Up close, the first thing Bilal thought was not Qaid-e-Azam or founder of the nation.
It was: If all the freedom leaders were the Avengers, this guy would be the legal Tony Stark.
Not the armor-building, quip-slinging billionaire version. The other one. The one who lived in a high castle, played with advanced toys, made genius decisions in meeting rooms, and then flew off while other people swept up the rubble.
Nehru with his speeches and rose? Thor, obviously. Gandhi as some weird mix of Professor X and a pacifist Dr. Strange. The rest of them—Liaquat, Patel, the princes, the generals—an overpowered, badly balanced roster of heroes and anti-heroes who fought world-ending monsters and each other at the same time.
Just like in the movies, nobody kept count of the bodies under the falling buildings.
Freedom leaders, Avengers, whatever label you slapped on: they had all been so busy battling empire and each other that they treated the people working inside the buildings—the clerks, the coolies, the nurses, the farmers—as collateral damage. Hero versus villain, villain versus villain, hero versus hero. The camera never panned low enough to see who got crushed when the set collapsed.
The man in the white suit watched him quietly, as if he had just heard all of that.
Bilal swallowed and forced his tongue to work.
"Where… where am I, sir?" he asked, in Urdu first, then repeated it in uncertain English. "What is this place?"
A faint smile touched the man's mouth, more reflex than warmth.
"This," he said, "is a… let us say, a pocket in history. An antechamber of sorts."
He gestured lightly at the room around them with one elegant hand.
"People find their way here sometimes. With their grudges. Their questions. Their certainties." His eyes flickered, just for a second, as if seeing other visitors standing where Bilal stood. "Some shout. Some try to assault me. Some weep. Some merely… admire. The fan boys, as you would say."
He tilted his head a little further.
"And who are you?"
"My name is Bilal," he said. His own voice sounded schoolboy small. "I'm… a developer. Game developer. Freelancer. From Lahore. Well. Near Lahore."
"And your reason for being here, Bilal-the-developer-from-near-Lahore?" Jinnah asked. "Which variety are you? Shouting, assaulting, weeping, admiring?"
Bilal hesitated.
He still half-expected to snap awake any second, back in his plastic chair with the router's dead light. Dreams could be sharp; anyone who had ever woken up sweating after missing an exam knew that.
But this felt different. The air had weight. The tobacco smoke curled in perfect, unhurried spirals.
He decided to treat it like a dream anyway. Worst case, he'd wake up. Best case… he had no idea what best case was.
"With respect, sir," he said slowly, "I think you were all fighting the wrong fight."
One of Jinnah's eyebrows rose, a precise punctuation mark.
"Were we?"
"You fought the monster," Bilal said, the words coming faster now. "You fought empire. You fought each other. But you never really fought the code underneath. The systems. You left the OS full of bugs and just slapped a new flag on the UI. You made a mess that still hasn't been cleaned, even after seventy-seven years of… of 'freedom'."
He almost spat the last word.
Jinnah did not look offended. He looked mildly pained, as if he had just heard a violin played very badly.
He raised a long, elegant hand to stop the flow.
"One moment," Jinnah said. His voice was dry, clipped, and cutting.
"'OS'? 'UI'? 'Bugs'?"
He looked Bilal up and down, his expression hovering between amusement and disdain.
"You speak a dialect I do not recognize, young man. Is this English, or are you reciting a cipher? If you intend to accuse me of negligence, have the courtesy to do so in a language that appears in a dictionary. I cannot rebut an accusation I need a cryptographer to decipher."
Bilal blinked, the momentum knocked out of him.
"It's… metaphors, sir. From my time."
"They are ugly metaphors," Jinnah noted, adjusting his cuff. "Translate them. Preciseness, please. I am a barrister, not a mechanic."
Bilal took a breath, forcing his brain to switch from Gamer to Lawyer, but Jinnah cut him off again, his gaze sharpening.
"And this profession you claim… 'Game Developer'. I assume this means you design amusements for children? Cricket bats? Board games?"
The sarcasm in the word amusements was sharp enough to cut glass.
"No, sir," Bilal said, realizing he had to bridge a century of technology in thirty seconds. "Not cricket bats. Listen. Do you know the radio?"
"Wireless telephony," Jinnah said. "Yes. Voices traveling through air."
"Imagine a radio that sends pictures, not just sound," Bilal said. "Moving pictures. Like the cinema, but in a box in your house. That is Television. It comes later."
"A cinema in a box," Jinnah murmured. "Convenient."
"Now," Bilal said, "imagine a Television that is also a window. A window that connects to every other window in the world. Through this window, you can speak, read, and learn. That is 'Online'."
Jinnah looked at the telephone on his desk. "A universal library connected by wire. The Empire of the Mind."
"But it is not just for reading," Bilal continued. "And this is where my job comes in. Imagine that instead of a library, the window shows you a dream. A world that doesn't exist."
He leaned forward.
"Here is the trick, sir: You are not just watching this dream, like a cinema audience. You are inside it. You can move. You can speak. You can build houses or fight wars."
"A shared hallucination?" Jinnah asked, skeptical.
"A constructed one," Bilal corrected. "And because the window connects everyone, you are not sleeping alone. You are inside that dream with thousands of other people, all sitting in their own homes in Bombay or London, but walking together in the same artificial field. Those people are called Players."
Bilal's voice gained strength.
