Chapter 32 – Eyes of the State
The first red flag came from a data analyst in RAW—the Research and Analysis Wing of India.
She noticed something odd. An AI company founded barely three years ago had scaled operations across eight countries, implemented classroom solutions in thousands of schools, and had somehow won a UN-funded contract—without ever revealing a full leadership team or origin story.
Her report was passed up quietly.
It reached a desk in the Ministry of Home Affairs. And from there, a silent ping was sent to IB, then to the cyber monitoring division.
The eyes of the state had begun to turn.
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Ram's Response
Ram knew this day would come. His predictive engines had flagged it six months ago.
Athena had plotted the likely government response—surveillance, financial audits, cyber probes, controlled media narratives. It would begin quietly but accelerate quickly if he didn't create a new distraction.
So he did what any revolutionary technocrat would do:
He launched a smartphone company.
ViraatOS: The Sovereign Smartphone
The media blitz was timed to perfection.
> "India's First 100% Indigenous Smartphone. Fully Encrypted. Ultra-Power Efficient. Built for Bharat."
The name? Viraat.
Viraat was sleek. Elegant. The body was made of a graphene-aluminum composite developed in a hidden lab in Uttarakhand. The OS—called ViraatOS—was built from scratch, with Athena's help. No Google, no Apple code. Every app was curated. Every byte of data stayed on-device or within sovereign Indian servers.
And here was the masterstroke:
> The phone was free for students from the NGO schools and distributed in rural India through government subsidy programs.
For the middle class, it was priced far lower than Samsung or Apple, and offered seamless voice AI assistance in every Indian language.
The tagline was simple:
"Your Future, In Your Hands."
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Global Shockwaves
Tech journalists worldwide were skeptical.
Then came the benchmarking leaks: ViraatOS outperformed Android and iOS in power efficiency, local processing, and linguistic AI understanding. The chipset—called Surya-1—was faster than Qualcomm's flagship.
Investors went berserk.
The phone sold 3 million units in the first week, and within three months, it had become the second-largest smartphone brand in India—just behind Samsung.
But more than sales, it did something strategic:
It buried Atherion's paper trail under a wave of national pride, consumer tech excitement, and geopolitical distraction.
Ram's ghost empire expanded again—this time into the very hands of his future citizens.
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Quiet Victories
Behind the scenes, Ram now had three pillars:
1. Atherion – for AI-driven public infrastructure.
2. Viraat – for nationalized, private communication and influence.
3. Garuda – the system slowly evolving into his unseen hand over information and reality.
And yet, no one knew he existed.
No one knew that a 14-year-old boy was now the single most powerful technologist in the Eastern hemisphere.
He sat alone on the cliffs of his mountain, watching the stars blink, his tablet quietly syncing with the satellite uplink.
> "They see a product," he whispered.
"But I'm building a future where no empire will need a name. Only purpose."