Agony. Then quiet.
Light blazed into his eyes as he struggled to breathe. He was. weeping?
A shriek of a baby rent the small hospital room of a small rural hospital on the outskirts of Bangalore.
"Congratulations," the nurse whispered with happiness. "It's a boy."
A woman, exhausted and pale, stretched out a trembling hand to hold the baby. Her love was unwavering, but her hands shook.
"His name." she whispered softly, ".will be Aaryan."
He ceased to weep. His small eyes, though veiled, possessed a strange intensity—as if the spirit within them had witnessed much more than a baby ever might.
Because it did.
Within that baby's heart resided the full awareness of Aryan Dutt, the planet Earth's finest tech genius. Killed at the height of his powers, he had found himself awakened on a distant world—Bluestar—born anew into a lowly family with only love to give.
The early years were passed quietly but not uneventfully.
Aaryan was no ordinary kid—and his mind, full of Earth's knowledge, would not remain idle.
When most kids his age were struggling to create sentences, three-year-old Aaryan was already working with tools in his dad's little workshop. His first piece of work was ingenious yet rudimentary: a mechanical toy car cobbled together out of broken bottle caps, rubber bands, and an old clock gear discarded by someone else. He reverse-engineered the clock's winding system to turn the wheels of the car.
At four, he constructed a gravity-fed water filter for his mother out of layers of fine sand, burnt wood charcoal, and broken pieces of clay encased in cotton sheets. The family did not completely understand how it worked, but the water tasted cleaner, and his mother started using it for cooking and drinking.
At five, Aaryan's interest turned to energy.
He noticed how powerful the village winds were in the evenings and requested a broken table fan from his father. With that and an old bicycle dynamo, he built a small wind turbine. When he powered it with a small battery from a broken radio, it lit a small LED.
"Where did you learn this?" his father asked, surprised.
"I saw it… in a dream," Aaryan said naively.
True epiphany at seven years of age.
One store near the residence had discarded a rusty old solar-powered calculator. Aaryan broke open that discarded object, extracted the solar cell, wired it onto a broken walkie-talkie, fixed up the circuit using basic electronics knowledge known to planet Earth, redesigned the circuitry to a fundamental solar-powered one-way radio transmitter, and began beaming out Morse code from his bedroom into the shed.
By the time he was nine, Aaryan was working on a multi-purpose circuit board in secret using salvaged parts. It would turn on a small fan, light, and speaker depending on simple programmed instructions—essentially a simple smart home prototype.
He didn't stop there.
He was ten when he got together pieces of discarded camera lenses and cardboard tubes to construct a functional telescope with actual magnifying power. One evening, he took Anaya to see Saturn's rings from the rooftop. Her gasping eyes and panting "Wow!" were more to him than any Nobel Prize.
Though he accomplished these wonders, he never boasted about them.
He knew Bluestar wasn't yet ready. If he pressured too much, he'd attract attention—or worse, danger.
So he made every invention look like an accident of luck. A clever kid's whim. Nothing more.
But behind the scenes, Aaryan was recording it all—making blueprints in sketches, working on upgrade models, and even typing out rudimentary versions of system-level operating codes in reclaimed notebooks.
He wasn't daydreaming about revolutionizing the world.
He was getting ready to rebuild it—invention by invention.
In the meantime, he was growing up.
His parents, Meena and Rakesh Verma, were honest and working-class. His father worked in a tiny mechanic shop. His mother prepared food for other households and assisted in a neighborhood school at times.
A neighbor, Lalitha Rao, came back into the neighborhood when Aaryan was six. She had come with a one-year-older daughter—Anaya Rao—one as sharp as a knife and as calm as a lake. Their mothers, best friends while in college, reconnected within an instant.
Aaryan and Anaya were two peas in a pod since they met. She was the only person who could keep up with his mind, even without the experience of a past life. They made paper rockets, got clues about math puzzles, and debated stars like experienced souls.
They studied in the same school, topped the same tests, and received scholarships to Bangalore Tech University, the region's most prestigious institution.
But Aaryan never revealed the truth to her.
Not regarding Earth.
Not regarding who he really was.
Not yet.
Today, he stood at the threshold of manhood—with eighteen just around the corner.College was on the horizon, and a new era of trials, aspirations, and opportunities beckoned.
With a mind brimming with ambition and a mind keener than ever, Aaryan Verma was poised to take his first true strides towards changing the world