The Price of Power
Ram had watched the global race for 5G with quiet amusement. Corporations and governments were pouring billions into building towers, laying cables, and licensing spectrum—all while fighting legal wars over who would control the infrastructure of the future.
But Ram had already seen the true path back in 2035.
Wired infrastructure? Vulnerable.
Urban towers? Expensive.
The real revolution wasn't on the ground.
It was above it.
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Project Vyomnet: India's First 4G Satellite Mesh
At a hidden aerospace campus near Dehradun, engineers worked under pseudonyms. Every contract was compartmentalized. No single team knew the full scope.
What they were building looked like a commercial CubeSat initiative—small, inexpensive satellites capable of orbiting at low altitudes. But buried in their cores were custom communication chips designed by Ram himself.
> Atherion-encoded
Viraat-synced
Athena-managed
These satellites didn't need massive ground stations. They communicated directly with Viraat smartphones. Each phone, by design, had a chip that could sync to Vyomnet—a high-orbit mesh of 4G satellites, creating global coverage without a single telecom tower.
And then he flipped the switch.
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The Launch
Ram coordinated with ISRO under the guise of a private research payload. No one questioned a tech NGO helping with disaster recovery communications. It sounded noble.
But once the fourth Vyomnet satellite was live, something changed.
Suddenly, students in Ladakh could stream educational videos without buffering.
Farmers in Madhya Pradesh were able to check market prices in real-time.
And most importantly, the Viraat phone was no longer tied to any telco network.
Ram had unplugged his empire from the rest of the world's control systems.
India was now the first country on Earth with a public-accessible, independent 4G satellite internet system—built entirely by a shadow empire no one knew existed.
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The World Reacts
At first, the tech giants dismissed it. "Small scale," they said. "Unsustainable."
Then came the shock: Vyomnet's compression algorithm—coded by Athena—allowed it to deliver 4G speeds at half the power and bandwidth needed by ground-based 5G systems.
And it wasn't geo-locked. Phones in Kenya, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka that ran ViraatOS suddenly had full bars in the middle of nowhere.
Investors began to whisper:
> "Did India just leapfrog the world?"
Telecom lobbyists panicked.
China's Ministry of Science and Tech flagged it as a "strategic threat." The U.S. NSA opened an investigation into how encryption was suddenly uncrackable on Viraat networks.
But no one could find the source.
Because the name "Ram" was nowhere in the paper trail.
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In the Shadows
At 2 a.m., in the heart of the Himalayas, Ram stood beneath the stars, watching a new satellite wink into view.
Next to him stood one of his Minions—bio-robotic, humanoid, and indistinguishable from a real person. It handed him tea.
> "Do you think they're scared?" the Minion asked.
Ram smiled faintly. "Not yet. Right now, they're curious. Scared comes next."
He looked down at his tablet. Athena displayed live stats:
42% of rural India now covered by Vyomnet
6 million Viraat phones active
312 blacklisted satellites trying to intercept Viraat traffic—all blocked
He turned back to the sky.
> "The ground is theirs," he whispered.
"But the sky? That's mine now."
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