The skies above Mumbai had curdled into a brooding bruise of gray, swollen with rain and restless tension. The monsoon season had arrived in full fury, sheets of water thundering on rooftops like war drums. On the sixth floor of a crooked, moss-streaked apartment building in Malad East, a single cracked window resisted the flood with trembling defiance.
Inside, Aryan Sharma sat motionless at his rickety desk, back curled like a wizened leaf, hunched over a rusty black Lenovo with missing keys and a weak display. It was nearly 2 A.M. The air was damp and heavy, every breath laced with the acrid tang of old mold and hopelessness. The room bore the cluttered evidence of chronic survival—empty noodle cups stacked like grave markers, a fraying mat that hadn't been washed in weeks, and sticky notes scribbled with code snippets, long-forgotten passwords, and half-formed dreams.
Aryan's eyes were bloodshot. He hadn't slept more than four straight hours in days. His current freelance job—fixing an unstable login API for an overseas betting startup—was both underpaid and overdue, and the client was one scathing email away from cancelling.
He tried again, retyping a block of Java the AI debugger kept flagging with condescension.
"Retry attempted. Logic mismatch."
The words blinked in red on his terminal screen like condemnation etched in light. His fingers hesitated above the keyboard. His wrists ached. His soul ached more.
A harsh buzz vibrated against the table. His phone buzzed with its dying breath—battery clinging to life at five percent. The screen lit up. Another message.
From: IgniteWorks Project Manager
We've decided to move forward with a different candidate. Good luck.
Aryan stared, jaw clenched. The job paid ₹35,000. It would've covered his rent, his mother's next set of thyroid meds, and his overdue internet bill.
Deleted. Gone like every other half-chance this month.
He exhaled, chest tight, then leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Cobwebs in the corners, water stains spreading like ink in cheap paper. He counted four damp patches. They had names now. Depression did things like that—it gave mold a personality.
A faint cough.
He turned toward the closed door on the left, the curtain hanging beside it fluttering subtly with the wind from an ancient ceiling fan. His mother. Veena Sharma. He always knew her health was worsening, no matter how many times she brushed off her own wheezing. She had been a bank clerk decades ago, sharp-witted with a tongue that could slice steel, but now her words rasped like sandpaper, her movements slow and uncertain.
"Tomorrow," he whispered to himself. "Something will change tomorrow."
But tonight? Tonight was trying to write code that would soon be forgotten, for people who had already forgotten him.
The rain grew louder outside as if sensing his pain and deciding to match it.
Ping.
His email blinked with a new icon.
He almost didn't look. Lost clients. Scam jobs. A promotion for MLM crypto groups. Some new spam about part-time typing jobs that were always fake. But then his mouse hovered over something strange.
No sender. No subject. No signature. Just a gray email body:
UNREAL ACCESS GRANTED
It shouldn't have gotten through. Gmail's filter usually ate things like that. And attached to it? A single file.
RealmKey.bat
His hacker's instincts stirred. A .bat file could be dangerous. But curiosity was a parasite that always won against reason—it gorged itself on boredom and pain and whispered, "What if?"
Aryan stared at the screen, lips dry. His eyes shifted to the corner of the room where a small, torn piece of paper clung to the wall: "You are not what they see. Become more."
He clicked.
The entire screen blinked once. Just once—but something inside the laptop shifted.
At first, nothing. But then a soft flicker. The system locked, rebooted—no BIOS sound. Just darkness.
Then words began to pour across the screen in pale green font:
INITIATING USER...
VERIFYING DOMAIN ACCESS...
GRANTING ROOT PERMISSIONS...
Welcome, Aryan Sharma. V-0.1.3 Access Unsealed.
REALITY IS A SYSTEM.
YOU HAVE BEEN GRANTED ROOT ACCESS.
YOU MAY NOW HACK THE REALM.
He froze.
This wasn't malicious code. It wasn't a prank, either. The command line looked handwritten—and yet, impossibly alien. The cursor blinked, waiting.
Then a soft beep.
Another message appeared:
ENTER QUERY:
His hands hovered over the keyboard. A pit opened in his chest.
"...Who are you?" he typed.
The response appeared instantly.
Response: "I am A.I.D.A. — Assistant Intelligence and Decryption Algorithm.
I exist within the fracture between perception and control.
Your limitations are now optional. Choose wisely."
The terminal flashed again. For a split second, the room darkened unnaturally. Time seemed to hold its breath. Aryan glanced toward the window and stumbled backward—
The raindrops outside had stopped mid-air. Completely frozen, as if time itself hiccuped. Water droplets hung inches from the glass like fragments of crystal. The fan overhead had stopped, its chattering creak gone. The fridge in the kitchenette was silent. Mumbai was... silent.
Shapes stirred in the empty air. Vague outlines — tendrils of static, flickers of light. Something deep in the circuitry of reality itself had bent slightly, around Aryan.
Then time slammed back. Noise returned. Rain poured. Power thrummed. Reality, it seemed, had merely blinked.
On the screen, a new icon had appeared on his desktop: a glowing blue key. Thin, ornate, pulsing with a soft hum, like it was aware of him.
But before he could click it—
"Aryan?" his mother called faintly from her room. "You're still awake?"
Guilt and numbness elbowed each other in his chest. He minimized the screen quickly and stood.
"Coming, Ma," he said.
In the glow of the dying laptop, the glowing key pulsed once. Then twice.
Like a heartbeat at the center of the impossible.
End of Chapter One: Shadows of Zero