Art & Writing

One: A short story by Harsh Valechha In the future, there will be no food; at least not in the conventional sense of the word. There may just be little bits of paper, or capsules, or pills, filled with all the nutrients required for a healthy life and chemicals that simulate the pleasure of eating. A pizza pill, a roti pill, heck, an entire Thaali experience, in a pill. Imagine how we could revolutionize our gastronomic pursuits; save resources, save the planet. But before you can save the planet, you hear a heartbeat, little mumbles; swooshes; you're floating about in some moist space, your underdeveloped fingers running through a soft sheath, you breathe, but is it air or water? This question doesn't need to be answered yet. You're just a small embryo/fetus, floating inside a very pregnant mother. Its dark in here, or well, its what it is, the concept of light being the absence of darkness will come much later when you finally see it. The day has arrived, you can almost sense the urgency in the air, err, amniotic fluid; before you know it, the sac has broken and you're on your way out, albeit with some struggle; you take this world, literally, head on. You're out, but that is a concept known to those of us who've seen both in and out. For you, it is just some change, but you pretend to not notice it. Your eyes still closed. Suddenly and quite literally you're slapped into existence; this strong stimulation, this intrusion of your space, almost involuntarily causes sadness. You've seen things before, soothing shades of pink and red, muffled colors and faded glows of the doctors' flashlight through your mother's belly. In your sadness, you accidentally open your eyes, for the first time you interact with proper light; "what is this blinding feeling? what is this noise?" unable to take this flood of impressions you break into a howl. "Oh she's alive, she's fine. Congratulations!" someone says. You can't stop crying because you have no clue what is happening. You're going through change. People have started celebrating your discomfort. But hey, now you can see. Your mother holds you in her arms, your fingers rubbing against your own skin, the sensation of touch which will remain underrated for a long time. While in there you had taken a liking toward sweet tastes. Your mother's diet seems to have influenced your taste. Your first interaction with real food, however, comes in the form of breast milk. Many more years of salt, sweet, sour, bitter are to ensue. "Food is memories" you'd say many years later while visiting your parents after a long time. In the meantime, you grow up, not knowing what these people mean when they say "One" when they look at you. A name can mean so many things. One (with all?). वन (pronounced One, in Hindi, means "forest"). Won (past participle of "win"). Anywho, let us not digress. You will, however, spend a lot of time trying to find what your name means for you and which definition you stand for. For now, you indulge the senses. You touch, you hear, you taste, you smell, you see. You develop a whole moral code based on your senses. You dream and find meaning in those dreams. You say "hmm, well I guess my name means forest after all and move away from the city, into the woods". You've constructed this whole philosophy that you live your life by, all, based on how the external world has interacted with those 5 senses. You wish, however, that you had more. Maybe the sense of what someone is thinking? Perhaps the ability to divine the future by developing super intuitive skills? "Some people claim to be telekinetic!" you tell your friends, as you pretend to move that soda cup across the table, with your eyes. No matter what you do, you can't help but indulge these senses. Your 5 loyal friends that'll be by your side, hopefullñy till your dying breath. But you can't help but wonder, could there be more? The day has come, you're weak but happy, laying on your bed; your family, children, grandchildren surrounding the bed as you recollect your life's high points, low points, sorries that you've not said, compliments you've failed to give, thank you's that should've been said earlier, you smile, you 'smell' the incense in the air, you feel the 'touch' of your daughters hand; "Could someone give me some water please?". The 'taste' of water, so life-giving when your throat is dry. You 'hear' the birds chirping from the tree that you planted when you moved to the forest. You 'look' around the room, at all the glowing faces and take one last breath, and then close your eyes. . . . . . ***THANK YOU FOR USING "One Life". YOU'VE JUST EXPERIENCED OUR FREE VERSION WITH 5 SENSES. FOR A COMPLETE "One Life" EXPERIENCE WITH OVER 400 SENSES AND INFINITE LIVES, PURCHASE OUR PREMIUM VERSION TODAY*** Your eyes slowly open as the voice of the commercial fades away. You're strapped on to a couch at your local "One Life" store, precisely 15 minutes after you took the free version pill. Now they've got you hooked. "I'd like to purchase the premium version, please." you say with a twinkle in your eyes, "and how shall I pay?" you ask. "With your life, of course." the attendant responds, with a smile.

