Dawn

by Rakesh K Kaul

  Tegh replied remorsefully, ‘Got a rescue Life Breath from a girl and I did not even feel it. Now, that is bad luck indeed.’ I slapped him jokingly and we all let out laughing sobs with a tremendous amount of relief.

  We huddled in front of a fire that Hafiz had lit and sipped some warm herbal tea to regain our energies while the gentle sound of the flowing river soothed us. I asked Yaniv, who had scanned the Jogi Badshah flowers and roots with his monitor, as to how it had worked.

  ‘The botanical name is Saussurrea Sacra. It has a combination of sesquiterpenes, triterpenes, flavonoids, lignans and phenolic compounds, as my health monitor says,’ he said, reading in the light of the fire. ‘All technical stuff but what matters is that it works as an anti-tumour, anti-inflammatory, anti-aging and cardiovascular stimulant. Tan’s Ayurvedic tantra text had it right; it was the perfect antidote.’

  I thanked Yuva in a silent prayer. Guided by him, the Niti wisdom, claws of courage and companionship, we had routed the horrific QuGene monster. The first battle honours were ours! But barely.

  Hafiz frantically pointed to the horizon. Ky(Q)om’s death had been recorded and it had resulted in reinforcements arriving in the form of a Swarnamula6 garuda-led army of black and white QuGene crows swarming the airspace. We readied ourselves and helped Tegh up on his feet.

  A snarling and hissing sound seemed to come from all sides. I looked around frantically.

  ‘It’s the Himalayan cats . . . and the lynx brigade,’ screamed Tegh with all his might.

  ‘And snow . . . snow leopards? I thought they were extinct!’ Hafiz whispered.

  We positioned ourselves in a circle, our backs to each other, as the animals started circling us in an alternate, three-layer, concentric formation, their bared teeth shining just as the morning sun came up the horizon.

  I activated my mace, swinging it over my head. It seemed to have an effect and the crows and cats moved back. Emboldened, I expanded my own circle and the cats retreated further. ‘Keep doing it,’ Tan directed me, ‘The Trisulabija stands for the seed of the three primal energies.’ Certainly, the mace seemed to have a force field that was keeping everyone at bay. But the QuGene animal hybrids did not care. Waves after waves came forward in a suicide attack formation. We expanded our circle and began to attack, my mace swinging like never before as its energy beams slashed through the air, eviscerating our enemies. Through the corner of my eyes, I saw Tegh scream and grab a leopard’s mouth with his bare hands, slashing its neck wide open with his tiger claws. I smiled; he was back in form. Yaniv and Hafiz were now back-to-back with Tan between them. They activated their antigravity hover belts and flew in the air, deftly slamming the animals with rocks in all directions. In the centre, Tan recited some chants, his hands flowing gracefully, giving all of us surges of energy.

  The pile of dead suicide fighters grew. I swung the mace faster and harder to the point that I was spinning. ‘Conquer or Die. Conquer or Die. Conquer or Die,’ I repeated my mantra. My limbs were aching and I thought that I would faint any moment from the superhuman exertion. But the mace and the mantra were invincible. In spite of that, I saw that the monsters kept coming, like steel from a factory. We were now low on energy and with this flow, it was evident that we would fall.

  ‘We have to make a Space Jump!’ screamed Hafiz, trying to punch some coordinates in his PDA but was blocked by the dense murder of the crows. I tried to thwart the birds, but I could not get them out of the way. We had only one way now. As a final gambit, I ordered the four Pandavas. ‘Dive straight down into the nearby river. The animals and the birds would not able to follow you.’

  All looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  ‘Trust me. Do what Muladeva did. The river will provide us protection.’

  ‘Follow Dawn,’ Tan commanded and took off, his antigravity belt blazing electric blue. I waited for all the boys to get a head start as I swung my mace at the face of our enemies. After I saw that none were following them, I sprinted like my life depended on it, my activated mace surging me forward. The felines raced snapping at my heels. The plan, however, worked. We took the QuGenes by surprise, since they did not expect us to do a steep dive down, head first, from the plateau. By the time they reacted, we were in the river. The sounds of the howls, hissing and snarls were blocked underwater. Gasping for breath, I frantically paddled with my one free hand and my legs. Bobbing up, I opened my eyes, looking desperately for the boys.

