Chapter 20 – Silicon Ashes: The Secret Chip Forge
January 2010 – Somewhere in the Western Ghats
The mountains held more than echoes now.
Within a sealed valley, nestled in the untouched wilderness of the Western Ghats, construction buzzed beneath the camouflage of nature. No one from the outside could spot the facility—not even with satellite imaging. The trees had been rearranged using AI models to blend with aerial heat maps. Even the power grid was independent, powered by micro hydro turbines.
This was Project Shakti.
And it would mark India's first fully sovereign semiconductor company—secretly controlled by a 10-year-old boy with the mind of a 30-year-old quantum-augmented genius.
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Why Chips?
Ram had learned from history.
The 21st century would be ruled not by land, oil, or weapons—but by processors, sensors, and silicon. Every robot, every server, every drone, every future AI… required chips. Yet in his original timeline, India remained a consumer, dependent on Taiwan, South Korea, and China.
This time, he would flip the script.
His hidden chip company—codenamed Agastya Microsystems—would quietly become the silent brain of the revolution.
But to do so, Ram needed to:
1. Recruit Top Talent: Disguised under scholarships, he began pulling chip designers, physicists, and electrical engineers from IITs, BITS Pilani, and global research labs using offers from shell companies.
2. Create Proprietary Tech: With Athena's help, he designed a revolutionary chip architecture—VedaCore—that could process classical and quantum operations on a hybrid scale, far ahead of anything available in 2010.
3. Build a Stealth Factory: Using funds from his early Bitcoin and stock trading profits, he hired private contractors under NDA to build India's first 5nm chip foundry—deep underground, radiation shielded, and camouflaged.
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Agastya Microsystems – Company Profile (Public)
Founded: Officially registered in Singapore as a microelectronics R&D firm
Visible Products: IoT sensor kits, FPGA test boards for academic use
Real Operations: Full-stack chip design, proprietary quantum-assisted logic cores, energy-efficient AI processors
CEO: A fictitious French-Indian AI-generated persona named Rajiv Laurent
On the surface, Agastya was just another boutique electronics firm.
But beneath the layers of misdirection, Ram's designs had begun to power:
Minion internal logic boards
Custom encryption modules for his hidden communications network
New smart modules for drones, bio-monitors, and micro-servers deployed across his growing empire
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Embedded into India's Soil
By February 2010, the first prototype of VedaCore-Alpha was fabricated.
Its specs stunned even Athena:
7x more efficient than Intel's latest 2010 mobile chip
Built-in quantum instruction support
Immune to 95% of known side-channel attacks
Self-healing circuits for durability in harsh terrain
Ram had effectively birthed a new national technology backbone. Quietly. Invisibly.
The chips were embedded into Saraswati Schools' tablets, Minion CPUs, and testing drones being deployed by his underground startups. No one knew they were powered by Indian-made super-silicon.
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Minions, Enhanced
The Minion Project, now in Gen-2 phase, integrated VedaCore chips, allowing them to:
Handle real-time threat analysis and self-defense protocols
Learn and adapt to CEO behavioral patterns
Secure their Dyad operations against digital surveillance or infiltration
Some could now mimic human behaviors to an uncanny level—passing basic emotional response tests and even responding to philosophical queries.
The Machine-Human Intelligence Layer was beginning to form.
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Ram's Journal – February 2010
> "Every great empire is built on something invisible. Rome had aqueducts. Britain had ships. America had silicon.
Mine will be built on something smaller than all of them…
But with it, I'll control everything."
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By the Numbers – Feb 2010
Company Name: Agastya Microsystems (hidden parent of chip production)
Facility: Western Ghats, underground stealth fab operational
Key Invention: VedaCore-Alpha (next-gen hybrid CPU)
Applications: Minions, encrypted servers, smart gear for V-Class CEOs
Net Worth of Agastya (hidden): $77 million in IP valuation, rising
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End of Chapter 20