The Lancer’s Shadow

Chapter 1: The Terahertz Ghost

The Aavarta Institute for Advanced Genomics (AIAG) sat like a silent monolith on the outskirts of North Bengaluru, far from the chaotic honking of the Outer Ring Road.  Inside Lab 09, the air was chilled to a precise 18°C, smelling faintly of ozone and isopropyl alcohol.

Dr Vikram stood before the Ananta-I, a custom-built quantum sequencer that occupied the center of the room like a chrome altar.  On a velvet-lined tray sat his "subject": a tarnished silver medal, the Mysore State Plague Service Medal of 1898, engraved with the name Subadar Mallappa.

"You are staring at that piece of junk again, Vik," a voice boomed.

Vikram turned to see Ananya, the lab’s lead bio-informatician, leaning against the doorway. She was holding two steaming mugs of coffee.  Following her was Dr Satya, the senior director of the Institute, a man whose hair had turned silver while chasing the mysteries of the human genome.

"It is not junk, Ananya," Vikram said, his voice tight with exhaustion.  "It is a hard drive.  It was worn against the chest of a man whose heart rate reached 180 beats per minute during the greatest crisis this city ever faced.  It is saturated with his sweat, his skin cells, and - if my theory holds - his terror."

Satya walked over, peering at the medal through his spectacles. "Vikram, we have discussed this.  Genetic Resonance is a beautiful hypothesis, but it borders on metaphysics.  You are suggesting that DNA does not just store the blueprint for a nose or a blood type, but the sensory data of the moment that DNA was shed."

"Think about it, Sir," Vikram argued, his eyes bright.  "When we experience extreme trauma, our bodies produce a flood of epigenetic markers. I believe that at a Terahertz frequency, we can 'ping' these markers. If I synchronize a descendant's DNA with the ancestral sample, we should not just see a sequence. We should see what they saw."

Ananya handed him a coffee, her expression skeptical. "So, what? I touch my grandmother's old saree and suddenly I am back in 1947 watching the Partition?  That is not science, Vik. That is a VR headset made of ghosts."

"It is about Quantum Superposition, Ananya," Vikram countered.  "The past has not disappeared; it has just lost its 'coherence.' If I can provide the right frequency - the Resonance - I can make two points in time occupy the same space.  My blood is the bridge. My DNA is the cable."

"It is dangerous," Satya warned.  "You are using yourself as the biological substrate for the experiment.  If the Resonance peaks too high, your brain might not be able to distinguish between 'Now' and 'Then.' You could suffer a total cognitive collapse."

"I have spent three years on the math, Satya. The probabilities are in my favor," Vikram said, turning back to the Ananta-I.  "I am initiating the sequence tonight.  I need to know why Mallappa stayed in the plague camps when everyone else fled.  I need to know what he saw in the red mud of Malleswaram."

Ananya sighed, checking the monitors.  "Fine. But if you start speaking 19th-century Kannada and asking where your horse is, I am calling the psych ward."

Vikram did not laugh.  He stepped into the glass-walled isolation chamber and placed his hand on the biometric sensor.  A needle-thin probe drew a drop of his blood, mixing it with the pulverized essence of the ancestral medal in the sequencer's core.

"Resonance Pulse in three... two... one..."

The lab did not explode. Instead, it shivered.

A low-frequency hum, so deep it was felt in the marrow rather than heard, filled the room.  The lights in the AIAG facility flickered between white and a dull, smoky orange.

"Vikram! Your vitals are spiking!" Ananya yelled, her voice sounding strangely distant, as if she were shouting from across a vast canyon.

Vikram looked down.  His left foot, clad in a sleek sneaker, remained firmly on the polished gray linoleum.  But his right foot... his right foot was bare. He felt something cold, wet, and viscous oozing between his toes.  He looked down and gasped.

His right leg was calf-deep in thick, red Bangalore mud.

"Vik... can you hear me?" Satya’s voice was a whisper.

Vikram tried to answer, but his right ear was filled with a different sound—the rhythmic, mournful tolling of a heavy bell and the splashing of rain on a tin roof.

