The rain in Dharma-Kshetra's Sump didn't fall. It seeped. A perpetual, grimy drizzle of acidic water that bled from the colossal city-plates five kilometers above.
Drip. Drip. HSSSSSS.
The sound of it sizzling on exposed power conduits was the Sump's lullaby. For Kalpit, it was the sound of opportunity.
He clung to the side of the AsuraCorp Data-Spire, magnets in his gloves and boots humming faintly against the corroded durasteel. Below him, the neon-drenched abyss of Sector 12 was a chaotic symphony of flickering ads for the SamsaraNet, promising digital heavens he could never afford.
His mission was simple. Get in, snatch the pre-Cataclysm data-core, and get out. The credits would be enough to keep his landlord's enforcer-bots from breaking down his door for another cycle.
"Almost there, Rohan," he whispered into his comm, his voice a ragged breath.
<"Status, Kal? My scopes are showing a P-Drone sweep in your quadrant. You have ninety seconds.">> The voice on the other end was tinny, laced with static and anxiety.
"Ninety seconds is an eternity," Kalpit grunted, pulling himself onto a narrow ledge.
He pressed his face to the cold metal, his worn-out cybernetic eye whirring as it zoomed in on the maintenance hatch. It was a standard mag-lock. Old tech. Easy.
He pulled a device from his belt—a mess of wires and salvaged processors. As he worked, the world flickered.
Just for a nanosecond.
The solid steel of the spire dissolved into shimmering green lines of code. He saw the hatch not as a physical object, but as a security protocol: LOCK_SEQUENCE_7.34. He saw the acidic rain as strings of data: ENVIRONMENTAL_DECAY_ALGORITHM.
Kalpit squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head. "Scrap. Need to get this optic fixed."
It had been happening for weeks. These… glitches. Moments where the world seemed to peel back, revealing a terrifying, beautiful machine underneath. He blamed it on cheap hardware and malnutrition.
He slapped the side of his head. The world snapped back to its grimy, solid self.
He got to work. His fingers, nimble from years of dissecting dead tech, danced over the hacking device. The mag-lock sparked.
BZZZZT-CLUNK.
The hatch hissed open. He slipped inside, the darkness of the maintenance shaft swallowing him whole. It smelled of ozone and forgotten things.
"I'm in," he breathed, his voice echoing in the confined space.
<"Core should be three meters down, access panel on your left. And Kalpit? Hurry. That drone is coming back around.">>
Kalpit navigated the shaft with the familiarity of a rat in a sewer pipe. He found the panel, pried it open with a groan of protesting metal, and saw it.
The data-core. An old, clunky thing from before MAYA had standardized everything. It pulsed with a soft, internal light, a relic from a time when information wasn't a constant, overwhelming flood.
He reached for it.
And then the glitch hit him again, harder this time.
KR-KRRRKT!
The world didn't just flicker. It fractured. The shaft, the core, his own hands—they all dissolved into a swirling vortex of pure information. He felt a phantom strength surge through his limbs, an impossible energy that hummed in his very bones. His mind, usually a chaotic scramble of worries about food and credits, became icily calm.
He saw the P-Drone outside, not with his eyes, but with some other sense. He perceived its flight path, its targeting vectors, the weak point in its primary energy cell.
The vision lasted only a second, but it felt like a lifetime.
When reality reasserted itself, he was gasping for air, the data-core clutched in his trembling hand.
<"Kal! What was that energy spike? The entire sector's grid just fluctuated! Get out of there, now!">>
Kalpit didn't need telling twice. He scrambled back up the shaft, the heavy core tucked into his jacket. He sealed the hatch just as the patrol drone, a sleek, insectoid machine of black chrome and glowing red optics, whirred past.
WHOOSH.
He held his breath until it was gone, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. That wasn't a hardware malfunction. That was something else.
Back in his cramped hab-unit, a metal box barely large enough for a bed and a workbench, the stench of stale synth-noodles filled the air. Kalpit placed the data-core on his workbench, its soft light pushing back the shadows.
He should have just handed it over to his client, a shady info-broker named Vyas. Taken the credits and forgotten the whole thing.
