October 5,1985 :Mercer Hall, Rudra's Bedroom

  The Turbo XT hummed on my desk, a distinct, rhythmic whirring of cooling fans and spinning platters that sounded like the heartbeat of the future.

  It was a beige beast of a machine, heavy enough to crush a foot and expensive enough to buy a used car. The monitor was a monochrome green phosphor CRT that cast a sickly, radioactive glow over the darkened room, illuminating the vintage Star Wars posters I still hadn't bothered to tear down. To anyone else in this house—to my mother, to Travis—this machine was just an overpriced calculator.

  To me, it was a weapon.

  I had spent the last three days setting it up, tweaking the config.sys files and optimizing the memory allocation. I wasn't playing Oregon Trail. I was building an empire.

  I cracked my knuckles—my long, slender, sixteen-year-old knuckles—and felt the strange disconnect between my youthful body and my veteran mind. I positioned my hands over the clunky, mechanical IBM keyboard and typed a command into the blinking DOS prompt.

  C:\> BHAIRAV_MAIN.EXE

  The screen flickered with a satisfying electronic whine. I had written a simple program in BASIC over the last forty-eight hours to track my assets, a digital ledger for a shadow CEO.

  > BHAIRAV HOLDINGS > LIQUIDITY: $38,000 > REAL ESTATE: 1000 ACRES (ROUND ROCK) > TENANT: PC'S LIMITED (PENDING CONST.) > FOREX POSITION: +$620,000 (UNREALIZED)

  The numbers stared back at me, green against black. The Yen trade was still printing money. The US Dollar was continuing its slow, agonizing slide against the major currencies, just as the G5 nations had intended with the Plaza Accord. But I couldn't touch that money yet. That was the war chest, the nuclear option reserved for the future.

  I needed cash flow. Immediate, operational, liquid cash flow.

  I leaned back in the creaking office chair and engaged the Mind Browser overlay. It shimmered into existence in my peripheral vision, a translucent interface only I could see.

  > SEARCH: 1985 HIGH GROWTH SECTORS (LOW BARRIER TO ENTRY) > PROCESSING... > RESULT: VIDEO RENTAL. DIET FADS. JUNK BONDS. SOFTWARE.

  Software.

  I looked at the blinking cursor on the physical green screen in front of me.

  In 1985, the software industry was the Wild West. Microsoft was currently stumbling around trying to release Windows 1.0, which I knew from history was a buggy, tiled mess. The world still ran on DOS. Programs were simple, functional, and aesthetically ugly.

  But I knew what was coming. I knew the algorithms that would define the next century. I couldn't write Windows from scratch—that was too complex for one person to code in a bedroom. But I could write tools. Utilities. Essential infrastructure.

  I typed a new mental query.

  > SEARCH: NORTON UTILITIES 1985 FEATURES > RESULT: UNERASE, DISK DOCTOR, FILE FIND.

  Peter Norton was currently making a killing selling software that simply recovered deleted files. It was absurdly simple logic.

  I closed my eyes, accessing the vast repository of knowledge from my previous life. I remembered the structure of a disk defragmenter. I remembered the mathematical logic of the Lempel-Ziv-Welch file compression algorithm. In 2024, this was open-source code you could download from GitHub for free. In 1985, this was alchemy. It was magic.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  I could write a suite of "System Optimizers." I could brand it. The Bhairav Accelerator.

  I paused. No. That sounded too Indian. Too foreign for Reagan's America. It needed to sound corporate. American. Scientific. Trustworthy.

  Mercer Systems. LogicPro.

  I started typing. The mechanical keys clattered like gunfire in the quiet room. The code flowed out of me, not pouring from my brain, but from memory. I wasn't inventing; I was transcribing the future into BASIC and Assembly language.

  Knock, knock.

  The sound broke my rhythm. The door opened before I could answer. It was Travis.

  He looked different than he had at breakfast. He had shed the suit for jeans and a polo shirt, and he held a rolled-up set of blueprints in a white-knuckled grip. He looked less like a polished politician and more like a conspirator caught in a lie.

