The NULLIFIER Equation

The answer is coming.
If it finds the question,
everything stops.

Complete novel · 121,960 words · 8h read

The Story

I

The Window

Dr. Ananya Nayagiri holds a single caesium atom in two states at once, under observation, for three and a half seconds. It is the result of her life. Nine kilometres away her mother has begun speaking a language she was never taught, the university has cut her lab hours, and a company with a great deal of money would like a word.

II

The Cage

The instruments are extraordinary and the contract owns everything she has ever thought. Her results start coming out impossible in a way she has no word for. Four floors above her, her brother opens a file he was not meant to find.

III

The Reckoning

For eleven minutes, the traffic in Hyderabad solves itself. Nobody on that road has seen anything like it. Cab drivers get out to look.

Ananya is the only person in the city who is frightened.

The Framework

∞ ≠ ∅

The Barriers

The walls between one order of existence and another are not physical. They are questions. A thing that has no answer takes up room, and something has to hold it open.

ॐ → ∞

The Mantras

They were never prayers. They are computations, written in a metre exact enough that an illiterate child could catch an error in it, and built deliberately never to finish. Somebody has been running them out loud for three thousand years, in shifts, and the arrangements by which they have never stopped are more interesting than the mantras.

∞ → ∅

The Nullifiers

Not invaders. Not cruel. Not conscious in any way we would recognise. You will know they are near because something difficult will suddenly be easy.

The Characters

Dr. Ananya Nayagiri

Quantum physicist · 29

Five years of being told her results were equipment error, and then one night they weren't. What makes her useful to the people who have been waiting for her is not that she is brilliant. Plenty of people are brilliant. It is that she can walk up to the edge of an answer and stop.

Dr. Sharath Jai Shetty

Chairman, Quantace Industries · 40

He was fourteen when the thing happened that he has spent twenty-three years and a great deal of other people's money trying to undo. He is the most reasonable man in the book. Every step of his argument is sound.

Vikram Nayagiri

Security analyst · 27

He has believed since he was nine that a good enough machine could answer anything. He turns out to be right, in the way you least want to be right.

The House in Hyderabad

Krishna · Lakshmi · Ajji

A mother who wakes at four every morning and calls it grief. A father in a wheelchair who has started writing something on the backs of his students' homework and has told nobody, not even his wife, and who was an orphan, and whose name is not written down anywhere at all. A grandmother who left her granddaughter a wooden chest, and everyone assumed it was books.

A page of it

"They became simple," said Acharya Vidyasagar. "Not mad. I want you to hear the difference, because you will remember this wrongly otherwise, and you are the sort of man who writes things down. They were not mad. They answered every question anybody put to them, correctly, instantly, and identically, for as long as they lived. My grandfather's brother was one of them. He was the kindest man in this valley for thirty-one years and there was nothing behind his eyes at all."

Prologue

Begin

26 chapters. 121,960 words. It ends on a question, and that is the point.

Read the manuscript

5 editions of this book exist