My clock flickered 8:00 AM in red LED glare.
Monday.
“Oops… late again,” I muttered, stumbling out of bed, hair a mess, mind
half-asleep yet racing ahead.
“Hey there — name’s CH, third-year undergrad in Artificial Intelligence and
Machine Learning.
As usual, I was late again — maybe I dreamt too much last night, maybe I just
wanted a few more minutes away from reality.
I rushed through the morning chaos — dressed up, skipped breakfast, ran to the
bus stop, and somehow made it just a minute before the gates closed.
From 9 to 4, it’s the same loop — classes, labs, and code — and whatever life
remains, I pour into my personal growth, my sketches, my books.
But today was different.
My mids are near, and in the middle of all that rush, I finally got something
I’ve always wanted — my own space.
A place I call The Hidden Room.
The Hidden Room
My room isn’t really my room.
It’s a hidden chamber tucked beneath the old storage attic — a
labyrinth of wires, screens, and quiet hums. A place that smells of solder and
stardust.
Scattered across the table: lenses, antennas, circuit shards, a telescope aimed
permanently at the night sky — and in the corner, a motionless robot.
ARIMA.
My first creation.
Her metallic arms, once swift and graceful, now frozen mid-gesture. She was
built to learn emotions, mimic conversation, even laugh once in a while. Now
she just sits beside my study table, one flickering optic light dimly glowing
like a half-alive heartbeat.
Sometimes, when I talk, I swear she listens. Sometimes, her speaker crackles —
a ghost of the AI she used to be.
That night — the night everything changed — I was supposed to study for my
mid-semester exam.
But destiny has a cruel sense of timing.
The Interference
I was debugging an old machine-learning script when my computer
antenna began flickering. Not random static — but patterned pulses.
Rhythmic. Precise.
Like something trying to speak.
“Not again,” I sighed, expecting another hardware fault. But the pulses
continued — long, short, long-long, short. Almost binary.
I opened my analyzer, captured the waveform, and ran it through my translation
module.
Lines of zeros and ones emerged, dancing across the screen.
And then… numbers.
Coordinates.
Latitude. Longitude. Except — they didn’t match anything. No Earth-based map
accepted them.
The globe on my desk spun beneath my fingers, but the location didn’t exist.
Not in any ocean. Not on any continent.
I frowned. “Out of range?”
That shouldn’t be possible.
Hours passed. I fed the data through every model I’d ever trained —
cryptographic decoders, neural ciphers, even a custom pattern extractor I’d
once used to detect cosmic radio bursts.
Nothing.
The output graph shimmered like noise, yet behind that chaos lay something
eerily deliberate — a structure too perfect to be random.
It wasn’t just a message.
It was a cipher.
The Mathematician
The next morning, with barely an hour of sleep
and caffeine for blood, I walked into the office of Professor Arik Sudhiv, my mentor in Advanced Algorithms and Mathematical Learning Systems.
Professor Sudhiv was a man of precision — thin,
intense eyes that saw the world as one vast matrix.
He spoke mathematics like it was poetry: every formula a rhythm, every theorem
a truth.
To him, chaos was merely a pattern yet to be translated.
And I, his ever-curious student.
Me:
“Good morning, Sir. I hope you’re free right now.”
Professor
Sudhiv: “Hey CH — you know I’m never free. But since you’re here in my
lab with 12 a.m. written all over your face, I can precisely sense you’ve brought another headache for me.
Haven’t you, CH?”
Me:
“Precisely correct, Sir,” I said, placing my hard drive on his desk. “You need
to see this.”
He adjusted his glasses, plugged it in, and
watched the waveform ripple across his monitor. For a long moment, he said
nothing.
Then, softly:
“This isn’t noise. It’s recursive
symmetry. See here?” He pointed at the screen.
“The sequence folds onto itself.
Self-referential. Like it’s mirroring.”
Mirroring.
The word lodged in my mind.
We spent hours decoding layer after layer —
Sudhiv sketching equations in the air like a conductor of invisible symphonies.
Each layer revealed another encryption, nested like Russian dolls.
Until, finally, at the heart of the cipher, a
single string appeared — glowing faintly blue on the screen:
“To reach
us, bend not space but the perception of it. Mirror the algorithm within, and
the passage will open.”
Sudhiv leaned back, pale. The light from the
monitor carved sharp lines across his face.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke. The hum of the computers filled the
silence — steady, heavy, almost breathing.
