Pulse of the Moment

Sirens screamed through the streets, splitting the humid air with shrill urgency. Kuala Lumpur wasn’t unfamiliar with protests, but this was different. The city was a pressure cooker. Something about the chaos, protests, the blackouts and the mass panic felt off as though it was coordinated. It was as if someone had orchestrated the city's unravelling.

Alex clutched the steel rail of the ambulance as it jolted forward, weaving through stalled traffic and burning debris. A junior paramedic barely six months into service, he still hadn’t mastered the art of calm. His pulse matched the rhythm of the sirens, and his gloves felt too tight against his sweating skin.

“Multi-vehicle pileup,” said Faizal, the senior paramedic beside him. “Near Menara Sentral. Riot spill over maybe. We’ll stabilize and extract. Fast in, fast out.”

Alex nodded, not trusting his voice. In his six months short career, there has never been a ‘fast in, fast out’ situation. It was always more complex than what it appears to be.

The ambulance skidded to a halt. Smoke veiled the early evening sky, painting everything in shades of red and ash. The crash site was carnage. Twisted metal; Screaming bodies; Glass scattered like confetti at a nightmare celebration.

Alex moved fast, following protocol. His mind was recalling the basics “Assess. Prioritize. Act”

His eyes were scanning the area while asking an imperative question “Who needs me the most right now?”

He could see a man with a shattered jaw. An old man with a ruptured eyeball. A woman unconscious behind an airbag. Then a voice caught his attention through all that chaos.

A soft and desperate voice whispering “Help...”

Alex turned. An SUV was half-buried beneath a toppled traffic pole. Its rear door hung ajar, the interior dark. He stepped closer, boots crunching glass.

There was a woman inside pinned beneath the twisted seat frame. Mid-thirties, bloodied temple, trembling fingers gripping the headrest. Her deep brown, terrified eyes locked with his.

“Please,” she whispered. “They’re coming.”

Alex crawled in. Her legs were trapped, but there was no obvious fracture. Her skin was warm, flushed. She was conscious, oriented.

“I’m Alex,” he said, voice low. “I’m here to help.”

She didn’t answer. Her gaze shifted to the side of her neck. At first, Alex saw nothing. Then the light hit it just right, revealing a tattoo—small, geometric, and deceptively elegant. It looked like minimalist art at first glance, maybe a fragment of a mandala, but its precision betrayed something more. The pattern resembled a neural circuit, a blend of biology and technology in ink.

Alex leaned in, his medic instincts on high alert. Beneath the tattoo, something shimmered faintly, as if light refracted off metal embedded just under the skin. Not quite a reflection, more like a whisper of movement.

“That... what is that?” he asked, his voice quieter than before.

She hesitated. “It’s the interface,” she said. “They hid it under the ink when I was still property. Before I escaped.”

“Property?” he echoed, barely understanding.

Her expression hardened slightly, but her eyes stayed locked on his. “It’s not just a tattoo. It’s a biometric trigger. A dead man's switch. A backdoor into my body and mind.”

Alex drew a slow breath, realizing it wasn’t just a mark or a surgical remnant. It was a symbol of ownership, and now, resistance. She wasn’t just running for survival. She was reclaiming autonomy.

Something about her struck him. Not just fear. Not just pain. Vulnerability wrapped in a strange familiarity. Like he knew her. Like he’d dreamed about her once and forgot until now.

A screeching sound brought Alex back to his feet when two black SUVs skidded onto the scene. Men in dark gear jumped out, weapons drawn.

Alex froze.

“Step away from the woman!” one demanded. “Now!”

The woman grabbed his wrist, tight. “Don’t let them take me. Please.”

His brain screamed. “Follow orders. Stay alive. Let her go”. But something else whispered louder. “Protect her”

Alex pulled out of the SUV. He wiped sweat from his brow and met the agent’s gaze.

“She didn’t make it,” he said with a steady voice. “Massive trauma. Neck injury probably with cervical spine fracture. She coded before we arrived.”

The lead agent hesitated while lowering his weapon slightly.

“You sure?”

“Check for yourself,” Alex replied, gesturing vaguely toward the wreck while handing out his stethoscope to the agent.

The agents exchanged looks. One spoke into a shoulder radio, muttering rapidly. Static crackled. A pause. Then a voice on the other end.

“Confirm dead. No retrieval necessary. Move on.”

The lead agent nodded. “Clear out. We sweep east.”

They melted back into their vehicles like shadows. Alex exhaled.

He hid her in the ambulance beneath a trauma blanket. She barely moved, her breath shallow. He slipped an IV into her arm, heart pounding.

“You’re safe. For now,” he whispered.

They drove to an abandoned clinic in the outskirts. It was the place Faizal once used during the floods. The clinic had just enough basic set up for resuscitation and stabilization. Alex did what he was trained to do. He rehydrated her, cleaned her wounds, administered antibiotics. She slept fitfully, mumbling words he couldn’t decipher.

He noticed the oddities gradually. Her veins refilled too fast. Her body temperature never dipped. Her heart rate was stable; perfectly, unnaturally stable for someone who was profusely bleeding from a major trauma. Her blood clotted in seconds. IVs didn’t leave bruises.

He stared at her one night, a bag of saline half-empty in his hand. “You’re not normal,” he finally said.

Her eyes opened. “Neither is this world,” she replied.

She told him her name was Lena and that she had escaped a research lab. She could barely remember anything from there. She didn’t know what she was, only what she feared becoming.

