Words: 1,013
The monsoon clouds hung heavy over Dehradun, casting a deep gray hue over the city. Rain tapped a restless rhythm against the windowpane of a small, cluttered study in the heart of the city. Inside, Deepak Rawat sat cross-legged on the floor, a steaming cup of chai by his side, and a glowing laptop balanced on a short wooden table.
A faint hum emanated from the cooling fan of the machine, blending with the sound of distant thunder. Most would call it a stormy afternoon, good for a nap. But Deepak was wide awake, fingers moving across the keys in a frenzy. Lines of code filled the screen, interspersed with ancient Sanskrit notes, physics equations, and blockchain hashes.
To the outside world, Deepak Rawat was a retired civil servant with a reputation for honesty and discipline. Few knew he had degrees in quantum mechanics and cryptography tucked away under layers of administrative work. Even fewer knew he'd been secretly working on a project that bordered on madness—Temporal Packet Transmission.
A ping on the screen snapped him from his focus.
> "Quantum Drift Calculated. Stability: 97.4%. Ready for Sync."
His heart pounded. This was it.
Over the past three years, he had been reverse-engineering quantum theories, piecing together scraps of research abandoned by Western labs, and blending them with India's own ancient texts on time and consciousness. The result: a theoretical framework to send data—text, code, digital wallets—into the past.
Deepak didn't want to change history. He wanted to rewrite the future.
He took a deep breath and activated the first phase: "Sync Chain Genesis."
A new terminal opened, and he watched as an old blockchain ledger began to reconstruct in real-time. Bitcoin's genesis block flickered into view—January 3rd, 2009.
His program was designed to inject a message into the early blocks, piggybacking on low-difficulty networks and timestamp vulnerabilities. If successful, it would create a wallet in the past, accessible only by a passphrase he knew in the present.
He reached for his notebook, opened a fresh page, and wrote:
> "Satyamev Jayate: The Future Begins in the Past."
That would be the key. A patriotic mantra, meaningful yet impossible to guess.
Thunder cracked above. The power flickered, but the UPS held strong.
He clicked "Transmit."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the screen flashed green.
> "Transmission complete. Wallet seeded. Timestamp: October 27, 2010."
Deepak exhaled. It had worked.
Somewhere in the blockchain history of 2010, a wallet had just been born—containing the private keys only he could access. He hadn't sent actual Bitcoin, of course—that was impossible. But he had seeded a trapdoor, an encrypted wallet waiting to receive purchases at that time.
Now came the hard part: traveling back to use it.
He stood and walked over to the corner of the room. A tarp covered what looked like a small glass capsule, about the size of a phone booth. He pulled the cover off, revealing a polished metallic frame embedded with copper coils and violet crystal rods—locally sourced from the Himalayas.
He called it "Kal-Chakra," the Wheel of Time.
It wasn't a time machine in the conventional sense. It used induced quantum resonance to place the occupant's consciousness into a mirrored state—allowing time-aware decisions to be made at earlier points in his own lifetime. Essentially, it was time-looped consciousness: memory traveling backward.
He entered the capsule, sat on the floor, and placed his hands on the copper coil rings.
He had programmed the return point: October 25, 2010—two days before Diwali, when he was 25 years old, living in a rented flat in Delhi, still debating between civil services and academia.
A time when Bitcoin was a word no Indian knew.
He closed his eyes and whispered the activation chant he'd composed from old Vedic mantras.
The lights dimmed. A pulse rang through his skull.
The world fell away.
---
October 25, 2010 – Delhi
Deepak gasped awake.
His heart raced. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
He looked around and saw familiar walls—cracked paint, a flickering tube light, a rusty ceiling fan. The air smelled of incense and books.
He stumbled to the mirror and stared.
It was his face. Young again. Sharp-jawed, less tired, full of restless energy.
It had worked.
His memories from 2025 remained intact, layered on top of his 2010 self. He remembered every step. Every word of the Bitcoin white paper. Every moment of the future. Every failure India would endure.
Not this time.
He turned to the desk, opened his ancient laptop, and connected to the internet. Slow, clunky. But it would do.
He opened Tor.
Found the Bitcoin forums.
Created a user account: BharatNode01.
And then, he typed:
> "Looking to buy BTC with PayPal. DM."
The future had just shifted.