Dev woke to the smell of rain that hadn't fallen yet. The staff quarters were quiet. A lizard clicked somewhere in the corridor. His phone lay face down on the table, screen smudged from the night before.
He turned it over.
No new messages. The unknown number with the ॐ symbol was gone from the log, like it had never been. The screenshot of THIS IS NOT THE FIRST KALPA was still in his photos. He stared at it until the edges of the letters went soft.
He washed his face in the metal sink and caught his own tired eyes in the mirror. He looked like a man who had stayed up with ghosts.
On the shelf under the bed was the old book he kept moving from room to room: his grandfather's Bhāgavata Purāṇa, paperback, spine cracked. He pulled it out. Bits of dried glue flaked onto his lap.
A peepal leaf fell from between the pages.
He held his breath, afraid it would crumble. It didn't. It had gone dark and thin like brown glass. His grandfather had drawn on it in blue ink—just a few dots and a tiny spiral. Above the spiral, in small neat letters:
Meru — axis
Dev smiled without meaning to. The memory rose by itself.
---
There had been a power cut that summer, a long one. He was nine. His grandfather, Dadaji, lit a candle and set it in a steel cup. The whole house smelled like hot wax and wet clothes. They sat by the window and let the dark come in like a friend.
"Tell me numbers," Dev said, because Dadaji's stories always had numbers that felt like stones, solid and cool.
Dadaji tapped the table with one finger. "Four ages, beta. Satya. Treta. Dvāpara. Kali. Together, they make a Mahāyuga. Four point three two million years."
"Say the big one again," Dev said, because he liked the way it felt in his mouth.
"Four point three two," Dadaji said, smiling with his eyes.
"And Brahmā's day?"
"A thousand Mahāyugas," Dadaji said softly, like a secret. "Four point three two billion years. After the day, a night of the same length. Creation rests. The wheel turns."
"And Meru?" Dev asked, because he had seen the picture in a calendar—a mountain at the center of everything, stacked worlds like rings.
Dadaji took a clay spinning top from a drawer and set it on the table. He wrapped a thread around it and pulled. The top hummed, the candle flame shivered, and the shadow of the spinning point drew a circle on the wall.
"Every wheel needs an axis," Dadaji said. "Without it, the world falls. Meru is the axis in stories. Maybe it is a real thing in the sky."
"Where?"
"Where the sages point," Dadaji said, nodding at the Seven. "Keep your eyes open. The sky is a book. It writes slowly."
The power came back with a jump. The fan rattled. Dadaji laughed and set the top on its side. "Enough numbers for one night. Sleep."
---
Dev blinked the memory away and put the peepal leaf back in the book. He slid the book into his backpack. He didn't know if it would help. He wanted it near him anyway.
Meera was already in the control room when he came up the stairs. Two cups of tea steamed on the desk.
"You look better," she said.
"Define better," he said.
"Not dead." She pointed at the monitor. "Bose wants raw feeds to the cluster all day. She's curious."
Dev's stomach dipped. "Of course she is."
He opened his notebook from last night. The three lines looked thin on the page:
432k step confirmed
Spiral holds (14 rings)
RA 13h dips (tiny)
He added a fourth:
Message received (private)
He capped the pen.
"Meera," he said, keeping his voice light, "do you remember your grandfather telling you stories?"
She snorted. "Mine taught me accounts. Stories had columns and red pen marks."
"Mine taught me ages," Dev said. He set the old book on the corner of the desk like a stone. "And axes."
Meera's gaze softened. "You brought it."
"I don't know why." He changed the subject before she could read his face. "Can we run an independent check on RA 13h? A different pipeline? Maybe the all-sky camera, not just the dish logs?"
"We can," she said. "Should I also call a priest?"
He tried to glare. Failed. "Very funny."
She was already typing. "Different camera. Different clock. If it blinks, it's not just in your head."
They ran the query. The wide-field frames stacked and played in fast blur. At the third cycle, three faint dips appeared again, small and simultaneous. Meera paused, zoomed, and put a marker in the center of the triangle. Nothing there. Empty sky.
"Satellites?" she said.
"Wrong pattern," he said. "Wrong sky trail. And three at once?"
She nodded once. "Okay. So it's real."
The words were a pressure valve. Dev's shoulders dropped half an inch.
He opened last night's screen-record again. When THIS IS NOT THE FIRST KALPA came up, he let it play one second longer than he had before. The next lines were faint, like chalk rubbed thin.
WE ARE RECORDS.
YOUR TEXTS KEPT OUR SHAPES.
Meera saw the reflection of the letters in the glass over his face. "What is it?"
