THE_ALGORITHM_OF_FATE

System_Log: Kashi_Arrival

The flight from Mumbai to Varanasi took two hours, but it felt like traveling back two thousand years.

Aryan spent the entire flight typing furiously on his laptop, trying to debug the geolocation protocol. He was desperate to find a logical explanation—a hacker, a virus, a prank. Anything but ghosts.

Kavya sat next to him, staring out the window at the clouds, clutching her leather notebook. She didn't speak. She was mentally preparing to meet her own death.

Varanasi - 07:00 PM

The heat hit them the moment they stepped out of the airport. It wasn't the humid, sticky heat of Mumbai; it was dry, dusty, and smelled of cow dung, diesel, and incense.

"My GPS is acting up," Aryan muttered, shaking his phone. The blue dot on Google Maps was spinning wildly. "It says we are in the middle of the river."

"Put the phone away, Aryan," Kavya said, adjusting her dupatta. "You can't navigate Kashi with satellites. You navigate it with instinct."

They took a taxi to Godowlia, the chaotic heart of the city. The car could only go so far before the streets became too narrow. They had to walk.

The sensory overload was instant. The clang of temple bells, the shouting of rickshaw pullers, the smell of frying kachoris mixing with the scent of marigolds. It was a riot of life.

But Aryan felt a strange pressure in his chest. His smart-watch buzzed every thirty seconds.
INTERFERENCE DETECTED.
MAGNETIC ANOMALY.

"It's getting stronger," Aryan shouted over the noise of a passing procession. "The signal! It's pulling us towards the river!"

They navigated the labyrinth of galis (narrow lanes). The deeper they went, the older the buildings became. Stone walls, crumbling arches, ancient wooden doors.

"Wait," Kavya stopped abruptly in front of a small, dilapidated shrine dedicated to Lord Shiva.

"What is it?" Aryan asked, wiping sweat from his forehead.

"I know this shrine," Kavya whispered. She reached out and touched the worn stone of the lingam. "In my dream... I hid a letter here. Behind the loose stone at the base."

Aryan stared at her. "Kavya, this shrine looks like it's been here for five hundred years. If you hid a letter, it would be dust."

"Help me look," she commanded.

Aryan sighed, knelt down in the dirt, and felt around the base of the shrine. His rational mind screamed that this was ridiculous. He was a Data Scientist; he shouldn't be digging in the dirt in Varanasi.

His fingers brushed against a loose stone slab. He pulled. It shifted.
Behind it was a small, dark hollow.
It was empty.

"See?" Aryan let out a breath. "It's just a dream, Kavya. There is nothing—"

"Look closer," Kavya pointed.

Aryan squinted. In the hollow, scratching into the stone itself, were faint markings. They weren't ancient script. They were numbers.
Binary code.
01010011 01000001 01010110 01000101

Aryan froze. He pulled out his phone and opened a translator app. He scanned the stone.

The app processed the binary.
The translation popped up on the screen:
S.A.V.E.

Aryan fell back, sitting on the dirty ground. "Binary. In a 500-year-old shrine. That... that is impossible. Computers didn't exist."

"We didn't write it in the past," Kavya said, her voice trembling. "We wrote it now. The timeline is looping, Aryan. We are sending messages to ourselves."

The Burning Ghat

They reached Manikarnika Ghat—the destination the AI had given them—just as night fell.

This was the most intense place on earth. The fires of cremation burned 24 hours a day, never stopping. The air was thick with gray smoke and the smell of burning wood. To an outsider, it looked like hell. To a local, it was liberation.

They stood on a balcony overlooking the pyres. The heat was immense.

"The coordinates," Aryan shouted over the roar of the fire. He checked his laptop. "The AI said the location is right here. Specifically... that pyre."

He pointed to a large funeral pyre burning brightly near the river's edge.

"That's the VIP pyre," Kavya said, her historian knowledge kicking in. "Reserved for royalty or high-caste families."

Suddenly, Aryan’s laptop screen turned bright red.
The fan whirred loudly, sounding like a jet engine.
The code on the screen vanished, replaced by a single audio waveform.

The computer began to speak.
It wasn't the robotic AI voice anymore. It was a man’s voice.
Deep. Urgent. And terrified.

"Kavya! Run! The British are crossing the river! Take the seal and run!"

Aryan dropped the laptop.
The voice was his own.

Kavya grabbed Aryan’s arm, her nails digging into his skin. Her eyes were rolled back, staring at nothing. The smoke from the pyre swirled around her.

"I remember," she gasped. "I remember how we died."

"Kavya?" Aryan shook her. "Kavya!"

"It wasn't a fire accident," she whispered, looking at him with tears streaming down her face. Her voice changed—it sounded older, heavier.
"You betrayed me, Aryan. You lit the fire."