The first transmission went out at 5:01 a.m.
Aryan Sharma stood alone in the safehouse control room, stripped to a vest, eyes locked on a single holographic feed projected from the Hijacked Pillar. Outside, the last traces of a storm still glittered on the streets, rainwater sliding in silver threads toward drains. But inside his mind, he stood at the center of something much larger. The captured lattice core hummed inside the Shard, rewired from the Warden's script-broadcast engine into an unfiltered truth vector.
This was the moment the playing field began to tilt.
The Pillar wasn't just a transmitter anymore. Aryan had fused it directly with the Remembrance Protocol. Now, every selected moment, every preserved truth his Anchors had stabilized across the city, could be streamed on the same channels the Wardens had used to poison his name. And the beauty of it—it would arrive not as video or story, but as lived experience. A recipient wouldn't just watch it; they'd feel as if they'd been there.
The first wave hit at dawn.
Across Mumbai's mesh of offices and markets, trains and homes, people blinked mid-conversation as a sudden warmth bloomed through their thoughts. They were seeing small, real episodes—the child pulling the elder from floodwaters, the old shopkeeper defending his store, anchors holding someone steady through a merge-break. These weren't the curated, clean moments the Wardens would allow. Some were messy. Some hurt. But they were real.
The effect was immediate. By 5:20 a.m., Aryan's private network chatter was full of startled confirmations.
"Receiving in Nagpada. My aunt's crying. She says she 'remembers' a boy who saved her nephew in the stampede last year, but that never happened—until now."
"Delhi cell here. My neighbor just thanked me for a rescue I never told her about."
Some Anchors were overwhelmed, but Aryan kept the streams short—enough weight to matter, not enough to break anyone's mental balance.
He'd made it through the first pulse.
But the Wardens, of course, noticed.
The Siege lattice shuddered within the hour.
By mid-morning, they had turned their attention toward the stolen pillar, and the war was no longer about playing defense—it had become a fight for control over the most powerful broadcast tool in the loop.
The first counterstrike hit from Dhaka. Anchors there reported blackout sequences—massive empty slots in public recall suddenly appearing like skipped pages in a diary. It was surgical. The Wardens weren't just stopping Aryan's content from taking root—they were erasing the context from people's minds before it even arrived.
Aryan mounted his counter in seconds. Pulling up the pillar's routing map, he redirected the stream in Dhaka through an unmonitored recreational loop disguised as an exercise-tracking network. As far as the Warden's own systems knew, the content had been translated into pedestrian route updates and calorie counts. In practice, every runner on that channel suddenly received the memory of an Anchor holding the line in the Mahim collapse. The Wardens adapted in twelve minutes. Aryan was already on to the next city by then.
The fight was everywhere at once.
In Karachi, a Warden override spliced his broadcast mid-stream, replacing an anchor's rescued infant with a scene of Aryan walking away. The falsity was well-crafted, calibrated for emotional appeal. He didn't fight to remove it directly. Instead, Aryan injected a follow-up that braided the truth with the lie, forcing the audience to see both and feel how one came without weight, how the other burned. It startled some of them. Confused others. But more than a few recognized the difference.
In Bangalore, his allies fought a holding action—simply keeping their areas stable while Aryan directed the pillar into risk zones. The Shard pulsed constantly, feeding him thread data like a battlefield map.
By noon, the network's range had tripled.
By two, the Wardens stopped trying to push him back.
They decided to take him head-on.
They came not as soldiers or shadows this time, but as voices in the feed.
It began mid-transmission in Chennai. Aryan was broadcasting a merge rescue sequence when the memory froze mid-frame and faded into blank light. Then a voice, old and steady, slipped into the minds of every connected listener.
"This man rewires truth. His intent may comfort you today, but destabilize you tomorrow. The Wardens protect your continuity. Without us, your mind will fracture under too much history."
Unlike their usual blunt propaganda, this was measured, persuasive. The voice did not shout. It invited.
Aryan cut back in, not by arguing, but by showing. He streamed one of his own most vulnerable memories—the days after his mother's illness, the rain hammering against their apartment's tin awning while he sat in the dark with nothing but the sound of her breathing. No speeches. No interpretation.
When the moment faded, he let the silence speak.
"Continuity without truth is an empty loop," he said quietly into the feed. "If your safety is built on lies, it's not safety. It's a cage."
The Warden voice did not return immediately.
By evening, Aryan's face had become a contested symbol across half the connected cities. In markets and on buses, in office canteens and public parks, people debated him openly. Was he dangerous? Was he a savior? Was he a manipulator or a liberator?
This was the war now—not in secret nodes or hidden rescues, but in the shared spaces of daily life, where every mind was a potential broadcast node.
Aryan sat in the safehouse as the sun sank, listening to live cross-city chatter. Anchors were adapting—holding quick, impromptu truth gatherings whenever the feed spiked in their area. Some were simply telling their own stories aloud, letting bystanders feel for themselves the weight behind the words.
It was working.
Stabilization rates were higher in zones where personal voice reinforced the broadcast.
The Wardens answered by upping the intensity.
At exactly 8:00 p.m., the Siege lattice folded in on the stolen pillar's signal, attempting to cut it completely. To anyone else, it would have looked like a blackout.
To Aryan, immersed in the Shard, it was a direct assault—a chain of false threads lashing at the pillar's core like whips, trying to overwhelm its processing lanes.
Inside his mind, the pillar fought back by instinct. But Aryan didn't rely on instinct. He reached into the feed and attached something the Wardens had no defense for.
Names.
Not invented ones. Not anonymous.
Names of people they had erased.
Karan Sharma.
Sirea.
The girl with the silver chain.
Dozens more, pulled from fragment caches in Nodes One and Two.
He didn't say what had happened to them. He didn't need to.
The names ran through the broadcast like a litany.
And in the mesh, Aryan felt something unexpected.
Some of the Warden threads paused.
Not all. Not enough to break the Siege by themselves.
But even among the architects of control, there were still those who remembered what it was to doubt.
By midnight, the pillar was holding steady again. Half its transmission lanes were routed through cover channels. The other half ran openly, daring the Wardens to try to stop them without proving his point that they feared truth more than collapse.
Aryan slumped back in his chair, drained, the soft murmur of the Shard's pulse like a heartbeat in his ears. The Anchors were exhausted, lines of tension etched deep into their faces when they checked in over secure links. But there was something else in those faces too.
Resolve.
They knew the war had changed shape. The Wardens no longer had uncontested control of the story. Every day that Aryan held the pillar was another day people could feel something real enough to question the falsehoods.
A.I.D.A. spoke finally, voice soft in the stillness.
"You realize," she said, "that this isn't just about holding the pillar anymore. Every truth you push through it, you wear. The public won't separate you from the memories you give them."
"Good," Aryan answered without opening his eyes. "Then they'll remember me as long as they remember the truth."
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
In the distance, the city breathed—restless, confused, alive.
The Broadcast War had begun in earnest.
And Aryan had no intention of giving the Wardens their feed back.