The question did not announce itself.
It slipped into conversations the way humidity slips into fabric—slowly, quietly, until everything felt heavier than before.
What do we owe what sustains us?
---
It surfaced first among the younger ones.
Not activists.
Not rebels.
Pragmatists.
Students graduating into a world that praised resilience but priced it cheaply. Workers who had grown up repairing things only to be told, gently, that repair was inefficient once they entered the market.
At the river table, a teenager named Satria asked it plainly.
"If care is what keeps things alive," he said, fingers tracing the crack in a ceramic bowl, "why does everything that runs on care eventually get exploited?"
No one answered immediately.
Because everyone understood the danger of answering too quickly.
---
The city felt the tension.
Not as conflict.
As hesitation.
New projects stalled—not from lack of funding, but from uncertainty about intent. Cooperative ventures hesitated to grow. Informal networks worried about becoming formal.
Care, once ordinary, was being noticed again.
And attention, as GarudaCity knew too well, changed things.
---
Danindra, long removed from leadership, was asked to speak at the university.
Not as an expert.
As a witness.
He stood before a hall of students who had never known the city before the hum stabilized.
"You're asking the wrong version of the question," he said after listening for a long time.
They waited.
"The problem isn't that care gets exploited," he continued. "It's that we keep asking care to justify itself."
A hand rose. "Then how do we protect it?"
Danindra smiled, tired but kind.
"By refusing to make it efficient."
---
Elsewhere, a proposal circulated quietly through city departments.
Standardized Care Framework
To preserve cultural resilience through structured replication.
The language was gentle.
The intent, sincere.
The effect—if approved—would be irreversible.
Yunitra, now serving in an advisory role she never sought, read the document once and felt a familiar chill.
She wrote a single margin note before returning it:
> Preservation is not the same as freezing.
---
That evening, the river table was crowded.
The proposal had leaked.
"So what do we do?" someone asked. "Reject it?"
"And let care decay?" another countered.
Wirasmi, frail now but still sharp-eyed, sat quietly until the noise softened.
"You let it move," she said.
They turned to her.
"Care that cannot walk away," she continued, "is already trapped."
---
The city did not vote.
It never did, on matters like this.
Instead, something else happened.
People began stepping back—selectively.
Repair collectives dissolved into smaller groups. Teaching rotated hands more often. No one stayed indispensable for long.
Frustrating.
Messy.
Alive.
---
The proposal passed on paper.
And failed in practice.
There were no centralized frameworks to plug into. No stable structures to anchor metrics. Care slipped through definitions like water through open fingers.
Analysts called it non-compliance.
GarudaCity called it breathing.
---
Late that night, Satria walked home past the river.
He carried nothing broken.
Nothing to fix.
And yet, as he crossed the bridge, he slowed.
Not because he had been taught to.
But because something in him resisted hurry without instruction.
The hum—faint now, almost imperceptible—passed through him and moved on.
---
The question still had no answer.
Which was why it mattered.
Because as long as it refused to sit still, no one could build a cage around it.
And GarudaCity, once again, chose not resolution—
But motion.