  I saw four heads bobbing up and down, gasping for air. They were safe!

  I led from the front and we swam upstream, defying gravity and propelled by our antigravity belts. I had noticed that downstream led to a very densely populated area. ‘Let’s avoid that,’ I said, motioning to the scene. As we reached a set of closely set boulders, I shouted, ‘We can go no further.’

  When we surfaced, we found ourselves in a round spring, which had aged octagonal walls of ancient stone. The water was bubbling up from the base into the centre of the spring forming an umbrella. The upward bubbles were like a handle and the round pool the umbrella. Resting our aching bodies in the arch, we saw an oval stone covered with ash and a few horizontal streaks of red across it.

  ‘I know where we are,’ I said, tracing my fingers on the ancient stone, recognizing the place. ‘Verinag.’

  It was the very spot that Yuva had brought our Cognition Twins to on our first visit to Kashmir to witness the story of Meghavahana. How unreal and filled with anxiety we were then, I thought as we looked around with renewed awe. It all seemed like an eternity ago. We had grown now, in ways we couldn’t even begin to explain.

  ‘We were at the source, King Nila’s water tank,’ Tan’s calm voice echoed through the stones. ‘Nilakunda, wherein lay the essence of Kashmir.’

  It was also the place where Maha had struck the ground with his trident and left his mark for eternity.

  PRAKARANA II

  THE MIND

  Sarga 10

  Inception

  250 BC

  Patanjali’s Yoga Ashram

  I was floating on my back in the water of the spring, the water cooling my gashed skin and soothing my back that had once again started burning. The sensation would get aggravated whenever I would do yoga. The itching sensation had always been like this, even when I would try to meditate in the cave. But the water here seemed to have a healing effect. The Pandavas were there too, on the ancient rocks, nursing the cuts and wounds we had borne in the fight. All were there except for Tabah. He had sent a message to Hafiz that AIman and Arman knew that they had been tricked and that now he was being extra careful.

  ‘Arman is now huddled up with his QuGene scientists, and they would be launching a search operation for Dawn any time now,’ said Hafiz, visibly tired.

  ‘Hmm . . .’ was all I could say. Turning to Yaniv, hoping to change the topic of discussion, I asked, ‘What are you up to?’ He was huddled over a small firepit, which he had put into place on the bank of the pond.

  ‘Cooking lunch. Quite primitive, but I have water chestnuts, lotus roots and mung beans. I am going to cook the delicious wild morel mushrooms,’ he said smilingly while pulling out a small pan from his bag. ‘And the star of the day is—fish. Au naturel!’

  Everyone laughed and started to get up to help the chef. All except Tegh, who still seemed a little weak from his encounter with the venomous mutant snake and the battle after that.

  ‘I am not that hungry, Doc. It must be something to do with that snake venom, which is making me feel that way.’

  ‘Yes, give it time,’ Tan nodded. ‘You will have some abdominal cramps for a while. So, indulge in the herbal tea.’ Then, with a smile, he added, ‘But don’t worry, the venom does not cross the blood-brain barrier, so your stubborn, bullheaded courage will remain unchanged.’

  As we all laughed, I looked around the odd bunch, feeling grateful that they were here with me in this quest for justice and life.

  Over a hearty lunch of the most delectable morel mushroom
s and fire-roasted fish I had ever eaten, I said, ‘Let us summarize what we know.’ Pointing to the figure half-lying down with a mug of steaming tea, I said, ‘Tegh has defeated the worst that Arman could send our way. Hafiz you, well, how to best put it, are smug.’ He raised his eyebrow. ‘Just kidding! You have proven that you are a master of illusion who can hack the most advanced computer system in the universe. This is great news for us. To me, it seems that the far-sighted Yoginis had built Arman’s world just like the legendary Kashmiri carpenters,’ I smirked.

  ‘Carpenters?’ Hafiz looked horrified.

  ‘It’s an analogy, you tech brick. Continue, Dawn.’ Tan had come to my rescue.

