THE_ALGORITHM_OF_FATE

System_Log: Retrieval_Mission

Manikarnika Ghat - 11:45 PM

The Ganga at night is not water; it is ink. It is heavy, opaque, and moves with a silent, deadly current.

Aryan stood on the edge of a wooden boat they had rented for triple the price. The boatman, an old man with betel-stained teeth, refused to go closer than twenty feet to the Ratneshwar Mahadev temple.

"That temple is cursed, Sahib," the boatman spat into the water. "It leans because it bowed to its mother, but it stays underwater because the Gods rejected it. Don't go in."

"We have to," Aryan said, stripping off his shirt. He shivered. The air was hot, but the river looked freezing.

He strapped his waterproof smart-watch tight around his wrist. He had set it to "Sonar Mode"—an experimental app he had coded for fun, which used the watch’s speaker to ping depth. It was crude, but it was better than blind diving.

"Kavya," Aryan handed her his phone (sealed in a plastic ziplock bag just in case). "If I’m not up in two minutes, pull this rope." He tied a coil of nylon rope around his waist.

Kavya looked terrified. "The sanctum is ten feet down. In 1725, there was a niche behind the Nandi statue. That’s where I hid it."

"Niche behind Nandi. Got it."

Aryan took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the smoky air of Varanasi, and jumped.

The Dive

The cold was a physical blow.
The water was pitch black. Aryan opened his eyes, but the silt and ash made it impossible to see. He was swimming in a graveyard.

Ping. Ping.
His watch vibrated against his wrist bone.

He swam forward, his hands groping in the dark. He felt stone. Slimy, moss-covered stone. He was at the temple spire.
He pulled himself down, fighting the buoyancy.

The pressure built in his ears. He reached the entrance of the sanctum. It was a small stone doorway.
He squeezed through.

Inside, the current died. It was absolute stillness.
Aryan clicked the side button on his watch. The screen flared bright white—a tiny flashlight in the abyss.

The beam cut through the murky water.
There it was. The statue of Nandi the Bull, submerged for centuries, staring at him with stone eyes.

Aryan kicked toward it. His lungs were starting to burn. Forty seconds left.
He reached behind the statue. His fingers scraped against rough stone. Nothing. Just algae and silt.

Panic.
Had the current washed it away? Had looters taken it?

Think like Leela, he told himself. She was smart. She wouldn't just leave it on a shelf.

He felt a small indentation in the stone. A geometric shape.
It wasn't a latch. It was a puzzle lock.
A triangle inside a circle.

Aryan’s mind flashed back to the AR simulation. The Royal Seal. It was cylindrical.
He didn't have the key.
But he was a Data Scientist. He knew how to brute-force a lock.

He didn't try to open it. He smashed the hilt of his pocket knife against the weak point of the stone setting.
CRACK.
The stone crumbled. Centuries of water had weakened the mortar.

He reached into the hole and grabbed something cold and metallic. It was heavy.
His lungs screamed for air. The edges of his vision were going black.
He kicked off the Nandi statue, shooting upward like a missile.

The Artifact

Aryan broke the surface, gasping, coughing up river water.
"Pull!" he screamed.

Kavya and the boatman hauled him onto the wooden planks. He collapsed, heaving, clutching a metal object to his chest.

"You got it?" Kavya asked, shining her phone torch on him.

Aryan opened his hand.
Sitting in his palm was a cylinder made of Panchaloha (five-metal alloy). It wasn't rusted. It looked pristine, protected by wax seals that had long since hardened.

"The Royal Seal," Kavya whispered, touching it reverently. "I haven't seen this since the night of the fire."

"It's not just a seal," Aryan wheezed, sitting up. "Look at the engravings."

Kavya shone the light closer.
The cylinder was covered in Sanskrit shlokas. But running between the Sanskrit lines were other markings.
Dots and dashes.
Geometric lines.

"That looks like..." Kavya frowned.

"Circuitry," Aryan finished. "It looks like a circuit board diagram."

He grabbed the cylinder and did something unthinkable. He tapped his smart-watch against the metal surface of the ancient artifact.

Aryan froze.
"Near Field Communication? In an object from 1725?"

The boatman backed away, making a protective sign against evil. "Throw it back! It is demon magic!"

Aryan ignored him. His watch screen lit up green. It was downloading data from the "Seal."

"It's not a seal," Aryan looked at Kavya, his eyes wide with fear and awe. "It's a hard drive. An ancient, analog hard drive."

"What is on it?" Kavya asked.

Aryan watched the download bar.
"Everything," he whispered. "The history of the world. The future. The algorithm that runs fate itself."

Suddenly, the cylinder grew hot in Aryan’s hand.
A beam of light shot out from the top of the cylinder—a hologram.
It projected a map into the humid night air. A map of the stars.
And then, it focused on a single point. A location.

"The code isn't finished," Aryan realized. "We just found the installation disk. Now we have to go to the server room."