Chapter 2 — Pattern Recognition
The world did not notice the 0.7 seconds.
Vansh did.
He did not discover his ability in a dramatic accident. There was no lightning, no near-death awakening. It began years ago as discomfort.
As a child, he disliked unpredictability. Not emotionally. Structurally.
When other children played, he observed. When teachers spoke, he predicted the next sentence. When exams came, he did not memorize answers. He mapped question probability distributions.
By sixteen, he noticed something strange.
Sometimes, when he focused intensely on a decision, the outcome tilted.
Not dramatically.
Slightly.
A coin toss he had no control over would land as expected too often. A delayed bus would arrive earlier if he recalculated departure timing repeatedly. Minor events aligned around him when his mind entered a certain state.
At first, he assumed confirmation bias.
Then he tested it.
He designed controlled micro-experiments.
Small probability environments. Low impact. Repeatable variables.
He discovered two rules.
First: influence required focus and time. The longer he held that internal alignment, the greater the strain.
Second: he could not force impossibility. He could only amplify a viable branch.
He called it internally: Causal Thread Interface.
He never wrote it down.
He never told anyone.
He refined it like a mathematician refines a proof.
By twenty, he stopped testing publicly.
By twenty-three, he stopped being surprised.
The bookstore was inherited, not chosen.
His father believed books built character. Vansh believed books built models.
After his parents passed in a road accident caused by a miscalculated overtaking maneuver, Vansh did not cry publicly.
He studied the accident report.
Probability error.
Human misjudgment amplified by impatience.
He concluded something simple.
Emotion destabilizes systems.
He removed emotional dependency from his decision architecture that year.
He sat behind the counter, reviewing dark matter coherence projections.
The 0.7 second anomaly had not repeated.
But Helix had not shut down the project either.
That was expected.
He activated the interface.
Duration: 1.8 seconds.
Energy cost: moderate cranial tension.
Projection: 74% probability Helix board debates second compression within 24 hours.
He released the focus.
His vision cleared.
Energy regeneration would require sleep or meditation.
He preferred sleep.
Meditation slowed processing speed temporarily.
Inefficient.
He checked global anomaly feeds.
Three minor deviations overnight.
A quantum encryption key failed randomly in Singapore.
A weather AI miscalculated cyclone path by 2.3%.
A financial hedge model in New York overestimated liquidity resilience.
Each small.
Together: directional.
Background coherence decay now at 0.004%.
Acceleration confirmed.
He calculated long-term trajectory.
If decay reaches 0.02%, predictive collapse begins.
If predictive collapse begins, global systems destabilize.
If destabilization crosses military thresholds, autonomous retaliation risk increases.
He leaned back.
Civilization was fragile not because of weakness.
Because of complexity.
His terminal blinked.
Helix had responded.
Not publicly.
Internally.
Compression recalibration scheduled.
But not canceled.
They would try again.
He expected that.
Human ambition does not retreat from first resistance.
It escalates.
A familiar voice entered the store.
Professor Harinarayan Mishra.
"Still reading while the world changes?" the old man smiled.
"The world always changes," Vansh replied calmly.
The professor studied him. "You never seem surprised."
"Surprise is inefficient."
The professor chuckled. "You calculate too much. Life isn't a formula."
Vansh did not respond.
Because for him, life was not a formula.
It was a system of constraints.
After the professor left, Vansh activated the interface again.
3.2 seconds.
Pain sharper this time.
Projection clarity degraded 12%.
That confirmed it.
Background instability was interfering with his precision.
That was dangerous.
If coherence weakened further, his advantage would narrow.
He did not fear death.
He feared losing accuracy.
He adjusted three international research grant flows.
He redirected two predictive modeling proposals toward gravitational damping theory.
He seeded an anonymous white paper suggesting compression restraint protocols.
Small moves.
He never pushed hard.
Push too hard and structure pushes back.
He learned that early.
He looked at his reflection faintly in the darkened screen.
Vansh Yaduvanshi.
Bookseller.
Network architect.
Probability manipulator.
Rationalist.
He did not believe he was chosen.
He believed he was optimized.
The dark matter experiment had touched something.
And that something was destabilizing the layer he relied on.
If they repeated compression above 1.006 baseline—
He would need to escalate.
Not emotionally.
Logically.
He closed the terminal.
Outside, Rishikesh moved normally.
Inside, causal noise increased again by 0.0003%.
He felt it immediately.
The second compression window had opened.
He stood.
Time to calculate the cost of stopping it.