot."