One brain. Trying to understand itself. This is what it remembers.
est. 2008 · experiment still running
descend
00
hypothesis 001 — the skull has locked doors. find the keys.
chapter zero — the spark
I was six. I had one question.
I met Spider-Man at six. It ruined me.
A bite rewrote a body. I wanted to know what rewrites a brain.
So I ran experiments. I stared at spoons until my eyes watered. I stood at closed doors waiting to teleport through. I went looking for the edges of my own mind and kept not finding them.
Everyone said the same thing. Theories. Stories. Nothing.
I believed them anyway.
Nobody warned me that the question — what can the thing behind my eyes actually do? — was the one I would still be asking at eighteen.
The first experiment never ended. This is its lab notebook.
fig. 00 — falling into his own eye
teleportation
telekinesis
with great power…
time
01
field note — 3–4 years of watching. attendance: voluntary. perfect.
chapter one — transmission
Then a screen asked me something back.
The superpowers did not arrive. So I went looking somewhere else.
Three years. Maybe four. I sat in front of YouTube the way other kids sat in tuition — daily, intentional, taking notes nobody assigned. How things work. How things are made. How people who make things talk.
From the outside it looked like a kid wasting his childhood on the internet.
It was a mind collecting parts for a machine it did not know it was building.
The screen was the first teacher that never took attendance. Years later, a screen would be the first thing to answer me back.
fig. 01 — the screen, asking backfig. 01b — the room where screens watch back
02
A school in Silda. Then, in class five — one exam.
The Jawahar Navodaya entrance test. Thousands of village kids sit it. A handful get through.
I got through.
One afternoon of answers. The map of a whole life, quietly redrawn.
JNV
Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, Paschim Medinipur.
From the outside: a great school. A golden ticket. The thing families pray for.
I walked in through those gates carrying a head full of questions.
fig. 02 — the boy at the door
॥
Inside, it was rules where curiosity wanted room.
Hostel timetables. Permissions. Walls.
A great school from the outside. From the inside, a container.
Here is what I learned about containers. Some minds learn the shape and settle. Some minds spend years finding exactly where the container leaks.
I was the second kind.
Remember that. It matters twice.
03
observation — the machine obeyed. the spoons never did.
chapter three — first language
Class six. The first time a machine obeyed me.
<!-- class 6. then 7. then 8. then 9. --> <html> <body> my first page </body> </html>// stuck here for three years lmao
Class six. I typed my first HTML tag, hit refresh, and something I imagined appeared on a screen because I told it to.
Understand what that meant to a boy who spent his childhood trying to move spoons with his mind.
It was telekinesis that worked.
And then I got stuck.
Class six became class seven became class nine. Same tags. Three years inside one language.
That is not a boy failing to progress. That is a mind looping.
Some thoughts have to repeat a thousand times before they compile.
04
recursion, n. — a thought that thinks about itself.
chapter four — logic
Class nine. The loop finally broke open.
fig. 04 — falling into the structure
Something shifted. I went from three years of <html> to the entire C++ data-structures-and-algorithms syllabus in one school year.
Trees. Graphs. Recursion — a function that calls itself. A thought that thinks about itself.
Fifteen years old, in a hostel, filling notebooks with structures of thought.
I did not know I was doing philosophy of mind with semicolons.
Years later I built a Raft consensus engine in C++20. Production-grade, with deterministic fault injection. It stands on exactly those nights.
05
warning — this page intentionally printed dark.
chapter five — static
STATIC
This part stays in because it is true. It stays vague because the details are not the point.
The internet has basements. I had sharp skills and no direction, and I found the stairs.
Down there it glittered. Fast money. Faster people. A place where being clever was enough and being good was optional.
For a while the signal of me turned to noise.
Then one day I looked at what I was becoming.
I closed every door and walked back up the stairs. I left that logic behind. I deleted that version of myself.
Some chapters exist so the next ones mean something. This is that chapter.
fig. 05 — a head full of noise
fig. 06a — standing on his own reflectionfig. 06b — a paper boat, going nowhere
After the tenth boards I walked out of JNV with a plan that sounded perfect out loud: a new school, fewer rules, all my time for tech.
I had all that freedom. I did nothing. Really nothing. I am not going to dress it up.
the container was never the problem. the void is also a room in the mind. everyone visits. few admit it. i am admitting it.
07
status — same gates. new mind. machines began to answer.
chapter seven — awakening
I walked back through the same gates. Here the story turns.
