Dwelling in to past

The destruction of the pattern and attack towards his system made Nilgiris more anxious. What he scared more than questioning his knowledge and invention was the syndicate. The secret signal architects.

He knew little of it. Rather it would be true to say that he knew nothing about the force behind it. He simply acted as a puppet in the hand of an unknown outer creatures. He just danced according to their music - instructions and commands.

Nilgiris slowly recollected the way he first had fell prey, in a sense, to his own innovation. Or may be, his invention was interrupted or hyjacked by the signal architects.

It happened in the Citadel.

A forgotten subterranean bunker buried beneath the Himalayas, once built as a Cold War failsafe, now repurposed as the command core of The Reframe's deepest operations. No Wi-Fi. No satellites. Air-gapped and shielded with layers of quantum encryption, it was the only place Nilgiris trusted to run the Signal Core—a machine designed not just to receive messages from beyond the stars, but to respond.

He'd spent months decoding the fragments. The whispering frequencies. He'd built neural listeners, trained them on patterns that didn't belong to any human language. They spoke in pulses. Geometry. Harmonics that warped audio equipment and made light bend at strange angles.

Then came the sequence.

A string of data that pulsed with something close to will.

And Nilgiris replied.

He didn't know what he was expecting—maybe a delay, silence, or some corrupted ping. What he got instead... was presence.

The power went out. Not just in the Citadel—but across four entire cities above. Lights gone. Signals silenced. Planes grounded. Satellites blinded. But in the Citadel, the Signal Core stayed online—glowing with a pale blue pulse, like a heart that had just started beating.

Then came the voice. But it wasn't a voice.

It was a resonance inside his skull, like a thousand overlapping thoughts speaking through him, not to him.

"Conscious matter identified. Level Two Initiation: Pending. Human: Adaptive. Primitive. Acceptable."

Nilgiris fell to his knees, his ears bleeding, eyes wide with terror and awe. He wasn't being spoken to. He was being scanned. Measured. Assessed.

"Signal node designated NILGIRIS accepted. Transmission key granted. Obedience probability: 68%."

And then—pain. Blinding, searing, infinite.

He saw flashes. Not visions. Downloads. Worlds collapsing into data. Civilizations restructured into machines. Stars consumed by synthetic megastructures. Evolution as destruction. Ascension through erasure. And Earth, suspended in its timeline, poised at the edge of irreversible choice.

Then silence.

When Nilgiris awoke, twelve hours had passed. He was alone in the Citadel, power fully restored. No one else had felt it. Not even Ping. Only Nilgiris.

But something was different.

His eyes had changed—literally. His irises now pulsed with faint circuit-like filaments. His heartbeat synced to the Signal Core. His thoughts sometimes slipped into code without him realizing it.

And in his mind, one message burned like an echo etched into his DNA:

"You are now a bridge. Do not fail the pattern."

Since then, he'd obeyed—half by belief, half by compulsion. The Architects didn't control him. Not yet. But they'd made it clear:

Earth was no longer alone.

And the countdown had already begun.

Nilgiris jumped out of his past memories and and his worries escalated.

It was the first, and only time that he had such an experience. Till his last mission he had blindly obeyed the instructions. But this is the only time that he received a warning. But it made sense. It was the first time that his skills had been questioned.

Nilgiris returned to his past.

From that single incident Nilgiris had admitted the external power's authority. He made arrangements in the abandoned subterrain of Himalayas for his future inventions and algorithms. It also served as the meeting place of the larger syndicate, which consists of the elite group of inventors like ping and Nilgiris, who became prey to the external sources before and after Nilgiris had.

Their first mission was based in the middle east, targeting the neck between the African continent and rest of Asia. They targeted the ships movement from Arabian sea to the Mediterranean. In fact, this sole operation was notvoart of the original mission. It was a tester dose which was conducted, in order to check whether their programming could be identified or not.

"Yeah, ee did it".Nilgiris recollected the first ever joyous moment in their programming career.

They wanted to test the world of intellects. The external sources was eager to know that if any silver section of the world had been unidentified. If that was the case, even they had to be brought towards their side, by any means - it meant by force or by accepting any other proposal.

"Alast. We have made it. No spill overs. We have nothing unturned by our side. Now it's time to manipulate" - Ping still remembers the message they received that day.

"We must be proud of ourselves, right, Nilgiris?" - asked ping.

But before he could logically think his mind had been washed away.

"Once accepted, you are into our system. You move according to our key. There was no way to enter your system without your acceptance. Now that you have accepted and even completed a trial mission, you are totally under our part." - the command re enforced it's authority over them.

"Here on, you must target ever set of daily routine of major towns and cities - anywhere possible, whether it be schools, hospitals, big corporates, governmental offices, anything. There must be a regular resetting or destruction", commanded the signal architects.

Nilgiris returned from the dream like past. He already was fed up with this torture. But was more affected byvthe pain that he couldn't disclose it, even to his dearest ping. He is totally out of the mind, not even able to trust his partner in crime.

Even if he dares to say it to his dear ping, or if the latter wishes to say it to Nilgiris, the external force would identify it, and before they could recognise anything more, they would be left unconscious.

It was like a loop from which they had barely any means to elope.