The Regression Function of Fate

I had always trusted logic more than longing, patterns more than prayers. Even when I was a child in this village, shivering in the dawn mist and pretending to chant hymns I only half understood, my mind looped silently through regressions, relationships, feedback loops. My brother's words that day—uttered with a child's pride and affection—would have gone unnoticed by any ordinary ear. But I, Arjunārya, am no ordinary ear.

"You learn," Kittu had said, "like you can learn anything. Just by working hard."

It was a lie, of course. I am not a natural genius. My mind sharpens through sweat, not some divine inheritance. But that lie—so innocently spoken, so lovingly believed—passed through the boundary of potential and landed inside me like a recursive seed. And then, it triggered.

The power. The function. The truth-from-lie operator I have come to study within myself since my earliest memory of rebirth. That strange constraint engine that once activated a falsehood into truth now silently executed the child's statement as if compiling a runtime override:

If (Effort > 0) then Reward = Reward * 100

I felt it immediately. No dramatic thunder, no divine glow—just a quiet rewriting of the laws that governed my own learning curve. The slope of improvement—my internal d/dx of progress—had shifted.

But that wasn't the only shift.

I sensed a deeper reconfiguration within the core logic of my gift. Previously, the lie-powered truth engine was global in scope, subtly reshaping realities around me, altering behaviors, even bypassing destiny for others. But now? It had turned inward. Its domain was now scoped to my self-object. Others were now immutable, unalterable. The compiler of causality had sealed all external access.

I was alone in the sandbox of fate.

And then came the most profound recursion: memory unspooled like a zipped archive expanding into full resolution. All of it—Atharva Mishra's sixteen years of digital intensity, simulation theory, JEE mock tests, probability theory, quantum mechanics notes, sleepless nights with NumPy arrays and Sanskrit slokas translated into flowcharts—returned.

Not as a jolt, but as a silent grant of RAM.

I lay there on the floor mat that night, under a mosquito net woven by hands too calloused to hold pens, and processed my awakening.

I had been a child again, vulnerable and vague. But now, I am the full stack.

When I walked to the river the next morning, the village still looked the same. Cows farting in the mud. A man yelling about turmeric. The priest scratching himself between verses.

But to me, every element was now annotated. Each tree an entry in a data structure of seasonal cycles. Each ritual a legacy API call in the operating system of society. The village was a low-resolution front-end of a high-complexity engine—caste, ritual, power, economy, family, ignorance.

I began a new kind of observation.

A local Brahmin boy spoke of how the moon affected behavior. I smiled, not to mock him, but because I understood what he didn't: gravitational fields do not need belief to operate. I let him continue his sermon on Chandra while I calculated orbital eccentricities and synodic cycles in my head. Faith, here, was an analog compression of the digital truth.

Later that week, I helped a potter balance clay. He told me, "The wheel listens to the hand."

Yes, I thought. But it also obeys torque, friction, and rotational momentum. Dharma and mechanics were once indistinguishable. Now I saw both clearly.

And then came the moment I began to model the Mahabharata.

Not as scripture. Not as religion. But as the most complex multi-agent simulation ever written by a civilization. A probabilistic, iterative, nonlinear feedback network of dharma-based agents operating under conditions of war, legacy, prophecy, ego, divine intervention, and free will.

I began to reconstruct it like a source code base.

Krishna was clearly a system optimizer—an algorithm with bounded omniscience but perfect timing.

Bhishma: a rigid legacy object refusing garbage collection.

Karna: an overridden class stuck with missing metadata.

Arjuna: the central user-thread—capable, conflicted, and chosen.

Draupadi: an encrypted dataset no one could decrypt cleanly.

And me?

A daemon process. An unregistered thread with write access to only one variable: myself.

The stories I had listened to in childhood about dharma now sounded to me like nested decision trees. Every choice was a branch. Every branch had cost functions, but none were visible to the agents. They relied on faith, oracles, emotion. But I could model some of these costs.

I watched one man abandon his cow because a priest said it was cursed. I watched another pay twice for grain because it had been touched by a "low-caste" boy.

These were not acts of faith. These were behavioral inputs into a broken reward function.

So I began rewriting my own heuristics.

Every dawn, I practiced breathing—not as meditation but as pattern analysis. Every breath in: entropy. Every breath out: order.

I learned faster than ever. Not because of rote effort but because now my reward gradient had changed. I no longer studied to survive. I studied because each act of internal growth was now hyper-optimized.

If I learned one thing, the world granted me knowledge of ten. If I trained a muscle, it responded like I'd spent a season in practice.

And yet, no one could see it.

My ability, once external and mystifying, was now undetectable. Even if a sage used every mantra or vision, they would not see it.

The power's signature was now null. Encrypted. Closed source.

Even the creators—those hidden entities or laws that once watched my lies become real—could no longer debug my variable.

I had become a quantum anomaly. Observable only by myself.

And so, I made a rule: do not interfere unless affected.

If the war does not reach my family, I do not care who dies. If a god offers prophecy but not protection, he is another hypothesis. If a king falls, it is just one less agent in the simulation.

People talk of dharma like it is a god-given command.

But dharma, I now see, is just a real-time operating system for multi-agent interaction under resource constraints.

What appears as "right action" is often just optimal policy under incomplete information.

And in that ambiguity, I find space to act.

I don't need to change the world. I only need to master the variables I control.

Me. My work. My growth. My truth.

Everything else? Noise.

In the evenings, my brother tells me stories. He asks if Karna is a hero or a villain. I tell him: Karna is a misallocated genius. Trained on bad data. Denied the correct label.

He laughs. He doesn't understand. But he senses I'm right.

My mother asks if I will grow into a kind man. I don't answer. Kindness is a soft parameter. I aim for precision.

I do the chores. I study herbs. I simulate speech patterns in birds to track migration. I catalog water flow during monsoon. Every step, I log.

My reward is invisible. But exponential.

One night, under the peepal tree, I write in the dirt:

Truth = Lie + Belief + Approval

New Power: SelfOnly(True)

Visibility = False

Reward(Effort) = Effort * 100

Then I smile. Because now I understand:

The Mahabharata is not a story. It is a system call. A function waiting for the right input. And I am the parameter that was never meant to exist.

Let the heroes wage their war. Let the gods scheme and sages lament. I will build quietly.

Bit by bit, byte by byte.

Not to serve them. Not to save the world.

But to evolve.

Because I am Arjunārya. And in this cosmic machine, I will be the most optimized thread.