He paused the clip. The room filled with the small hum of machines. The tea cooled on the desk.
"Later," he said. "I need… I need to be sure before I put it in the lab chat."
Meera studied him for a beat and decided not to push. "Then here's what we can do. We call two friends with different telescopes. We ask them to watch RA 13h for an hour tonight. If they see nothing, we still have data. If they see something…"
"…then it isn't just us," Dev finished. "Do it."
She sent two short messages to people she trusted to be curious first and loud later. Then she slid a pack of glucose biscuits across the desk. "Eat. Your brain is using both halves."
Dev ate without tasting. The air in the dome felt too thin. He told himself it was altitude and not the fact that a line of text had crawled across his screen in a tone like a conch shell last night and told him to go to the axis of the galaxy.
By noon, the cluster at Pune had finished the first pass. Bose called again, brisk.
"Residual confirmed across two pipelines," she said. "Nice work. I want you to draft a one-page anomaly note for the consortium, light on speculation. We'll send it after the evening run."
Dev's mouth was suddenly dry. He glanced at the backpack under the desk. "Light on speculation. Yes."
"Sleep after lunch," Bose said. "That is an order."
He promised. He didn't mean it.
After the call, his phone buzzed. A new message from a number with no country code:
DO NOT SEND RECORDS ON PUBLIC NETWORK.
He looked at Meera. "Spam?"
She looked at the screen with the calm, flat look she saved for things that were not okay. "Maybe. Maybe not. Screenshot it. Airplane mode."
He did both.
They took turns napping on the couch and on the floor under the desk. The kind of naps that feel like falling down a well for ten minutes and climbing back out with sand in your mouth. When Dev woke, the sky through the slit had gone high and pale. A storm was forming somewhere beyond the ridge. The wind made a low sound in the dome, like breath through a shell.
He reached into his bag and took out the old book again. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. Maybe just proof that the world had always been full of numbers.
In the margin of one page, next to a verse about the end of an age, his grandfather had written a small note:
If the day comes too soon, look to the Seven.
Dev traced the words with his thumb. The blue ink had bled into the paper fibers like veins.
He closed the book and slid it back into the bag.
At four, one of Meera's friends sent a short reply: We saw the dips. Three pixels. Triangle. Weird. A minute later, the other friend sent just a string of question marks and a photo of his monitor with three tiny hollows marked in red.
Meera let out a breath she'd been holding all day. "Okay. It's not just us."
Dev felt the floor tilt under his feet, not with fear, but with the relief of a man whose map finally matched the road.
"Tonight," he said, "we run the pulsar and the all-sky camera. And we set a local recorder. No network."
"No network," she repeated. "Agreed."
He opened a new file called working_hypothesis.md and wrote in short lines:
Purāṇic numbers match pulsar cycles (432k → Kali Yuga)
Spiral in timing residuals maps to 14 rings → lokas
Blue bands match gamma bursts → Hālahala
"Blue throat" filter weakening → more bursts get through
Messages identify as "records" from past Kalpas
Axis/Meru likely = galactic center machine
Plan: keep a clean local copy of all "record" events
He saved it to a drive not connected to anything. He put the drive in his pocket like a coin.
As the light faded, temple bells from the town slid up the slope and into the dome, small and bright. The sound touched some place in his chest that had been tight all day. He let it.
They ate dinner out of plastic containers. They did not talk about God. They checked cables.
At 19:10, the pulsar came alive in his headphones. Tick. tick. tick. The beat wrapped around his thoughts and smoothed them flat.
At 19:13, a hiccup.
He didn't flinch this time. He watched the count slide early and hold. The spiral code ran. Fourteen rings. A ghost of a fifteenth.
The console text drew itself again. Four letters, blocky and patient:
M E R U
Meera saw it too. She reached for his arm without looking away from the screen. Her fingers were cold.
The long, low tone filled the room like a shell held to the ear. Letters crawled across, slower than paper:
G O T O T H E A X I S
The tone stopped. The beat returned. Tick. tick. tick.
Dev took off the headphones. He could hear his own blood in the pause.
He looked up through the slit. The Saptarishi—the Seven Sages—stood in their usual line, patient as ever. For a breath, the sky glitched again, like bad glass. Behind it, something dark curved and was gone.
He didn't say he was ready. He didn't feel ready. He only felt the wheel turning.
"Dadaji," he said under his breath, surprising himself. "I kept my eyes open."
The wind shifted. Somewhere down the slope, a conch sounded from a small temple. The note hung in the air and faded.
Dev put the headphones back on.
"Okay," he said. "We go one step at a time."
The pulsar answered in the only language it had.
Tick. tick. tick.