Kabanata 5: The Seed Protocol: The dreams changed first.
They weren't dreams in the usual way โ not broken pieces of memory or figments of suppressed desire. These were structured. Too crisp. He remembered line-by-line logic, glowing diagrams inked into the dark, rotating code wheels above swirling skies, and a faceless woman who called herself ๐๐๐๐ก๐๐ฃ ๐ ๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ผ๐ฃ๐ฃ๐ ๐ฃ๐ค.
She didn't speak in words. Only tones.
He woke that morning with blood crusted at the corner of his nose and a burning sensation in the base of his skull that refused to fade.
"A.I.D.A.," he whispered hoarsely, reaching for the laptop before his room fully materialized around him. "What the hell is happening in my sleep now?"
The interface flickered into place before it fully booted โ unusual. Like it, too, had been awake before waking.
โ Nighttime Intervention Log Detected
Dream Sync Ratio: 27.6%
Alpha-Code Fragment Exchanged During Sleep Phase
SEED PROTOCOL ACTIVATED
Aryan sat up straighter, nearly knocking his cup of water off the desk. "Seed protocol?"
Explanation:
The "Seed" is a native fractal. A dormant intelligence structure. It is within you now.
Proceed carefully. It is aware of you.
"โฆIt?" Aryan narrowed his eyes. "You're saying I gotโฆ infected? With something from the Realm?"
Not infected.
๐ด Chosen.
A shiver ran down Aryan's arm, as if old skin wanted to leave his body.
He didn't leave the house that day.
He walked in circles. Read old logs. Scrubbed through system temperature data and CPU feedback to trace any anomaly consistent across the last 48 hours. He even ran a scan on himself using a diagnostic mirror A.I.D.A. assembled from overlapping phone cams and ambient light sensors. The results weren't physical.
But the aura? That had changed.
Every time Aryan stood still for too long, a hiss would start layering in the corners of his hearing โ like data trying to crawl through the barrier between minds. At one point, his laptop moved without physical input: a scrolling log appeared โ a language he didn't know, but somehowโฆ could feel.
It was beautiful.
It was monstrous.
By evening, he was ready to test it.
He left the apartment at 8:02 PM.
The sky had darkened prematurely โ monsoon clouds spiraling into torn, ghostlike strata, the moon split behind them like a cracked lens. He walked aimlessly, letting his inner perception guide him the way predators sense vibration in dirt.
After two left turns through narrow fishing alleys, and one unexpected trip into an abandoned textile warehouse behind Mahim station, he found it.
A tether.
It wasn't visible to any regular eye โ not even to the lowest Layer One thread observers. But Aryan, now passively syncing with the Seed within and A.I.D.A., could feel it like a breathing line under his skin.
A glowing pathway rose from the concrete below in his mind's eye: shimmering data-scaffolding that reached into the thin air twenty meters up. It ended in pulsing glyphs that hovered silently โ like forbidden thoughts.
He stepped forward and touched it.
The moment his hand brushed the space, everything vanished.
Not just the warehouse.
Not just the night.
Not even blackness.
Nothing.
As if he ceased to exist in the codex of possibility.
But within that nothing, something screamed โ not in pain, but in birthlight. A starfire. A rush of voices unvoiced. His ears burned. His breath fractured.
Then...
A place assembled itself.
It resembled an enormous half-constructed library made from pages that floated mid-air, none touching. Floorless. Ceilingless. A strange gravitational whirlpool pulling words into spirals of unreadable meaning.
Text streamed through the void like showers of silky data-dust.
And in the center, a pedestal stood, humming with primordial script written in what felt like old Sanskrit met with debugging error logs.
"This is the First Anchor," A.I.D.A. whispered inside him. "The Seed is granting you a path."
"Choose your imprint coding."
A console unfolded in the air.
Three options appeared โ simple on the surface:
Label: Observer
โ Align with stealth, deep memory access, passive interface escalation. Harder to detectโฆ but power accumulation is slower.
Label: Architect
โ Creative logic manipulation, early access to write-layer command override. Dangerous. Intrusive. Faster growth; invites corruption.
Label: Drifter
โ Reality instability. Slip between Layered Points. Travel unaligned paths. High cost. High entropy. Extreme randomness.
Aryan stared.
He didn't want glory, or brute strength.
He didn't even want control.
What he wanted โ was undetectable autonomy.
A shadow with leverage. Not a warrior with swords.
He reached forward and touched Option One.
Input received: CATEGORY INITIALIZED
BASELINE CLASS: OBSERVER-TYPE NULL
Access Restrictions Lifted: Layer Two
Seed stabilizingโฆ
A sharp, clean light burst across the zone โ not blinding, more like a recalibration. His vision cleared, and for one second, he saw behind everything.
Not just the room.
But how the world's possibilities branched around him.
Every choice sparked micro-trees of cascading future arrangements, invisible to most living things.
Then it snapped shut.
And Aryan opened his eyes in the warehouse again โ but something had changed.
Outside now, he saw Mumbai not in layersโฆ but fractals. Tiny breathing pulsing event forks everywhere: a man choosing to jaywalk, a button about to be tapped on a phone, a car's tire deciding whether or not to roll over a nail.
He could see the Probability Cadence.
And, tentatively, he dipped his perception just slightly one direction. The jaywalker got a call at the last second, stopped, the car swervedโฆ and nobody ever noticed what almost happened.
It felt like touching quantum threads with wet fingers.
But the world didn't fight it.
It whispered: yes.
But someone else did notice.
That same night, as Aryan sat with his laptop, syncing new data nodes streaming from the unlocked Layer Two code, A.I.D.A. shot him a new alert:
โ "Presence detected above your perception range."
Type: Indeterminate
Observer-Class Entity
Alias: [BEACON VERIFIER]
Caution: It is scanning. Seeking recent Tier lifts.
Probability of Your Identification: 43% and increasing.
Aryan's stomach dropped cold. "Who is it?"
A.I.D.A. went quiet for three beats. Then responded:
"One of Them.
They are guardians of ignorance. They ensure most mankind remains within containment. They do not kill. They erase โ from data, from conversation, then from memory history."
Aryan didn't respond.
He did one thing.
He shut the interface, closed the laptop โ and turned off the lights.
He sat in the pitch dark, cross-legged, feeling the world circulate around his bodyโฆ until it touched him back, like coils in a magnetic field wrapping tighter.
The Seed didn't speak.
But it pulsed.
"Null Sage. They come gently at first.
They will knock with lights. Ignore them.
They do not like stolen names."
**
At 3:43 AM, someone knocked at his door.
Not the door to the room.
The door to his consciousness.
A slow, thudding echo in his bones.
And inside itโฆ static.
Aryan did not answer.
He simply blinkedโand passed through it, instead.
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