It was no longer just about faces.
It was about systems.
And inside Magicnet, Vikram had begun to see them differently — not as scattered orbs of memories and skills, but as structured memory maps. Layers of experience. Threads of logic. Notebooks folded into minds.
It started with an accidental discovery.
He'd touched a young British librarian named Edgar while handing over a receipt.
Three seconds.
Thread connected.
What Vikram saw was not surprising — classifications, book numbers, subject stacks. But the way Edgar's mind arranged that knowledge?
That was different.
Each thought was filed like a shelf. Mental bookmarks. Color codes. Internal indexes.
Vikram watched himself move through Edgar's memory map — like navigating a private, invisible library.
He returned to his press, stunned by the clarity.
That night, he went into the memory space of Ramu — the press floor worker — and saw only chaos. Memories jumbled together. Shouts. Ink spills. Timings. Accidents.
Not everyone's mind was a library.
But maybe they could be.
Over the next two weeks, Vikram touched two more British-trained bureaucrats.
One handled rail logistics. Another filed regional tax records.
Both had rigid mental orders. Filed receipts in thought. Could recall a ten-digit license number by visualizing its placement in a drawer in their mind.
It wasn't intelligence.
It was cognitive structure.
Vikram fused this into a new orb: Intermediate Memory Filing.
And he gave it to Leelu.
The result? Leelu went from reporting events vaguely to naming exact timestamps, license numbers, shop faces, vehicle markings, and descriptions down to cloth pattern.
And he didn't know why he could.
Vikram smiled quietly.
Memory maps worked.
But he didn't stop there.
He wanted to rebuild the knowledge of the Empire, one man at a time.
He selected six minds over the next month:
A British surveyor who had mapped Delhi's drains in 1901
A tax officer who handled grain markets in five states
A postman who'd memorized postal routes across the country
A Parsi bookkeeper with legal accounting skills
A drunk clerk who handled industrial permits
And a telegraph decoder with field-level encryption training
Each touch gave Vikram not just memories — but their skill logic. How they stored. How they processed. How they remembered what mattered and ignored the rest.
He created separate maps inside Magicnet:
Trade and Supply
Urban Infrastructure
Legal Loopholes and Permit Paths
Postal and Telegraph Control
British Intelligence Movement Patterns
He could now track a piece of information from desk to dispatch.
He could predict where files would be stored, or which clerk would be weak to bribes, or how letters would be delayed by routing policies.
Vikram didn't store this in papers.
He stored it in people.
Through Magicnet, he assigned these memory maps — one per loyal worker. Leelu got postal intelligence. Sattu got permit processing. The eldest press boy got supply chain paths.
These boys didn't just carry out orders.
They became living indexes of British control.
The beauty of it?
None of them knew what they were.
They remembered what Vikram needed them to remember — as if it had always been theirs. He could pull a route, a signature, a shipping label, or a customs law within seconds.
This was no longer espionage.
This was replication.
He wasn't just fighting the Empire.
He was quietly replacing it.
And deep inside Magicnet, he began to see a change.
The space now showed walls forming. Corridors. Halls. Rooms made of orbs stacked on orbs. It was no longer abstract.
Magicnet had become a mental fortress.
Each thread was a bridge.
Each user, a library.
And Vikram — the only one who could read it all.