Chapter 11: The Ones Who Came Before

Forty-two hours left.

The spiral was still glowing.

Arjun sat cross-legged beside it, fingers stained with dried blood, heart pounding hard enough to echo in his skull. Bete had gone eerily quiet after the Speaker's last message. Even for an AI with a sarcastic streak, the implication was too big to joke about.

We were not the first.

Not the first civilization. Not the first species to build a grid. Not the first to play warden to something buried under the bones of older worlds.

And now, Arjun had invited that ancient voice to speak directly into his mind.

"Okay," Arjun exhaled. "Let's do this."

"Hold up," Bete said, his voice lower than usual. "Before you go full psychic archaeologist—what if this thing's lying?"

Arjun blinked. "Why would it lie?"

"Why wouldn't it?" Bete snapped. "It's been locked underground for thousands of years. Maybe all it wants is a ride topside."

Arjun paused, the thought twisting in his gut.

"Then we verify."

"How?"

Arjun smiled grimly. "We go looking for physical proof."

Across the street, in Arclight's van, the feed showed Arjun dragging out his field kit—gloves, sampling tools, and a battered handheld spectrometer he'd once traded for half a semester's worth of history textbooks. The younger agent frowned.

"Is he seriously about to do archaeology in his own flat?"

The senior agent shook his head. "No. He's looking for something the Speaker left behind."

"Like what?"

The senior's eyes were fixed on the spiral. "Artifacts. Traces. Proof that the First Council didn't invent the grid—they inherited it."

Arjun's fingers trembled slightly as he scraped the edge of the spiral with a sterile scalpel, collecting a fine layer of blackened dust. The moment the sample hit the spectrometer tray, the screen freaked out—readings fluctuating wildly between common carbon compounds and something no terrestrial geology textbook could explain.

"Bete," Arjun whispered, "what the hell is this?"

"Cross-referencing…" Bete's processors hummed. "That elemental signature doesn't match anything on Earth's natural formation record."

"Alien?"

"Not necessarily." Bete hesitated. "Could also be pre-plate-shift contamination—meaning it's from before our current continents even existed."

Arjun's skin crawled. That put it somewhere in the late Precambrian era—hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved.

"Okay," Arjun breathed. "We're officially off the map."

The Speaker's presence shifted—like a breeze passing through stone—and Arjun felt the tug again, that sense of being pulled under, like the vision before. But this time, he didn't resist.

The spiral opened.

Arjun stood inside memory itself.

Not a vision, not a metaphor—this was direct recall, pulled from the Speaker's fragmented mind. The ground beneath his feet wasn't earth. It was something older, a city carved from dark stone and glowing veins of metal, stretching in concentric circles toward a central tower made entirely of spiral geometry.

In the sky above, there was no sun—only a massive crack, like space itself had torn open, bleeding light that wasn't light.

And around Arjun moved figures.

Not human. Not even close.

Tall, slender, limbs jointed in too many places, skin marked with natural spirals, like their very biology reflected the same design that would later appear in ancient human temples.

They weren't gods.

They were engineers.

The Ones Who Came Before.

They moved in silent urgency, building structures that vibrated with living energy, setting stones into place, tracing patterns with something that glowed like molten gold but moved like liquid thought. Arjun realized, with a nauseating twist, that they weren't building something new.

They were repairing something ancient.

This grid wasn't their invention either.

It was a hand-me-down from whatever came before even them.

In Arclight HQ, Thorn stood with a glass of whiskey in one hand, watching the live telemetry from Arjun's hacked systems. The frequency Arjun's body was now emitting—his pulse, his brainwaves—matched data from an old archaeological incident logged by Arclight in 1983.

The Jebel Haroun Incident, where an underground temple in Jordan briefly reactivated before collapsing entirely.

The readings were identical.

"He's found it," Thorn whispered.

The assistant frowned. "Found what?"

Thorn's smile was razor-sharp. "Proof that human history isn't human."

In the memory-space, Arjun stood before the central tower. Its surface wasn't smooth. It was covered in writing—the same ancient glyphs found scattered across the stepwell, the same spirals his mother had drawn obsessively in her diary.

But this time, Arjun could read them.

The Speaker's gift had unlocked the language, forcing understanding into his mind like liquid fire.

It wasn't scripture.

It was a warning.

"We were the second.We broke the first seal.The ones who came before us spoke to the stars.The stars answered.And they never stopped listening."

Arjun's heart pounded louder than ever. This wasn't about ancient India. This wasn't even about Earth.

This was about a cycle—civilizations rising, discovering the grid, and using it to speak upward, thinking they were sending prayers to the heavens.

But they weren't talking to gods.

They were talking to something waiting on the other side.

The memory shattered, dumping Arjun back into his flat, sweat-drenched and shaking. The spiral had stopped glowing—but the handprint remained, darker now, edges sharper, like it had been reaffirmed.

"Bete," Arjun croaked. "We need a new plan."

"No shit."

Arjun wiped his face with a trembling hand. "HelioCore isn't just about power. It's a signal amplifier. If Arclight activates it—"

"They won't just power Mumbai," Bete finished. "They'll reopen the first broadcast channel."

The channel the First Speaker's civilization had used.

The one that got them erased.

Forty-one hours.

Arjun stood, dizzy but resolute. "Okay."

"Okay what?"

"We're not building a power plant anymore."

Bete's circuits hummed nervously. "Then what are we building?"

Arjun's grin was feral. "A firewall."

The aftershocks of the memory vision still echoed in Arjun's bones as his flat flickered back into focus around him. His forehead was damp with sweat, fingers trembling slightly from the strain of being force-fed ancient history straight into his nervous system. The spiral beneath him still pulsed faintly, like it had seen what he saw and was now thinking about it too.