The lab's glass partition began to warp.  In the reflection, Vikram did not see the racks of servers or Ananya’s frantic face.  He saw a rain-drenched forest of eucalyptus trees and standing in the middle of the forest, staring directly at him, was a man on a bay horse.  The man wore a dark blue military coat.  A silver medal glinted on his chest.  His face was Vikram’s face - distorted by a century of hardship and the shadow of death.  "Who goes there?" the man on the horse shouted.  The language was Kannada, but the accent was old, sharp, and military.

In the lab, the digital clock on the wall flickered violently, stuck between 11:45 PM and a date that kept scrolling back: September 1898... August 1898... July 1898.

"Ananya! Satya!" Vikram screamed.

The Lancer leveled his lance, the bamboo tip glowing with the violet light of the quantum field.

"Spirit!" the soldier roared.  "Are you the one they say brings the Black Death?"

Vikram reached out, his hand passing through the glass partition into the cold, rainy air of 1898.  He felt the sting of the wind and the hum of the servers simultaneously.

Suddenly, the lab's primary capacitor groaned.  A surge of violet lightning arced from the Ananta-I to Vikram’s chest.  The world tilted.  The gray linoleum vanished.  Vikram felt himself falling - not onto the lab floor, but into the deep, dark mud of a Bangalore that had been dead for a hundred years.

Ananya screamed as she watched Vikram’s body literally flicker out of existence.  On the tray, the rusted silver medal suddenly began to shine as if it were brand new.

In the mud of 1898 Malleswaram, Subadar Mallappa looked down.  A man in a strange white robe had just collapsed at the feet of his horse.  The man was holding a glowing rectangular device (Vikram's smartphone) that flickered with a single message before the screen died:

"Signal Lost. Reconnecting..."

Chapter 2: The Sentinel of Malleswaram

The transition was violent.  One moment Vikram felt the hum of the Aavarta Institute’s air conditioning; the next, his lungs were filled with the thick, suffocating smell of woodsmoke, eucalyptus, and something sweet and rotting.

He was no longer standing.  He was on his knees in the red mud of Malleswaram. To his left, the shimmering, ghostly outline of the Ananta-I sequencer still flickered like a dying hologram.  He could see Dr Satya’s frantic face through the "veil," but Satya was looking at an empty space.  To them, Vikram had vanished.  To Vikram, they were a fading memory.

"Get up, Demon!"

The voice was like a whip.  Subadar Mallappa sat atop his bay horse, the animal snorting in terror at the "ghost" in the white lab coat.  The Lancer’s bamboo lance was leveled at Vikram’s throat.

"I am not a demon, Subadar!"  Vikram gasped, coughing as the 19th-century rain soaked through his modern clothes.  "Look at my face! Look at my eyes!"  I am your blood, I come from future to help you.”

Mallappa hesitated.  The resemblance was too uncanny to ignore.  In the dim light of a kerosene lantern hanging from a nearby tree, the soldier saw his own reflection in the stranger’s face.

"You wear the garb of the Farangis, but you speak like a man of Mysore,"  Mallappa muttered, though he did not lower the lance.  "Why have you appeared in the middle of a plague-curse?"

Vikram tried to stand, but his left leg - still partially anchored in the 2026 lab - felt weightless, as if it were made of air.  He stumbled.

"The plague..."  Vikram pointed toward the flickering fires in the distance.  "I know how it spreads.  I know how to stop it."

Just then, a sound pierced the veil from the 2026 side.  It was a high-pitched digital whine.

"Vikram! If you can hear us, don't move!"  Ananya’s voice echoed in his left ear, sounding like a radio transmission from a distant planet. "The Resonance is unstable. Your molecular density is fluctuating. If you walk too far from the 'Anchor Point,' the connection will snap. You will be stranded in 1898 forever!"

Vikram looked at the shimmering outline of his lab.  He was tethered by an invisible umbilical cord of DNA.

"Subadar," Vikram said, turning back to his ancestor.  "I cannot stay long. But you must listen. The people in that camp... they are dying because of the rats.  The fleas on the rats carry the Black Death. You must burn the grain sacks, not just the clothes! and wait for help from Bombay Waldemar Haffkine."

Mallappa’s eyes widened. "Rats? We have been told it is the 'Bad Air' or the anger of the Goddess.  You speak of tiny insects? You are indeed mad.  And who is Waldemar Haffkine"

Suddenly, a group of villagers emerged from the shadows of the eucalyptus grove.  They were carrying heavy sticks and torches.  They were the "Escapees" - men who had fled the crowded Petes (town) only to find themselves trapped in the Malleswaram quarantine.

