CHAPTER 3: THE DOWNLOAD
SCENE 1: THE CAMPFIRE
The fire was a weak, sputtering thing against the crushing weight of the Himalayan night.
They sat in a tight circle, the flames casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to stretch and contort against the trees. The silence of the valley was absolute. It wasn't peaceful; it was heavy, pressing against their eardrums like deep water.
Rudra poked the embers with a stick, sparks swirling up into the black void above.
"My dad thinks I'm an addict," Rudra said quietly. He didn't look up. The anger in his voice was gone, replaced by a hollow exhaustion. "He looks at me like I'm broken hardware. Like if he hits me hard enough, I'll start working right."
Laksh took a slow sip from his metal flask, the firelight catching the rim of his glasses. "At least he looks at you," he replied, his voice devoid of its usual arrogance. "My parents look through me. They see the rank, the grades, the future CEO. They don't see Laksh. I'm just an asset in their portfolio. A high-yield bond."
Dhruv looked between them, his face illuminated by the warm glow. He was shivering, not just from the cold, but from the raw honesty bleeding out of his friends.
"We're good at the game because it makes sense," Dhruv said softly. "The rules don't change. You shoot, they fall. You heal, they live. Out here..." He gestured to the oppressive darkness surrounding them. "Out here, you can do everything right and still lose."
Rudra threw the stick into the fire. It snapped. "I just want to matter," he whispered, the confession hanging in the freezing air. "I want to be the guy on the screen. Not the guy in the chair."
Laksh nodded slowly. "We all do."
For a moment, the connection was palpable. No lag. No avatars. Just three young men huddled against the cold, admitting they were lost.
Then, the sky tore open.
SCENE 2: THE IMPACT
It didn't start with a sound. It started with pressure.
The air suddenly rushed out of the clearing, sucked into a vacuum directly above them. The fire was extinguished instantly, plunging them into total darkness.
Then came the boom.
CRACK.
It was a sonic fracture, a sound so loud it didn't register as noise but as a physical blow to the chest. Rudra was thrown backward. Laksh scrambled on the dirt, blind and deafened. Dhruv curled into a ball, covering his head.
Whump.
Something slammed into the earth fifty meters away. The ground heaved, throwing up a wave of soil and pine needles. The vibration rattled their teeth.
"Earthquake?" Dhruv screamed, his voice thin and terrified in the ringing silence that followed.
"No," Laksh gasped, pushing himself up, wiping dirt from his glasses. "That fell. From up there."
Slowly, the dust settled. Through the gloom, a faint, rhythmic pulse began to glow.
They shouldn't have moved toward it. Every instinct screamed at them to run. But the gamer brain is wired differently. It sees an anomaly and calls it loot. It sees a crash site and calls it an event.
They crept forward, boots crunching on shattered rock.
It wasn't a meteor. It was a monolith.
Standing about seven feet tall, it was a jagged shard of obsidian geometry, utterly alien against the natural chaos of the forest. It didn't look manufactured; it looked grown. Veins of neon blue light pulsed beneath its black surface like a digital circulatory system, beating in time with a low, sub-bass hum that vibrated in their marrow.
"It's... it's a server rack," Rudra whispered, his mind trying to map the familiar onto the impossible. "Look at the patterns. It looks like circuitry."
"Don't touch it," Laksh warned, his voice trembling. "Rudra, seriously. Don't—"
Rudra reached out.
SCENE 3: THE INSTALLATION
The moment Rudra's finger brushed the cold, slick surface, the blue veins turned blood red.
The hum spiked into a shriek.
[SCANNING...]
The voice didn't come from the rock. It came from inside their skulls. It was a cold, synthetic sound, stripping away their humanity in milliseconds.
Three beams of coherent red light shot from the monolith, striking them directly in the eyes. They tried to look away, but they couldn't. Their bodies locked up, paralysis seizing their muscles.
"I can't move!" Dhruv screamed, panic rising in his throat.
"It's... inside!" Laksh choked.
This wasn't a magical bestowal of power. It was a forced entry.
Tendrils of hard light erupted from the monolith, lashing out like cobras. They didn't wrap around the boys; they pierced them. The light stabbed into the base of their spines, burning through skin and fusing with the nervous system.
It was agony.
It felt like ice water and molten lead were being poured into their veins simultaneously. Rudra arched his back, a guttural scream tearing from his throat as the foreign code rewrote his biology. He felt his aggression, his rage, being stripped, digitized, and re-uploaded.
[AGGRESSION DETECTED. HOST: RUDRA_01.]
[DOWNLOADING BERSERKER PROTOCOLS...]
Laksh fell to his knees, clutching his head as his mind was flayed open. Every calculation, every suppressed emotion, was analyzed and categorized.
[CALCULATION DETECTED. HOST: LAKSH_X.]
[DOWNLOADING ARCHITECT DRIVERS...]
Dhruv wept, not from fear, but from the overwhelming sensation of his own life force being measured. The machine saw his loyalty, his desperate need to protect, and it weaponized it.
[PRESERVATION DETECTED. HOST: DHRUV_WALL.]
[DOWNLOADING GUARDIAN FIRMWARE...]
The pain reached a crescendo. It was no longer physical; it was existential. They were being deleted and reinstalled.
Rudra's eyes rolled back, flooding with a violent, toxic Purple light.
Laksh's eyes snapped open, burning with a cold, unyielding Gold.
Dhruv's eyes ignited with a fierce, vibrant Green.
The world tilted. The forest dissolved into binary. The pain vanished, replaced by a terrifying, cold clarity.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZED.]
[WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD.]
Then, darkness.