The night air in Navi Mumbai carried the smell of salt and rain-on-metal — a storm gathering but refusing to break. Aryan Sharma stood on the skeletal rooftop of an abandoned import office, looking three kilometers east toward the hulking silhouette of his next move.
The Warden Pillar Tower rose from the edge of the port like a cathedral for liars. In physical sight, it was a forgotten telecom hub, thirty floors of cracked concrete and broken glass, locked behind rusted gates. But in thread-view, the disguise peeled away — revealing a column of living code, black and silver, rotating in slow, deliberate pulses.
This one wasn't just feeding Mumbai. It was broadcasting directly into Delhi, Karachi, and three secondary hubs Aryan hadn't even touched yet. The lattice threads that bound it into the Siege were thick as ship moorings.
Tonight, he wasn't here to destroy it.
He was here to steal it.
A.I.D.A.'s voice hummed in his head, clipped and methodical:
"Four active Warden custodians on-site, plus automated defense intervals every twenty seconds. Core is 93 meters above street level. Breach sequence must be simultaneous at three connection bridges or reset protocol will wipe the core in under two seconds."
Aryan scanned the shimmering cables feeding the pillar. Wiping it would be easy for them — burning evidence was their specialty. Capturing it intact, though… that would mean taking control of its story stream in real time.
And that would turn their network into his megaphone.
The Shard Within pulsed once, not in warning but alignment. It wanted this too.
Movement below.
Two Anchors emerged from the shadows — the Kurla medic and the ex-driver from Dadar. Both wore loops of copper wire around their wrists, grounding rigs meant to keep their mental anchors from being hijacked while inside the pillar stream.
The medic grinned quick and tight. "You know this is impossible, right?"
Aryan smirked faintly. "Good. That means they won't expect us to succeed."
From the other side, the Byculla shopkeeper Anchor approached with the old slowness that belied his precision. His eyes were calm, but Aryan saw the threads of memory swirling tightly around him: he'd been rehearsing the shared-moment they would use to overwrite the Warden broadcast.
They moved.
The first barrier wasn't made of walls—it was made of disbelief.
The Wardens had layered a perceptual lock around the site. Walk toward the tower in the street-level view and you'd find yourself turning away without thinking, your mind telling you the route was blocked by something else. Cars never even came close.
Aryan forced them through by projecting the desire to reach the core — a stream of purpose so tangible it warped the lock into letting them pass. The Anchors followed in his wake, gripping grounding wire until their knuckles went white.
At the base of the tower, the disguise peeled back completely in their sight: the true pillar glowed like an obsidian spinal column veined with light, each pulse sending untruth through the loop.
And wrapped around it, four custodial Wardens, their armor flickering between corporeal and pure dataform.
There was no warning exchange this time.
Aryan's team moved as one—Anchors splitting to the left and right bridgeways, Aryan charging the center with Shard-fire burning in his chest. The first Warden turned to intercept, rod spinning into attack form, but Aryan caught it between two fingers in thread-space and froze the strike mid-motion. He jammed a burst of his own memory into the attacker — the rescue of the girl in the market collapse. The Warden hesitated, faltered, the rod glitching out of sync.
The medic Anchor reached the north bridge point and slammed his palm onto the conduit. Reality shivered — his mind linking into the feed for the first time.
Being inside the feed wasn't like seeing through screens. It was being inside a billion eyes at once, watching every city connected to the Siege. Each person's "memory" of Aryan as a destroyer ticked away in quiet, poisoned repetitions.
In a skyscraper conference in Delhi, executives nodded gravely as they recalled "confirmed reports" of his chaos.
In a Karachi marketplace, vendors "remembered" a fight breaking out moments after shaking his hand.
The Siege wasn't about convincing them — it was about drowning out their capacity to question.
Now Aryan had hands on that firehose.
"Aryan," A.I.D.A. warned, "if you try to push too much of your own thread into this, the system could backfeed—"
He didn't let her finish.
He reached deep into the Shard, into Node One, Node Two, and Node Three, and pulled out not just a single event, but a constellation of moments:
Karan's laughter at the kitchen table.
The silver chain being pressed into his hand.
Anchors laughing together after stabilizing a block.
The boy in Versova clutching his sister as rain poured.
He braided them together and fired.
The Wardens felt it instantly.
Three of them lunged for the bridges, trying to sever connection, but the Anchors held. The shopkeeper roared a memory of protecting his own store during the Monsoon Collapse. The driver poured in the sensation of handing bread to strangers while half-drowned himself. The medic broadcast the sound of 14 heartbeats surviving a merge-break because they were allowed to remember.
The lattice's stream stuttered.
And then… shifted.
For the first time since the Siege began, the public feed changed without Warden approval.
Across five cities, people paused mid-step, mid-word, mid-breath as something unexpected slid into their recall: not Aryan tearing cities apart, but Aryan saving them. Not Anchors sabotaging neighborhoods, but Anchors building them back.
Millions felt it in seconds.
The Wardens didn't retreat.
They detonated.
A failsafe erupted in their armor, collapsing the physical anchors they'd bound to the site. The pillar began to destabilize, loops of glowing code ripping off and lashing around wildly like cut cables, sparking false-memory storms at random.
A.I.D.A. screamed in Aryan's mind:
"If the core overloads, it'll wipe everything—truth and falsehood—within its range. You have 19 seconds!"
Aryan's jaw set. "Then we take it with us."
Without breaking contact, he shifted the entire team into a probability slip, dragging the pillar's interface into a parallel drift where the Wardens' detonation couldn't propagate fully. It meant carrying a live, semi-autonomous falsehood engine inside his own Shard.
It would fight him every second until he tamed it.
But it was theirs now.
They slipped out of drift onto a rain-swept pier three kilometers away. The tower they'd left behind in physical space was nothing but a collapsed ruin.
In Aryan's mind, though, the Hijacked Pillar burned — a captive signal node ready to be rewritten, retuned, repurposed.
The Anchors stood, dripping and wide-eyed. The shopkeeper laughed once, breathless. "Well," he said, "I suppose now the real fun starts."
Aryan didn't answer. His eyes were closed, listening to the feed inside him, feeling the constant, writhing attempts of the captured lattice to overwrite his Protocol.
It didn't matter.
Because now, for the first time, the war wasn't just defense.
It was broadcast.
And when the cities woke tomorrow, they wouldn't be united under Warden lies…
They would be remembering him.
Not as the enemy.
But as the man who made them remember at all.