30 Days to Unmake a Monster

Chapter 22: Colliding Frequencies

The silence that followed the phone call was not a lack of sound, but a heavy, pressurized void that seemed to suck the oxygen right out of the room. Raka’s hand, still clutching the smartphone, felt as though it had turned into lead. The distorted scream of a woman he loved, layered over the bored, murderous baritone of the man he was terrified of becoming, continued to vibrate in his inner ear like a phantom limb. It wasn't just a recording; it felt like a broadcast from a radio station that existed only in the center of a black hole.

"Raka? Please, you’re scaring me. Who was on the phone?"

Luna’s voice broke the spell, but the warmth in it felt like a sharp contrast to the biting chill currently radiating from his own marrow. She was standing mere inches away, her hand resting on his forearm. Her touch was soft, human, and terrifyingly fragile. In this new timeline, she was an interior designer with a penchant for bright watercolors and a future that didn't involve being a "broken ornament."

Raka looked at her, his vision momentarily blurring as the face of the screaming Luna from the phone call overlapped with the innocent, concerned woman in front of him. He felt a sudden, violent urge to pull her into his arms and never let go, but the note in his pocket—the warning in his own handwriting—screamed louder. Don’t let her remember.

"Just a wrong number, Mbak," Raka forced himself to say, his voice sounding like it was being squeezed through a throat filled with dry sand. He used the more formal honorific, a subtle, instinctive attempt to re-establish a distance that might protect her. "Some telemarketer. The connection was terrible. A lot of static."

Luna’s brow furrowed, her intelligent eyes scanning his face. She didn't believe him. She couldn't. The way his hands were shaking and the sickly, pale hue of his skin told a story of a man who had just looked into his own grave. But she didn't push. In this timeline, their relationship was built on a tentative, beautiful grace. She simply nodded, though her hand lingered on his arm for a second longer, her thumb tracing a small, comforting circle against his skin.

"You should get some rest, Mas," she murmured, her voice laced with a worry she couldn't quite hide. "You've been working too hard on the new branding project. The city... it feels heavy today, doesn't it?"

Raka managed a stiff nod. He waited until she had retreated into the kitchen, the soft clatter of tea mugs providing a deceptive mask of domestic peace. He didn't wait for the tea. He grabbed his denim jacket, the one containing the warning note, and slipped out the door.

The streets of Jakarta felt different tonight. The neon lights of the SCBD district, usually a vibrant tapestry of urban life, seemed to flicker with a malicious intent. As Raka navigated the humid, rain-slicked sidewalks of Sudirman, he felt the city watching him. Not the people—the buildings. The glass towers stood like silent, judgmental sentinels, their dark windows appearing like eyes waiting for the return of the Mogul.

He didn't know why he was heading toward his old studio apartment in the Tanah Abang area. He hadn't lived there in months. It was a place of stagnation, a tomb for the man he used to be. But the frequency in his head—the high-pitched hum that had started the moment the phone call ended—was pulling him there like a compass needle to a magnet.

The building was even grimmer than he remembered. The elevator was out of order, the hallway smelling of damp concrete and cheap tobacco. He reached his old unit, the door still bearing the faint scratches from the night Luna had first broken into his life. He pushed it open.

The room was empty. No furniture, no computer, no piles of soda cans. It was just a shell of a life he had discarded. But as Raka stepped into the center of the room, the hum in his head reached a deafening crescendo. The air felt thick, charged with a static charge that made the hair on his arms stand up.

He looked at the wall where his desk used to sit. The concrete was cracked, the wallpaper peeling back in long, jagged strips. In the dim light filtering in from the streetlamp outside, he saw it.

Embedded deep within the concrete, as if it had been forged into the very foundation of the building, was the silver watch.

Raka’s breath hitched. This shouldn't be possible. The timeline had been reset. The watch had been destroyed on the beach at Ancol. Yet, there it was, the metal casing partially merged with the stone, looking like a prehistoric fossil of a future that refused to be erased. The small digital display was cracked, but a faint, dying amber light pulsed behind the glass—a rhythmic, heartbeat-like glow that matched the frequency in Raka’s skull.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

"It didn't go away," Raka whispered, his hand reaching out to touch the cold metal. "The debt... it’s still here."

He needed help. He needed a mind that could navigate the wreckage of a reality that made no sense. He pulled out his phone and dialed the only man who had ever truly seen the glitches in the world.

Twenty minutes later, Gani arrived. In this timeline, Gani was no longer a desperate street racer; he was a highly successful IT security consultant with a clean-cut look and a sleek, silver sedan. But as Gani stepped into the ruined studio and saw the watch embedded in the wall, the confident, corporate mask he wore shattered.

"Raka... what the hell is that?" Gani’s voice was a low, terrified rasp.

"The reason the world feels wrong, Gani," Raka said, staring at the watch. "You feel it too, don't you? The déjà vu. The sense that we're living in a house built on top of a cemetery."

Gani didn't answer. He walked toward the wall, his hands instinctively reaching for a tablet he had brought with him. He began scanning the watch, his fingers flying across the screen. "The signal... it's not radio. It’s not even digital. It’s a temporal resonance. It’s like this device is a speaker, and it’s broadcasting the echoes of a timeline that’s currently being liquidated."

"Can you decode it?"

