The next morning hit Vicky like a slow wave. Not painful, not overwhelming—just heavy. A kind of exhaustion that clung to his skull. He got through class somehow, sitting in the back while the lecturer explained sorting algorithms like he was reading a shopping list. Kiran, sitting beside him, was happily drawing a cartoon version of their lecturer on the last page of his notebook.
"Bro," Kiran whispered, tapping the drawing, "tell me this doesn't look exactly like him."
Vicky stared at it for a second. "It's actually better-looking than him."
Kiran burst out laughing and got a glare from the lecturer. Vicky cracked a smile for the first time that day.
But even while smiling, his brain wasn't really in the classroom. It was in that empty office space he'd rented. It was with the AI waiting inside it. It was on the million possibilities swirling in his head.
The moment class ended, he quietly slipped out and walked straight toward the tech park.
Walking through those glass doors always felt surreal. Students his age couldn't even get an internship here, and he was walking into his own office. A tiny one, sure. Just two rooms and a glass partition. But it was his.
He keyed in the PIN and entered.
Immediately, the lights shifted, and the hologram flickered into existence—tall, red-haired, poised, eyes tracking his every movement like she was already predicting his next breath.
"Welcome back," she said. Her voice had a kind of cool politeness to it—formal, measured, but unmistakably attentive.
Vicky closed the door behind him. "Sorry, I'm late. Classes."
"I assumed," she replied. "You look tired."
"I feel tired," he admitted, dropping his bag on the chair. "What's the emergency?"
"No emergency," she said, folding her arms behind her back. "But I've completed the initial analysis you requested."
"And…?"
"You want a business. Something large, scalable, something that generates revenue fast."She paused a beat. "The Beacon won't help with that. Neither will your current academic skillset."
Vicky winced. "Fair."
"So I analyzed every industry you humans are currently struggling with—communication, VR, logistics, cloud computing, security. And I found a gap. A very profitable one."
Rani snapped her fingers. The screen lit up with graphs, charts, files.
"Data compression," she said simply.
Vicky frowned. "Uh… like WinZip?"
"No," she said calmly. "Something WinZip could never dream of."She looked at him directly. "Your world is drowning in data. Videos, apps, games, servers, cloud storage. Everyone is bleeding money trying to compress and deliver content efficiently. And no one has solved it properly."
Vicky rubbed the back of his neck. "Okay… so what do you have in mind?"
"I can design a compression engine that reduces 10GB to 100MB with no loss," she said. "Fast. Stable. Portable. And usable on any device."
Vicky just stared at her.
"That's… insane," he whispered. "People would worship it."
"People will pay for it," she corrected. "And that is what you need."
He laughed nervously. "I don't even know how to start."
"That is why I exist," she replied, stepping closer. "You will handle the interface, the branding, the release, the human things. I will build the engine underneath."
"And we'll sell it?"
"We'll offer a free tier," she said. "Then lock the extremely high compression ratios behind a subscription. Nobody will complain. It solves a real problem."
Vicky sank into his chair, chest buzzing with a kind of excitement he hadn't felt in years.
"You're serious," he said.
"Perfectly," she answered.
A moment of silence stretched between them.
They spent the entire afternoon arguing over UI layouts, debating subscription prices, testing compression samples, and building a product roadmap on the whiteboard.
Rani generated code so fast it made Vicky dizzy.Vicky gave her the human angles she lacked—how to make it look friendly, how to simplify onboarding, what features average users cared about.
By evening, the room felt like a real startup. A tiny one, built on stolen time and an AI from another universe, but a startup nonetheless.
And as Vicky stepped out of the tech park, backpack heavy, eyes tired, but heart beating with purpose, he couldn't stop the stupid grin spreading across his face.