At eight in the morning, Suka Maju Village was not a place for anyone with a weak heart or a low tolerance for noise. Outside, the world spun at an exhausting, full-throttle pace. The ear-piercing roar of a modified scooter exhaust belonging to a frantic package delivery driver clashed aggressively with the screech of a traveling vegetable vendor aggressively pitching discounted bird's eye chillies. To top it all off, the neighbor next door had a chronic addiction to blasting bass-boosted remix dangdut, operating under the firm delusion that everyone else's eardrums were public utility property.

Inside the Barokah Jaya Convenience Store, however, the laws of physics and time simply surrendered and died.

This was the royal throne of Bagas.

Bagas, a twenty-four-year-old holding the undisputed heavyweight record for the lowest ambition in all of Suka Maju Village, was currently horizontal, draped across a creaky bamboo cot tucked away in the shadowy corner of the shop. His spine molded in absolute, lazy harmony with the hard bamboo slats, while his hand gripped a dying smartphone clinging to a critical battery life of five percent. The screen was nearly black, yet Bagas stared at it with what little flickering consciousness he had left.

"Life is like a phone battery, kid," Bagas muttered to a philosophy entirely devoid of practical value. "If you force it to sprint at five percent, you're just speed-running your own funeral."

"Hey! Bagas! Wake up, you crusty barnacle!"

A thunderous voice tore through the morning air, obliterating the fake peace inside the shop.

Bagas didn't even twitch. He knew the exact frequency and amplitude of that sound by heart. It belonged to Mum—a stout, middle-aged woman whose combat energy when enraged could easily rival a short-circuiting power transformer.

Mum stomped out from the living quarters into the shop area, wielding her ultimate weapon: half a coconut-fiber broom with a wooden handle whose bristles were half-bald from being used to beat plastic water jugs—or the heads of deadbeat neighbors suffering from convenient selective amnesia.

"It’s ten past eight! The sun is already roasting the neighbor's roof, and you're still sprawled out like a hit-and-run victim on the highway! Get up!" Mum roared, aggressively jamming the tip of the broom handle straight into Bagas’s shin.

Bagas groaned softly, hitching his sweatpants up an inch, and glanced at Mum with one half-closed eye while fiercely defending his horizontal real estate. "Mercy, Mum. Don't factory-reset your son's life just yet. I'm not being lazy; I'm... conserving national energy."

"Conserving national energy my left foot!" Mum propped her hands on her hips, her face flushing crimson with suppressed fury. "From the Stone Age to the digital age, all you ever do is horizontal! You're built like a utility pole, but your spine is boiled gelatin! You know what you are, Gas? If you were a product, you’d be one of those cheap hotel flip-flops that, the moment you lose one, not a single sane person on earth would shed a tear."

Bagas exhaled a long, dramatic sigh, wearing the most pitiful, tragic expression he could muster.

"Ouch, Mum, that's a brutal comparison. At least a hotel flip-flop has a noble purpose protecting feet from cold ceramic tile. Me? I'm the designated guardian protecting this convenience store from the existential threat of boredom."

"Boredom my foot!" Mum raised the broom handle high, locking in on her final-stage execution. "Choose: get up right now, or your weekly allowance and snack privileges are officially nationalized and abolished!"

At the magic words snack privileges abolished, the emergency survival alarms in Bagas's brain fired simultaneously. He shot up from the cot with lightning speed, springing to his feet while desperately smoothing down a t-shirt that proudly featured a massive hole under the armpit.

"Whoa, whoa, let's leave snacks out of this, Mum! That's a sensitive geopolitical border that could trigger a household civil war!" Bagas protested with a wide, disarming grin, trying to melt the tension. "Fine, fine, I'm up. You want to open the shop, right? I'll arrange the soy sauce bottles so they look aesthetic, like a hipster cafe."

"We don't need aesthetic! Yesterday you stacked them in a pyramid and the neighborhood kids thought it was target practice for rock-throwing!" Mum barked fiercely, though the corners of her mouth twitched, threatening to betray a smile at her middle child's endless clownery. "Now go wash your face! Then sweep the front porch. If I see one crinkled plastic bag stuck in the fence, God help you!"

Mum spun around, stomping back toward the kitchen while continuing a running monologue cursing the cosmic lottery for handing her a specimen like Bagas.

Bagas let out a gust of pent-up air. He scratched the back of his neck, dragging his feet toward the water jar near the back door. Just as he scooped a handful of water to splash over his face to chase away the lingering sleep, a bizarre glitch in reality struck out of nowhere.

The world around Bagas slowly shifted gears. The noisy yells of the vegetable vendor outside suddenly sounded muffled, as if echoing from the bottom of a deep water pipe. Bagas's vision blurred into a hazy wash, peppered with wild, flashing white dots for a few agonizing seconds.

"Ugh... Must be the side effects of binge-watching late-night dramas; my eyes are short-circuiting," Bagas grumbled, squeezing his eyelids shut and rubbing them fiercely.

When Bagas finally forced his eyes open and blinked twice, his vision cleared right up. But there was one minor detail that instantly sent his heart crashing straight down into his stomach.

Floating gracefully right out of thin air, hovering directly above the back of his mother’s head as she pottered around the far end of the kitchen, was a chilling, translucent neon-blue combination of numbers. It flickered softly, buzzing with an eerie hum, and ticked backward second by second:

003:14:22:05

Bagas froze solid. He stood locked in place beside the water jar, his wet hand still dangling in mid-air. His mind went entirely blank, instantly replaced by a level of blind, primal panic he had never experienced in his entire life.