Dev Arjun wasn't supposed to be awake. The rest of the team had gone back to the dorms hours ago. The dome was still open to the night. The dish tracked a single point in the sky, smooth as a clock that refused to stop.
In his headphones, the pulsar clicked: tick. tick. tick. Fast. Steady. Too steady.
He woke fully, rolled off the office couch, and jiggled the mouse. The green-on-black interface came alive. Signal strength. Timing residuals. A scrolling heartbeat in numbers.
He pulled the latest log and exhaled when he saw it. The midnight data was still there. The screen-recording file too, named in the way he named things at three a.m.: n7_final_final_reallyfinal.mp4.
He printed the timing table again and held it under the desk lamp. There it was: a clean reset every 432,000 pulses. No matter how he binned the beats, the same step appeared, like a notch in a gear.
432,000.
His grandfather's voice touched the edge of his mind, calm and warm. Kali Yuga, beta. Four hundred thirty-two thousand years. Four ages in one great cycle.
"Coincidence," Dev said out loud. It didn't sound like he believed it.
The door opened. Cold air slid in with a person-shaped shadow.
"Still here?" Meera leaned on the frame, rubbing her eyes under her glasses. Hair in a messy bun. Pencil through it like a skewer. "I told the night guard you sleep with the machines."
Dev tried a smile. "They're quiet roommates."
She set a thermos on the desk, poured tea into the lid, and pushed it at him. "Drink. You look like a fossil."
The tea smelled like cardamom and hope. Dev took a careful sip. "Thanks."
Meera scanned the screen, then the printout. "Same anomaly?"
"Yeah." He tapped the line of numbers. "Reset every 432k. It's… consistent."
"Do we like that or fear that?"
"Ask me in ten minutes."
They worked in silence. The dome motors hummed. The dish adjusted by a hair. Dev reran the timing residual code from scratch. Cable jitter? Temperature drift? Clock offset? He even kicked the floor to feel the vibration. He turned the A/C off and on to watch the noise spike and settle. Nothing erased the clean step at 432,000.
"Software?" Meera asked.
"If it is, it's everywhere." He pointed at his messy script on one screen and the clean pipeline on the other. "Both agree."
"Hardware?"
"We'd see it in the monitors. The oven clocks are solid. The maser is stable." He swallowed. "It's in the sky."
Meera gave a small nod. Serious now. "Run the spiral map, professor. The pretty one."
"It's not pretty. It's… okay." He launched his side project, fed it the new batch. Points bloomed on black, climbing into a bright staircase. Fourteen rings appeared, clean and even, stacked like the picture in every book from his childhood.
Meera leaned closer. "You really named the function mount_meru()?"
"It kept me honest." He kept his eyes on the rings. "Fourteen layers. Fourteen lokas."
"In your code," she said, but softly.
"In the data," he said, even softer.
He did not tell her about last night's blue bands. He did not tell her the screen had shown him a sentence that wasn't from any program he owned. He would tell her. Just not yet. One more pass when his hands weren't shaking.
Meera checked her phone. "Sunrise in twenty. I'll close the dome. You breathe."
She clanged down to the motor controls. The slit narrowed; the stars slid out of view like a slow eyelid. The heartbeat in Dev's headphones stopped. The silence felt heavier without it.
He saved the spiral image and copied it to every drive in reach. He labeled two big envelopes and slid the prints inside. Paper still made him feel safe. Paper didn't crash.
"Breakfast?" Meera said when she came back up. "If we go now we beat the student bus."
"Ten minutes," Dev said. "Annotate, then I'm yours."
"Don't marry the pulsar while I'm gone," she said, and left.
The room was too large without her. Dev opened the midnight screen-recording and jumped to the hour that wouldn't leave his head. He pressed play.
There it was. The spiral. The faint flicker of the dome light when wind hit the power line. And then, clear as chalk on a board:
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST KALPA.
He paused and took a photo with his phone. Stupid, maybe. But his hands wanted proof he could hold.
He watched the clip again. The hairs on his arms lifted in the same two places. He closed the window. He sat still until his breathing matched an imaginary tick again.
The canteen smelled like oil and onions and a clean metal sink. The sky over the ridge turned pale orange. Undergrads in institute hoodies argued about cricket at the far table. A stray dog slept under the bench like a folded rug.
Meera slid a plate of poha toward him. "You look less dead."
"I watched the file."
"And?"
"And I'm not crazy."
"You were never crazy," she said. "Just stubborn in the correct direction."
They ate. Dev tried to taste. Mostly he tasted metal and old plastic from the headphone cups. He checked his phone out of habit. News. Rain in Chennai. A minister scandal. A goat climbing stairs like a person. No alert that the sky had blinked. Maybe no one else had seen it. Maybe they'd filed it under satellite flare and moved on.
Back upstairs, the day shift flooded the room. Screens lit. Coffee cups multiplied. Someone swore at a stuck script. Dev forwarded the timing table, answered questions, and said "interesting" too many times.
