20 Years Later

 

Just as Saira began to respond to Aditya's question, Vyom's signal indicator buzzed again. Aditya saw the signal map. "This is similar to the one I saw before your arrival." He murmured. Saira quickly grabbed him by his palm. 

   In a blink, Aditya found himself at the foot of a mountain. He looked around with a frown. It is broad daylight, unlike the moment before in Vyom with Saira at about 8 pm. He recognized the surroundings and the mountain. This was the same mountain on which he had built Vyom, but with one difference. Now it had a well-built road that spiraled to its cliff. There was also traffic on the road. He knew he stood ahead of his time because in his time, only Ruka could traverse the rocky terrain and none other, apart from him had any business to venture close to this deserted mountain. "Why am I here, explain" saying, he turned to Saira who too was staring around. Alerted to his voice, Saira responded "they were coming to kill you..." "Give me access to the internet" Aditya interrupted, remembering the instruction he had given to Maya, to relay the live footage on his social media platforms on one condition. Saira lowered her arm, pointing to a flat rock on the ground. A virtual monitor and keyboard appeared. Aditya opened the browser on the virtual monitor and typed in facebook.com in the URL bar. The display flashed Error 505. He knew what he was going to see as he typed in the next URLs. Nevertheless, he typed in all social media platforms. None of them now existed. After a gap, he typed in 'Vyom'. Thousands of search results waterfalled. The top results showed a tourist destination, a museum, built on the same mountain. Vyom's images looked extravagant and much larger than the Vyom he worked in. 

'History of Vyom' he typed now, finding exactly what he was looking for. A paragraph describing the history and a video link. The paragraph read: 

Vyom is a Science Museum and Research Center, built as a replica of the private work station of the author Aditya Teja. It had an assembly of state-of-the-art AI gadgets, that the author passionately collected and carried out experiments. The original Vyom was attacked and brought to rubble on the night of 1 Feb 2021. The attacker was caught live on its AI cameras. The attacker could never be traced. it is believed that the AI sent out waves in frequencies that coincidentally struck 2 aliens crossing earth at that time. The aliens morphed as humans, carried out the attack. Aditya then aborted his project to completely disconnect the accidental alien connection and save the earth. His noble decision is remarked as human history's first sacrifice of scientific pursuit to save humanity. The Research center now promotes and awards ethical Sciences. The prize money on the attacker is still unclaimed and to this date, some investigators go out to find the morphed aliens. Watch the original video by Vyom's AI below to see the attacker.  

Aditya clicked to play the video. He saw a man rewinding the video on Vyom's large screen. The video showed Saira walking in and looking around and stopped. The man twitched and grumbled 'she was here and shot at the screen. Aditya paused the video and asked himself these two questions. Why does the video start where it started and why did the video in Vyom end where it ended? He recalled that he had instructed Maya to go live only when Vyom begins to destroy. He went back in the video. He inspected what he could see of Vyom. One of the cameras was broken. He understood that as soon as the man shot at the camera, Maya had acted on his instruction to go live. Why did the video that the man saw stop at Saira looking around? I had come just a moment later. He realized that when he got off Ruka, he had disconnected his table and closed the relay, so the video played only until a few seconds before he arrived. Picturing what had happened, he continued to play the video. After the man shot at the screen, he fired the entire interior, he walked out and blew up Vyom, all through rays emerging from his hand. No wonder people believed it to be an alien he thought. A deep sadness emerged in him as he pictured Vyom falling into rubble. He gathered himself, turned to Saira, who was also looking at the video, and asked "What do you want from me?"