  ‘Thanks, Tan. Hafiz, hear me out. My mother would say that the clever Kashmiri carpenters would always omit a few nails during the construction of a house. This would lead to a demand for repeat visits by their customers to fix the flaws until they got paid fully. So, the moral of the story is: the house owner only had the illusion that he was in control.’

  ‘Thanks, Dawn. Never thought that we AI folks were carpenters, but I suppose we are building frames, homes and cities—all digitally,’ said Hafiz, his voice tinged with mock sarcasm.

  Helping himself to the mushrooms, Tan said, ‘But Hafiz alone cannot overcome AIman and Arman’s system. They are too formidable. AIman’s mind is infinitely more advanced and powerful than all ours put together,’ he pointed to us. ‘Every single day, every minute, every second, AIman collects more data than has been accumulated in the previous day . . . since the dawn of history. Once she triangulates on our location and gets enough data, we are going to be locked in her radar. We will be absorbed by her. It’s evident that Arman has built a doomsday machine in the form of her.’

  I countered, ‘But AIman is still incomplete, Tan, irrespective of how “intelligent” or “big” she is and grows to be. My mother spotted her weakness and she could not contest it.’

  ‘The world has been built on incomplete knowledge from the very beginning. But what is built—while being useful, no doubt—inevitably is vulnerable to a surprise, the all-new better mousetrap, as you may call it. That is what progress is,’ Hafiz said thoughtfully and plated up more mushrooms on a large lotus leaf. ‘I plan to be the surprise for Arman’s Circassian lieutenant. A terminal surprise,’ he ended with a cheeky grin.

  ‘Yes, but for that, my dear brother,’ said Tan, tapping Hafiz’s forehead, ‘we need to know more than our enemy. Only then can we outsmart her. As Dawn’s mother said, to know it all, we must go beyond the mind. We must go to the source, which is the Self.’

  Hafiz got up and looked about the land. ‘Hmm. Right now, we are in Verinag, which Yuva said is derived from Virah, meaning ‘to go back’ and nag, which means ‘spring’. So, that is what we do.’

  ‘Umm . . . We jump back into the spring?’ said Yaniv, looking fearfully at the water that flowed next to us.

  ‘No!’ grunted Tan, rolling his eyes, ‘We spring back even further! AIman is progressing by devouring everything as it moves forward. But we will progress by going back,’ he said, waving his hand behind him. ‘Get it?’

  Yaniv smiled sheepishly and put some more dry branches in the fire. ‘AIman will devour herself. A healthy mind and healthy body go together. The mind is either expanding or it is contracting, right? If it is dominated and then subjugated, then it has no room for growth. And that’s her story as she doesn’t own her own mind. Arman the controller does. It will inevitably go in the direction of self-destruction. What your mother said about the shikha clones is completely predictable.’

  ‘What you said Yaniv is not true just for human beings but also for Nature.’ We looked up. We were all taken by surprise: It was Tegh, of all people. ‘Take this River Vitasta. You can see that over time, they have made her impure, they have bound her up. In her own way, she is striking back, punishing the humans with violent floods as you can see from the mud levels overtopping the banks. Well, I may be headstrong and all brawn, but I can know a thing or two.’

  The boys laughed at Tegh’s clever comment.

  I revelled in the moment that was brimming with the warmth of friendship and hope. For the first time since my mother was taken, I felt better. I touched my back; it seemed to be healing too. It meant that I was slowly recovering from my grief. I still remembered my mother every moment. The pure, sacred and insurmountably sweet person that she was had been consumed by a ghastly horror at the end. Lost in thoughts, I started whistling the koori lullaby. The Pandavas watched me with a surprised smile because they did not know that I could whistle. They did not know a lot about me. For that matter, I did not know a lot about myself. My life had become a source of unending amazement even to me.

  Later, when we dropped off to sleep, Yuva and Kira came to us. I told Yuva that just as our bodies had come to the physical source—the Verinag—it was time we went to the source mentally. Only by removing the limitations of the mind would we be able to see the whole truth. ‘Only then would we have an advantage over AIman,’ I said.

  Yuva nodded his head, ‘What is real is what was in the beginning, what is now and will be at the end and nothing else. AIman was not in the beginning and will not be there in the end.’

