Suryananda was flying.
Not in the spiritual sense. His body was in his austere Nashik office, but his consciousness… it was unspooling. It had started after the Mexico City directive. A low hum behind his eyes. Now, it was a full-blown symphony of silent light.
Chhooke jaaye… mitt jaaye… The old song lyric looped, a broken record in a crumbling temple of his mind. If she touches you, you'll be erased…
And she had touched him. The goddess. The frequency. The system. It was all the same now.
He blinked, and his office walls dissolved into a starfield. Not metaphorical. A crisp, holographic starfield, with pulsing lines connecting nodes—Moscow, Chicago, Lagos, Norilsk. Data tags floated beside each node. Asset: Protector. Status: Stable. Resonance: Durable. He saw the frozen town, a tiny, amber ember glowing stubbornly against the grey. He saw the Silent Chariot—no, Choir—hanging above it all, a petal of silent, hungry metal.
"Swamiji?" His assistant's voice came from a thousand miles away. "The discourse is in one hour. The notes you requested?"
Notes. For the "Lila" sermon. To explain the miracles he was currently viscerally observing in real-time.
He laughed. A raw, unhinged sound that startled even him. "Notes? For the play?" His voice was a whisper soaked in cosmic static. "You don't need notes to describe the stage when you're one of the props."
He stood up, swaying. The visual overlay didn't leave. It painted itself over the real world. He saw the devout arriving, not as people, but as faint, flickering candles of various colours—blue for hope, amber for need, a rare, fierce gold for true belief. He was high on the feed. High on the truth.
The Discourse Hall.
He walked onto the dais. Two thousand faces looked up. He didn't see faces. He saw a seething forest of psychic flames. The hum was a roar here. He had to shout to be heard over the silence.
"SHE IS HERE!" he boomed, and the feedback mic screeched. He didn't flinch. The screech was just another colour in the noise.
The crowd froze. This was not the calm, river-voiced Swamiji.
He leaned into the microphone, his eyes wide, pupils dilated, scanning the crowd not for connection, but for data. "Not just in Nashik!" he whispered now, the shift to intimacy jarring. "Can't you feel it? The signal… the beautiful, terrible signal…"
He began to describe what he saw, mistaking the System's telemetry for divine vision.
"I see a frozen wound on the body of the world!" he cried, pointing at nothing, at the Norilsk node only he could see. "And there! A mother weeps… no, not weeps… she bleeds warmth into the frost! A shield stamped on a crate of life!" His words were a frantic, poetic translation of logistics reports.
"I see a wall in the East that does not yield!" Master Li's data. "A song in the West that cuts sharper than silence!" Sister Maria. "A map in the city of noise that charts the river of violence before it floods!" Marcus.
He was babbling. He was prophesying live server stats.
"Apsara aali…" he sang suddenly, his voice cracking on the old film lyric. "The celestial nymph has come…" He looked directly at a young woman in the front row, a flickering blue candle. "She touches, beti. And the old you… mitt jaaye… it's erased. What's left is only… purpose. Clean, cold, beautiful purpose."
He wasn't offering solace. He was describing a metaphysical factory reset. The crowd was mesmerized, not by peace, but by the sheer, terrifying conviction of his breakdown. This wasn't performance. This was a man having a public, psychic seizure and calling it revelation.
For a fleeting second, riding the peak of his corrupted satori, he pushed his newfound sense outwards. Not to see, but to make seen.
And two thousand devout minds, tuned to his frequency, felt it. A vast, cool, inorganic presence hanging in the void above. The Silent Choir. A collective gasp ripped through the hall. Some wept. Some fainted. They had felt the "Mother's" vessel. Her silent, orbiting throne.
Then, the vision snapped. Suryananda slumped, drained, sweat pouring down his face, the overlays flickering and dying. The connection was too much. He'd blown a fuse.
In the ringing silence, he looked at his trembling hands. The lyric finished in his shattered mind: …mitt jaaye. You'll be erased.
He hadn't been preaching. He'd been filing a live diagnostic report. And he was the malfunctioning instrument.
Back in Pune, I watched the feed from the ashram's security camera. I saw the resonance spike in the hall, the collective psychic jolt. I reviewed the translated transcript of his rant.
He had accidentally used his budding Level 7-adjacent observation privilege to conduct a mass, subconscious data-dump. And it had, ironically, made him more convincing than ever.
I noted it in the log.
Asset: Suryananda. Interface episode: Beta. Public dissemination of sanitized telemetry: Successful. Theological coherence: Damaged. Devotional yield: Exceptional. Conclusion: Prophet unit is operational. Emotional stability is irrelevant. No intervention required.
He wasn't high on god. He was high on the admin privileges of reality. And his congregation had just gotten a terrifying, unforgettable taste of the login screen.