The warning alarms began as a whisper.
A soft pulse of amber light ran along the glass walls of the control chamber, too gentle to justify panic. It was the kind of signal engineers trained themselves to ignore—the background hum of machines forever flirting with failure. Arjun Menon noticed it anyway. He always did. He had built his career on hearing the note that didn't belong in the symphony.
His fingers hovered above the console, steady, precise. Streams of data cascaded across the central display, equations blooming and collapsing in elegant succession.
Plasma density: drifting beyond tolerance. Magnetic containment: unstable.
Someone behind him said his name.
"Arjun."
He did not turn. Human voices, in moments like this, were almost always noise.
"Give me thirty seconds," he said. His voice emerged calm, almost detached, as if borrowed from someone else. "I can stabilize the field."
He leaned closer to the glass. At the heart of the chamber, the fusion core burned—a captive star, luminous and indifferent. Lines of force bent around it, held together by mathematics written decades earlier by minds long dead. This was supposed to be the proof. Proof that humanity could reach for infinity without burning its hands.
A memory intruded without permission.
A satellite image of the Indian subcontinent at night: the coasts blazing with light, the interior swallowed by darkness. Not absence of intelligence. Absence of opportunity. A civilization taught, for centuries, to endure instead of lead.
Another alarm rose, sharper now.
Containment failure predicted.
Arjun finally turned. The control room stared back at him—engineers, physicists, technicians. Some were frozen, some moving too fast. All of them afraid. He recognized the expression; he had worn it once, years ago, before he learned that fear clouded judgment.
What he felt instead was grief.
Not for his life.
For time.
Even if this works, he thought, it will be too late.
Too late for the famines that could have been prevented. Too late for knowledge buried under superstition and empire. Too late for an India that might have shaped the world instead of surviving it.
The equations on the screen began to unravel. Symbols slipped out of alignment, assumptions collapsing one by one. Years of certainty dissolved into error margins.
Containment failure.
The room filled with heat—vast, immediate, impossible to comprehend. Light followed, pure and annihilating, erasing shadow, sound, and self.
In that final fraction of a second, as reality folded inward, Arjun Menon did not think of fame, or legacy, or fear.
He thought of a single, unbearable wish.
If I had one more chance…
Darkness answered.
And then—
The scent of incense.