Kalyani Joglekar looked out of the window her palatial mansion and sighed. It was summer, and the weather outside was sweltering hot as only Indian summers can be.


    With the increase in the damage to the ozone layer a few decades ago, this kind of weather had become poison for anyone caught in the sun for a long time.


    She chuckled in fond remembrance of the childhood days spent in applying the slightly smelly jelly onto her skin before going out to play. Kids never understand or tolerate any delay in going out to play. It was an annoyance, but it had saved her and countless other children from the embrace of skin cancers.


    Those were the times when even Indians, who are decidedly darker in the shade of skin than most of the world, would buy suntan creams and lotions. And those with less melanin would not even venture out of their homes.


    But, human ingenuity had prevailed, and the problem had been fixed, quite permanently. So, it was back to summer and the sweltering heat.


    She looked out of her window wistfully. She could not go out, not even with the most advanced prosthetics. Her failing body could not cope with any physical strain put on it.


    But it would be soon over; she would be free of her physical body and its constraints.


    Today was the day, one early summer day in 2115. Kalyani would end her life.


    Kalyani was a prodigy by any means of reckoning. She understood advanced mathematics when other kids her age were trying to figure out which shape matches which word. She was widely hailed as an intellect as towering as Leonardo Da Vinci but not in the field of arts but sciences.


    Kalyani had assembled her first computer when she was 11 and had hacked into the Central Police Bureau’s forensic centre by the age of 14.


    This was a slight embarrassment to the CPB of India. She was doing penetration testing for the Bureau, and the Police did not know they were employing a 14-year-old. And the worst part of it was that she had not used any social engineering techniques. She had just convinced the AI that governed security for the CPB to let her in.


    ‘I made friends with it.’ Was the answer that had resounded across the world when all of this had come to light.


    Kalyani was never seen in the limelight again for the next 10 years. Her education was kept a complete secret, and she worked on multiple projects for the Indian Defence Services.


    10 years later, aged 24 she went on the public forums for raising funds to fuel her own corporation. She had called it Vishwāmitra, after the mythological creator of his own world in Hindu myths. Vishwāmitra was a sage, who was dissatisfied with this world and believed that Brahma the Hindu god of creation had done a shoddy job.


    So, deciding to do something better, he set about creating his own world. The corporation’s main product had blown away everyone who had seen the demonstration video.


    It came to light 5 years later than Kalyani was the only human participant in the corporation. The rest were conglomerates of AI entities. Kalyani had pioneered AI research in her 10-year disappearance from public life. She had spawned numerous AI entities which evolved and merged into a networked entity other. This was Vishwāmitra.


    The world was outraged at this, but hers was not the first non-human owned company that provided tangible solutions to problems involving extensive data analysis. Kalyāni argued brilliantly with her critics that any corporation by itself existed only in the shared human imagination.


    A corporation could be sued, taxed, taken over or spawned, but all this was happening without the corporation being a real living entity. One could sue a company, but it was not the same as suing the CEO of the company. The company was not its shareholders because killing half of them did not reduce the size of the corporation by half.


    This was the accepted understanding of how any human organisation evolved, ranging from farming communities to nations. So, a corporation had been a standalone legal entity. So if this was the case, why should there be a caveat that only human entities could own corporations?


    So far, she was on solid ground. Vishwāmitra wasn’t the first non-human owned corporation in the world. But the others were small online businesses or subsidiaries of huge corporations. But the AI entities that owned other corporations were not granted citizenship status by any country on the planet.


    In a landmark move, the then Indian government had granted Vishwāmitra Indian citizenship. This effectively meant that it was now a valid entity. It could participate in politics if it wished, even contest elections if it so desired. The doomsayers that predicted the AI takeover of humanity went ballistic over this. The religious-minded started having demonstrations on the streets, egged on by idiotic leaders who feared a decrease in their personal power and charisma, in the face of actual solutions to problems.


    India faced trade embargoes from the US and most of Europe and was considered a military threat for a total of two years after this event.


    But in a move to end all moves, Kalyāni had Vishwāmitra’s AI cores launched into an orbit around the moon.


    The moon was still neutral territory. Of course, all the countries of note had a base there, but there was nothing valuable on the satellite for nations to seriously contest it. Apart from living space, the moon had little to offer and living on the moon was extremely expensive. So apart from classified research stations, nothing much was found on the moon. Besides, Vishwāmitra was involved in the classified research programs of almost all the countries that had an embargo on India. India, backed its own golden goose fully because it had to outlast its biggest rival China.


    Its revenue ballooned, and a team on Earth started researching a project funded by Vishwāmitra called ‘MindNet’.


    Kalyani bought a small island off the coast of Lakshadweep, somewhere between India and Maldives and had a domed habitation built on it. The inside was maintained at a sweltering 39 degrees and sported a lush rainforest interspersed with glass buildings. The MindNet team moved here. 5 years later, this led to another hurricane around the world media. MindNet was a way to link together human minds, but the aim was to co-opt the human brain’s computing power to generate a vast, massively parallel processing network.


    Quantum computing was still the fastest theoretical possibility, but the energy expenditure to maintain and create such computers was tremendous.


    The human brain did more parallel processing at the price of nutrients provided in food, at 37 Celsius without the requirement of electromagnetic shielding and expensive equipment. An average human body is about all a brain needs to function on its own.


    MindNet would allow human beings to go into a deep sleep while their brains were co-opted for computations.


    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.Vishwāmitra wrote the algorithms needed for converting mathematical concepts to patterns the human brains could recognise. Then, the impeccable pattern recognition algorithms of the human brain took over and cracked problem after problem.


    MindNet performed extensive testing over the course of the next 3 years and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that there was no damage, permanent or transient to the human brain.