"The Lancer! He blocks the road!" one of the villagers yelled. "And look! He talks to a phantom! They are practicing black magic to keep us here to die!"  The crowd was frenzied by fear. A stone whistled through the air.

In the 2026 Lab, Ananya screamed. "Vikram! Your blood pressure is bottoming out! Something is hitting you!"

In 1898, the stone struck Vikram in the shoulder.  He felt the bone crack. Simultaneously, in the 2026 Lab, the robotic arm of the sequencer jerked violently and snapped, as if hit by an invisible force.  The "Symmetry" was perfect and deadly.

Mallappa saw the "Phantom" bleed. "He is flesh!" the Subadar realized.  "He bleeds red like any man!"

The villagers rushed forward.  Mallappa, driven by a sudden, inexplicable instinct to protect the man who shared his face, spurred his horse forward.  He swung the butt of his lance, driving the rioters back.

"Back! In the name of the Maharaja!" Mallappa roared.

As the horse pivoted, its heavy hoof came down right where Vikram’s modern "Anchor" sat. The collision of 19th-century mass and 21st-century quantum energy created a Static Discharge.

A blinding flash of violet light erupted.

Vikram was thrown backward.  He felt his left half - the modern half - being dragged into a vacuum.

"Vikram! Re-syncing!" Satya’s voice boomed. "We're pulling you back for a heartbeat to stabilize!"

"No! Wait!" Vikram reached out for Mallappa.  He saw something on the Subadar’s neck - a dark, grape-sized swelling.  A bubo.  Mallappa was already infected.

"Subadar! You have the plague!" Vikram screamed as his body began to turn into digital smoke.

Mallappa looked at him, his face pale under the lantern light.  He touched his neck and felt the lump.  He knew what it meant, a death sentence.

"If I die, Spirit... do you die too?" the soldier asked, a strange calm settling over him.

The Resonance snapped.

Vikram opened his eyes.  He was back on the floor of the AIAG Lab in 2026.  Ananya and Satya were hovering over him, their faces pale.

"You were gone for exactly four minutes," Satya whispered.

Vikram did not look at them.  He looked at his own neck in the reflection of a monitor.

A dark, grape-sized swelling was beginning to form on his own throat.

The Genetic Resonance had worked too well.  He had not just seen the past; he had inherited the infection across a century.

"We need to go back," Vikram gasped, his breath coming in ragged heaves.  "If I do not save him in 1898... I am already a dead man in 2026."

Chapter 3: The Sovereign Remedy

The AIAG lab was in a state of controlled panic.  The "Black Death" was no longer a ghost of the past; it was a living, breathing pathogen inside Vikram’s modern body.

"Satya, look at the biopsy!" Ananya shouted, pointing at the screen.  The bacteria under the microscope were ancient, far more aggressive than the strains preserved in modern medical archives.  "It is 1898 Yersinia pestis.  It is replicating at a rate the human immune system has not seen in a century."

Vikram sat in the isolation chair, his fever climbing to 103°F.  The bubo on his neck was a hot, throbbing coal.  "We... we have the cure," he rasped, clutching a small vial of Gentamicin - a modern antibiotic that would tear through the 19th-century bacteria like a hot knife through butter.

"If you take that medicine here, Vikram, you save yourself,"  Satya said, his voice grave. "But the Subadar dies in 1898. And if he dies before having children, you vanish. Your DNA in our sequencer will simply... cease to exist."

"Then I have to give it to him," Vikram said, staggering toward the sequencer.  "I have to smuggle the cure across the resonance."

"But Vikram," Ananya intercepted, her hands flying across the keyboard.  "Our simulations are crashing.  If you cure the 1898 plague with 2026 technology, you create a Causality Loop.  If the plague ends in a week instead of years, the British administration never builds Malleswaram.  The Maharaja never funds the Research Annex.  This lab disappears. You will be trapped in 1898 with no way back."

"I would rather be a living man in 1898 than a dead memory in 2026," Vikram grunted.

He grabbed a specialized bio-transference canister.  Inside, he placed the small quantity of life saving antibiotics, sanitizers, a high-intensity LED flashlight, and a brief, simplified note translated into 19th-century Kannada  on "The flea-rat connection" and wait for help from Waldemar Haffkine from Bombay in the form of vaccines.

