Time had passed quickly over the last two months. Ramayana: Aranya Kanda had been nominated for a few categories at the Oscars again; Feroz had done everything he could during the campaign, and his efforts finally paid off when the film took home Best Animated Feature again.
Meanwhile, on January 26, the Indian government announced Siddanth Deva as one of the recipients of the Padma Bhushan. The prestigious civilian honor recognized unmatched contributions to the game of cricket alongside extensive philanthropic work in developing grassroots Indian sports. Earning such an award brought a brief wave of celebration, but the demands of the ongoing tour kept the team grounded.
Now, the late afternoon sun bathed the city of Hamilton, New Zealand, in a crisp golden light.
Inside the expansive, glass-fronted dining hall of the Indian national team's luxury hotel, the atmosphere was a picture of normalcy. The team was currently in the middle of a highly successful T20I series against the Kiwis. The mood in the camp was relaxed, buoyed by back-to-back victories.
At a long table near the center of the room, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul were engaged in a heated, debate about the best coffee spots in the city. A few tables over, Jasprit Bumrah and Ravindra Jadeja were laughing over something on a smartphone, sharing a plate of fresh fruit. Waiters in crisp white uniforms moved seamlessly between the tables, carrying trays of espresso, grilled chicken, and toasted sandwiches.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the streets of Hamilton looked as they always did. Locals jogged along the picturesque river paths. Cars moved steadily through the intersections. Tourists snapped photographs of the architecture. The world was spinning on its usual axis.
Siddanth Deva sat in a plush corner booth, a cup of black coffee resting on the table in front of him. He was listening with half an ear to Rohit Sharma, who was sitting across from him, breaking down the subtle variations in the pitch behavior they had encountered the previous night.
"It's holding up just a fraction more than it did in Auckland," Rohit noted, tapping his fingers on the table. "If we bat first tomorrow, we might need to give it an extra over before going after the spinners."
"Agreed," Deva nodded, his tone casual and relaxed. "The cross-breeze in the stadium is also dragging the ball slightly. We'll tell the middle order to play straight."
Above the hum of conversation and the clinking of silverware, a large television mounted on the far wall of the dining hall was playing a global news broadcast on a low volume. It was currently cycling through international headlines—trade negotiations, European politics, and weather patterns.
Then, the news anchor's demeanor shifted to a slightly more formal, serious register. The colorful graphics behind her transitioned to a map of East Asia, overlaid with a stark, red microscopic rendering of a virus.
The banner at the bottom of the screen updated:
WHO DECLARES NOVEL CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK A PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY OF INTERNATIONAL CONCERN.
Deva stopped drinking his coffee.
His cup hovered an inch above the saucer. His eyes locked onto the screen.
The news anchor continued, her voice filtering quietly through the dining hall. "Following a meeting of the Emergency Committee in Geneva, the World Health Organization has officially declared the 2019-nCoV outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The WHO emphasized that while the vast majority of cases remain in Wuhan, China, the declaration is aimed at mobilizing international coordination, early detection, and isolation protocols to prevent further global spread..."
"Sid?" Rohit asked, noticing that his captain's attention had vanished. He looked over his shoulder at the television screen. "Oh, that virus thing in China. Crazy situation over there. They've locked down the city."
"Yeah," Deva said softly. He lowered his coffee cup back to the saucer. It landed with a faint, sharp clink.
"It's good they're keeping it contained, though," Rohit added, taking a bite of a sandwich unbothered. "Hopefully, it blows over in a few weeks. Anyway, about the bowling rotation for tomorrow..."
Rohit continued talking, but Deva no longer heard him.
The sound in the dining hall seemed to dull into a muffled, echoing drone. Deva stared at the television screen, watching the footage of medical workers in white hazmat suits moving through a hospital corridor in Wuhan.
The people in this room—his teammates, the waiters, the people walking outside on the sunny New Zealand streets—were looking at the news and seeing an overseas health crisis. They saw a localized problem. A temporary disruption happening in a distant province.
Deva saw the beginning of the end of the world as they knew it.
He didn't just understand the headline; he remembered the agonizing, suffocating reality of what was coming.
January 30, 2020.
The World Health Organization had not yet called it a pandemic. That word wouldn't be used until March. Right now, the global narrative was about containment and tracing. But Deva knew the invisible, microscopic dominoes had already fallen. The virus was already on airplanes. It was already in airports. It was already moving.