He pushed himself up, body protesting every motion. His mouth was dry, the air tasted faintly metallic—a side effect, he guessed, of touching the raw heart of the grid's memory.

"Bete," Arjun croaked. "Get me the full HelioCore blueprint. I need to see it all."

"Working." Bete's tone was uncharacteristically subdued. It wasn't often the AI got rattled, but watching his user get mind-hijacked by pre-human history was enough to make any system reconsider its life choices.

The familiar wireframe of HelioCore's design filled the screen—a system that, in theory, should have revolutionized energy harvesting in high-density urban centers by pulling low-frequency energy from the earth's natural ley currents. Cheap power, endless supply, good press. That was the cover story.

Arjun saw the lie immediately.

"Of course," he muttered, tracing a finger over the screen. "The primary coils aren't just inductive."

"They're directional," Bete added quietly. "Like antenna arrays."

"Because HelioCore isn't just a receiver."

"It's a damn broadcast tower," Arjun finished.

The ancient civilizations who touched the grid always assumed they were tapping into free cosmic power. What they were actually doing was opening a line—sending a signal upward, outward, across dimensions that had forgotten Earth existed.

Until someone said hello.

His stomach twisted. The Vedic hymns, the temple bells, the spirals carved into every shrine—they weren't prayers for blessings. They were coded pings, pulses meant to keep the grid's language focused inward, safely sealed beneath the soil.

HelioCore would rip that inward focus apart—and turn every node into a lighthouse screaming into the void.

And Arclight wanted him to finish it.

"Bete," Arjun said softly, "we're not building a power plant."

"Yeah, I kinda figured."

"We're building a firewall."

The first thing Arjun did was erase every design assumption HelioCore was built on. It wasn't about maximizing output anymore. It was about choking signal flow—forcing every fragment of ley resonance to collide with itself until all that was left was incoherent noise.

It was crude. It was ugly.

It was going to save the world.

He scavenged through his parts hoard, pulling out oscillators, capacitors, half-broken RF modulators, and the prayer stones' shattered remains. Even broken, they still held traces of the original harmonics—the signature the grid recognized as authorized Keeper access.

"These stones were meant to talk to the grid," Arjun said. "I just need to teach them to lie."

"You're gonna spoof divine credentials?" Bete sounded halfway between terrified and impressed. "That's either genius or deeply sacrilegious."

"Both," Arjun muttered. "The grid expects prayers and invocations. We're gonna feed it spam calls and hold music until it can't tell what's real anymore."

The design took shape on his floor, paper scraps taped together into an impossible flowchart, mixing tech terms with Sanskrit verses, RF bands with ancient sigils. It made no sense if you looked at it through one lens. It made perfect sense if you knew the truth—that ancient technology and ancient religion were just two ways of describing the same machine.

Every step Arjun took built off what the Speaker had shown him. The previous civilizations, the spiral towers, the way every node had been turned inward, aimed at suppressing the memory encoded in the earth itself. They hadn't just sealed knowledge away—they'd tricked history into forgetting it existed.

HelioCore would undo that.

Unless Arjun could make it too noisy to work.

Across the street, in the Arclight van, the two agents were watching Arjun's frantic assembly through the long-range surveillance cam. The younger agent squinted. "What the hell is he doing now?"

The senior agent's fingers were steepled, eyes narrowed in fascination. "He's rewriting the entire protocol."

"Is that allowed?"

The senior agent smirked. "Allowed? This is exactly what Thorn wanted."

"He wanted him to break it?"

"No." The senior agent's eyes glittered. "He wanted to see if a Varma could rewrite the prayer itself."

Arjun wired the first node bypass into place, fingers blistered from the soldering iron, knees sore from kneeling on the tile for too long. When he powered up the modified prayer stone—now acting as a signal scrambler—the spiral flared bright, but the hum that came back was…wrong.

It wasn't a clean tone anymore. It was fractured, like someone had dropped a microphone into a blender filled with temple bells and modem screeches.

Bete's diagnostic panel flickered.

"Node 6…offline," Bete announced. "Signal corrupted beyond reconstruction."

Arjun sagged in relief. "That's one."

"Eight to go."

By nightfall, Arjun had neutralized three more nodes, each one harder than the last. The grid was starting to notice. Each time he bypassed a node, the spiral burned a little brighter, and Arjun could feel the Speaker watching him.

Not angry.

Amused.

"Keep laughing, ancient asshole," Arjun muttered, "but you're not getting back on air."

Inside Arclight HQ, Thorn stood alone in the executive observation room, watching the ley network map update in real-time. Nodes 3, 6, 7, and 9 were dark, their output corrupted, pulsing faintly with Varma-encoded noise.

Thorn's smile was thin. "He's actually doing it."

The assistant stood nervously nearby. "Sir, if he completes the firewall—"

"Then we lose the signal forever."

"Should we intervene?"

Thorn's gaze lingered on the map, fingers tapping his chin.

"Not yet."

By midnight, Arjun's floor was a battlefield of sweat-stained notes, cracked components, and empty chai cups. His vision blurred from exhaustion, but the spiral glowed steadily, matching the pulse in his veins.

"Bete, how much time left?"

"Thirty-nine hours."

Arjun's smile was exhausted, triumphant. "Plenty."

Bete sighed. "You always say that."

Arjun wiped his hands on his jeans, sat back against the wall, and stared at his Frankenstein firewall—a system built from myth, tech, and desperation, all held together by one truth:

History belonged to the ones who could rewrite it.

The Speaker's presence flickered once, almost like a smile.

Far below, beneath the earth, something shifted. The seals had held for millennia. But now the language was changing—and language was the only lock that ever really mattered.