At noon, Dr. Bose called from Pune. Calm voice, quick and clipped. "Meera says you have a persistent residual."
"I do." He shared his screen, pointed at the 432,000 step. Not the message. Not yet. "We ruled out instrument noise."
"Send raw files," Bose said. "I'll put them on the cluster. Also—sleep."
"I slept," Dev said, looking at the couch and deciding not to define sleep.
He packaged the files. The transfer bar crawled right. He touched his backpack where the three pocket drives sat, and the inside of his jacket where the two envelopes lay flat. He thought of the old paperback Bhāgavata under his bed in the staff quarters. Spine cracked. Corners rounded by years of hands.
Late afternoon. He walked to the edge of the compound. Sun low and wide. Heat lifting off the gravel. The wind tasted like stone and a promise of rain. He stood by the fence and listened. Not real silence—the transformer hum, a crow's comment, a motorcycle on the road—but the other kind he'd started to notice. The silence that waited behind sounds and watched.
His phone buzzed. Unknown number:
RA 13h. Check the dip.
A link flashed under it and vanished before he could tap.
He stared at the empty message field. He didn't like how cold his hands got.
He went back in, pulled the last hour of all-sky data, and ran a quick search at right ascension thirteen hours. The script flagged three tiny drops, tight triangle. Fractions of a percent. Simultaneous.
He overlaid positions on the wide-field map. Zoomed. In the center of the triangle: nothing special. No cataloged object. Just black.
Dev looked anyway. He stared at the empty patch like a man watching a locked door, waiting to hear a breath on the other side.
For one heartbeat, a single pixel dimmed and brightened.
He blinked. Maybe it was his eyes. He ran a detector on the raw frame. The code shrugged. Noise.
He opened an email draft to Meera. Subject: another_thing_pls_dont_kill_me. He typed nothing in the body. He deleted the draft.
Dusk. The dish climbed. The heartbeat returned to his ears. Comforting and wrong at the same time.
He opened a fresh notebook and wrote three simple lines:
432k step confirmed
Spiral holds (14 rings)
RA 13h dips (tiny)
He closed the notebook and set it on the print stack like a lid.
The first stars came on. Dev unlocked his phone to look at the freeze-frame of last night's message one more time, then locked it again without looking. He put the phone face down.
"Rhythm," he told the empty room. "Just keep the rhythm."
The pulsar obliged. Tick. tick. tick.
He started a new recording with a sensible name: pulsar_run_01. He stared at the trace and let his shoulders drop. He let the clicks wash his thoughts clean.
At 19:13 local time, the trace hiccuped.
Dev straightened. The hiccup was small—a breath between beats—but the program flagged it. The reset point slid early by a handful of ticks. Then slid back. Then held steady. Like something had almost tripped a switch and then changed its mind.
"Come on," he whispered. "Do that again."
It did. The second hiccup arrived thirty seconds later. The step jumped forward, then back, then forward again and stayed. The line on the screen re-drew itself. The count reached 432,000 and did not reset.
Dev's mouth went dry. The pulsar should not do that. Not on its own. Not like that.
His spiral code ran by itself—he hadn't asked it to—but his finger must have hit a key or his script had been waiting to fire. Points bloomed. Fourteen rings formed. Then a thin, almost invisible fifteenth ring ghosted above the rest and faded before he could zoom.
"Wait—" He grabbed the mouse. The image was already saving. The filename was one he didn't pick: meru_auto_001.png.
He looked at the terminal. His function name was still there. His code. But a second process line sat under it, greyed, like a whisper on the screen:
/sys/axis/meru: handshake
He hadn't written that path.
The dish motors hummed. The dome lights flickered and steadied. Dev could hear his own heart over the tick, which was stupid because the tick was in his ears.
On the main console, new text began to draw, pale at first, then bolder. Not from any window he had open. Simple letters, blocky. English, not Devanāgarī. Four characters only:
M E R U
Dev's hands hovered over the keyboard. He didn't touch anything. He didn't breathe.
The word blinked once and vanished.
The tick fell silent.
The room held its breath with him. Then the pulsar came back, not as clicks, but as a long, low tone that vibrated in his chest like a note from a conch shell. The tone broke into short pulses. His program translated them without being asked. Letters crawled onto the screen one by one, slower than a printer:
G O T O T H E A X I S
The last letter landed. The tone stopped.
Dev took the headphones off. The world outside the cups was too quiet. He pressed his palms to the desk until his bones hurt. He forced a laugh out of his throat and didn't know what to do with it when it came.
He looked up through the slit in the dome. The Seven Sages sat where they always did, calm and bright. For a heartbeat, the sky flickered like bad glass. Behind the stars, something curved and hungry moved, then was gone.
His phone buzzed on the desk. Unknown number again. No text this time. Just a single symbol in the preview before it disappeared:
ॐ
Dev stood. His knees wobbled and held. He reached for the record button with steady fingers and started a second file: pulsar_run_02.
"Okay," he told the empty room, his voice small and clear. "I hear you."
The heartbeat returned to his headphones.
Tick. tick. tick.