XT Kids

CHAPTER 1 XT KIDS 1.1 XT Kids Sometimes the future doesn’t arrive as an answer. It arrives as a question that refuses to leave your head. Malang in the late 1980s was still a cool, quiet college town. Mist settled over the campus streets most mornings. Students walked to their lectures in loose groups, books under their arms, dreams tucked somewhere they didn’t talk about. Among them was a young man from Blitar named Bayu, a student in the Faculty of Animal Husbandry at Brawijaya University. Like most students living away from home, he watched his money carefully — by the end of some months his wallet was thinner than his lecture notebook. But he had one habit his friends found hard to explain: he was drawn to anything new, the way other people are drawn to gossip. He shared a boarding house near campus with two students who would matter more to his life than either of them yet knew. Hanief studied Agriculture, the son of a madrasah teacher from Kediri — calm, deliberate, the kind of person who thought twice before answering a question that didn’t need it. The others in the house called him “Little Ustadz.” He never denied it. He never confirmed it either. Arif was from Surabaya, a Physics student in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. He talked fast, calculated everything, and rarely agreed to anything before he knew what it would cost him. Three different faculties, three different ways of thinking — but one bathroom, one kitchen, one living room will do more to bond three strangers than shared interests ever could. Most evenings ended there, complaining about their shrinking allowances, arguing about things that didn’t matter at all. That semester, the university added a two-credit computer course to every faculty’s requirements — law, agriculture, animal husbandry, even the science students who already lived comfortably with numbers. Nobody understood why. Computers were still a rare sight. There was no internet, no such thing as a mobile phone; for some students, this course would be the first time they touched one at all. A few weeks in, Bayu found a place near the main road that students kept crowding into — a computer rental shop, owned by one of the lecturers. Rows of machines, almost never empty. Someone typing a lab report. Someone running numbers for a thesis. A line, some evenings, for the printer. He started stopping by just to watch. Sat in the corner. Said nothing. What others saw was a computer. What Bayu saw was a need. What others saw was a rental shop. What Bayu saw was an opportunity. One evening he stood outside longer than usual, watching students stream in and out, the printer never quite catching up, a price list taped near the register. If this place is already this crowded, what will it look like in a few years? The question followed him back to the boarding house. Into his lectures. Into the noodle stall down the road. Into his sleep. That night, over tea and a plate of fried bananas they’d bought by pooling loose change, Bayu spoke up before either of the others had settled in. “I have an idea.” Arif didn’t look up from his physics textbook. “Another idea? Last month it was cassette tapes.” “This one’s different. A computer rental shop.” Hanief set down his glass. Arif closed the book. “Where’s the capital coming from?” Arif asked, already sure of the answer. “That’s the part I haven’t figured out.” They laughed — the same laugh that met any idea too big for three broke students. But that night the laughter didn’t last. Bayu told them what he’d seen. The line for the printer. The reports that needed typing. His growing certainty that this wasn’t a fad — that computers were about to become something people couldn’t do without. Hanief listened the way he always listened, nodding without interrupting. Arif fired off questions like he was testing a hypothesis: How much does a unit cost? How many students need typing done each week? How long before the capital comes back? What started as a late chat turned into hours, the light in their living room still on after every other window on the street had gone dark. It didn’t stop there. Night after night they ran the same numbers, argued, crossed things out, started again. A computer alone cost more than they had. Add electricity, add rent, and every calculation ended the same way — heads shaking over a number too big. Then one night, Hanief, who’d been quiet, scribbling on a scrap of paper, said it simply: “Let’s rent a house.” “And turn it into the shop?” Arif asked. “Not just that.” He looked up. “We rent the rooms too. Move out of here, find somewhere bigger. Front room for the computers. Back rooms for boarders.” Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the pieces started fitting. Students needed computers. Students needed housing. They needed the second income to survive the first year. Arif ran the numbers again, faster this time, filling two pages. It still wasn’t safe. It wasn’t a guarantee. But it was close enough to try. By the time they went to bed that night, the boarding house was silent, the street outside empty, a sheet of scrawled arithmetic sitting on the table between three nearly empty glasses. They would find a house. Open a rental shop. Rent out rooms. Try. No investors. No family fortune behind them. Just three students from three faculties who’d shared nothing but a roof until that night, and who now shared something much larger — a bet, and the belief that the future was already knocking. Bayu lay awake a long time afterward, thinking about the green screen from the campus lab — a two-credit afterthought that had somehow become a dream, an opportunity, a road he’d never walked before. Outside, the city lights blinked in the distance. He was still smiling when he fell asleep.