My name is Kai. I am twenty one years old, and I have a strange habit: I cannot stand seeing broken things left just as they are.
My classmates might know me as a third year student who rarely speaks, but secretly, I am the person who resolders the broken radios belonging to campus security guards for free. I am the person who recalibrates classroom projectors whose colors are off, simply because it bothers me. My friends say I am obsessed with control. I call it caring. I like things that can be fixed.
But in the real world, not everything can be fixed.
The only thing I can truly control in this rotting city of Jakarta is 17:40.
Every afternoon, after my back is crushed from working as a transmission tower maintenance technician, I have a ritual. At 17:40, I go down to this underground commuter station, walk straight toward concrete pillar number seven, and lean against it.
Exactly at the second my shoes stop moving, the chip at the base of my neck reads the lactic acid surge in my muscles. The system plays a song. The original title is Urban Bossa v.2. Because the original drum beat was slightly off tempo, last month I hacked and modified it myself so the bass kicks would be more precise. That song always manages to drown out the screech of the rails and the bustle of footsteps.
Simultaneously, the system re-renders the giant billboard across the tracks into a sunset projection.
That orange color is important to me. It looks exactly like the sky in my grandmother's backyard ten years ago, just before the land was demolished to become a synthetic feed factory. In front of that billboard is the only moment I do not feel like I am in Jakarta. I feel like I am in the past, in a place where I do not need to worry about apartment bills or a hungry stomach.
This afternoon, at 17:40, I stood at pillar number seven.
I leaned my back, closed my eyes, released the tension in my shoulders, and prepared my index finger to tap my thumb following the bass tempo.
One second.
Three seconds.
Five seconds.
My finger stopped in the air. I frowned. Empty.
The sound of iron screeching against rails suddenly hit my ears so hard that my jaw clenched in reflex. There was no music. That noisy sound was immediately followed by a hoarse phlegmy cough from someone at the end of the platform, a baby crying, and the sharp hum of high voltage cables drilling into the base of my skull.
I took a deep breath through my nose, waiting for the system to pump the scent of wet earth after rain that usually accompanied my sunset.
My throat choked. The hot air heavy with dust, rust, and the smell of urine poked my nostrils. I coughed hard, turning my face toward my own jacket collar. My eyes watered.
Lag.
It must be just lag. Sometimes the server is slow during rush hour.
My heart beat a little faster. I looked up, staring toward the billboard across the platform. I needed that orange color.
Nothing.
There was only a rusty iron frame with severely peeling paint. Its surface was covered in black mold stains. Cut wires dangled from its corners. Drops of thick black water mixed with oil from the station roof fell slowly. Drip. Drip. Hitting that dead iron.
I tapped the base of my neck with my fingertip. Softly.
Empty.
I tapped it again, this time exactly three times in a row quickly—the standard manual override protocol. I blinked hard, trying to force the visual system in my eyes to restart. I even opened my mouth, trying to break the pressure in my ears as if it would clear my clogged auditory nerve paths.
Come on. Load the data. My fingers unconsciously moved fast in the air, typing command lines on an imaginary keyboard. My stupid habit whenever I panic.
I glanced at the watch on my wrist. 17:48. I had stood like an idiot for eight minutes.
I slapped the base of my own neck. Hard enough that the burn scar from a work accident three days ago stung intensely. "Turn on, damn it," I muttered softly.
Still rusty iron.
The hand that had been on my neck slowly dropped. I swallowed. It felt like swallowing broken glass. That rusty iron stripped bare the reality that the orange color would never appear. That the song whose code I had modified desperately had evaporated. The accident did not just burn my chip, but it erased my grandmother's backyard for the second time. And this time, I had no data backup.
My chest tightened. I rubbed my face roughly.
When I pulled my hand back, my palm was wet.
Across the platform, right under that dead billboard, a couple was hugging.
The man whispered something, and the woman laughed sweetly. The woman's parachute jacket was dull and covered in dried mud stains. Her eye bags were black and hung thick. The man hugging her emitted a stinging acidic smell of sweat all the way to where I stood. The man's back was hunched, his jaw muscles stood out hard. Their bones must be aching terribly.
I looked away, staring at the tip of my shoes. One, two, three scratches on the concrete floor.
I looked back at them.
The man smiled widely. The woman blushed, brushing dust off her partner's jacket as if it were diamond dust.
I looked away again. This time I stared at pillar number seven. I started counting the mold stains on its concrete surface, pretending I was reading something important. Pretending that the couple did not exist.
But five seconds later, my head turned back toward them for the third time.
My hands clenched tightly inside my jacket pockets. My jaw hardened. They should be angry. They should go home, lie down, and sleep. Why are they smiling in the middle of this urine smelling station?
Cheating.
The platform light blinked red. A commuter train that was porous, dented, and covered in graffiti crawled in. The mechanical door opened with a harsh hiss. The stuffy air mixed with the breath of hundreds of humans immediately hit my face.
I stepped inside. A man's elbow hit my ribs hard. The smell of limp hair stung my nose. I was squeezed between people who were too busy smiling to realize that they were stepping on other people's feet.
Clack clack. Clack clack.
The sound of iron wheels against rails. Harsh. Nauseating.
"Warning. Heartbeat reaching one hundred twenty per minute," a flat voice suddenly appeared in my right ear.
It was Silvn. A small program I created myself to schedule campus tasks and remind me to eat, which I secretly hid in the remaining memory of my neck. She was just a logic machine.
"Disable monitoring, Silvn," I commanded softly through neural impulses.
"Processing command. Monitoring disabled." Static pause. "Recommended to close your eyes to reduce visual load on the cortex."
I obeyed. I closed my eyes tightly, dropping my head against the dirty and vibrating train window rest.
Tonight. Once I arrive at the apartment, I will take my toolbox. I will dismantle the chip in my neck. Resolder the circuits. Do anything. I do not care if my hands tremble or my neck bleeds.
I have fixed things far more complex than this piece of junk.
I cannot live with this truth.