The next morning, Aisha's office was tense.
Radha sat in the corner, nervously checking her watch. Aisha was pacing, checking a file.
"It's 10:15 AM," Aisha said, looking at Arjun.
"Your 'genius' isn't coming. People who talk to 12-year-olds at bus stops are usually crazy, Arjun, not prodigies."
Arjun sat behind Aisha's desk (a spot he had naturally claimed), spinning a pen. "She'll come. Engineers operate on a different time zone."
At 10:18 AM, there was a loud thud against the door, as if someone had kicked it.
The door swung open. Meera Reddy stood there. She looked even more disheveled than the day before. She was carrying a massive cardboard box filled with tangled wires, circuit boards, and a soldering iron that looked like a weapon.
"This building has no elevator," she announced, panting. She dropped the box on the floor with a crash. "If I have a heart attack, you're paying my medical bills."
Aisha stared at the mess on her clean floor. "Who... is this?"
"This," Arjun said, hopping off the chair, "is our CTO. Meera, meet Advocate Aisha Siddiqui, our legal counsel. And my mother, our Chairman."
Meera waved a hand dismissively at the adults and zeroed in on Arjun. "I quit my job. My mom is crying. My dad thinks I've joined a cult. This better be real, kid."
"It's real," Arjun said. He pointed to the whiteboard he had set up in the corner.
It was covered in diagrams. But not just any diagrams. They were blueprints for a machine that didn't exist in 1991.
"The problem," Arjun began, tapping the board with a ruler like a seasoned professor, "is the government's Land Records.
They are old, crumbling paper. Some are 100 years old. They are hand-written in archaic Kannada script."
He looked at Meera. "The current scanning tech—flatbeds—takes 2 minutes per page. And they just save an image. They don't read the data."
Meera nodded, her eyes sharpening.
"Raster images. Useless for searching."
"Exactly," Arjun said. "To digitize 5 million records, we need two things.
One: A scanner that can feed paper automatically without tearing it, at a speed of 5 seconds per page.
Two: An OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine that can read handwritten Kannada."
Aisha frowned. "OCR? That barely works for typed English. For handwritten Kannada? That's science fiction."
"That's why we're going to build it," Arjun said. He looked at Meera. "I have the software logic for the OCR. I know how to train a neural network to recognize the curves of the script. But I need a machine that can see."
He slid a piece of paper toward Meera. It was a check.
Pay to: Meera Reddy
Amount: ₹ 10,000
"This is for parts," Arjun said. "We're going to SP Road. We're not buying a scanner, Meera. We're building a monster."
Meera looked at the diagram on the board—a high-speed drum scanner design that wouldn't become industry standard for another decade. Then she looked at the check. Then at the 12-year-old boy.
A slow, manic grin spread across her face.
"I'm going to need more copper wire," she said.