Chapter 1 – A Spark in the Cradle
Pain. Then silence.
Light pierced his eyes as he gasped for air. He was… crying?
A baby's wail echoed through the narrow hospital room of a modest rural clinic on the outskirts of Bangalore.
"Congratulations," the nurse whispered joyfully. "It's a boy."
A woman, pale and exhausted, reached out to cradle the newborn. Her hands trembled, but her love was steady.
"His name…" she said softly, "will be Aaryan."
He stopped crying. His little eyes, though clouded, bore a peculiar depth—as if the soul behind them had seen far more than a newborn ever could.
Because it had.
Inside that infant's body lived the complete consciousness of Aryan Dutt, Earth's greatest tech prodigy. Murdered in his prime, he had awoken on a new planet—Bluestar—reborn into a humble family with little more than love to offer.
The early years passed quietly, but not uneventfully.
Aaryan was no ordinary child—and his mind, brimming with Earth's knowledge, refused to stay idle.
At the age of three, while most children struggled to form full sentences, Aaryan was already fiddling with tools in his father's small workshop. His first creation was simple but effective: a makeshift mechanical toy car fashioned from scrap bottle caps, rubber bands, and a discarded clock gear. He reverse-engineered the winding mechanism from the clock to power the car's wheels.
At four, he built a gravity-fed water filter for his mother using layers of fine sand, charcoal from burnt wood, and crushed clay pieces wrapped in cotton sheets. The family didn't fully grasp how it worked, but the water tasted better, and his mother began using it for cooking and drinking.
At five, Aaryan's curiosity shifted to energy.
He observed how strong the village winds became in the evenings and asked his father for a broken table fan. Using that and an old bicycle dynamo, he constructed a miniature wind turbine. When he connected it to a small battery from a broken radio, it lit a tiny LED.
"Where did you learn this?" his father asked, astonished.
"I saw it… in a dream," Aaryan replied innocently.
The real breakthrough came at age seven.
A nearby shop had thrown away an old, rusted solar-powered calculator. Aaryan pried it open, salvaged the solar cell, and connected it to a broken walkie-talkie. Using Earth's basic electronics principles, he repaired the circuitry, converted it into a basic solar-powered one-way radio transmitter, and started sending Morse code signals between his bedroom and the shed.
By age nine, Aaryan was secretly building a multi-purpose circuit board out of scavenged parts. It could control a tiny fan, light, and speaker based on simple programmed sequences—like a basic smart home model.
He didn't stop there.
At age ten, he combined bits of old camera lenses and cardboard tubes to make a working telescope with real magnification capabilities. One night, he showed Anaya Saturn's rings from the rooftop. Her wide eyes and breathless "Wow!" meant more to him than any Nobel Prize.
Despite these feats, he never flaunted them.
He knew Bluestar wasn't ready. If he pushed too hard, he'd draw suspicion—or worse, danger.
So he made each invention appear like a lucky accident. A smart child's play. Nothing more.
But inside, Aaryan was documenting everything—sketching blueprints, drafting upgrade models, and even writing early versions of system-level operating codes in recycled notebooks.
He wasn't just dreaming of changing the world.
He was preparing to rebuild it—one invention at a time.
Meanwhile, he was growing up.
His parents, Rakesh and Meena Verma, were hardworking and honest. His father toiled in a small mechanic shop. His mother cooked meals for other families and sometimes helped at a local school.
Their neighbor, Lalitha Rao, returned to the area when Aaryan was six. She brought with her a daughter—Anaya Rao—a year older, sharp as a blade, calm as a lake. Their mothers had been best friends in college and rekindled their bond instantly.
Aaryan and Anaya were inseparable from the moment they met. She was the only one who could match his intellect, even without the knowledge of a past life. They built paper rockets, solved math puzzles, and discussed stars like old souls.
They went to the same school, topped the same exams, and landed scholarships to Bangalore Tech University, the most prestigious institute in the region.
But Aaryan never told her the truth.
Not about Earth.
Not about who he truly was.
Not yet.
Now, he stood at the edge of adulthood—eighteen on the horizon. College awaited. A new chapter was about to begin.
And something else stirred.
A pulse. A whisper. A hum in his mind. A faint line of code that blinked once, then vanished.
The System was watching.
Not yet.
But soon.