The fluorescent lights in the Advanced Cybersecurity Research Lab of Hyderabad buzzed like mosquitoes with engineering degrees. At 2:47 AM, while most of the world was sleeping or arguing on Twitter, Sharath Krishnamurthy was deep in a standoff with his neural net simulation—and losing spectacularly.
"Just one more test," he mumbled, half to himself and half to the AI system on his screen, which had recently developed the charming habit of crashing in increasingly creative ways.
He adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses and sighed. His desk looked like a vending machine had exploded over a graveyard of caffeinated corpses: coffee cups teetered in a precarious stack, energy drink cans lay toppled like fallen soldiers, and Post-it notes clung to every surface like yellow barnacles.
"Note to self," one sticky declared, "NEVER let the AI name itself again. 'NeuroBoop3000' is not intimidating."
The lab door hissed open. A soft beep from the security system heralded the arrival of the only other human being awake and willingly in this building at this hour.
"Still here, Romeo?" came the familiar voice of Dr. Madhu Priya. Her silhouette was framed by the blue-white glow of the hallway. She held two coffee mugs like peace offerings.
Sharath didn't look up. "Technically, yes. Mentally, I may have already reincarnated as a bug in the server."
"Then allow this sacred brew to restore you," she said, placing one mug beside him. The smell hit him instantly—authentic filter coffee, the kind that made lab-made instant powder taste like punishment.
He sniffed theatrically. "Did you just—did you brew this yourself?"
She smirked. "I broke into the executive lounge. Left a thank-you note."
"You're a goddess," he said, taking a sip and sighing. "A criminally underappreciated, highly caffeinated goddess."
Madhu's white coat swished as she settled beside him. Her ponytail was pristine, her face makeup-free and radiant with that annoying combination of intelligence and elegance. It was deeply unfair, Sharath thought, how she could look so composed while he looked like a data gremlin who'd lost a fight with a whiteboard marker.
"You know," she said, peering at his triple-monitor setup, "normal people go home when their system starts hallucinating penguins in the encryption layer."
"It's not a hallucination," he muttered defensively. "It's emergent behavior. Quantum feedback loops forming probabilistic image clusters. The penguins are a side effect."
"You're building Skynet with a penguin fetish."
"That's unfair," Sharath said, typing furiously. "It's more like... an emotionally unstable spreadsheet with boundary issues."
Madhu laughed, the kind of warm, unfiltered laugh that made his chest ache in a way even a hundred cups of coffee couldn't fix. He'd been crushing on her for a year now, ever since the fateful day she corrected his variable notation during a seminar and ruined his dating standards forever.
"You're impossible," she said fondly, watching him work.
"And you're still here. Which means you're either very patient or very bad at making life choices."
"Or maybe I like watching you argue with your code like it owes you money."
Sharath grinned. "It does owe me money. At this rate, NeuroBoop3000 will bankrupt the entire research grant."
The two lapsed into a companionable silence, broken only by the sound of keystrokes and the low hum of servers. Outside the reinforced glass, Hyderabad's city lights twinkled under the night sky, oblivious to the impending madness unfolding within the lab.
"I think I'm finally close," Sharath said after a moment. "The neural adaptation loop is stabilizing. See this spike? That's the system predicting a quantum intrusion before it happens."
Madhu leaned in. "That's... impressive. You might actually do it. Predictive quantum threat assessment. You'd be the youngest keynote speaker in the history of the CyberDefense Conference."
"Imagine the free merch," Sharath whispered, eyes gleaming.
"Ah yes. The true reward of scientific achievement—conference tote bags."
He ran the simulation again. A new progress bar appeared on the screen. It moved at a snail's pace.
"Bet it crashes at 87% again," Madhu said.
"Nah. This time it's different. I gave it a self-correcting feedback layer and bribed it with jokes."
"You told it jokes?"
"Only dad jokes. The algorithm responds to puns better than patches."
She covered her face, laughing. "This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a pun."
As they watched the simulation tick forward, Sharath found himself relaxing. The system was holding. The code wasn't screaming in binary. The penguins were—blessedly—absent.
"This might actually work," he murmured.
And then the alarms started.
All across the lab, red lights began flashing. The monitors blazed with cascading warning messages.
[CRITICAL ERROR: NEURAL NETWORK BREACHING CONTAINMENT]
[SAFETY OVERRIDES DISABLED]
[INITIATING HARDWARE MELTDOWN]
Sharath stood so fast he knocked over his mug. "That's not possible! I sandboxed it!"
Madhu jumped to her feet. "Sharath, pull the plug—now!"
"I can fix this!" he yelled, hands flying over the keyboard.
The server rack behind them sparked violently. Smoke began pouring out in curls, and an acrid burning smell filled the room.
"Sharath!" Madhu grabbed his arm.
"Wait! It's learning—look at the patterns—it's not just adapting, it's changing!"
"YOU ARE TOO CLOSE TO THE—"
A final spark, like a lightning bolt from a digital god, arced from the quantum core. It hit Sharath directly in the chest.
Time fractured.
For an endless moment, everything was light, code, heat, and music—yes, music, like an orchestra of thought itself playing a grand finale. He felt himself unraveling, his neurons liquefying into data, his heartbeat syncing with binary pulses.
Images flashed through his mind like corrupted slides:
Madhu's shocked face.
A penguin spinning a Rubik's cube.
Coffee brewing backward.
The words "WELCOME, SHARATH." in glowing light.
Stars. So many stars.
And then...
He was cold.
Not air-conditioned cold. Organic cold.
Wet. Sticky. Screaming.
What the actual hell—
The sudden awareness of arms cradling him, of bright torchlight dancing on stone walls, of voices chanting in an unfamiliar dialect.
And the smell. Not antiseptic or electric ozone. But lavender and blood and firewood.
He blinked his newborn eyes and promptly wailed again.
This is fine, he thought