Arjun Malhotra The night the universe confessed its scaffolding, drizzle worried the windows of Aanya’s lab and every monitor hummed like a beehive of distant stars. She had asked the building to forget the hour; the automated lights obeyed, settling into an amber dusk. On the wall, the microwave background unfurled as a field of noise, speckled and stubborn, a fossil of the first light—except she could not ignore the cadence hiding in it anymore. Noise refused rhythm; this wasn’t noise. It was the third week of revisiting old sky maps compiled by instruments long retired. Aanya’s code, stitched from…
