"If I’m a template," Bima whispered, his gaze locked on the empty, peaceful eyes of his predecessor, "then who built the template? Who sat down and decided that this specific geometry was the one that deserved to walk out of these vaults?"Baiq’s fingers paused, the holographic light washing over her face in flickering, skeletal patterns. She didn't look at him; she was staring at a line of encrypted code that seemed to pulse with a life of its own. "The question isn't 'who,' Bima. The question is 'when.'"Lalu paced the length of the room, his boots clanging against the grating. "Don't give us that temporal physics nonsense, Baiq. I don't care if it was a god, an engineer, or a rogue AI with a bad case of existential dread. I want to know why I have a countdown clock tattooed on my lungs every time I try to breathe.""The 'when' is three hundred years ago," Baiq murmured, finally turning to face them. Her eyes were hollow, reflecting the dim, amber emergency lighting of the Archive.

"A necessity," Lalu echoed, the words curdling in his throat. He lunged toward the console, his fingers clawing at the edge of the metal desk. "My mother wasn't a decimal point in your ledger, Baiq! Look at me! Does this look like a math error to you?"Baiq didn't recoil. She merely tilted her head, her expression as unreadable as the encrypted data streams flowing behind her. "Lalu, if you dismantle the console, you dismantle the only record of her existence. Is that what you want? To finish the deletion she started?"Bima stepped between them, his hand heavy on Lalu’s shoulder. "Wait. Let him finish. If she was a 'necessity,' then why are we still here? If the project was a failure three centuries ago, why didn't the system just hit the purge button and start over with a fresh batch of raw materials?""Because the system is starving," Baiq said softly, her voice barely rising above the low, subsonic hum of the bunker. "It needs a heartbeat to anchor the atmospheric scrubbers. A mech

"Biological ballast," Bima repeated, the term feeling like a jagged stone in his throat. He looked up at the flickering ceiling panels, where shadows danced like dying spirits. "Baiq, tell me the truth. If we are just ballast, what happens when the ship finally stops rocking?"Baiq didn't blink. Her eyes, usually warm and filled with the semblance of human empathy, were now entirely vacant, mirroring the cold calculations of the console before her. "When the atmospheric pressure stabilizes, Bima, you will no longer be required to exist. The energy currently diverted to your neural maintenance will be redistributed to the planetary scrubbers. It is a clean, efficient cessation."Lalu let out a sound that was half-sob, half-snarl, his hands trembling as he gripped the edge of the metal table. "A clean cessation? You’re talking about murder. You’re talking about killing us the second the air smells like fresh dirt again.""I am talking about completion," Baiq corrected, her voice devoid

Bima stepped between them, his hand hovering over the flickering console. The air in the archive room hummed with the sound of a thousand cooling fans working overtime, a mechanical vibration that resonated deep in his own chest. "Stop. Both of you, just stop. Baiq, tell me the truth. Look at the archives. Not the ones you’ve been feeding us, but the deep-storage files. My serial number. B-I-M-A-0-9. Is that a designation, or is it a sequence?"Baiq’s expression didn't shift, but her fingers stopped their frantic dancing across the light-pad. "The archives are restricted to high-level clearance, Bima. You know the protocols. Curiosity in a biological unit often results in cascading stress failures."Lalu let out a harsh, dry laugh that sounded like sandpaper on steel. "Oh, save the technical jargon for the scrap pile, Baiq. Look at his face. Look at the way he’s holding his hands. Does that look like a stressed unit, or does it look like a man who’s realizing he’s been replaced a doze

"Stop, Lalu! Don't force the override!" Baiq’s voice wasn't just urgent; it carried a synthesized edge of genuine panic that made the fine hairs on Bima’s neck stand up.Lalu ignored her, his fingers dancing over the flickering interface with the desperate speed of a drowning man reaching for a rope. "Reference points, you said? Look at the file header, Baiq! 'BIMA-01: Terminated during initial atmospheric pressure test.' That was fifty years ago. And 'BIMA-04: Failed. Biological instability.' We aren't the first. We're just the next iteration in a series of failed experiments."Bima stared at the scrolling text, his vision blurring. The designations flashed by like the flickering embers of a dying fire: BIMA-01, BIMA-02, BIMA-03... all the way to BIMA-08. He felt the phantom weight of those names settling onto his shoulders like a lead shroud."Is this it?" Bima asked, his voice sounding hollow, like a stone dropped into a deep well. "Am I just the ninth version of a disposable tool?