  "The City Council vote is Tuesday," Travis said, leaning heavily against the doorframe as if he needed the physical support. "The 'Innovation Corridor' bond measure."

  "Do you have the votes?" I asked, not looking away from the cascading lines of code on my screen.

  "I have the Democrats because of the promised jobs. I have the Republicans because of the 'business expansion' rhetoric. But I have a problem."

  I stopped typing, the silence in the room suddenly deafening. I swiveled my chair to face him. "What?"

  "The press," Travis said, wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead. "The Austin American-Statesman is digging. They saw the land transfer records at the county clerk's office. They know a shell company bought the land right before the bond proposal was announced."

  "Did they link Bhairav Holdings to the Mercers?" I asked sharply.

  "Not yet," Travis said grimly. "Robert hid the ownership well; it's buried under three layers of LLCs. But the reporter, a woman named Sarah Jenkins... she's sharp. She's sniffing around, asking why a company founded last month bought a desolate goat farm for half a million dollars cash."

  "Sarah Jenkins," I repeated softly. My eyes flicked to the corner of the room as I ran a query.

  > SEARCH: SARAH JENKINS JOURNALIST AUSTIN

  > RESULT: INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER. PULITZER FINALIST 1989. KNOWN FOR EXPOSING CORRUPTION.

  A formidable opponent. This wasn't a gossip columnist; this was a hunter.

  "She thinks it's a kickback scheme," Travis said, pacing the small stretch of carpet between my bed and the desk. "She thinks I tipped off a developer. If she finds out the developer is her subject's sixteen-year-old brother... I'm done. That's political suicide. I'll be disbarred."

  "She won't find out," I said calmly.

  "How can you be sure? She's interviewing Silas Miller, the farmer we bought it from, tomorrow morning."

  I smiled. The green light of the monitor reflected in my glasses, hiding my eyes.

  "Because Silas Miller thinks he robbed us," I said, my voice steady. "He thinks we're city idiots who overpaid for useless scrubland. Let him tell her that. Let the narrative be that Bhairav Holdings is a foolish out-of-town speculator getting fleeced by a local farmer."

  "And when the bond passes and the land value triples overnight?" Travis asked, stopping his pacing to look at me.

  "Then we are geniuses," I said. "But by then, the ink is dry and the bond is law. In the meantime, however, we need a distraction. We need to feed the beast."

  I turned back to the computer, my fingers hovering over the keys.

  "Travis, does the City Hall use computers yet?"

  "Yeah, a few in the admin wing," he shrugged, confused by the pivot. "Why?"

  "I'm going to give you a tip," I said, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Launch an internal investigation into the 'efficiency' of the Public Works department. Tomorrow. Create a scandal about... let's say, lost paperwork. Overtime fraud."

  Travis blinked. "Is there overtime fraud in Public Works?"

  "There is always overtime fraud in Public Works," I said cynically. "It doesn't matter if it's true. Create a small fire to hide the big construction project. Give Sarah Jenkins a juicy, easy bone to chew on so she stops digging in the dirt."

  Travis stared at me for a long moment. The silence stretched between us.

  "You're scary, you know that?" he whispered. "You talk like Dad, but... colder. Different."

  "I'm just protecting our investment," I said, turning my back to him. "Now go. I have to code."

  Travis hesitated, then turned and left, closing the door with a soft click.

  I was alone again. I looked at the screen. The cursor blinked, waiting for my command.

  Create a scandal. It was a dirty tactic. A tactic from my old life, from the corporate shark tank I had drowned in. A tactic Rudra the CEO would have used without blinking an eye.

  But as I sat there in the scrawny body of a teenager, surrounded by posters of Luke Skywalker and X-Wings, I felt a twinge of something unfamiliar in my chest.

  Loneliness? Guilt?

  I analyzed the feeling.

  No. It was just hunger. The hunger to climb back to the top.

  I typed the command to initialize the compiler.

  PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

  The screen responded instantly.

  HELLO WORLD

  "Hello, 1985," I whispered to the empty room. "Prepare to be optimized."