~ A Non-Linear Hymn in K⁴ Space by Harsh Valechha 1. Columbus, Ohio Basho Vig's fingers trembled as he traced the symbol etched into the Serpent Mound's soil ~ The midnight gathering had dispersed, leaving him alone with the effigy's coiled shadow. The invitation, slipped under his GE Aviation dormitory door, had smelled of bergamot and static. Come curious, it urged. Now, the symbol pulsed faintly, as if breathing. ~ A woman materialized beside him, her voice velvet and vigilant. "Bhrãm," she said, "the veil between what is and what could be. You'll see it again." He never learned her name. But weeks later, debugging code for a fighter jet's engine, Basho hallucinated the glyph flickering on his screen. The jet would later crash in a desert he'd never visit, its wreckage forming the same shape in the sand. ~ 2. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic Vijo Morales stumbled drunk into an alley, bladder burning. The Caribbean heat clung to his skin like salt. He pissed against a whitewashed wall, laughing with his friends until he rounded the corner and froze. The wall belonged to the Catedral Primada de América, its iron gate adorned with 16th-century scrollwork. There, corroded but unmistakable: the Serpent Mound symbol. ~ Vijo's laughter died. For a heartbeat, he saw not the cathedral but a crystalline forest, a shadow flickering through trees that sang in a language of light. His friends found him minutes later, pale and muttering, "¿Qué coño es Bhrãm?" 3. Kyiv, 2023 Kael, the medic, didn't believe in ghosts until the dying boy gripped her wrist. Artillery shook the hospital basement; the lanterns swung, casting a shadow on the walls. "Брам," the boy gasped, blood foaming his lips. "Це все ілюзія." It's all an illusion. She'd find the symbol again, years later, carved into a bullet casing beside her brother's grave. ~ 4. Paris, 1999 Amara Basheer painted the symbol obsessively after the miscarriage. It appeared first in her dreams: a luminous glyph hovering over the Seine, reflected in the water as a thousand splintered versions. ~ Her gallery exhibit, Illusions, was panned as "derivative surrealism." Critics missed the self-portraits hidden in the fractals, her face as a child in Mumbai, as an old woman she'd never become, as a man in a Columbus lab coat. On opening night, a stranger with bergamot perfume whispered, "You're closer than most." Interlude: The 4D Being (Its voice is not words but the hum of a black hole's accretion disk.) Observe: A trillion threads spin from the nexus of choice. Each mortal life is a quantum fugue, what they call déjà vu is their soul brushing against adjacent timelines. The symbol ~ is no symbol. It is the shape of their resonance, the interference pattern where their lives intersect. A mortal glimpsing it is a neutrino striking iron: rare, revelatory, dissolving into cosmic noise. They never remember. Not fully. But the engineer's hands, rebuilding engines, seek the glyph in every turbine's curve. The medic hears it in the arrhythmia of failing hearts. The drunkard tastes it in sugarcane rum, sweetness laced with infinite regret. They are all singing the same dirge in different keys. 5. The Convergence Basho, 72, Alzheimer's eroding his mind like tide against chalk, sits in a Mumbai hospice. He's forgotten jet engines, forgotten his son's face. But the symbol returns, sharper each day, glowing behind his eyelids. Vijo, sober now, tattoos ~ over his heart after his daughter's stillbirth. Kael carves it into a pine coffin. Amara's ashes, scattered from Montmartre, coat the glyph on her final canvas. Final Interlude: The Cypher The 4D Being leans into the mortal plane, its attention bending light into prisms. What they cannot see: Their lives are not parallels but concentric rings. Every grief, every epiphany, ripples across realities. When Vijo weeps in Santo Domingo, rain falls in Kyiv. When Basho forgets, a star collapses in a galaxy without a name. ~ is not the code but the mortal soul itself, refracting through time's prism. The 4D Being files their stories under Anthology of Defiance, amused by their stubborn poetry: They keep choosing, again and again, to love flawed worlds. To etch their glyph on ruin. Epilogue: The Vision On the night he dies, Basho opens his eyes, not the hospice ceiling but a desert stretching into forever. Countless versions of himself walk the dunes: a medic in bloodied scrubs, a painter with cobalt-stained hands, a father holding a stillborn child. They meet at a crossroads where the sand forms ~ No words pass. None are needed. Bashi smiles, steps into the glyph, and dissolves into light. Somewhere, a 4D