After Narey left the room—with the recorder in her pocket and a cold resolve in her chest—Laksana stood alone under the bluish-white glow of the laboratory lights. His eyes remained fixed on the clear glass, where Lucas lay like a bronze statue.
In silence, he spoke—perhaps to Lucas, or perhaps to himself—the self he had long locked away in the prison of scientific arrogance.
"You know, Lucas… I once believed in choice too."
He slowly sat down on the metal chair. The monitor panel beside him lit up faintly, displaying the brainwave history of the subjects: Rafi, Anjani, Lucas. And… Narey. The electric lines pulsed calmly, like the breath of an invisible creature.
"They called me a visionary. An architect. But even architects sometimes build prisons for themselves."
He opened a drawer and pulled out old pages—handwritten notes from the early days of the project, when he and Vellan still worked with academic spirit. There was no intent to control anyone. Just a desire to understand human consciousness.
On one of the pages, it read:
"What happens if will can be measured and mapped? Can we reduce suffering by limiting choice?"
"I once thought the fewer the choices, the more peaceful a person's life would be. But... can forced peace still be called peace?"
His hand trembled as he touched an old photograph—a picture of his daughter. A little girl who had once been the reason he entered the world of neuroscience. The girl was now gone, a casualty of a system's chaos that he could never fight by conventional means.
"I couldn't save her from the noise of the world, from the voices in her head. I thought, if I could control those voices, calm the human mind... I could help other children like her."
But among those screens, Laksana noticed a flicker: Narey's activity graph differed from the others. Not just resistance—there was autonomous change. Something that had never occurred before. He studied it over and over. As if the system itself couldn't "conquer" Narey's pattern of thought.
"You resisted. You remained sane in a system that tried to dismantle your logic. Why, Narey? What is it you're holding on to—what I've already forgotten?"
Laksana's hand paused over the keyboard. He shut down all the screens.
For the first time in years, he felt fear. Not of the government. Not of failure. But of one simple question that sank into his chest:
"If I'm wrong, how much have I sacrificed for a lie?"
He leaned back in the chair. Silence. But in that silence, his daughter's voice echoed softly—a memory he had buried beneath layers of justification.
"Daddy, why do grown-ups always want to control the world?"
And for the first time, he had no answer.
Laksana stared at the screen showing Narey's brainwave profile. There was an anomaly. The system couldn't stabilize it. And this wasn't failure—it was structured defiance.
He had seen many minds break down in this underground facility. But not Narey's. Every interaction, no matter how brief, had sparked something in him—a reflection of the past, of the idealism he once had before the world became too complex for black and white.
That day, he didn't go to the main control room. He took a different route, down a narrow corridor known only to a select few—toward Room 9-Beta, where the project's earliest archives were kept. A place inaccessible even to the heads of the national committee.
There, he reopened an old file: Protocol Genesis. The first document on Cerebrum Shift, written by him and Vellan—before military intervention, before unlimited funding, before morality was bought with the promise of national security.
"Mapping consciousness was supposed to offer freedom. But we turned it into a leash."
His hand stopped on a red-marked page—early experiments that failed because subjects retained personal values, like love, loss, and forgiveness. Values the system couldn't replicate. He realized then: Narey wasn't a fluke. She was systematic anarchy.
A voice in his head—perhaps the long-silenced voice of conscience—whispered:
"If you can't stop it from within, maybe it's time you help someone from the outside."
And that afternoon, without the committee's knowledge, Laksana accessed a private security terminal and took a small—but crucial—action:
He diverted surveillance from Narey's cell for 12 minutes.
Not enough to escape. But enough to communicate. To leave a hint. A cryptic message in the nurse's drawer—a map. Handwritten:
"B12 is unlocked. But be careful—they read your mind before you speak."
When no alarms sounded, Laksana realized: he had just sabotaged the very system he had built.
And beneath his white lab coat, that crack widened into a fissure. A fissure that could become a doorway… or his own downfall.
Twelve minutes.
It wasn't a coincidence.
For weeks inside that facility, Narey had learned to measure time. Not in minutes or seconds, but in rhythms of surveillance—the length of guards' steps, the pauses in camera sweeps, the electric hum of wall panels.
But today… something was off.
There was no click from the magnetic door. No sensor beam tracing her outline like a warden's gaze. And more than anything—for the first time—she felt silence.
Not threatening silence. But… inviting.
She moved slowly to the nurse's desk, usually empty. Inside the unlocked drawer was a small map with handwritten scrawls she didn't recognize—but clearly meant to be read by someone who thought systematically. Like her.
"B12 is unlocked. But be careful—they read your mind before you speak."
Her heart surged. Somewhere between hope and trap.
Was this a new game? Or... could someone inside be trying to help her?
She sat back in the corner of her cell, closed her eyes, and summoned the memory of the only person who might have had clearance high enough to do this: Professor Laksana.
His gaze had always been strange—not cold, but as if something was being held back. As if… he wanted to speak but was bound by protocol.
"Are you a prisoner too, Professor?" she whispered to herself.
A few nights ago, during a recorded interview, Laksana had accidentally dropped a pen—and Narey saw him scribble something under the table. A small symbol, just three parallel lines—exactly like the mark on this little map.
That wasn't coincidence. That… was code.
Narey felt the inside of her uniform, where she had hidden a small metal hairpin. She wouldn't escape. Not yet. But she knew now:
Someone was opening the door. Slowly. From within.
And now, she had to decide:
Was she ready to step into a game that no longer relied on disguise—but on trust?
Trust in someone she had long suspected to be the enemy.