"Satya, boost the Terahertz pulse to 5.0," Vikram commanded.  "I need full density. I need to be able to hand this to him."

"The power draw will blow the city's transformers!" Ananya warned.

"Do it!"

As the pulse hit, the lab lights did not just flicker - they turned into a blinding violet sun. The walls of the AIAG facility began to tear like wet paper.

Vikram felt a sensation of being stretched.  His left arm was still being held by Ananya in the lab, but his right arm - holding the canister - was suddenly feeling the cold, biting rain of Malleswaram.

He saw Mallappa.  The Subadar was slumped against a eucalyptus tree, his horse standing guard, its head low.  The soldier’s face was pale, his breathing labored.  He was hours away from death.

"Mallappa!" Vikram’s voice was a roar that vibrated through both centuries.

The Lancer opened his eyes.  He saw the "Spirit" again, but this time, the Spirit was glowing with a terrifying violet aura.

"The... the remedy?" Mallappa whispered, his hand trembling as he reached out.

Vikram thrust his hand through the shimmering veil.  The resistance was immense, like pushing through thick, electrified gelatin. The air around his arm began to glow with Cherenkov radiation.

"Take it!" Vikram screamed.

At that exact moment, in the 2026 lab, the computer monitors began to change. The AIAG logo was flickering, turning into something else. The history of the world was rewriting itself in real-time.

"Vikram! Stop!" Satya yelled. "The timeline is shifting! The Institute... It is becoming a textile mill in the new reality!  We are losing the Anchor!"

Vikram ignored him.  His fingers brushed against the Subadar’s cold, calloused hand. The exchange happened.  The modern plastic canister was now in the mud of 1898.

"Drink the liquid in the glass!"  Vikram commanded. "Kill the rats! Save the city!"

Mallappa gripped the canister.  He looked at Vikram with a final, lucid gaze. "Whatever you are... son of my sons... Mysore will not forget."

A massive surge of energy threw Vikram backward.

Chapter 4: The Resonance of Home

Vikram hit the floor of the lab, but it was not the gray linoleum of the AIAG Institute.

He looked up.  The high-tech servers were gone.  The Ananta-I sequencer was gone.

He was lying on the wooden floor of a dusty warehouse.  Through the window, he could see the skyline of Bangalore.  There were no flyovers or hyper-modern towers.  Instead, the city looked like a sprawling, green garden city, frozen in a mid-20th-century aesthetic.

He looked at his clothes.  He was not wearing a lab coat anymore.  He was wearing the khaki uniform of a Public Health Officer.

He touched his neck.  The bubo was gone. The plague had been cured in the past, and thus, he had never been infected in the present.  In this branch of history, Bangalore was a "Garden City" of science, a sprawling, green utopia where the 1898 plague was remembered as a brief, divine turning point rather than a massacre.

He walked out into the streets of Malleswaram.  The geography was hauntingly familiar, but the air was different.  It tasted of rain and eucalyptus, free from the heavy smog of his original 2026.  He arrived at the center of the 15th Cross, where a grand marble statue stood.

It was Subadar Mallappa.  The statue did not hold a sword; it held a simple, clear bottle (the sanitizer).  Vikram sat at the base of the statue, leaning his head against the cold marble.  He closed his eyes, tuned out the quiet hum of the garden city, and focused on the deep, rhythmic hum of his own blood.  He did not need a Terahertz pulse anymore.  The trauma and the triumph of the jump had turned his brain into a permanent receiver.

“Grandfather?” Vikram whispered into his own mind.  A static-heavy sound, like a radio tuned to a dead frequency, crackled in his inner ear.  Then, a voice - sharp, archaic, and proud - vibrated through his jawbone.  “The Golden Ghost... is that you?”  It was Mallappa’s voice, recorded in the very DNA they shared.  It was not a ghost standing in front of him; it was a Genetic Echo.

“I saved you,” Vikram thought, tears streaming down his face. “But I lost everything else. My world is gone. My parents never met here. I am a ghost in a beautiful world.”  The voice in his head grew warm, like the sun on a Lancer’s back. “Do not weep for a shadow, my son. You gave this city a century of life. You gave me the chance to see my children grow. You are not a ghost; you are the bridge. If you can hear me, it means the bridge still stands. Now, cross it.”