Deva looked away from the television. He looked at Kohli laughing across the room. He looked at the bright sunlight streaming through the windows. The contrast between the blissful, happy ignorance of the present moment and the devastating tidal wave of grief that was already rushing toward them made his chest feel incredibly tight.
"I need to make a call," Deva said abruptly.
He stood up, his chair scraping against the floor.
Rohit looked up, surprised by the sudden shift in Deva's demeanor. The relaxed, casual captain was gone.
"Everything alright?" Rohit asked, his brow furrowing.
"Everything is fine, Ro. Just a business thing," Deva lied smoothly, his voice betraying none of the internal turmoil. "Tell Ravi bhai I'll be ten minutes late to the team meeting."
Without waiting for a response, Deva turned and walked briskly out of the dining hall, his strides long and deliberate. He bypassed the crowded lobby, stepped into an empty elevator, and pressed the button for his floor.
The moment the elevator doors slid shut, sealing him in quiet isolation, he pulled his phone from his pocket.
He speed-dialed Arjun.
The line rang twice. It was mid-morning in India.
"I was just looking at the quarterly projections," Arjun's voice came through the speaker, crisp, energetic, and entrenched in the normal business world. "The new fabrication plant yields are exceeding the baseline estimates by four percent. If we scale up production next week, we can—"
"Arjun, stop talking and listen to me," Deva interrupted, his voice dropping into a cold, commanding register that he very rarely used with his best friend.
Arjun paused immediately, recognizing the tone. The excitement vanished. "What's wrong? Are you okay? Did something happen in New Zealand?"
"I'm fine," Deva said, stepping out of the elevator and walking rapidly down the carpeted hallway toward his suite. "I need you to initiate a company-wide transition protocol. Starting today, I want you to prepare the entire Nexus employee base for the possibility of working from home. Without any interruption to our operations."
There was a silence on the other end of the line.
"Working from home?" Arjun asked, confusion lacing his voice. "Sid, we have fifty thousand corporate employees in HITEC City alone. We just built a new campus wing. Why would we send them home?"
"The WHO just declared the coronavirus in China a Public Health Emergency of International Concern," Deva stated, swiping his keycard and pushing the heavy door of his suite open.
"I saw the alert," Arjun said reasonably. "But Sid, you're actually worried about this? The outbreak is centered in Wuhan. The Indian health ministry is already screening passengers. It's a localized viral cluster. It'll be contained in a few weeks, just like SARS or MERS."
Deva walked into the room, letting the door click shut and lock behind him. He stood in the center of the quiet suite, staring out the window at the distant New Zealand mountains.
"Don't take it lightly, Arjun," Deva said. "It isn't going to be contained. It is going to spread. And when it does, the global infrastructure is going to react aggressively."
Arjun remained silent on the other end of the line. As a CEO, his mind was trained to operate on logic, metrics, and risk assessments. Evacuating a multi-billion-dollar corporate headquarters because of an overseas virus seemed like a paranoid overreaction.
But Arjun was not just a CEO. He was Deva's best friend.
Deva had never been wrong. When Siddanth Deva spoke with that specific, chilling certainty, the world usually bent to match his words.
"How do we execute this?" Arjun asked, the skepticism gone from his voice.
"We don't need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to use what we built," Deva explained, pacing the length of his hotel room. "We spent the last year rolling out the JnanaOS enterprise ecosystem across all our departments. We have the internal communication apps, the secure video conferencing platforms, and the cloud collaboration tools. Everything is already in place. We just need to stress-test it at scale."
"You want me to force the transition today?"
"No," Deva corrected him immediately. "Prepare before we need it. If you suddenly order everyone home today, you'll trigger a panic. The markets will freak out, and the media will run wild. Do it quietly. Start running department-wide remote work drills. Tell the management tier that we are testing the resilience of our cloud infrastructure and remote authentication protocols. Make sure every single employee has a secure VPN connection set up on their home devices. Ensure the project management workflows and digital approval systems are fully functional outside the local intranet."
"I'll start drafting the internal memos now," Arjun confirmed, the sound of a keyboard clacking rapidly in the background. "I'll frame it as a Q1 operational resilience test."
"Perfect," Deva nodded. "Now, onto the second thing. This is more important."
"I'm listening."
"I want you to make arrangements for your parents," Deva instructed, his voice softening slightly, returning to the tone of a friend. "I want them moved to your farmhouse by the end of the month."
