> "No one would suspect a solar farm.
No one ever suspects the future growing beneath the dust."
---
Day 22
The transformation began not with lightning or aliens or fireworks, but with a dull hunk of scorched metal and the smell of old plastic. That was all it took. A single remnant of gold, melted by Heatblast, then dulled in sand and mashed to hell by Four Arms, wrapped in burnt wire, and pressed into the casing of a junked power supply unit.
Arslan studied it calmly. No shine. No glimmer. No sign of its worth. It was scrap now — the kind that filled entire marketplaces in Lahore, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi.
To the untrained eye, it was just another crusty PSU soaked in dust and grime.
He packed it with a handful of rusted capacitors, bundled it into an old plastic tub with torn cable spools and broken RAM sticks, and sealed it shut with duct tape that frayed at the corners.
Not even a curious uncle would question it.
---
By noon, Arslan was halfway to Bahawalpur, driving a rickety motorcycle with mismatched mirrors, the toolbox roped to his sidecar like a street scavenger's bounty. He wore his usual — dusty black jeans, faded kurta, grey canvas shoes with rubber soles worn to threads.
The metal yard on the edge of the industrial block wasn't a formal shop — more a half-open canopy, two weighing tables, and a blue-painted shed filled with hanging copper wire and ceiling fans with their blades removed.
The man at the scale grunted.
> "Melted it yourself?" he asked, jabbing a crooked finger at the PSU shell.
> "Some," Arslan muttered, lowering his gaze slightly, "leftover from tower cleanouts. Might be some plating."
The man sniffed.
> "Circuit junk's worth more than your mother's gold bangles these days," he joked, tapping the edge with a screwdriver. "You want rupees or scrap credit?"
> "Cash."
Twenty-five minutes later, Arslan rode out with ₨645,000 in hand. All untraceable, all clean. Sold as "circuit metal residue."
He didn't celebrate.
Didn't pause.
He took the first right turn, dialed a number from memory, and said two words:
> "We begin."
---
Day 23–25
The first funds went to land and labor.
Three lawyers. Four intermediaries. No direct link to his name.
He purchased all surrounding land — ten hectares in each cardinal direction, sixty total, dried and lifeless, fit only for goats and dust storms. Cheap, too. No water. No value. No neighbors. A sand-cracked expanse that had been sitting for decades untouched.
He had one condition: no questions.
The next hire was a fencing crew from Sindh — six men who laid old barbed wire along the entire sixty-hectare boundary. No cameras. No poles. Just enough line and rusted steel to say this is not your land anymore.
That was enough to keep everyone out.
Villagers don't question fenced land. In Pakistan, if you own a wall, it means you own a story — and no one wants to be caught inside a story they don't control.
People assumed he was laundering money.
Or just stupid.
Or rich enough to waste it.
Arslan leaned into it. He even paid an old man to walk around the perimeter daily with a notebook and a tattered army cap.
> "Land survey, saab," the man would mutter to strangers. "Solar feasibility."
No one pressed further.
---
Day 26–33
Next came construction.
Thirty men, hired in staggered shifts, trucked in by covered vans and told to keep to their work. Most had never seen a project like this — no arches, no ceramic work, no tile cutting or marble orders.
Just concrete.
Industrial.
Sharp lines.
No ornamentation.
The first build: a 3-meter tall wall, poured in quick-slab sections reinforced with scrap rebar, cut copper mesh, and broken fiber cement — all sourced from local scrap yards to make the concrete EM-resistant by default.
Each wall segment was sealed with acoustic foam in the cores, layered between sand pockets and lined with black ABS sheeting. No windows. No corners. Seamless joins.
On the inside: three main rooms, four auxiliary chambers, all prefab skeletons bolted into poured concrete.
And every single room had no windows.
Only louvered vents carved behind vertical creepers.
Waterproof. Dustproof. Drone-proof.
No glass.
Not one inch of reflective material.
The workers didn't ask questions. They assumed he was either building a sound studio, a panic bunker, or an underground mosque.