"How?" Vikram gasped aloud.

“Focus not on the world you see, but the world that remembers you. Resonance is not just science, Vikram. It is belonging.”

At that moment, back in the Old Reality (AIAG Lab), the scene was chaotic.  Ananya was weeping over the smoking remains of the sequencer.  Dr Satya was staring at the empty isolation chamber, his face a mask of defeat.

"He has gone, Satya," Ananya sobbed.  "The causality loop closed.  He saved the ancestor, so he erased the reason for this lab to exist.  He is... he is deleted."  Satya did not look away.  He noticed something.  The biometric scanner was still flickering.  It was not a steady green, but a frantic, rhythmic pulse - just like a heartbeat.  "He is not deleted, Ananya," Satya whispered, his voice trembling with a sudden, wild hope.  "He is in a superposition.  He is trying to 'ping' us back."

Satya grabbed the manual override.  "Ananya, give me everything!  Every watt of power in the North Grid!  We are not looking for a sequence anymore.  We are looking for a feeling.  Broadcast the 'Home' signal!"

Ananya did not ask questions.  She began typing.  "What signal, Sir?"

"The sounds of the city!  The morning traffic on the Ring Road, the smell of filter coffee, the sound of the 2026 news!  Remind his DNA what 'Now' feels like!"

In the Garden City, Vikram felt a sudden, jarring sensation. The quiet, peaceful air of the utopia was being pierced by a familiar, ugly sound - the distant honking of a Bangalore traffic jam.  He smelled the burnt aroma of a local cafe.  The marble statue of Mallappa began to flicker.  “Go,” the Subadar’s voice echoed one last time.  “Your duty there is not yet done.”  Vikram stood up, his body turning into a prism of violet light.  He reached out into the empty air, grabbing onto the "sound" of Ananya’s voice.  With a roar that shook both centuries, the Warehouse in the Garden City imploded into a vacuum of white light.

Chapter 5:  The Reconciliation

Vikram hit the floor of the AIAG lab with a bone-jarring thud.  The air was 18°C.  The smell was ozone and isopropyl alcohol.  The monitors were screaming "SYSTEM FAILURE."

"Vikram!" Ananya threw herself at him, her tears soaking his khaki uniform - the uniform of the other reality that was already beginning to fade back into a white lab coat.

Dr Satya stood over them, his hands shaking as he helped Vikram up.  "You are back.  By all laws of physics, you should not be here."

Vikram looked at them, his eyes wide and ancient.  He looked at his hand.  He was still holding the rusted silver medal of 1898; but as they watched, the rust began to flake off, revealing a shiny, new surface beneath it.

"I saved him," Vikram whispered, his voice raspy.

"We know," Satya said, pointing to the wall.

The portrait of the Mysore Lancers, which had always hung in the lab, had changed.  Subadar Mallappa was still there, but he was no longer looking sternly at the camera.  He was smiling, and in the background, almost invisible in the shadows of the 1898 camp, was the faint, blurry outline of a man in a white lab coat.

"You changed the past, Vikram," Satya said softly.  "But the universe is kinder than we thought.  It allowed the change to happen while keeping our 'Now' intact.  It is a Harmonized Timeline."

Vikram sat on the floor, leaning against the cold metal of the Ananta-I.  He was home.  The traffic was loud, the lab was messy, and the future was uncertain, but he could still hear the faint clip-clop of a horse in the back of his mind.

He looked at Ananya and Satya and smiled.

"Next time," Vikram said, "let us just use a drone."

They laughed, a warm, human sound that filled the room, proving that while science can map the stars and the blood, it is the reconciliation of the soul that truly brings us home.

Appendix:

The Mysore Lancers:  The personal cavalry of the Maharaja of Mysore, the Lancers were one of the most elite military units in India.  While they are world-famous for their charge at Haifa (1918), in 1898, they were the "First Responders" of the city.  They enforced quarantines, protected the plague camps, and maintained order.

 The Great Plague of 1898:  The "Black Death" arrived in Bangalore via a railway porter from Hubli.  It was a catastrophe that changed the city forever.  To stop the spread, the British and the Mysore Administration burned infested "Petes" (markets) and created new, planned suburbs with wide streets and ventilation.  This is how Malleswaram and Basavanagudi were born.