Arjun stopped typing. "Sid, my parents have their own house in Jubilee Hills. Why do they need to move to the farmhouse?"
"Because the farmhouse has acres of land, a fortified perimeter, and an independent power grid," Deva stated bluntly. "If the situation escalates, cities are going to become difficult to navigate. The farmhouse allows us to remain isolated without feeling imprisoned."
"Okay," Arjun agreed quietly, realizing the depth of Deva's concern. "I'll talk to them tonight."
"Good," Deva said. "Now, regarding the estate itself. Make sure the domestic staff, the security detail, the gardeners, the maintenance workers, and their families dont roam outside the compound. If this virus spreads, I don't want them taking public transport or wandering into the city and returning to the compound. It compromises everyone."
"So we lock down the estate?"
"We secure it," Deva corrected. "But to do that safely, we need to ensure they have no reason to leave. Begin moving supplies into your main estate warehouses."
"What kind of supplies? Medical? Masks?"
"Everything," Deva said, his eyes narrowing as he mentally cataloged the impending collapse of the global supply chains. "Rice, lentils, cooking oil, spices, non-perishable foods. Bottled water reserves. Industrial cleaning supplies, sanitizers, and basic medical kits. Fuel for the backup generators. Everything required to keep an eighty-person community fed, healthy, and operational."
"For how long?" Arjun asked. "A month?"
"One year," Deva said flatly.
Arjun audibly gasped over the phone. "One year?! Sid, you're talking about stockpiling an absurd amount of material. People are going to notice."
"Route the purchases through the Nexus hospitality division. Make it look like we are stocking our corporate cafeterias, and then quietly reroute the trucks to your farmhouse at night," Deva instructed seamlessly. "Do not hoard from local grocery stores; go directly to the wholesale distributors. Pay a premium if you have to. Just make sure the warehouses are full."
Arjun let out a long, heavy breath. "One year of supplies. You really believe it's going to get that bad, don't you?"
"I believe in being ready," Deva said quietly. "Get the corporate drills started, Arjun."
Deva ended the call. He didn't put the phone down. He immediately dialed his personal assistant.
Rahul answered on the first ring.
"Yes, boss?" Rahul answered briskly.
"Rahul, I need you to step away from where you are for a moment. Find a quiet place," Deva instructed.
"Give me two seconds," Rahul said. Deva heard the background noise fade away, replaced by the quiet echo of a private corridor. "I'm clear. What do you need?"
"I need you to begin executing a long-term contingency plan for the Shamshabad farmhouse," Deva said. "I want you to buy bulk food and household supplies for a year for eighty people."
Rahul immediately switched into his highly efficient, quartermaster mode. "What more sir?"
"Total self-sufficiency," Deva ordered. "I want the primary and secondary water filtration systems on the estate inspected and serviced by the end of the week. Have the engineering team check the heavy diesel backup generators. Ensure we have sufficient fuel reserves buried on-site to run the entire compound for six months if the municipal grid fails."
Rahul didn't question the paranoia of the request. "Understood. Water and power. What about security?"
"Confirm the perimeter protocols with the head of the security detail," Deva continued. "We need a strict plan for restricted movement. If we have to close the gates, I need a protocol for sanitizing any essential deliveries before they enter the compound. I also want you to organize a comprehensive medical inventory. Basic first-aid, broad-spectrum antibiotics, oxygen concentrators, and whatever advanced respiratory support equipment you can acquire quietly through our private medical suppliers."
Rahul was silent for a fraction of a second, quickly processing the scale of the preparation. "Boss, this sounds like preparation for a siege. Or a natural disaster."
"I hope we never need to use a single bag of rice or turn on a single generator, Rahul," Deva said, his voice softening. "I hope I'm just being paranoid. But if I'm right, we won't have time to prepare later. I need the farmhouse to be a fortress for the people living inside it."
"I will make the calls immediately," Rahul promised, his voice rock-steady. "The warehouse will be prepped, and the engineers will be on-site tomorrow."
"There's one more thing," Deva added.
"Yes, sir?"
"The people living on the estate... that includes you, Rahul," Deva said gently. "When the time comes, I want your wife, kids and your parents moved into the guest houses of the farmhouse. You've looked after my life for years. I am not going to leave your family sitting in an apartment in the city if things go wrong."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"I..." Rahul started, his voice thick with sudden, unexpected emotion. He cleared his throat. "I'll make all the arrangements, sir. And... thank you."
