Dr. Sathya Yaathri wasn't the kind of man who needed alarm clocks.The planet itself kept him awake.
As a life scientist at NASA, his nightly ritual was as predictable as sunrise: step into the observatory lab, sip his too-strong black tea, then stare at global bioluminescence maps until something—anything—behaved strangely. Most nights were dull. Earth glowed in steady patterns: plankton blooming, insects flaring, fungi pulsing faintly under forest canopies.
But on this night, the Earth misbehaved.
At exactly 1:00 AM IST, Sathya's screen flickered. A spike.Then another.Then a pulse so bright it nearly overexposed the satellite feed.
Bioluminescence, but unnatural.High intensity. Short bursts.Repeating every 26 seconds like the planet itself was… blinking.
Sathya straightened in his chair."Okay… that's not normal," he muttered, all trace of sleep gone.
He expanded the data bands. The glow wasn't random; it was coordinated. Like a global network of tiny living lights responding to an invisible signal. And every pulse, every flare, every shimmer… began to drift.
Not scatter.Not swirl.But move.
"Is this… migration?" he whispered.
His colleagues trickled into the room—some half-asleep, some annoyed, all wide awake the moment the screen lit up with the next pulse. At T-minus 26 seconds, the map flashed again, confirming it.
Africa. Australia. Southeast Asia.Oceanic blooms. Forest pockets. Desert organisms.
All of them—every glowing species tracked on Earth—were shifting direction.Converging.
Toward southern India.
Toward Kerala.
Toward one specific pinpoint on the map.
Trivandrum.
"Run a temporal scan," Sathya ordered, voice sharp. "I want location vectors, time lapse transitions, species classification—everything."
Lights blinked. Servers hummed. The room moved.
Time passed in tight knots of urgency.Data piled up.Patterns emerged.
The pulses began exactly at 1:00 AM, the moment Raaghav's nightmare hit him like a truck.
For the next three hours, from 1:00 AM to 4:00 AM, the phenomenon continued without a single deviation. Every 26 seconds, the world flashed with bioluminescence—then funneled its glow one step closer to Trivandrum.
By 4:00 AM, the intensity vanished.
Just like that.As if someone flipped a switch.
Silence returned to the screens.The planet went back to behaving like a planet.
But Dr. Sathya Yaathri couldn't unsee what he'd witnessed.
He leaned back in his chair, jaw tight, mind racing."Nature doesn't coordinate itself with that precision. Not on a global scale. Not across species."
His colleague swallowed. "So what does?"
Sathya didn't answer immediately. He stared at the map, at the tiny bright dot marking the region where the pulses converged. He felt something old and unsettling stir in his chest.
"This wasn't natural," he finally said. "This was intentional."
He pulled up the final frame—one last snapshot of the global glow converging toward Trivandrum like the world was pointing at something.
Or someone.
Sathya's voice dropped, barely above a breath.
"Whatever triggered this… is down there."