One of them joked:
> "Might be shooting YouTube science videos for NASA."
> "Or hiding gold from his third wife," another snorted.
Arslan said nothing.
He walked the site each night after they left. Not inspecting.
Listening.
He pressed his bare foot to the floor each time he passed the concealed trapdoor that led to OMNI — still sealed underground, still glowing faintly, humming ever so gently.
Her cable feeds had been hidden into the outer beams, spliced with Upgrade's filaments, and routed into wall-mounted breaker panels that served no electrical function. Just camouflage.
No detection. No trace. No broadcast.
Omni was underground.
The workers never noticed. They were too busy measuring tiles, welding pipes, pouring floor foam.
---
Day 34–50
The compound was now livable.
Not furnished. Not decorated.
But sealed.
Efficient.
Independent.
Now came greenery. Not for luxury — but cover.
Arslan sourced fast-growing plants from southern Punjab:
Jujube trees — drought-resistant, broad-canopied
Neem and bottlebrush — dense, noise-dampening
Sugarcane — grown in small plotted squares to shield OMNI's antenna ducts
Creepers — specifically planted against the inner south wall to distort the shape of the compound in drone footage
Basil and mint — to mask chemical scents with a natural herbal overtone
By Week 7, the entire courtyard resembled an oddly geometric forest with no flowers.
Just thick green function.
The floor was a patternless mixture of broken bricks, gravel, slate chunks, and embedded rubber — specifically chosen to break up pattern recognition from above. No drone would ever be able to map this compound in full clarity.
Every garden was plotted by sun-angle, thermal bleed, and airflow.
Even the wind chimes (made from old phone bodies and fused aluminum strips) were tuned to sound like background construction noise.
---
Week 8
The final element: solar.
It didn't happen all at once. It happened systematically.
Arslan started ordering panels quietly — not from a major supplier, but from liquidation auctions, fire-damaged stocks, cracked-but-working off-grid setups. He bought through intermediaries, fake shell buyers, even paid a school to say it was for a STEM energy project.
Over 2,000 panels arrived across 15 days.
He mounted them everywhere — on the outer edge of the property, in staggered terraces hidden by fencing netting. Some were tilted, some were flat, some were vertical. No symmetry. No grid. The whole thing looked… random.
But it wasn't.
Each panel was wired into Omni's sub-grid, boosted by capacitor loops buried beneath the fields, grounded in scrap wire, fed through shunt regulators fused by Upgrade.
No local electricity was ever tapped.
No meter was tripped.
The house glowed with invisible energy — not a single bulb needed.
Arslan even had OMNI simulate limited energy production reports and forward them to a dummy account. On paper, he was testing panel orientation.
He went so far as to claim he was "preparing to sell electricity to the grid."
Which in Pakistan meant:
"Don't mess with this guy. He knows people."
---
And now?
Now, it stood.
Not a mansion. Not a palace. Not a lab.
Just a smooth, tall monolith compound with:
No windows
No open roofs
No interior photos
No one allowed in
A place surrounded by 60 hectares of barren, owner-purchased land, all fenced, all ignored, all invisible in plain sight.
Villagers called it the "Data Farm."
Others called it "Solar Doctor's place."
One man said he was building a server farm for YouTube.
Another said he was connected to ISI.
No one cared to find out.
No one dared to ask.
They had their own problems.
Pakistan doesn't question the rich.
It just works around them.
---
> "Omni," Arslan said one evening, standing at the edge of the inner garden, staring at the southern sky, "ready the core."
> "Solar intake stable. Compound offline and secured. Object pull buffer charged."
> "Tomorrow," he said. "We start."
> "Request confirmed. Pull queue is open. Filters engaged."
> "No risk. No instability. Pure function."
> "Understood."
A soft pulse came from beneath the earth. A heartbeat. Slow. Mechanical. Alive.
And for the first time, Arslan allowed himself to exhale. Not relief. Not pride.
Just readiness.