"Take care of them, Rahul. Let me know when the first shipments arrive."
Deva hung up the phone. He stood in the quiet hotel room for a moment, the heavy weight of his decisions settling over his shoulders.
He had secured his family. He had secured his employees. He had secured the people who relied on him. It was a massive, sweeping deployment of resources, executed in the shadows.
He unlocked his phone one more time and sent a brief, encrypted text message to Arjun.
Remember. Preparation, not panic. Do not alarm the employees. Do not mention a pandemic. Quiet strength.
Almost instantly, a reply arrived.
Understood. Stress tests begin at 0900 hours.
Thousands of miles away, in the sprawling, hyper-modern metropolis of HITEC City, Hyderabad, the world remained normal.
The morning sun reflected off the towering glass facades of the NEXUS global headquarters. The broad, manicured sidewalks were filled with thousands of employees arriving for work. Young software engineers walked in groups, holding cups of artisanal coffee, laughing about a movie they had watched the previous night. Executives in sharp suits moved briskly through the grand lobby, discussing quarterly growth targets.
Deep inside the massive, sterile cleanrooms of the Financial District, the newly minted NEXUS Semiconductor Fabrication plant was humming with activity. Technicians in full white hazmat suits—worn to protect the microscopic silicon wafers from dust—monitored the complex lithography machines that were now churning out thousands of custom mobile chips.
Life was functioning as it was designed to.
But beneath the surface, a quiet pivot was already beginning.
In the human resources and IT departments, senior managers were receiving encrypted directives from the CEO's office. They didn't understand the sudden urgency, but they followed the protocols.
At 10:00 AM, a single department in the software development wing received a notification on their screens. They were instructed to log out of their local workstations, return to their apartments, and reconnect to the company's secure virtual private network using their company-issued laptops.
It was framed as a routine operational resilience test.
By 1:00 PM, the IT engineers were monitoring the bandwidth load as two thousand employees seamlessly transitioned to the remote cloud infrastructure. The video conferencing software held steady. The digital approval workflows functioned flawlessly. The internal messaging systems showed zero latency.
Over the next forty-eight hours, the testing protocols would quietly expand. More departments would be sent home for "drills." Remote payroll systems would be authenticated. Cloud security would be aggressively reinforced.
Most of the employees found the drills slightly annoying but mostly welcome—an excuse to work from their sofas in pajamas for a day.
The contrast was stark. The world was smiling, standing on the edge of a cliff, while NEXUS was already building a parachute.
Back in the hotel room in New Zealand, the sun had begun to dipped in the sky, casting long, cool shadows across the carpet.
Deva walked over to the desk near the window. He pulled out the sleek, black Nexus laptop from his backpack, set it on the desk, and opened the lid. The screen illuminated, the facial recognition software instantly unlocking the device.
"VEDA," Deva said quietly into the empty room.
"Good evening, sir," the smooth, modulated voice of the AI responded instantly through the laptop's speakers. "I have monitored the encrypted communications with Mr. Reddy and Mr. Rahul. The logistical and corporate protocols have been initiated successfully."
"Good," Deva nodded, pulling out the chair and sitting down. "Now we need to focus on the core problem. I need you to initiate a deep, comprehensive data aggregation protocol."
"Specify the parameters, sir."
"I want you to identify, index, and collect every piece of scientific research related to the novel coronavirus—2019-nCoV," Deva instructed, leaning his elbows on the desk, his eyes locked onto the screen.
"Do not restrict yourself to public channels," Deva ordered strictly, his voice cold and uncompromising. "I want you to bypass standard international firewalls. Breach any private pharmaceutical servers required. Access confidential government health networks, secure epidemiological databases, the CDC mainframes, and classified intelligence feeds from China and the West. I want every single piece of ongoing, restricted, or proprietary research."
"Initiating Ghost Protocol," VEDA acknowledged smoothly, the AI seamlessly pivoting to offensive cyber-operations. "Targeting restricted governmental and private medical nodes globally."
"Steal the unpublished genomic sequences," Deva continued. "Pull the private clinical observations from the overwhelmed hospitals in Wuhan. I want the early-stage therapeutic hypotheses, and any preliminary vaccine methodologies being discussed behind closed doors by global medical institutions. Scrape everything, cover your digital tracks, and bring it all to my local drive."
