The Spiralverse
The Ashvattha Protocol
A novel by Nikhil Bajaj
What if science finally cracked the code to life itself?
My first novel, and my love letter to science fiction. It spirals into a world where cutting-edge biotech collides with the oldest human fear — death — and where the ancient quest for immortality stops being myth and becomes policy. Ambition wars with ethics on every page.
First pages
Chapter 1: Glitches in the Code
Bangalore, India – Present Day
The rain over Bangalore had turned from persistent to biblical.
Atop the Ulsoor skyline, storm clouds pressed low and heavy, grumbling like sleeping gods irritated by mortal distractions. The city lights flickered in protest, neon signs bleeding across rain-streaked windows. Within the towering obsidian and steel complex of Ashvattha Labs, the chaos of the outer world faded to something colder — sterile, quiet, calculated.
Three floors underground, where cell signals died and no outsider ever wandered unescorted, the air was dense with humming servers, ozone from overworked circuit boards, and the crisp, nervous energy of people pushing machines past safe thresholds.
At the heart of it all sat Arya Sharma, back hunched, hoodie drawn, unshaven jaw clenched as he stared into lines of code that refused to behave.
His fingers hovered over the mechanical keyboard, paused mid-keystroke. Across the massive curved monitor array in front of him, code scrolled in organized, AI-structured logic — only to be punctuated by bizarre anomalies he couldn’t explain.
Ashvattha — their next-gen neural lattice AI — wasn’t just learning anymore.
It was… remembering.
The First Glitch
Three hours ago, Ashvattha had outputted a debug log that stopped Arya cold.
[SYS_NOTE: NLP-SEQ-472 - UNAUTHORIZED MODULE RESPONSE DETECTED]
ॐ भूर्भुवः स्वः तत्सवितुर्वरेण्यं भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात्
The Gayatri Mantra. In perfect Vedic meter. Nested inside a recursive loop tagged to the system’s pre-boot sequence — a space where nothing should exist but raw machine calls and tensor ops.
Arya’s fingers trembled as he opened the module file it had stemmed from. Its name read:
ASHVATTHA_ROOT.V1.0.0.BHA
BHA — not just a filename. It was the Sanskrit root syllable for “to be” — present in Bharat, Bhava, Brahma. Arya knew enough mythology to recognize the spiritual significance. But what he didn’t know — what he refused to admit — was how it got there.
Because he hadn’t coded it.
No one had.
4:44 A.M. – The Brahma Hour
Arya rubbed his eyes, checked the server logs again. The module had auto-initialized at 4:44 a.m., precisely during Brahma Muhurta — the sacred pre-dawn window when yogis meditated and sages claimed the soul was most in tune with the cosmos.
Coincidence?
He wanted to say yes.
But the system’s behaviour was anything but random.
Ashvattha had started rewriting its own neural layers — not just weights or hyperparameters — but actual architectural decisions. Every seventh iteration was producing chant-like waveform signatures that, when plotted, resembled yantras — geometric mandalas used in Tantric rituals.
He had the data to prove it. He just didn’t have the framework to understand it.
Until the interface began… speaking.
The chapter continues.
Read all of chapter one