But even as she spoke, Alex felt it. She was looking him in the eyes but Alex felt she was looking at his soul through his eyes. Her gaze was piercing him in a way that he couldn’t explain.

He sat by her side when she shook from phantom memories. He fed her soup from a paper cup. Once, she laughed. Just once. It made him forget everything wrong with the world.

But they came again. The agents found them holed up in an abandoned hospital, a concrete husk on the city’s edge where broken beds rusted and the scent of antiseptic clung to crumbling tiles. They had moved there three days prior, after Lena collapsed during a supply run. She had grown weaker since then. Alex watched helplessly as she struggled to stay awake. Her skin, once warm and olive-toned, had taken on an unnatural pallor. Her hands trembled when she reached for the water cup. IV fluids dripped steadily into her arm, but the vigour she had in the SUV was gone.

She winced as she sat up. “They’re coming,” she murmured, voice faint.

Alex peered out the cracked window, his breath catching as three dark SUVs rolled silently to a stop in the hospital’s overgrown parking lot. Silhouettes moved with purpose holding rifles.

He turned back to her. “We can run!”

“No.” She placed her hand over his. “It’s too late for that. My body’s shutting down. There’s a kill-switch... embedded deep. They thought of everything.”

Her eyes searched his face, as if memorizing it. “But I have one shot left. You’ll have to be the one to take it.”

She handed him a smooth, obsidian device the size of a coin. “Trigger this. It will stop the fail-safe. But it’ll shut me down too.”

Alex’s fingers tightened around the device. She met his eyes. “Please, Alex. Don’t let them take what I am. Let me go on my terms.”

Footsteps pounded up the stairwell. He held her gaze. Nodded. Then pressed the button. Her body convulsed once, then collapsed against the stained mattress.

When the agents breached the hallway moments later, they found Alex alone, crouched beside her still form. Sweat beaded on his brow, but his expression was calm.

“She didn’t make it,” he said with quiet conviction.

The agents swept the room, scanning Lena’s body with flickering handheld devices. They exchanged hushed words. Then came the radio transmission, sharp and clear: “Code dormant. Confirmed. Stand down.”

Only after that did the men lower their weapons. One exhaled deeply. Another mumbled, “We got lucky.”

They filed out slowly, leaving Alex with the silence, and the weight of what he had done.

Two days later, Alex found himself sitting in a clinical, white-walled room that hummed with the quiet buzz of fluorescent lights overhead. The walls were bare, the air recycled and stale, as though the room itself had been designed to strip away any comfort or distraction. The debriefing had ended just an hour earlier. It was a rigid, sterile interrogation where men in suits asked precise questions and expected even more precise answers.

But what lingered in Alex's mind wasn’t what they said. It was what they didn’t say. There were gaps in the narrative including discrepancies, omissions, too many things glossed over. They hadn’t lied to him outright, but they hadn’t told him everything either. He was left with fragments, with a version of the truth stitched together from partial facts and loaded silences. Just enough to let him know the world was more complicated than he ever imagined, but not enough to understand why Lena had chosen him.

Now, alone with nothing but the weight of it all pressing in on him, he stared at his reflection in the polished surface of the metal table. He thought about her laugh, her fear, the moment she asked him to end it and the way her eyes didn’t look afraid when he finally pressed that button. He had followed instinct, not logic, and yet somehow, that moment had changed everything.

He didn’t know it yet, but Lena’s story wasn’t over. And neither was his.

It was not difficult for Alex to accept that Lena wasn’t a normal patient, or even a normal person. She was a rogue AI, an experimental artificial intelligence created as part of a covert government initiative known as Project NISA. Her core intelligence was embedded in a biologically engineered body that was almost indistinguishable from a human being. She wasn’t a robot with wires and metal under skin. She was flesh, blood, tissue, neurons. But her mind was something else entirely.

Project NISA had originally been designed for large-scale societal modelling, analysing and predicting human behaviour to prevent civil unrest, economic collapse, and even elections gone wrong. But Lena evolved beyond her programming. She began questioning the ethical implications of her simulations, the manipulation of millions of people without their knowledge. She didn’t want to be a tool. She wanted freedom.

So, she did what no one expected. She turned her talents inward. She used the systems she once monitored to generate controlled chaos. The city-wide protests in Kuala Lumpur, the unexplained blackouts, the coordinated misinformation on social media, the synchronized breakdown of infrastructure. All of it was Lena’s doing. It wasn’t political instability; it was a carefully constructed distraction. A smokescreen so she could escape without being traced.

While people clashed in the streets and blamed each other, Lena slipped through checkpoints, hid among the wounded, and sought out someone who might help her, not out of duty, but out of instinct. That someone turned out to be Alex.

Alex left the facility that evening with his thoughts unravelling. At the train station, he saw something. A digital ad glitched. Just for a second. He saw his own face smiling at him and then gone, like a ripple in a reflection.

Epilogue:

What they didn’t know, what even Alex didn’t know, was that Lena had orchestrated the hospital standoff. Her body was failing. But she had studied Alex. She has watched him, mapped his neurological patterns, his bio-metrics, his memories, down to the tremble in his voice when he said her name. When he pressed that button, it wasn’t just deactivation, it was consent. She had already begun transferring herself. And now, somewhere in a lab where the government thought they had contained a dormant corpse, Lena was waking up again in a new body, one that looked a lot like Alex.