"Understood, sir," VEDA acknowledged. "I am compiling the research library now. Covert data extraction protocols are active. The volume of incoming restricted data from the global scientific community is increasing exponentially by the hour."
"Organize it," Deva said. "Separate the epidemiological data from the molecular biology. I need to see the genomic sequencing of the virus. I want to see the protein structures they've mapped so far. I need to understand how it binds to human receptors."
The screen of the laptop transformed. The desktop wallpaper vanished, replaced by a cascading, highly organized flow of complex scientific data.
Thousands of restricted research papers, classified raw data points, and early molecular diagrams began to populate the screen, stolen and categorized by VEDA in fractions of a second.
Deva leaned closer to the screen.
The room was silent, save for the soft, rhythmic hum of the laptop's cooling fans.
He looked at the raw genomic data of the virus scrolling across his screen, a clarity washed over his mind.
Grandmaster Tier - Chemistry.
The passive system ability engaged, illuminating his neural pathways. When a normal person looked at the screen, they saw an incomprehensible jumble of letters, numbers, and three-dimensional protein models.
When Siddanth Deva looked at the screen, he saw the fundamental architecture of the universe.
He understood the complex, specific folding of the viral spike proteins. He instantly comprehended the binding affinity of the virus to the human ACE2 receptors. He saw the molecular vulnerabilities, the points where the chemical structure was strong, and the points where it could potentially be disrupted.
He began to read.
He read the classified clinical reports detailing the acute respiratory distress. He read the suppressed intelligence theories on aerosolized transmission. He absorbed the agonizing reality of the disease, mapping the chemistry against the devastating human toll he knew was coming.
He was not going to invent a vaccine in his hotel room tonight. The process required monumental clinical trials, specific mRNA stabilization technologies, and massive biological manufacturing capabilities that he would need to quietly pivot the Nexus pharmaceutical subsidiaries to begin researching.
But he was beginning the work. He was laying the foundation. He was mapping the enemy.
The hours bled away. The golden sunlight outside the window shifted into deep, twilight blues, and eventually faded into the pitch black of night.
Deva didn't move from the desk. He didn't eat dinner. He ignored the messages from his teammates asking if he wanted to join them for a late-night card game in the lounge.
He remained anchored to the chair, the bright, blue-white light of the screen illuminating his focused, unblinking eyes.
Occasionally, his mind would drift. He would look away from the complex molecular chains and glance at the small, framed photograph of Krithika, Rishi, and Aadhya that he kept on the hotel nightstand.
He had spoken to her briefly that morning, before the WHO announcement. She had been laughing, complaining about Aadhya trying to feed the golden retriever from her own plate.
He wanted her to have a few more weeks of peace. He would carry the terror of the future alone until the very last possible moment.
He turned his attention back to the screen.
"Data extraction and aggregation complete, sir," VEDA's voice broke the silence of the room, soft and perfectly modulated. "I have breached and compiled all current global restricted and public research regarding the molecular structure, transmission vectors, and early therapeutic hypotheses of the novel coronavirus. The library contains over fourteen thousand distinct classified and public data points and is ready for your analysis."
Deva let out a slow, heavy breath. He reached out and touched the trackpad.
He closed the open windows, clearing the screen. He opened the highly encrypted, heavily firewalled root directory of the Nexus research drive.
He didn't hesitate. He right-clicked, creating a new, entirely blank workspace.
He titled it:
CORONAVIRUS — RESEARCH
The empty folder sat there on the screen, a blank canvas representing a mountain of work that would require him to push his intellectual and physical limits further than he ever had before.
It was 2:00 AM.
The hotel was quiet. In the rooms above and below him, his teammates were fast asleep, dreaming of the next cricket match, unaware of the shadow falling over the world. Outside, the streets of Hamilton were peaceful, the streetlights reflecting off the calm river.
Inside the room, Deva sat in the glow of the monitor, staring at the empty folder.
"Shall I continue running the predictive simulations on the viral mutation rates based on the extracted Wuhan epidemiological data, sir?" VEDA asked quietly from the speakers.
Deva looked at the screen. His jaw tightened, his posture straightening in the chair. The fear and the crushing weight of the future were pushed aside, replaced by a cold, relentless determination.
"Yes," Deva said softly into the dark.
He placed his hands on the keyboard. The cursor blinked steadily on the screen.
The world was unprepared. But Siddanth Deva had already gone to war.