For the next two weeks, Arjun's life fell into a relentless, productive rhythm. He was a perfect, clockwork machine.
By day, he was Arjun Varma, the 12-year-old boy. He went to school, got perfect marks on his (now trivial) exams, and was polite to his neighbors, allaying his mother's fears that his fainting spell had changed him.
By night, he was the Architect.
He'd wait for his mother to fall asleep, her soft breathing filling the small apartment. Then, he would sit at his small wooden desk and activate [Accelerated Learning].
His Personal Prana bar, which he refilled by [Scanning] and mastering his mother's college-level textbooks, became a fuel tank. He burned through 10 PP per hour, every hour.
He didn't just learn BASIC. He mastered it. He moved on to C, the language of choice for serious applications. His 2025 knowledge provided the theory; the System hammered it into his 12-year-old brain's muscle memory.
In parallel, he executed Step 4 of his plan: researching his target.
He needed a way to find "Bharat-Tech" without an internet. During the day, he'd use his meager pocket money to buy old tech magazines from a local raddiwala (paper scrap dealer).
He'd [Scan] them.
[Scanning 'Dataquest' Magazine, July 1991...]
[...Found 1 mention of 'Bharat-Tech'. Status: 'Struggling'. Reason: Failed to secure government contract.]
He found what he needed. A small blurb in an industry circular.
Bharat-Tech Solutions, based in Bangalore, has posted another quarterly loss. CEO Prakash Murthy's gamble on a new data management suite has failed to find a market, and experts predict the company will be insolvent by year's end.
He found the company's address in a phone directory. It was a small, rented office not far from his home.
His plan was now locked in. He spent the next three nights in a [Accelerated Learning] trance, writing code. He wasn't just copying a 2025 algorithm; he was adapting it, re-writing a complex Huffman coding derivative into a clean, simple package that could run on the 386-era computers of 1991.
The result was a thing of beauty. A piece of code, written on a few pages of a school notebook, that could compress data at a ratio 50% better and 2x faster than anything on the market. It was a golden key.
Now, he had to deliver it.
He sealed the notebook pages in a plain brown envelope. On a separate, typed sheet (from a local print shop), he wrote a simple message:
To Mr. Prakash Murthy,
Your company is failing. Your data suite is slow because your compression is weak. The code in this envelope will solve your problem.
It is a gift.
If you are smart enough to use it, you will know where to find me.
- A.V.
He didn't sign it or ask for money. It was a "Krishna" move. A hook. He was giving his target the bait for free.
The next day, he skipped his last class. He took a bus to the other side of town, his heart a strange mix of a 12-year-old's fear and a 34-year-old's predatory calm. He walked into the lobby of the rundown office building, slipped the envelope onto the receptionist's unattended desk, and walked right back out.
The hook was in the water.