  I thought that I could spend my whole lifetime with Yuva. He was so enigmatic and profound. Someday, I would write down all his sayings.

  Yuva continued, ‘But now I have to do something new with your Cognition Twin. Until now, you were able to observe but were invisible and unable to interact with the people in these “trips” we have taken. Now, you will be able to function fully when we time travel. The source you want cannot be only seen. It also has to be experienced.’

  Yaniv marvelled, ‘How will you do that?’

  With a smile, Yuva replied, ‘Through my drishti, my vision. I will just look at you. I will be the instrument that will make you materialize.’

  Tegh could not control himself, ‘This is spooky! Impossible! Look at us. Until now, I thought that the Cognition Twin was just like a hologram; only that it was able to travel through time. But now, you’re saying that there will be two of me? And that both will be real but separated in time and in space?’

  Yuva gave him a broad grin. ‘And you forget that both will be functioning completely and yet connected identically. Because I will look at you.’

  ‘This is too much for my brain. It’s impossible! I have now become two entities like the king in Lila’s story,’ said Tegh, spreading his arms wide.

  Hafiz was the calm one. ‘No, Yuva is not saying anything impossible. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen predicted this nearly two thousand years ago in a 1935 research paper. The quantum particle appears when an instrument measures it. We have known about paired, entangled particles for the longest time. What happens to one particle happens instantly to the paired particle as well. I use the same Quantum Mechanics principles for my unbreakable cryptography. But until Yuva came along, nobody had been able to make it happen to real humans.’

  Tegh sputtered, ‘B-but Hafiz, that’s impossible. Wouldn’t instantaneous mean faster than the speed of light?’

  Hafiz responded in an uncharacteristically humble manner. ‘Yes. Even though Einstein wrote the paper, he too did not believe it for the very same reason you gave. But Quantum Mechanics turned out to be right. Believe it or not, Tegh, it goes on to say that the Universe—you, me and everything—is just entangled quantum particles. Even Space and Time arise out of entangled networks. Tegh, Quantum Mechanics is my world. Trust me here.’

  Tegh turned to Yuva and asked, ‘But who could do all this? Who created it this way?’

  Yuva replied simply, ‘My father, Maha.’

  I stepped in, ‘Yuva, it seems your father has a playful side. To think that he came up with this idea of an entangled Universe that we are all part of—like a bowl of spaghetti and pesto!’

  Yuva laughed, waving his trunk in bemusement, ‘Not entangled spaghetti but more like a blazing fire of light from which an infinite number
of sparks fly, each identical and connected to the source.’ With a slight change in the tone of his voice, he said, ‘But AIman and Arman are plotting, even as we speak. So, my vyomanauts, let us transport. We are now heading towards Patanjali’s Yoga Ashram, situated not too far away.’

  Next moment, we were at the entrance and I spotted a painting of a half-man half-snake. Instinctively, I took a defensive stance. Yuva patted his trunk on my head. ‘It’s not a mutant, you can relax, Niti warrior princess. This is a portrait as visualized by an artist. The human here,’ he said, pointing to the man, ‘signified the material energy, while the coiled snake tail points to the invisible Life Breath force. So, the snake symbol too has a deeply positive meaning.’

  Feeling relieved, we all walked in only to spot a thin, highly energetic man who had a cosmopolitan air about him. The portrait was obviously his. He nodded his head with great joy when he saw Yuva with us following him.

  Yuva bowed, ‘I salute you who resides in his ultimate nature. You, whose very word on reaching the listeners’ ears, liberates them. I have brought you seekers who want to be initiated by you.’

  The man looked at all of us and said, ‘So, now Yoga? What brings you all here?’

  ‘Our world is facing a mortal threat,’ I said, stepping forward. ‘They have killed all the women on the planet. I am the only one left. Our enemies seek to end the Universe.’

  ‘And they have the most formidable artificial intelligence and lethal technology at their disposal, while we are puny humans,’ Tan concluded with a bow.

  The thin man half-bowed to Tan and then turning to me, he said, ‘They must really hate you.’

  ‘Yes. They . . . They have killed my mother. I will never forgive them,’ I said wistfully but no more tears came. It seems that I had been hardened.

  ‘I see. Do you know why Yuva brought you here and what we do here?’