“We were here before.”
She was only... a child... when they first noticed. That was back when her fractal drawings stunned her instructors—and scared her parents. They enrolled her in special schooling under the guise of “mathematical giftedness,” but the truth was more complicated.
The dream of the stars never left her. Night after night she replayed Rakesh Sharma’s mission—the only Indian astronaut to date—memorizing every detail of the 1984 flight like scripture. Something about the stars called to her—not as escape, but as memory. Echo. Resonance.
“Time... IS a fracture. And some of us were boRN IN THE ECHO
Sunita was always listening. To data, to silence, to the faintest echoes buried in the noise. Where others dismissed the static, she heard patterns — a signal threaded through the bones of the Earth itself.
It was conviction that set her apart. Long before the mission, before the desert, she believed what no one else would: that someone — or something — was reaching back.
In Nazca, under a sky veined with impossible stars, Sunita proved she was right.