Neel Madhav Rao Chapter 1 – The Echo of Forgotten Names The city of New Delhi no longer breathed in silence. It hummed and pulsed like a living circuit board, streets strung with cables of light, towers crowned with translucent domes where advertisements and memory-feeds shimmered day and night. From Connaught Place to Dwarka, holographic billboards rippled against the heat-hazed sky, whispering promises to the millions who walked the streets below: Upload today. Secure tomorrow. Become more than flesh. Dr. Elara Vaughn had stopped listening to those voices long ago. She had seen too many patients who came clutching their…
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Rhea Narayan 1 The rain hadn’t stopped in three days. London’s sky, swollen and sullen, pressed down on the city like a secret too heavy to bear. In a dimly lit lab tucked into the corner of King’s College, Dr. Ayesha Kapoor sat hunched over her laptop, the soft hum of servers the only sound interrupting the storm’s murmur. Her fingers hovered over a USB drive, its scratched casing labeled in smudged black ink: Lazarus. She hadn’t touched it in five years—not since Geneva. Not since she walked away from everything. The screen blinked awake, casting a bluish pallor across…