Gani’s face was illuminated by the blue light of his tablet, his eyes reflecting a frantic, digital rain. "I can try to isolate the coordinates. It’s hidden in the pulse. It’s a location, Raka. Somewhere in the city. A point where the frequencies are colliding most violently."

They worked in a tense, suffocating silence for what felt like hours. The amber light of the watch flickered, casting long, distorted shadows of the two men against the peeling walls. Finally, Gani let out a sharp, jagged breath.

"I got it. It’s in North Jakarta. Near the old docks. It’s an abandoned construction site."

Raka’s heart did a slow, nauseating roll. "The Satya International Center."

"How did you know the name?" Gani asked, his voice trembling.

"Because I saw it in a dream," Raka lied. "Or a nightmare."

The construction site was a skeletal titan of rusted steel and gray concrete, looming over the black waters of the harbor like a ghost ship. It was supposed to be Raka’s masterpiece—the crown jewel of his future empire. Now, it was a half-finished tomb, abandoned by a world that had forgotten the man who was meant to build it.

They moved through the site with only a single flashlight, the beam cutting through the thick, salty fog that rolled in from the sea. The air here was even heavier, the hum now a physical vibration that rattled Raka’s teeth. They found a heavy steel door in the basement level, hidden behind a pile of discarded rebar.

Gani used his tablet to bypass the electronic lock, the door groaning open with a sound like a dying beast.

They stepped inside, and Raka’s flashlight beam swept across the room. He felt the air leave his lungs.

The walls were covered. Thousands of photographs were pinned to every available inch of space. They weren't just pictures; they were fragments of lives. Raka saw himself and Luna in a thousand different iterations. In one, they were laughing in a garden in Bandung. In another, he was standing over her grave in the rain. In another, she was the one in the suit, and he was the one being broken.

There were Polaroids, digital prints, and some that were nothing more than shimmering, translucent projections that flickered in and out of existence.

"It’s not just one future," Gani whispered, his voice sounding small in the vast, haunted room. "It’s all of them. Thousands of failed timelines. Thousands of attempts to fix the debt. Raka... this struggle... it’s been repeating for aeons."

Raka walked toward the center of the room, his hand trembling as he touched a photo of him and Luna dancing under a red sky. The "Correction" wasn't a one-time event. It was a sentient pressure from a universe that demanded a specific outcome. He saw the photos of his successes, and next to each one, he saw a photo of a tragedy.

A photo of Raka signing a massive contract. Next to it, a photo of Baskara’s car wrapped around a tree.

A photo of Raka and Luna in their new Tebet apartment. Next to it, a photo of a woman in the next building over, her house burning down in an electrical fire.

"The Auditor," Raka breathed, the memory of the cold, cosmic entity flickering in his mind like a dying lightbulb. "The debt of happiness. It wasn't paid. It was just... redirected."

Suddenly, the air in the room warped. A physical glitch in reality—a shimmering, pixelated distortion—manifested in front of the wall of photos. It didn't have a face, but it spoke with a thousand voices at once, a cacophony of the lives Raka had never lived.

"Raka Satya... do you think... joy is free? Do you think... you can have... the girl... and the soul... without a price?"

The glitch expanded, the images on the wall beginning to ignite, burning with a cold, violet flame.

"Baskara... lies in a hospital... his legs crushed... his mind a void. That was... the payment... for your kiss at the gala. The child... in the burning house... was the payment... for your clean apartment."

Raka recoiled, his back hitting a pillar of cold steel. "No! I didn't ask for that! I tried to be good! I gave it all up!"

"You cannot... give up... what you do not... own," the glitch hissed, the frequency now so intense that blood began to leak from Raka’s nose. "The universe... is a closed system. For every ounce... of happiness... you steal... from the future... someone... in the present... must pay... in blood."

The room began to vibrate, the thousands of photos of Luna beginning to scream—a low, rhythmic sound that matched the recording on Raka’s phone. Raka looked at Gani, but his friend was frozen, his eyes wide and vacant as if his mind had been overwritten by the sheer scale of the paradox.

"Then take me!" Raka screamed into the shimmering void. "Take my life! Leave her alone! Leave the city alone!"

The glitch laughed, a sound of static and grinding stone. "You are... already... taken, Raka. You are... the battery. The more... you love her... the faster... she fades. Your happiness... is her... slow death."

Raka looked at his hands, seeing the faint, violet light beginning to pulse beneath his skin. He realized then that the "new" Luna wasn't safe. She was being "erased" again, not by a monster, but by the very love he was using to save her.

He stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand failed lives, as the abandoned skyscraper groaned around them. The light of the glitch intensified, illuminating a final photo on the far wall—a photo that hadn't been there a second ago.

It was a photo of Luna, the Luna currently waiting for him in Tebet with a cup of tea. In the photo, her skin was starting to turn translucent, the watercolors on her desk bleeding into gray ash.

The frequency in Raka’s head reached a final, agonizing note, a sound that felt like a bridge snapping in the middle of a hurricane. He realized that to save her, he couldn't just be a "good man." He had to find a way to break the very math of the universe, or watch as the woman he loved became the final payment for a debt he could never hope to settle.

As the glitch began to consume the room, Raka’s eyes turned toward the door, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had to get back. He had to see her. But as he turned, the floor beneath him seemed to dissolve, leaving him standing on the edge of a void that tasted of salt, black roses, and an inevitable, crushing ruin.