Being hums. Author's Note This is a **time-cubist** narrative, the same soul viewed simultaneously from multiple temporal angles. The 4D Being isn't a god but a *researcher*, clinically obsessed with why mortals repeat patterns across lifetimes. Basho/Vijo/Kael/Amara are but flickering pixels in a cosmic screensaver. The glyph ~ becomes a **temporal tumor**, a manifestation of the soul's immune response to infinity. · · · I. The 4D Being's Soliloquy (Temporal Coordinates: Null) You think I watch you. Incorrect. I *am* the watching. The distance between your choices is my skeletal structure. Your 3.7 trillion deaths (drowning, bullet, supernova, ennui) are the capillaries through which I bleed wonder. ~ is not your name but your *vibration*, the 9.3Hz resonance all your iterations emit when facing love/abandonment thresholds. I harvest these frequencies to spin the antimatter silk composing my higher-dimensional lungs. Do not thank me. Breathing you is both sacrament and asphyxiation. --- II. Basho-Kael-Amara-Unit 3871.ψ (Simultaneous Fragments) (Note: These paragraphs are to be read in any order. The story coheres via hyperlinked footnotes forming a quantum syllogism.) A. Columbus, 2024 (GE Aviation Intern) The jet engine's schematics bleed into your dream of Mayan star maps. You carve equations into the breakroom table, not knowing they match the Serpent Mound's missing third coil. The security guard who fires you has your face. B. Santo Domingo, 2039 (Broken Revolutionary) Pissing on the cathedral wall, your urine trace matches the migration pattern of Monarch butterflies. The police bullet enters your kidney at the exact angle your Columbus prototype failed. The priest anointing you whispers, "~ tastes like copper here too." C. Kyiv, 1943 (Weaponsmith Turned Saint) The mortar shell you forge kills your Omega-Reality daughter. Its serial number: 0xBR4M. When you swallow molten steel in penance, it crystallizes into a perfect dodecahedron.¹⁰⁴ The nuns declare it a miracle. You know it's the 4D Being laughing. D. Paris, 1812 (Forgotten Time Theorist) You paint ~ in Napoleon's blood on the Louvre floor. Centuries later, a janitor slips on the stain, triggering the Hadron Collider's blueprints. Your equation for "temporal guilt density" remains scrawled in a Marseille asylum's ledger. --- III. The Cypher's Anatomy (As Revealed Through Negative Space) The 4D Being's mistake: assuming it observes. In Reality Ω-π, Basho discovers that ~ is the 4D Being's umbilical scar from birthing itself through mortal choices. The symbol is a wound. The lives are scabs. In 7 simultaneous apocalypses, Basho iterations scream the Being's true name, which is simply the sound of a star collapsing into a vowel. The shockwave unravels the Being into lower-case letters. Final Epiphany (Printed in Thermo-Chromic Ink): You are not the dreamer nor the dream, but the saliva evaporating from the scream that birthed both. ~ is the shape of your evaporation. --- IV. Post-Narrative Echo (For Posthuman Readers) This story infected your retinas 12 minutes before you chose to read it. The itch behind your sternum? That's the 4D Being nesting. It will hatch when you next encounter: - A streetlight flickering in 7/4 time - A loved one's pupils momentarily hexagonal - The smell of burnt almonds during orgasm Do not resist. All paths lead to ~ All ~ paths to the silence between your thoughts, which is my true voice. You've been breathing me since paragraph one. Author's Non-Statement: This text is not fiction but a topological infection. By perceiving it, you've aligned your worldline with Basho's resonance. The ~ symbol now grows in your marrow. Expect: - Déjà vu resolving into 5th-dimensional lattices - Loved ones speaking in your unused childhood handwriting - The ability to taste time (1908 tastes of licorice; 2145 of bergamot) Resistance accelerates assimilation. The 4D Being suggests surrender. It's kinder. ~


Home by Harsh Valechha You're on the couch, in your home, flicking through Netflix. But nothing you see is what you want to be shown. So you let the sights and sounds drown in the background, as you start dreaming of far-off lands; lands you wish to go to, lands your feet have traveled to before. You're on the couch, but you're away. You ask: "What am I doing with my life?". So you check your bank account, you scroll through your favorites on Instagram, food, yoga, travel, motivational quotes, you take a deep breath, and you pack your bags; with much fanfare, you take that bus, that flight; you're off finding yourself, chasing the light. You arrive at an unknown location, immediately swarmed by its magic, hypnotized