The dissolution was not a collapse, but a controlled, purposeful bloom. The "Beej" foundations—for semiconductors, civic AI, health sensing, and digital literacy—opened their virtual doors. The initial response was a global torrent of curiosity, skepticism, and, from a dedicated few, frenzied activity.
Harsh's role shifted from CEO to Chief Curator. His office was now a studio at the Foresight Institute, repurposed as the "Beej Hub," its walls covered not with corporate performance charts, but with live feeds from a global map tracking fork-and-star activity on the GitHub repositories, and with photos sent by early adopters.
The first harvest was wild, weedy, and magnificent.
In a garage in Coimbatore, two mechanical engineering students forked the Rishi-28 design. They weren't trying to make a faster chip; they were trying to make a tougher one. Using the open PDKs (Process Design Kits), they stripped out non-essential functions, over-engineered the power regulation, and encased it in a resin pot. Their "Vajra-1" chip was designed to survive the heat, dust, and voltage fluctuations inside a small, farmer-owned sugarcane crusher, providing basic automation and predictive maintenance. It was inelegant, overbuilt, and perfectly fit for purpose.
Their project log, posted on the Beej forum, went viral in Indian agricultural circles. Harsh had their "Vajra-1" schematic framed and hung in the Hub. It was more beautiful to him than any blue-chip stock certificate.
Meanwhile, the Gram-Disha software, seeded into the world, began to grow in strange shapes. A collective of urban planners in Bogotá, Colombia, adapted it to model traffic flow and pedestrian safety in their dense, chaotic city, using a network of cheap cameras and crowd-sourced phone data. They called their fork "Con-Sentido" (With Sense). Their dashboard didn't predict landslides; it predicted collision hotspots for cyclists.
Harsh watched a live demo over a grainy video call, the Spanish-language interface a testament to the seed's journey. The Garden was no longer Indian; it was a global biome.
But not all growth was benevolent. In a shadowy corner of the internet, a group with dubious intent forked the Arogya biometric libraries. Their aim, gleaned from their encrypted chatter which the Harsh security team passively monitored, was to create a "stress-sensing" system for online poker games—trying to algorithmically spot tells via webcam. It was a perversion of the tool, but it was also an inevitable test of the Beej philosophy: if you set the seeds free, you cannot control what soil they find.
Vikram Joshi wanted to issue a cease-and-desist, to use the foundation's legal power to kill the fork. Harsh refused. "We open-sourced it with a copyleft license for a reason. If it's used for harm, the community will identify it, shame it, and build defenses. We have to trust the ecosystem's immune system."
He was proven right, partially. The "poker tell" project was indeed flagged—not by a government, but by a coalition of ethical hackers within the Beej community. They didn't sue; they forked the fork, creating a counter-measure library that could scramble biometric leakage, and publicized it widely. The original project withered in the spotlight of ridicule and technical counter-pressure.
The Gardener's Guild, Harsh's lean new company, found its niche. They didn't sell finished products; they sold certainty. A European start-up wanting to build medical devices needed Rishi-28 chips they could trust with human lives. They contracted the Guild's fab in Pune, paying a premium for the certification, the traceability, and the ironclad ethical supply chain. The Guild's first profit came not from selling a million units, but from guaranteeing the integrity of ten thousand.
One evening, Priya and Anya visited the Beej Hub. Anya ran her fingers over the world map with its glowing points of activity. "It's like our fireflies, Papa," she said, referring to their summers in Alibaug. "Each one is small, but together they light up the whole dark."
Harsh put his arm around his wife. The empire was gone. The fearsome, complex machinery of power, influence, and defence he had built over a lifetime was being dismantled, its parts scattered to the winds.
But as he looked at the map, at the blinking light in Coimbatore, the steady pulse in Bogotá, the nascent cluster in Nairobi experimenting with Udaan modules for refugee education, he felt a peace deeper than any quarterly profit had ever brought.
He had not built an empire. He had planted a forest. And the first, wild, wonderful harvest was proving that the trees could now plant themselves.
(Chapter End - Start of Arc 8: The Legacy of the Chipman)