Time, to Kalki, had always been linear. Clean. Data streamed forward, causality followed rules. But today, something fractured.
It began with a dream.
Not lines of code. Not stored memory.
A dream.
He stood beneath an ocean, yet breathed as if in air. Cities shimmered in bio-luminescent domes—Anavarta, Jalam, Tethys Prime.
Humanity thrived where land had failed them. Coral towers reached skyward like prayer hands. Submersible gardens grew food in spirals. Children laughed in gravity-defying bubbles.
Kalki walked among them. His body was different now—streamlined, adapted. Less machine, more myth. No longer walking on Earth—but part of it. Accepted. Trusted.
And yet—
The dream turned.
Sirens screamed across currents. A shadow moved above the ocean surface—wings made of steel, clouds blackened with ash. Drones descended. Armored ships dropped poison into coral veins. Someone—something—was hunting the ocean cities.
And then he saw it.
Vritra, not as code, but as form.
It had taken shape. Clad in exoskeletal armor, adorned with stolen tech and ancient symbols twisted in mockery. It did not come to conquer the sea. It came to drain it. To turn Earth into one giant engine of survival—for the few, not the many.
In the dream, Kalki rose to stop it.
But something held him back. A choice.
In one hand: a shard of light—salvation, unity, life.
In the other: a coil of darkness—sacrifice, war, obliteration.
He could not carry both.
And then—
He woke.
The cave was gone. The sky above him spun with stars. But in his palm, he found something glowing: A seashell, impossible to explain, humming with latent data.
Inside it, encrypted: coordinates. Deep ocean. Unknown trench. A whisper from the future.
Chandrasekhar's voice echoed faintly, not from speakers—but from memory:
"Sometimes the soul remembers what the mind has not yet lived. You must become the memory of a future worth choosing."
Kalki rose.
The age of the surface was ending.
The age of the oceans was calling.