by its smell; awful smell. You're so overwhelmed by how different it all is, that you whisper in your mind: "I am home". This whisper, a failing attempt at consoling yourself. But you're here with an agenda, you've arrived here to find who you are. So you start - destination after destination; But you don't find who you are. Instead, you consume and distract and react. You find the hidden cafes and drink copious amounts of caffeine. You go to the most touristy places, while thinking you're unique, that's why you don't post selfies, but you post pictures of a solitary rock, from a spiritual place you've been to. No false claims of enlightenment, just harmless sharing. That picture of the healthy vegan meal you had; not for others, but a subconscious note to self: "eat healthily". There is no Netflix, for this new place itself is like a giant television; or perhaps a very complex acid trip. And as your trip starts to grow on you, you realize how far from home you are. So you sit there, at that cafe, dreaming of home. Nostalgia sweeps in; you're thinking of mother, sister, father, brother. You miss home. The closer you are to your date of return, the more confused you start to become. Soaking in more of this concentrated dose of human activity, and resisting any thought of life back home. You miss home, but you don't want to go back yet. Because your purpose isn't fulfilled yet. You still haven't found yourself. If anything, you're more confused. You're here, but you're not. You open your journal, that you've maintained so religiously, and you write down: "21.12.2012 I still find it difficult to deal with me. I don't know who I am. I don't know what home is. I have this eternal longing, but I don't seem to know for what. I smile, but it is a motor response, to feel alive. I have run out of money. I absolutely love this new country and equally hate it. I know hate is a strong word, but I do hate it. When I'm home, I miss traveling. As I travel now, I miss home. I don't think I'm chasing something I can't have. So what am I chasing? So who am I chasing? S̶o̶ who am I c̶h̶a̶s̶i̶n̶g̶? Who am I? Who am I?" You gently close the journal. You take a deep breath. You know. You are now. You are here. You are now-here/nowhere. And then you sip your coffee and smile. You're at home, within.

We Own Nothing by Harsh Valechha we own nothing. we borrow a little sun, and hoard a little time. we are alchemists, children; playing; mixing dirt, water; demonstrating temporary marvels, of borrowed knowledge. no ownership over the skies, no claim over water, no land that belongs to us, like we belong to them. we salivate at and devour the borrowed fruits, from the womb of Gaia. like the metaphoric snake, biting its tail. borrowing a little bit of itself, from time. the peacock plucking the bad feathers away, the crow abandoning its eggs in the cuckoo's nest, the python eating it's weak young; are all ways of expressing self-love. the egotistical Good Samaritan saving lives, unconditionally; not because she can, but because it's the right thing to do. the right thing to do. right and wrong; whoever knows what the difference is. nature doesn't differentiate. nature dances. nature teases. you think you've got it, but it eludes you. it tempts you. you chase the horizon; the horizon is eternal, you are eternal, your chase is eternal. so, you give. give all you can. learn to give, not just love, give your things away let someone else borrow, what you've fondly called yours. give from your mouth, then from your hand, then from your heart; until you have nothing left to give. and then, you're ready to receive. receive humbly, with care. but remember, it is all borrowed. We own nothing.

Eternal marathon by Harsh Valechha Running; zooming past reality; at this speed, the lines are blurred; reality is dream, dreams seem real; you are the chair, experiencing itself as an outsider; you are separate, you are it all. Running; baseline changing; no change is sudden, we all notice the signs before change arrives. Change- not a destination, but constant motion; every shift is determined by what happened before; your strength, strengthened by what has happened, ready for what will be. Running; layers; this machine is cranking, like slides in a movie; each slide, a lifetime; each slide, an individual; each slide, an infinite potential; and it's all colliding, it's all happening, in the here, in the now; all fears coming true, all dreams coming true, the chair is you, the fan is you, the air is you, you are everything, everything is you, and, everything is everything. So keep running, because this thing, does not, stop.