Re-admission to JNV Paschim Medinipur. Same hostel. Same rules. The same container I once wanted out of.
The boy walking back in was not the same.
And the timing was absurd. Out in the feed, two words were spreading: ChatGPT. Claude. Machines you could talk to.
The screen from chapter one — the one I had been interrogating for years — had learned to answer.
I did not start building a career. I started building whatever made me happy. Weird tools. Small worlds. Things nobody asked for.
Read that word again. Happy.
After the basements and the void, it is the most important word here.
fig. 07 — the boy, switched on
08
acknowledgements — no mind lights itself.
chapter eight — two humans
No mind lights itself. Two people struck the match.
fig. 08 — how minds are passed on
Tapas Kumar Das
art teacher · jnv paschim medinipur
In a school built of rules, he watched me make strange, unaskable things. He did not correct me. He opened every door he had.
Time. Space. Trust. Materials. Belief. Everything a teacher can give, he gave.
Of course it was the art teacher. He was the first adult who looked at the making and saw the point of it.
Adrita Mahata
founding ai engineer · ben ai
Then a founding AI engineer walked into my world. Same Navodaya corridors. Then a track record of actually building the thing.
I sat and listened and the fog burned off. This is what AI is. This is what it can do.
Proof, standing right there, that the road from these gates leads somewhere real.
Look at what came out of one hostel kid with a laptop.
A distributed consensus engine in C++20 that I torture with deterministic fault injection, to prove it survives chaos. A pixel crab named Clawed who lives on my desktop, who later got a wife, because of course he did. Entire videos melted into living ASCII. A city you can drive through in a browser. A daily factory that writes, voices and renders cinematic reels while I sleep.
My GPU has 4GB. It laughs at the word "training." So I borrow free cloud compute and teach my own language model to speak the way my neighbourhood actually speaks — two languages mixed mid-sentence.
The boy who waited at doors to teleport now works a trainee job building AI pipelines, before his class 12 boards.
The brain that wondered about brains now builds them.
fig. 10 — a mind, settling · the script dissolves into the sitter
So no. Teleportation never worked out.
But sit with this: the six-year-old was not wrong. He was early.
The superpower was inside the skull the whole time. Every chapter here — the spoons, the screens, the tags, the trees, the basements, the void, the two humans — was one long experiment on a single machine. My own mind.
Now I study the oldest question there is. Consciousness. What it is. How it fires. Whether it can be built.
The experiment from chapter zero is still running.
You just scrolled through its lab notebook.
soundtrack of this mind · side A — titans listen to phonk
3:51 · beat synthesized + voices rendered by my own pipeline · lyrics below
STILL RUNNING — the subhajit track
[verse 1 — the spark]
six years old, staring at a spoon,
waiting on a door like it opens to the moon.
they said "beta, powers are stories" — theek hai,
but the story kept me up, and the story knew my name.
spider on the wall, question in my head:
if a bite can rewrite a body —
what rewrites a brain instead?
[verse 2 — transmission]
no cape ever came, so I turned the screen on,
four years of tutorials, tuition ke bina padhaai — on and on.
CRT glow asking "so, what do you feel?"
I feel like the answer's buried somewhere in the reel.
class six, first tag, machine ne suna mujhe —
spoons never moved, but the pixels obeyed, dhuaan sa utha.
[hook]
still running, still running, still running —
the experiment runs, it was never off.
gates of Navodaya, ink on my palms,
container leaks, and the current comes.
still running, still running —
brain that wondered about brains,
now it builds the drums.
[verse 3 — static & void]
internet ke basement, seedhiyan neeche jaati thi,
fast money glitter — par raste andhere the.
one day I looked at the mirror mid-fall,
closed every door, climbed back through it all.
then the void — freedom, aur kuch bhi nahi,
a paper boat on black water, main hi main nahi.
everyone visits that room. main admit karta hoon.
[bridge — two humans]
an art teacher opened every door he had,
said "banao beta" — first adult who understood the madness.
then a builder from the same corridors came through,
proof in the flesh: the road from these gates is true.
[verse 4 — output]
now the dam is broke — C++ mein consensus,
crab on the desktop with a wife, relentless.
videos to ASCII, cities in the browser,
4GB GPU? cloud se compute borrow.
Bengali in the model like my para speaks it,
class 12 boards aage — still I'm shipping weekly.
[outro — the headline]
newspaper pe likha tha, graffiti bold:
WHAT IF IT ALL WORKS OUT?
…what if it all works out.
still running. still running. lights on.