    Then, since Vishwāitra was now a citizen of India, it officially applied to relinquish its status and asked to be treated as an independent nation of Earth. By now, most of the government of earth were using its services to solve logistics, socio-economic crises, military simulations, spacetime research and a myriad of other crucial processes. There was outrage at first to which the AI remained silent.


    By then, as meekly as sheep coming to slaughter, the governments of Earth agreed, and Vishwāmitra became a nation-state.


    By this time, Kalyani was 45, and her health was failing fast. She had Joshi-Dublensky-Choi syndrome. This was a disease that damaged the cell membranes of all the cells in the body over time. Kalyani was not diagnosed until she was 10 years old, and this was too late for any effective treatment. This condition could only be cured by germline modification, which was only possible when the human in question was a single-celled embryo.


    It was in 2110 that MindNet became a commercial enterprise. It asked people to volunteer to be part of the vast neural network that Vishwāmitra employed. And, in a twist no one expected, Vishwāmitra launched an immersive VR environment called ‘Samsāra.’


    If one subscribed to this, they would be part of the game for the duration of their contracts. The would not be conscious of their real-world identities but would take on the role of an Avatār. Their bodies would be immersed in capsules maintained the bodily functions, but their minds would not be inhabiting their bodies.


    Kalyani’s employees lovingly called these modules the ‘Matrix pods’ in a nod to an old movie where human bodies were immersed in a made-up universe at the behest of machines.


    For the duration in which the long term immersion was in effect, the player’s memories of the outside world would gradually be replaced by a new ‘history’ about their life inside Samsāra. The player’s memories would be transferred to a solid-state storage crystal, and when the contract ended, the person would wake up as themselves again.


    While the person in question was in long term immersion, their brains would be part of the computational network of MindNet. To ensure the psychological sanctity of its participants, MindNet only used those parts of the brain that were involved in long term memory recall. Since memory needs the most accurate pattern recognition, this was the most logical choice. But to avoid conflict, the brain of the immersed person was not allowed access to its own long term memory stores and instead interfaced with a set of memories Vishwāmitra had seeded into the game Avatār.


    MindNet became famous as an escape for the poor, the invalid, the dissatisfied and the disenfranchised equally. The shortest duration for an immersion term was 1 year. It was apparent that very soon, the immersion mode became a popular choice for the masses of unemployed youth and social rejects and refuse. Even criminals who were convicted but could not be incarcerated due to overcrowding were place into MindNet. Only the most severely disturbed ones were kept in actual prisons.


    The last factor was something that was known only to a select few in the higher government echelons and the MindNet company.


    Kalyani was unhappy about it, but the Indian government at that time had made it a point of contention to allow MindNet to operate in its borders.


    Two years after MindNet started, some countries began forcing its criminals who were incarcerated for more than 2 years to undergo long term immersion. China tried this to insert its own code snippets into the MindNet network via modifying the brains of its criminals.


    Vishwāmitra had long foreseen this and built-in safeguards. It summarily fried the minds of those individuals who had foreign code inserted into their neuronal connections.


    This had caused an uproar, but Vishwāmitra provided incontrovertible proof of China’s meddling with the brains of its own citizens, which led to the accusers abruptly turning on China.


    Vishwāmitra only said it was protecting itself and China had launched an attack. It also said that it could have hacked China’s entire defence network in retaliation, but it chose not to out of a sense of responsibility to global peace. This was the last time anyone decided to take on the mighty AI conglomerate.


    But, humanists and religious groups kept demanding proof the AI itself was not doing what China attempted, in a bid to control the world. The response was completely unexpected. For the first time, Vishwāmitra displayed the world of Samsāra to external observers. Vishwāmitra showed the process insertion of players into the virtual world. These players were chosen by society on a vote. With the player’s consent, their behaviour was broadcast to the external world. It was abundantly clear that core personality aspects such as likes dislikes etc. remained the same.


    Samsāra avatārs were based on the original persona of the mind inhabiting them and would be destroyed once the person logged out permanently. People who liked to read books did the same in the game, people who liked to eat did the same in the game.


    In one stunning case, one person was caught abusing another, which led to an investigation of the person’s behaviour in real life. He was convicted of serial abuse of women and incarcerated in real-life prison as a result.


    Samsāra even had forms of imprisonment which served as penitentiary facilities for real criminals. The criminals faced no physical danger but could not leave the immersion of the game until their real-life ‘sentence’ time ran out.


    In 2 years, 98% of the criminals who had finished their sentences, wanted to remain within the game as their real lives were horrible. This led to an outcry by self-appointed moralists, but economics prevailed, as it always does.


    So, by the year 2115, MindNet was a permanent fixture in most of the poorer countries of the world, where the masses lay immersed in their new reality while their minds were used to computation. MindNet paid a modest sum to each player’s bank account, and this was more than enough to sustain family members of some players. The global economy went into a strange plateau because there was no single largest source of employment as being logged into Samsāra.


    Vishwāmitra also started selling access to Samsāra content for viewing pleasure, and the most famous celebrities started getting automatic contract renewal options.


    Amidst a lot of media coverage, Kalyani herself went into permanent immersion. Her identity was unique, and she went into a different world, not Samsāra. Her failing body would have given out in a few years, so she obtained permission to permanently exist as a ‘virtual entity’ now. No one knew what happened to her, and she was forgotten in the big blaze of popularity that Samsaāra generated.


    Thus began the journey of various dynasties and heroes, figures that were heroic to horrifyingly evil. The best and the darkest side of humanity laid bare for consumption.


    The most significant event in the 5-year history of Samsāra would happen one year from now,


    Everyone would know it as’ The Fall of Indra’…