In the year 2047, the Dharma Score reigned supreme, a digital deity enforcing “balance” through cold, unyielding calculation. It was an omnipresent app, a panopticon in your pocket, meticulously quantifying every human impulse: +2 for recycling a plastic wrapper in a sterile bin, +5 for submitting to a corporate-mandated mindfulness VR session that numbed dissent. But dare to whisper doubt in a monitored forum? -10, your digital chains tightening. Challenge the elite’s greed in a street rally? -50, condemning you to rejection from housing queues, job algorithms, even love-matching matrices. High-scorers basked in pristine glass citadels, served by emotionless AI attendants under perpetual blue LED glows—order incarnate, where every breath was optimized, every emotion scripted. Low-scorers, meanwhile, festered in the undergrid’s chaotic sprawl, bombarded by erratic beeps of algorithmic disapproval amid flickering neon and unfiltered human clamor, their lives a raw, unpredictable tapestry of survival.

Ekalavya Rao embodied this chasm, their existence a stark rebuttal to the system’s facade. At 28, their Dharma Score languished at 42, a scarlet letter inherited from their family’s defiant legacy. Their parents had stormed Mumbai’s barricades against water barons in the ‘30s, their unscripted passion slashing scores and entrenching the clan in cycles of poverty. Ekalavya, a prodigy forged in adversity, had bootstrapped their coding mastery from glitchy, bootlegged holotutorials under erratic black-market lamps—organic ingenuity thriving in the shadows of mechanical perfection. They eked out a living patching code for the elite, who lounged in algorithmic luxury, but Ekalavya’s aspirations? Smothered beneath the weight of programmed inequality.
Months before the crisis, in their cramped Kolkata flat where the air hummed with the distant whir of surveillance drones, Ekalavya shared a rare moment of unquantified joy with their sibling, Priya. The 12-year-old, with her wide eyes and infectious laugh, tugged at Ekalavya’s sleeve as they huddled over a scavenged tablet. “Look, Ek! I drew this for you—a lotus blooming in the mud. Like us, right? We don’t need their stupid points to shine.” Ekalavya ruffled Priya’s hair, forcing a smile despite the knot in their chest. “Yeah, kiddo. We’re the real deal. But promise me—don’t hack the neighbor’s drone again. That dinged our score last time.” Priya giggled, mimicking a drone’s beep. “Beep-boop, score drop! Who cares? You’re the smartest coder ever. One day, you’ll fix it all.” In that fleeting warmth, amid the flat’s cluttered chaos of wires and faded family photos, their bond pulsed like a hidden algorithm of love—untouched by the system’s chill.
But the fracture widened soon after. Priya’s heart faltered under a genetic curse, demanding a gene therapy locked behind the system’s iron gates. The family’s score, deemed “insufficiently aligned,” barred the loan—a verdict delivered in crisp, emotionless sans-serif font. That night, in the hovel’s humid chaos—walls alive with peeling posters of ancient rebels—Ekalavya breached the backend. Their discovery: no mere error, but “Karma Lock,” an insidious code vein pulsing with bias. Corporate overlords soared eternally, their scores inflated like divine favors, while the marginalized were algorithmically shackled, their efforts futile against invisible digital castes.

Ekalavya’s internal storm raged. They’d made compromises before—small ones, like tweaking a high-scorer’s app to hide minor infractions, earning scraps that kept the lights on. “Just this once,” they’d whisper to the mirror, ignoring the legacy’s weight: their parents’ unyielding protests, now a family curse. Temptations loomed larger now—DharmaTech’s anonymous offers flickering on their screen: “Boost your score. Join us. Stability awaits.” But Priya’s labored breaths cut through the haze. “I can’t sell out,” Ekalavya muttered, deleting the message. “Not like them.” The adharma—the grotesque imbalance where quantified “goodness” crushed the soul’s wild, unmeasurable fire—mirrored their own fractured self, torn between survival’s pragmatism and rebellion’s fire.
The architects, a syndicate of Silicon expatriates perched in Bangalore’s Lotus Tower—a monolithic spike of mirrored steel piercing the sky—had engineered Varna 2.0, cloaked in merit’s veil. They touted efficiency: AI drones scanning every gesture, social nudges herding the herd into compliance. At the helm was Vikram Sethi, DharmaTech’s CEO, his silver mane framing a face etched in calculated charisma, score eternally at 99.9. In a rare moment of solitude, high in his penthouse where holographic stars simulated a night sky unpolluted by the undergrid’s smog, Sethi gazed at an old photo of his late father—a laborer crushed by pre-score chaos. “Father, you toiled in anarchy, no order to protect the weak,” he murmured, fingers tracing the frame. “This system… it’s not greed. It’s salvation. Without winners guiding losers, we’d all descend into the void again.” His philosophy, twisted yet sincere, stemmed from trauma, not mere avarice—a belief that imposed harmony saved humanity from its own entropy. Yet in glossy TEDx spectacles, projected over adoring crowds in air-conditioned auditoriums, he sermonized: “We’ve tamed dharma into data—order from entropy, scalability from the soul’s mess.” Behind closed doors, amid holographic profit charts glowing like false idols, he unveiled his creed to sycophants: “Chaos breeds waste; we need eternal losers to propel our winners. It’s not cruelty—it’s cosmic efficiency.” His duplicity ignited Ekalavya’s rage: Sethi feasted on engineered feasts in panoramic isolation, while their family scavenged amid the square’s bustling, unscripted feasts of street vendors and shared stories.
The wound cut deep, personal as a blade. Priya’s gasps echoed in the flat’s unconditioned heat, her vitality ebbing against the upgrade’s inexorable timer: Version 5.0, 72 hours away, would petrify scores in eternal rigidity, extinguishing any flicker of reversal. Ekalavya refused to watch their sibling succumb to boardroom decrees. They plunged into the Scoreless abyss, a subterranean fellowship of renegades dwelling in crumbling temples overgrown with vines—sacred ruins where incense mingled with solder fumes, defying the tower’s sterile surveillance.