"But the dream does not build itself. Someone has to decide the laws of that world. Someone has to decide: Is there gravity? If a man steals, do the police come? If there is a drought, do the crops die?"
He pointed to himself.
"The person who designs those rules… the person who builds the dream so the others can participate in it? That is the Game Developer."
Jinnah's eyes narrowed in understanding. The skepticism was replaced by a sharp, calibrating interest.
"You are a legislator," he said slowly. "But of a world that does not exist."
"I was a System Builder," Bilal said. "In my world, games are complex economies. I had to design cities where food had to be grown, transported, and sold. I had to create police systems to stop Players from robbing each other. If I designed the rules wrong—if the 'code' was bad—the dream collapsed. The society fell apart."
Jinnah watched him for a long moment. There was no mockery in his gaze now.
"You construct theoretical societies," Jinnah mused. "You test governance in a laboratory of the mind. That is… a significant intellect. It requires foresight. Structure."
He gave a curt nod of approval.
"You are not a toy-maker. You are an architect. Very well, Mr. Game Developer. You say we failed to repair the… 'machinery'. That we left these 'structural defects' to rot."
His face grew serious again.
"On that count," Jinnah said quietly, "you may have a case to argue."
He leaned back, the momentary heat in his eyes cooling into a different kind of intensity.
"I do not pretend to understand the mechanics of your 'connected dreams,' but I hear what you mean—that there were deeper structures we failed to reform. We fought the British, but we kept their police manuals. We fought for land, but kept their revenue laws."
He looked up again, sharp now.
"Has that not happened? Has your time not fixed it?"
Bilal laughed once, a short, dry sound.
"No, sir. Not like that. Pakistan—my side of your map—never really got its convalescence. The army stepped in. Once, then again, then again. We had generals running the country like they were still running cantonments. The politicians that came in between treated ministries like family businesses. The judges twisted the law whichever way the powerful wanted. If someone tried to patch the system properly, he was thrown in jail, disqualified, or shot."
"And you?" Jinnah asked. "Where do you fit in this tragedy? Why is a man who designs economies for dreams standing in my study?"
"I tried," Bilal said, the bitterness leaking through. "I studied for the real government too. In my time, we call it the CSS. I sat the exams. Twice."
"And?"
"Passed the written exams with flying colors," Bilal said. "Economics, History, Law. I knew the machine inside out."
"But you are not a civil servant."
"Failed the interview," Bilal said. "Twice. The panel said I lacked 'officer-like qualities.' I didn't have the charisma. I didn't have the… theater. I was a nerd who knew how the pipes worked but couldn't convince anyone to turn the tap."
Jinnah allowed a faint, rare smile to touch his lips.
"You lacked the presence," he said. "It is a common failing in intelligent men. So you retreated to your machines?"
"I went where competence mattered," Bilal said. "I built fake governments because the real one wouldn't let me in. And now… now I'm here. And you—you have the theater. You have the presence. You can make people listen."
He looked straight at Jinnah.
"But you don't know the future. I do. I have the manual for the next fifty years."
Jinnah picked up his pen, turned it between his fingers, then set it down again.
"If you truly believe that we fought the wrong fight," he said, "then I am offering you something more than the comfort of hindsight. Come with me. Not as a prophet, not as a ghost whispering from the walls, but as a companion. A second mind in the same struggle."
Bilal stared.
"Come with you where?"
"Back," Jinnah said simply. "Into the flow of events. Before the lines were drawn. Before the trains. Walk those years with me. Argue with me. Advise me. Show me the 'code' beneath the politics. Help me build the plumbing before the fireworks."
Bilal opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Every rational part of his brain screamed that this was, definitively, where the dream officially went off the rails. But there was another part—a smaller, meaner part—that was listening.
The part that had three sisters' phone calls on mute. The part that had done the maths on his nephews' school fees. The part that had felt a flicker of shameful relief when the internet had gone off.
If he said yes… all of that would be on pause. Out of reach.
For once, his absence would not be something he had to apologize for. He would be gone in a way no one could blame him for.
The idea felt like treason.
It also felt like oxygen.
"You're asking me to abandon my family," he said quietly.
"I am asking you to help me prevent a million families from being torn apart," Jinnah replied, just as quietly. "Including, perhaps, yours—if you believe time can be… persuaded."
Bilal let out a long breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.
"If this is a dream," he said, "it's a very manipulative one."
Jinnah's mouth twitched.
"Most important choices are. So, Mr. Game Developer. Will you remain in the cheap seats, shouting at the screen? Or will you step into the picture itself and risk being wrong in a more… consequential way?"
Bilal closed his eyes for a moment.
He saw trains. Fire. Children hanging from trees in other people's stories. He saw his mother counting pills into a plastic box.
When he opened his eyes again, the mahogany desk was still there. So was the man in the white suit.
"Fine," he said. His voice shook once, then steadied. "I'll come. But if I'm going to help, you have to let me say the things you won't like."
Jinnah inclined his head, as if they had just concluded a particularly difficult clause in a constitutional draft.
"That," he said, "is the only kind of help worth having."
The room darkened, the shelves and walls receding into a black that was deeper than any loadshedding night. Bilal felt something tug at him, not backward or forward, but underneath, as if the save file of the world were being loaded from an older version.
For a last guilty second, as the sound of his own time faded, he thought of his sisters and nephews and felt a strange, indecent lightness.
For once, it wasn't his job to answer their messages.
Then the pocket in history closed over him, and the story began again.