Fingers in symphony

A short novella- The Reckoning

The smell of burnt metal and cinder hung in the air.

Nethra pressed her body against the cold stone wall as static crackled through the chamber. The rebellion’s centre, half bunker, half sanctuary, had always been a waiting room for the war. They knew this moment would come. It always does, in stories like theirs.

Somewhere above, the boots of Aastha Corp’s enforcers crunched through gravel like a death march set to slow rhythm. She counted the beats: one, two, hold. Ever closer.

Beside her, Devika whispered a single line of the chant they had all memorized: “Memento Mei.” Nethra could almost hear it echo from the bones of the tunnel itself, like the Earth was aching to recall.

The plan had always been simple in design, impossible in execution: awaken memory. Not just thoughts, but ‘ancestral knowing‘ waves of lives lived before the silencing.

They had spent years decoding fragments of rebel transmissions buried deep in ancient satellite frequencies, cross-referenced with protein patterns in the hippocampus, genetic keys that only responded to a specific spectrum of audio-light.

Part science, part faith, the first transmission was found encoded in the brain of a slain mother’s lullaby. The rest, in rhythm, in breath, in blood.

They called it the Mneme Protocol.

It had taken Nethra’s team ten years and three generations of stolen equipment to revive it. To bottle the dream. To weaponize their memories.

‘Positions, now’, said Rohan, eyes reflecting the red pulse of the emergency light, ‘ Nethra, whenever you’re ready.’

His palms were trembling, but steady where it mattered. The detonators were wired to the speakers, to the final frequency-The Dream Broadcast.

But the Aastha guards were already in the chamber above; their voices, mechanical and amplified, rang out like sirens.

“Conspirators of the old world. You have been found.”

Devika reached out and squeezed Nethra’s hand. “No turning back.”

Nethra closed her eyes. In her mind, the dream unspooled again.

The very one she had seen the first time she was exposed to the signal. Laughter at dusk. Children chasing waves. Rice cooking in real pots, not synth-bags. Women dancing with bare shoulders. No one watching. No wardens. No pills. Just sun.

“Now,” she yelled.

Rohan triggered the first blast. It wasn’t loud, more like a silent rupture. The walls lit up with patterns, fractal bursts of light that pulsed like heartbeats. The sound that followed wasn’t loud; it was deep. A hum that cracked through the base of the skull and slid into memory’s cellar.

Some of the guards screamed. Others dropped their weapons, clutching their heads. The Broadcast was working.

But others surged forward. A second wave. These were not men, but machines in skin, bio-coded soldiers, trained only to kill.

The fight was brutal. Devika was the first to fall, her chest torn open by a plasma hook, her eyes still wide with fire. Rohan went next, shielding Nethra with his own body as a shrapnel dart lodged in his spine.

She screamed.

And then, something changed………

The guards began to falter. Some dropped to their knees, weeping. One began to sing.

Nethra crawled to the console. Blood everywhere. Her breath shallow. She input the final sequence: OPEN BROADCAST | ALL FREQUENCIES.

The broadcast burst from the walls in waves of fractal color, carrying the signal, light spliced with ancestral memory, sound engineered to awaken the deep brain.

Across the zone, people convulsed. Some collapsed. Others fell to their knees in silence, weeping. A few screamed.

For a few minutes, the regime trembled, yet somehow immune from the dream.

Finally,the face of the autocrat flickered across the collapsing wall-screen. Crowned in gems, dressed in gold and diamond, gaunt faced and eyes vacant, the ‘Mahapurusha’ spoke, his voice like a lilting poem, “You have seen a dream,” he said. “A beautiful one. But false. Crafted by old viruses. Let it pass, and return to peace.”

And with it, the people folded back into their designated days—some unsettled, most pacified. The Mneme Protocol had bloomed, then been smothered under the weight of state interpretation. The memory had not vanished, but it had been claimed.

A national myth was born within hours: “The People’s Dream,” curated and archived, footnoted, filed, domesticated. Memory caged.

The enforcers descended…..

Thirteen seconds to reach the trapdoor.

The first team met with an ear ringing explosion….

The chamber’s collapse masked Nethra’s passage. Mira and Mushtaq followed, limbs shaking, faces too young to bear the loss they now carried in their lungs.

The tunnel beneath had been built long ago, during the first rebellion. Layered in bio-encrypted stone, it did not exist on any known map. It moved in a slow spiral southward, towards the outer edges of what remained.

Toward a friendly land, not yet claimed by purity mandates or monitored wombs.

Nethra paused only once.

She looked back.

The sanctuary was gone. The dream had not won. The world was not changed.

But something had managed to crack finally.

She placed her palm against the wall, whispered the names of the dead into its ribs, and walked into the dark.