In her space, Bani had absorbed what felt like weeks of learning—copying knowledge from book after book, seeing the logic of games and the magic of AI unfold before her like a dream. She experimented, tested, and imagined—each action guided gently by the space wreck's calm presence.
She had done so much… and yet, when she finally blinked and opened her eyes to the real world, only 15 minutes had passed.
The fan still spun lazily above her. Manu snored softly on the other side of the room. The moonlight slid across the floor like nothing had changed.
But Bani had changed.
She looked at her hands—steady, ready. Her mind felt clear, focused. She now knew what IDEs were, how code blocks worked, what a game loop meant, how AI could make gameplay smarter.
She stretched, yawned, and whispered to herself,
"Tomorrow. I'll start building it at college."
Her heart fluttered with a strange excitement—not fear, not pressure, just quiet purpose. She pulled the blanket over her.
That morning, Bani had her usual omelet for breakfast. She packed her books and her new laptop — simple, functional, but nothing advanced — and left for college with quiet determination in her eyes.
She attended the first class as always, the one where attendance was taken. Once her name was marked and the lecture began, she slipped out quietly, unnoticed. It was time to begin her real work.
Wandering through the school building, she searched for a quiet corner. Finally, on the top floor, she found it — an old, unused classroom filled with sunlight and silence. She stepped in, closed the door gently, and placed her laptop on the desk.
She opened it.
The laptop powered on slowly. It was basic — good for typing assignments, browsing, maybe watching videos — but not built for what she had in mind. Not for building a game. Not for running code editors or AI tools.
She stared at the screen and sighed.
"Can I upgrade this laptop's function?" she asked into the silence, reaching inward to her space — the place within her mind where knowledge and energy flowed freely.
The space responded immediately, calm and clear.
> "Keep the laptop in touch. I will upgrade it with full strength."
Bani gently placed her hand on the keyboard. A soft current of warmth ran through her palm, as if the laptop and her space were syncing together.
For a moment, everything went still.
In her space wreck, glowing threads of code wrapped around the shape of her laptop, rewriting its limits. Storage expanded, processes streamlined, new tools installed — all invisible to the outside world.
Back in the real world, the screen flickered once… then stabilized. Smooth. Fast. Ready.
A new folder appeared on the desktop: "ST_MODE_ON"
Her laptop was no longer just a tool. It had evolved.
The upgraded laptop hummed quietly on the desk, smoother and faster than it had ever been. The sunlight warmed the back of Bani's shoulders as she sat in the quiet room, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.
She took a deep breath.
Everything she needed — the logic, the code, the visuals — was inside her now, copied in an instant from the glowing books in her space. But this was the first time she would apply it in the real world.
She opened the lightweight code editor that had appeared after the upgrade. The interface looked simple, but it pulsed with quiet power — tools arranged just as she had seen in her space wreck.
She created a new file and titled it:
"flappy_bird_basic.py"
Then, she began typing. Her fingers moved slowly at first, like someone writing in a new language she somehow already knew.
import pygame
import random
# Initialize game
pygame.init()
# Screen dimensions
screen_width = 400
screen_height = 600
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((screen_width, screen_height))
pygame.display.set_caption("Flappy Bird)
# Colors and font
white = (255, 255, 255)
black = (0, 0, 0)
# Game variables
gravity = 0.5
bird_movement = 0
bird_y = 300
# Clock
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
The first few lines built the basic game window. She smiled — it was working. No errors. Just clean, running code.
From her memory, she recalled the elements one by one: the bird, the pipes, the collision logic, the score tracker. All of it was in her now — she just had to lay it down.
Her heart beat faster as she added sprites, created the jumping motion, and coded the falling physics. The game began to take shape line by line, not as a copy-paste from the internet, but as something she had understood and recreated with her own hands.
A few hours later, when she hit "Run", a small window appeared.
There it was — her version of Flappy Bird.
A pixel bird hovered on the screen, pipes scrolling past. The bird jumped when she pressed space. It crashed when it hit the pipe. It restarted when the game was over.
Bani laughed softly in disbelief.
"It works," she whispered.
"I made it work."
And in that quiet, dusty room of her college building, with just an upgraded laptop and the copied wisdom of her space, an arts student — who once only knew how to use PowerPoint — had just built her first game.
It had taken her only three hours.
From the moment she began typing to the final line of code, Flappy Bird: Bani's Version had come to life — bouncing, flapping, and crashing just the way she wanted.
By then, it was already lunchtime.
She didn't need to step outside. Her mother had packed her tiffin with care: two chapatis, a portion of crispy chicken fry, and a simple salad of cucumber and carrot. She sat on the cool floor of the quiet room, the sunlight sliding across the dusty tiles, and ate slowly — content, calm.
But even as she finished her last bite, her mind was still moving.
"If I've built it… why not publish it?"
She had the knowledge. The glowing space books had already shown her how to package, test, and launch a mobile game. She tweaked the graphics for iPhone screens, replaced keyboard controls with tap gestures, and made sure everything ran smoothly in a simulator.
There was only one final step: publishing on the Apple App Store.
To do that, she needed to pay Apple's developer fee — $99 per year, the same price it had been since 2009, roughly ₹5000 at that time.
Luckily, just yesterday, she had received ₹5000 as payment for Mysore photoshoot she had done the previous week — her first-ever paid good fee of modeling gig, done quietly, without much attention.