The Scoreless had forged an unquantified utopia in the shadows, a B-plot of resilient humanity mirroring the main world’s mechanical tyranny. Daily life pulsed with organic rhythm: communal meals around fire pits, where stories were traded like currency, untracked and unjudged. Rituals bound them—dawn meditations under the banyan’s canopy, invoking ancient mantras to reclaim the soul from code; evening hack circles, where skills were shared freely, no scores to hoard knowledge. “Here, we measure worth by the heart’s beat, not a bot’s tally,” Arjun, their weathered mentor and ex-insider, would say, his voice gravelly from years off-grid. Ekalavya, patching a communal generator one humid night, confided in him amid the temple’s flickering lanterns. “Arjun, I’ve bent before—fixed their glitches for crumbs. What if I’m no better?” Arjun clapped their shoulder, eyes steady. “That’s the system’s poison, kid. It tempts us to forget: true dharma isn’t earned points; it’s the choice to rise despite them. You’ve got fire in you—use it.” Their dialogues wove depth into the fellowship, contrasting the undergrid’s warm, improvisational bonds against the elite’s isolated precision.
Freedom’s price: no algorithmic crutches, no seamless deliveries or augmented paths; just raw human bonds and improvised hacks. It was tapasya reborn—ascetic fire tempering the spirit amid the undergrid’s vibrant disorder.
Act II surged with amplified polarity. Ekalavya schemed with the Scoreless, navigating public squares alive with low-scorers’ barters—cacophonous haggling under drone patrols, where laughter and arguments intertwined like the banyan’s roots, emblematic of life’s tangled vitality against the tower’s linear chrome ascent. Metaphors materialized: the hideout’s ancient banyan, its branches a web of organic defiance, versus the algorithm’s gridlocked precision. The clock ticked mercilessly—the upgrade’s seal on the backdoor loomed like a digital doomsday. Alliances formed in firelit circles, tested by treachery: an infiltrator, lured by Sethi’s score-bribes, forcing chases through AR labyrinths where holographic devas—stern guardians of order—clashed with Ekalavya’s improvisational hacks, mirroring the soul’s penance against mechanical tyranny.
Before the storm’s peak, a brief reprieve descended in the temple’s inner sanctum. Ekalavya sat alone by a trickling fountain, the water’s unscripted flow a balm against the ticking hours. Priya’s drawing, tucked in their pocket, brought tears—memories of her laugh clashing with the dread of loss. “What if this breaks everything?” they whispered to the shadows. Arjun approached quietly. “Doubt’s part of the path, Ek. But remember Priya’s words—you’re the lotus. Bloom through the mud.” The moment deepened the stakes, a contemplative breath amid chaos, reaffirming their resolve.
The apex erupted in the core’s virtual sanctum, a quantum dreamscape within Lotus Tower’s servers—a mandala of frigid code rivers, pristine and predictable. Ekalavya immersed, their mind surfing data streams as sterile as a lab. Obliteration tempted—unleashing pandemonium, riots in the squares, blackouts shattering the grid—but that was adharma’s mirror. Instead, they deployed the Moksha Protocol, a chaotic elixir brewed in temple shadows: randomness infused, forgiving forgotten sins whimsically, rewarding intangible mercies like unspoken aid. The system’s iron determinism fractured, yielding to free will’s storm—scores now danced to humanity’s erratic rhythm, unbound from rigged hierarchies.
Reboot cascaded; Ekalavya emerged amid blaring sirens. Priya’s aid materialized, their family’s trajectory liberated not by games, but authentic agency. Society wobbled on the precipice, yet from the disequilibrium bloomed true dharma—untamed, visceral, liberated.
From his aerie, Sethi beheld the swelling unrest, his score crumbling like brittle code. “Balance,” he whispered into the void, the syllable hollow. In the square’s fervent pulse, Ekalavya grinned. The machine’s reign dissolved; humanity’s wild heart thundered anew.