Fire bloomed inside the chamber.
Not the wild, chaotic blaze of an uncontrolled explosion, but a precise, spiraling inferno — the unmistakable collapse pattern of a destabilizing fusion core.
Arjun Malhotra recognized it instantly.
The equations unfolding across the holographic displays confirmed his fear. The containment field was slipping. Not by a dramatic margin, not by an obvious failure — but by a microscopic deviation, so small that most engineers would never even notice it.
Just 0.0007 percent.
A rounding error in the harmonic stabilization coefficient.
In conventional reactors, such a flaw would be statistically irrelevant. In a micro-singularity fusion array compressed into a mech-scale chassis, it was a death sentence.
The alarms began screaming half a second later.
Crimson emergency lights flooded the underground test facility. Warning sigils erupted across transparent holographic panels, data streams cascading faster than the human eye could comfortably track. Automated safety protocols slammed into motion, sealing bulkheads, locking down sectors, and flooding the chamber with radiation-dampening gas.
CORE INSTABILITY — CRITICAL
CONTAINMENT FAILURE: 2.87 SECONDS
Arjun stood alone at the center of the control ring, clad in a reinforced engineer's suit, his dark eyes locked on the collapsing equations spiraling across the primary display.
Thirty-two years old.
Chief systems architect of Project ASTRIX.
One of the youngest engineers ever granted unrestricted access to India's deepest military research complexes.
And about to die.
The realization did not disturb him.
Fear was an evolutionary inefficiency. It consumed valuable processing time, disrupted fine motor control, and clouded logical reasoning. Arjun had trained himself for years to suppress it, until calm analysis became second nature even in the face of annihilation.
Instead of panic, his mind accelerated.
Solutions flashed through his thoughts in rapid succession.
Containment override? Too slow. The control lattice would destabilize before activation.
Remote venting? Reactor geometry would fracture, triggering asymmetric collapse.
Emergency ejection? The fusion bloom radius would engulf the entire vertical shaft before the core could be expelled.
Automated dampening fields? Already at maximum output.
One by one, each possibility was calculated, simulated, and discarded.
No external method would work.
There was only one viable path.
Manual stabilization.
A failsafe designed decades earlier — a theoretical safeguard, never once used in real operation. The system required a living human neural pattern to forcibly re-synchronize the quantum lattice of the core during catastrophic collapse. A biological mind could provide chaotic variability no artificial intelligence could replicate, anchoring the energy matrix long enough to bleed off excess power.
In simpler terms — a human sacrifice.
A stabilizer.
Survival probability: 0.00%.
Arjun's gaze flicked briefly toward the observation deck beyond the blast shielding.
Technicians, researchers, military supervisors — dozens of people stared back in frozen horror. Some pounded on the transparent barrier. Others simply stood there, pale and trembling, watching the countdown tick toward zero.
Beyond them lay five hundred meters of reinforced bedrock.
Above that, a sleeping megacity.
Twenty million lives.
The calculation was trivial.
Arjun exhaled slowly.
He did not hesitate.
He turned and sprinted toward the reactor chamber.
Security systems reacted instantly. Emergency lockdown protocols attempted to seal the blast doors, biometric locks flashing as they tried to deny him access.
He bypassed them in less than a second.
His fingers flew across the control panel in a blur of muscle memory and instinct, overriding security layers, spoofing authentication nodes, and forcing a mechanical compliance loop. Years of intimate familiarity with the system architecture paid off.
The blast doors parted.
White light poured out.
The fusion core hovered at the heart of the chamber — a miniature artificial star, its gravitational field distorting the very air around it. Space itself seemed to ripple, bending subtly as arcs of superheated plasma lashed outward like solar flares.
Containment rings fractured one by one, shattering into glowing debris.
His suit screamed warnings.
TEMPERATURE: LETHAL
RADIATION: CATASTROPHIC
TIME: 1.43 SECONDS
Arjun stepped forward.
The heat stripped moisture from his skin instantly. Every breath felt like inhaling molten glass. His vision fractured into spectral distortions as radiation surged through his retinas.
Pain did not arrive immediately.
His nervous system overloaded before it could process the stimulus.
He slammed his palm against the neural anchor node embedded beside the reactor core.
Instantly, his consciousness was seized.
The quantum lattice latched onto his brainwave pattern, flooding his mind with incomprehensible torrents of information. Stellar-scale energies surged through his neurons, collapsing equations, folding spatial metrics, and tearing at the edges of reality itself.
Memories flickered.
Long nights spent hunched over schematics.
Endless equations scrawled across glass boards.
Failed prototypes.
Brief flashes of pride when something finally worked.
A lonely apartment.
Cold meals eaten in silence.
A life devoted entirely to machines.
Arjun smiled faintly.
Even now, his thoughts remained analytical.
So this is what annihilation feels like.
Light consumed everything.
Then —
Nothing.