What if your whole world crashed on a random Tuesday?
What if all your dreams and aspirations came down to one choice?
What if both the options were death in two different ways?

At least that is what it felt like when Aarya Rao splashed down into the Arabian Sea.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

She was going to prove all of them wrong. The doctors who had told her she would never be walking again by herself. The flight schools that’d laughed at her. The engineers that’d thought her mad. Aarya wasn’t just going to fly—she’d be the first ever to ever fly. Higher, faster, above anything the human mind ever thought it could.

Now plummeting toward the cold emptiness, her neural link flickering in and out of being like the failing pulse of life, she wondered if she had flown too near the sun.

Aarya had always pushed gravity aside in every sense but the most obvious one. She was born with a unique neurological condition that caused standing up straight to be problematic for her, but otherwise she was the epitome of contradictions: the girl whose body yearned for the ground but whose spirit belonged up above.

Growing up, she always had the reassurence from her parents and friends that she was enough. She never needed to prove herself to anyone. Her parents took the best care of her. Her friends never let her out of sight, carried her stuff around in school, and helped her with school projects.
It was all from a place of love and concern, but what they failed to understand was her sheer determination to prove herself that she was enough. This thought, single-handedly, fueled her to take charge of her own life.

But safety had a tendency to feel like a cage. Every extended hand, every cautious look, and every reassuring word was like another lock on a door she wasn't supposed to open. They were trying to help; she knew that. But how could she trust that she was enough when she had never been given the chance to try? She didn't need protection—she needed proof. Evidence that she was worth helping. Evidence that she could stand, not because she had someone holding her up, but because she had determined to stand. And so she ceased to wait for approval to attempt.

She couldn't let her condition become the hero and her- the underdog.
That was the simple story—the girl who won in spite of her body, the delicate genius who battled against destiny. She hated it. Her tale wasn't one of overcoming frailty; it was one of demonstrating strength. And if the world wouldn't acknowledge it, she would inscribe her name across the sky until they had no choice.

She built a flight simulator at seventeen with scraps of metal and recycled game controls. She committed flight manuals at the age of twenty-one. She built something that should not be at the age of twenty-four: The Shruti, an aircraft that did not need hands, feet, or the precision of the perfect body but just the mind that could operate it. A ship that responded by thought alone.

The world wasn't prepared for her. The government tried shutting her down. The aerospace industry spurned her. "No license, no approvals, no way in hell," they told her.

She did the sensible thing that needed doing.

She copied her own prototype. At midnight near Pune at the old airfield, Aarya launched The Shruti into the vast unknown. No parachute. No backup. No permission. Only pure rebellion wrapped in steel and wires.

And for that fleeting moment—she was limitless.

The skies complied with her bidding, her body now aligned with the universe. Aarya cut through the atmosphere, carrying The Shruti past the boundaries of possibilities that she hadn’t expected for it. It wasn’t flight. It was redefining the rules of flight.

Then came the missile.

Because it happened that an unauthorized, unidentified flight entering restricted airspace at midnight wasn't something the Indian Air Force approved with a wink and a nod.

Aarya could either submit and allow them to shatter her vision or fade away into myth.

She chose the latter.

A dive under pressure, the ocean floor below, and the life-changing decision that would be the difference between ending up with flames—or with the peacefulness of the ocean floor.

She witnessed the stars for the last time just before impact. Never were they so close by.

They never found the wreckage.

They searched for weeks, surmising, hypothesizing, and debating. Some insisted that she drowned. Some assumed that she escaped and now led a new life with a new name, plotting her return. Some went so far as to suggest that she did the unthinkable—that The Shruti disappeared into the atmosphere, carrying with it its pilot outside the boundaries of human communication.

Then three years later came a sign.

From heights no plane has ever reached before.

One message, broadcast over the world's radios of flight:

Aarya Rao here. You were wrong.