SP Road in Bangalore is a legendary place. It is a narrow, crowded labyrinth of shops selling everything from microchips to heavy motors. It is the heart of the city's hardware trade.
For the next week, it became their home.
Arjun, Meera, and a bewildered Radha (who was there to pay for things) scoured the market.
Meera was in her element. She argued with shopkeepers over the purity of capacitors. She dug through piles of junk motors to find high-torque steppers. She was a tornado of technical jargon.
Arjun used [Scan] to ensure they weren't getting ripped off.
[Item: Stepper Motor (Used)]
[Status: 40% Life Remaining. Internal Rust.]
[Arjun's Verdict:] "Put it back. It's garbage."
By the end of the week, Aisha's office looked like a mad scientist's lab. The smell of solder and ozone hung heavy in the air.
Meera worked 18 hours a day. She slept on the floor. She ate only when Radha forced food into her hands. She was building the "Frankentool."
It was an ugly machine. It was built from the cannibalized parts of three broken xerox machines, a high-speed camera lens Arjun had found in a pawn shop, and a custom conveyor belt Meera had built using bicycle chains.
But the heart of it was the computer Arjun sat at.
While Meera built the body, Arjun built the brain. He was coding the neural network. In 1991, "AI" was a buzzword for universities. But Arjun was writing a lightweight, pattern-recognition algorithm based on 2025 principles, optimized for the limited RAM of 1991 PCs.
On the seventh day, at 3:00 AM, the machine hummed to life.
"It's ugly," Aisha said, leaning against the doorframe. She had stopped by to check on them.
"It's beautiful," Meera corrected, wiping grease from her cheek. "Feed it."
Arjun handed Meera a crumpled, yellowed land deed he had "borrowed" (bought) from a clerk for testing. It was written in messy, cursive Kannada.
Meera fed the paper into the hopper.
Whirrr-ZIP.
The paper shot through the machine in 3 seconds. It didn't tear.
On Arjun's monitor, a progress bar flashed.
[Scanning...]
[Processing Image...]
[OCR Analysis...]
A text box popped up.
Owner: Ramesh Gowda
Survey No: 45/2
Village: Yelahanka
Area: 2.5 Acres
It wasn't an image. It was text. Searchable, editable text.
The room went silent.
"It read it," Radha whispered. "It actually read the handwriting."
Meera let out a whoop of victory and high-fived Arjun so hard he almost fell off his chair.
"We just invented the future," Meera grinned.
Arjun looked at the screen.
[System Alert: Prototype 'Bhoomi-1' Completed. Grade: A-Rank. Impact Potential: National.]
"We didn't just invent the future," Arjun said, his eyes cold and calculating. "We just printed our ticket to the government."
He turned to Aisha. "Advocate. Tomorrow, we go to the Vidhana Soudha (State Secretariat). We have a meeting to demand."