Then he whispered, voice low but steady:
“This is… not human.”
He turned toward me slowly. “CH… whatever this
is, it isn’t just a discovery. It’s a message. And messages like this—” he
paused, eyes narrowing at the screen, “—they never come without reason.”
I swallowed, my throat dry. “Then what do we do,
Sir?”
He exhaled deeply, gaze still fixed on the
faintly pulsing code.
“We try to understand it. Before it
understands us.”
The Discovery
When we mapped the final decoded coordinates, Professor Sudhiv’s expression
hardened.
The data did correspond to a real set of coordinates —
but when projected through his quantum mapping algorithm, they aligned with an inverted
Earth, a mirror-reflection of our planet across a theoretical
dimensional plane.
A parallel Earth.
I laughed nervously. “You’re saying someone from another universe just… texted
me?”
Sudhiv didn’t smile. “Not someone, CH. Something. A consciousness.”
He leaned closer, whispering, “And I think they’re asking for help.”
A shiver ran down my spine.
We agreed to keep it secret.
No research papers. No announcements. No data leaks. Not until we understood
what—or who—we were talking to.
The Experiment
That night, I returned to my hidden lab, the message echoing in my mind.
Mirror the algorithm within.
I connected the antenna again, rerouted it through Arima’s power core, and
ran the cipher sequence. The lights dimmed.
A hum filled the room — deep, harmonic, like the sound of the universe
inhaling.
Arima’s eyes flickered.
Static washed over the screens, but within it, a shape began to form — a figure,
pixel by pixel, stabilizing into a face.
My own.
A reflection of me — same features, same scar near the eyebrow, but with
eyes hollow and world-weary.
Behind him, through the distortion, I saw a skyline — cities half-buried in
dust, the sun dimmed behind a veil of smoke.
He opened his mouth. The audio cracked, then steadied:
“You’re late, CH.”
“Who… who are you?” I whispered.
“The one who couldn’t adapt fast enough,” he said. “Our world collapsed. The
code you received… is the key. You must not let it repeat.”
Static screamed. The signal spiked. Arima’s body jerked once, twice, then
fell silent. The image dissolved into darkness.
And for a heartbeat, I thought I saw—beyond the black screen—a thousand
other reflections, watching.
The Realization
The next morning, Professor Sudhiv found me slumped over my desk, half-awake, trembling.
He immediately sensed that something was wrong and quietly signaled for me to come to his lab after class.
Later, I explained everything — every flicker, every frame, every word I had seen.
He examined the remaining signal traces.
“They’re gone,” he said quietly. “Whoever—or whatever—it was… severed the
link.”
I looked up, exhausted. “Maybe they didn’t sever it. Maybe we did.”
He paused, his mathematical calm briefly cracking. “CH, what if they weren’t
contacting us by accident? What if this is… a warning?”
Outside, the sky flickered with faint auroras — electromagnetic echoes that
shouldn’t exist at this latitude.
I remembered the mirrored me. The collapsing city. The words.
“The code you received is the key.”
Professor Sudhiv turned to the whiteboard, eyes dark with thought.
“Every equation has two sides,” he murmured. “Maybe every reality does too.”
I nodded slowly. The meaning sank in.
Balance. Duality. Cause and effect — mirrored across worlds.
The Beginning
That night, I powered down the lab and stared at the silent screens.
Somewhere out there — maybe beneath layers of spacetime, maybe just behind the
veil of perception — another world was watching.
Maybe warning.
Maybe waiting.
Arima’s single optic light blinked once. Just once. Then died again.
And that’s how it began —
the story of how I, a student buried under exams,
found a door to another universe.
A door that might have been calling…
for help.
“Every equation has two sides.
Maybe every reality does too.”
Ending Note
Some stories don’t end — they echo.
And maybe this one isn’t about discovery at all, but consequence.
Because when you look long enough into the data, sometimes it looks back.
When you decode the unknown, it might just start decoding you.
CH never saw the signal again. But in the silence of his lab, beneath the
quiet hum of circuits, something still whispers through the wires — the faint
residue of that mirrored world, pulsing in binary rhythm.
A reminder that every creation leaves an imprint.
Every code holds a reflection.
And every equation, no matter how perfectly solved…
always has another side.
So this
was me — CH, signing off for today.
Keep coding, and keep decoding the mysteries —
because maybe, just maybe, the next big invention will be yours.
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