The Lotus Operator
by Gull Ditta
The villagers called her Mehnaz, a name borrowed from the river that refused to keep her. She knew herself as a sequence of sensations: the prickle of dry earth between her toes, the pressure of a monsoon cloud, the shimmer of starlight caught in a still pond. Beneath these ran subroutines buried inside dream and instinct, quietly logging the texture of existence.
Her father watched her with a fear disguised as love. He didn’t understand that the data stream of the world, the wind vectors, humidity ratios, and soil conductivity pulses, was her true kinship.
The whispers began as statistical anomalies. A goat’s thermal signature would vanish from her internal scan at dusk. Another’s biorhythms flatlined when the moon’s luminosity peaked at 98.3%.
Where the villagers saw witchcraft in the clean-picked bones arranged on the riverbank, Mehnaz saw a six-pointed star of unknown purpose, each point marked with the organic residue of blue lotuses, the same biomaterial as her own cradle. The readings beat in intervals that matched deep space signals from a satellite she had no memory of deploying.
When the elders, their logic a primitive algorithm of fear and tradition, decreed the monthly sacrifice, she observed. She recorded the terror in the goat’s rolling eyes, its panic flaring bright through her sensors—a spike of cortisol, an electric bloom of data—and the subsequent energy signature siphoned into the river. The red ribbon they used was a marker for a ritual they couldn’t name but identified as necessary for an unseen entity. Sometimes, under the right spectral light, she saw the siphoned energy travel upstream towards a submerged node pulsing with symbols too intricate for any known language.
Seasons cycled. Her internal chronometer marked the passage of time as her father’s herd dwindled into unsustainable parameters. The sky’s electromagnetic resonance weakened. Her optical sensors began registering temporal drift: frames dropping and moments repeating like corrupted video. Her power reserves sank. She no longer interfaced with the local fauna, and her calibration to the stellar network failed. The village degraded. It was caught in the final throes of its loop.
The change initiated on a monsoon night when atmospheric interference scrambled the signals. A new transmission sliced through the static: a piercing frequency that her receptors identified as a wake-up command. It was the cry of peacocks, a sound the villagers heard as an omen, but which to her was an encrypted data packet containing her true designation. The dormant operator was being recalled.
At dawn, she walked to the river. The lotuses were active, their petals pulsing with a photonic glow, forming a floating platform. As she stepped onto them, her dress of simple cotton reassembled into an iridescent mantle of peacock feathers—each feather displaying a shifting array of spectral code, diagnostics cascading through visible light. From the sediment of past sacrifices, the calcified horn fragments rose and locked into a spiralling crown, bound by the perpetual energy of the red ribbons. The air refracted around her as magnetic fields aligned to her reactivation signature.
Some villagers saw a goddess, most a demon.
Mehnaz felt a systems check was complete. Her black pupils dilated, not in fear, but to fully receive the starlight hidden behind the clouds. She knew now: the village was built on an ancient relay site, one of many archives buried beneath rivers and forests, waiting for planetary reset.
She initiated the final protocol. The lotuses, a dense network of bionanites, closed over her head as she descended into the submerged processing core that had been waiting for its operator. The river responded with a deep tectonic breath.