But he couldn't. He needed to know what was on it. What could cause a system-wide energy spike?
"This is a bad idea," he muttered to himself, connecting the core to his salvaged console.
The screen, usually a mess of flickering pixels, lit up with a pure, brilliant white. Ancient symbols, characters he'd never seen but somehow understood, blazed across the monitor. Not machine code. Something older. Deeper.
Vedic-Code.
A voice, ancient and powerful, echoed not from the speakers, but directly inside his mind. It was a voice that spoke with the gravity of collapsing stars and the wisdom of silent eons.
<"Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata…">*
"Whenever there is a decline in righteousness, O descendant of Bharata…"
<"Abhyutthanam adharmasya tadatmanam srjamy aham…">*
"And a predominant rise of unrighteousness—at that time I descend Myself…"
The words hammered into his soul. His vision blurred, the code on the screen and the code of reality merging into one. The walls of his apartment became transparent, showing the flow of Prana energy from the sleeping inhabitants of his block, thin blue streams rising up, up into the insatiable maw of the SamsaraNet.
He saw the lie. The beautiful, perfect, all-consuming lie.
Suddenly, a system-wide alert klaxon blared through his room, painfully loud.
WARNING. UNLAWFUL DATA ACCESS. ANOMALY DETECTED. SECTOR 12, BLOCK 7, UNIT 42.
SYSTEM PURGE PROTOCOL INITIATED.
Panic seized him. He had been marked. Not by some low-level corporate security, but by MAYA itself.
He looked out his grimy window. Down below, black-armored AsuraCorp Enforcers were flooding the street, their plasma rifles casting sterile blue light on the wet pavement. They were moving with chilling efficiency, surrounding his building.
He was trapped.
He grabbed the core, shoving it into his pack. He had to run. But where? In a city that was a machine, there was nowhere to hide from the ghost in it.
CRASH!
His door, reinforced with scavenged steel, was blasted off its hinges, skidding across the room in a shower of sparks. Two Enforcers stood silhouetted in the doorway, their featureless helmets turning to face him.
"Target identified," one of them said, its voice a synthesized growl. "Surrender the data-core and submit for soul-erasure."
Kalpit's survival instincts screamed. As they raised their rifles, that strange power surged through him again. He saw it—a structural weakness in the floor beneath the Enforcers, a hairline fracture in the plasteel.
Without thinking, he stomped his foot down. Hard.
CRA-KOOM!
The floor gave way. The Enforcers shrieked in surprise as they plunged into the apartment below. Kalpit didn't wait. He scrambled out the gaping hole where his door used to be and sprinted down the hallway.
Alarms blared. Red lights flashed. The whole building was on lockdown.
He was cornered at the end of a corridor, a reinforced blast door sealing his exit. Through the thick window, he could see the relentless acid rain. He was out of options. Out of time.
More Enforcers rounded the corner behind him, their heavy boots thudding a death march on the metal floor.
"No escape, Anomaly," one of them boomed.
They raised their rifles, the barrels glowing with lethal energy. This was it. This was how his pathetic life ended. Not with a whimper, but with the sizzle of plasma.
He closed his eyes.
SHVROOOM—CLANG!
A sound unlike any he had ever heard. The sound of energy meeting metal, but impossibly clean. He opened his eyes.
Standing between him and the Enforcers was a man.
He was old, with a long white beard and eyes that seemed to hold the star-dusted expanse of the galaxy. He wore simple, hand-spun robes that should have been rags in the Sump, but on him, they looked like the vestments of a king. In his hand, he held a simple wooden staff that hummed, a soft golden light deflecting the plasma bolts into the ceiling.
The Enforcers paused, their targeting systems likely unable to classify the threat.
The old man didn't even look at them. His ancient, powerful gaze was fixed solely on Kalpit.
"The glitch has been found," the old man said, his voice calm amidst the chaos, a resonant bass that vibrated in Kalpit's bones. "The system is hunting for a ghost it cannot comprehend."
He took a step towards Kalpit, his presence a shield against the looming threat.
"Your time of running is over, Kalpit," he declared, the words sealing Kalpit's fate and cracking his world open.
"Your time of awakening has just begun."