STEP INTO THE WORLD OF LAVANYA
Read selected passages from this science-fiction journey into the year 2144, where humanity’s relationship with life, nature, and its own existence has profoundly changed.
BEFORE YOU BEGIN
This preview was created to introduce you to the world of LAVANYA, the perfected order of life in 2144, the first movement Lavanya encounters beyond the system, and the central conflict of the story.
It contains selected passages that preserve the flow of the narrative rather than the complete novel. At certain transitions, you will find brief omissions intended to avoid revealing events that unfold later in the book.
Now we enter a world where the human lifespan has been extended, but the desire to live has disappeared.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
LAVANYA was born while I was reflecting on how the connection a person forms with life begins within the body.
While writing this novel, I focused less on describing the technology of the future and more on how humanity’s relationship with technology shapes life itself. I considered what people might lose in a world where pain, uncertainty, and risk have been eliminated, and how the body, mind, and consciousness might grow apart when choices are entrusted to another system.
LAVANYA was not written as a story that tells people what they should do. It emerged as a space of experience in which every reader can observe what is taking place within their own life.
As you read, simply notice the movement arising within you: What does your body sense? Which scene makes you pause? As you approach each character, do you feel curiosity, discomfort, anger, enthusiasm, or relief?
Because the continuation of this story is not found only in the next chapter. It also continues wherever the reader is living.
Nalan Kahraman
Kuşadası, 2026
CHAPTER 1 — SIGN OF LIFE
By 2144, people no longer aged.
Every 180 days, their bodies entered a cycle of cellular renewal. Damaged tissues were replaced, and organs were restored to their original biological age. Bones were strengthened before they could break, the slightest irregularity in heart rhythm was detected by the Central System, and memory loss was repaired during sleep.
Death had taken its place in the historical archives as an old technical problem humanity had solved.
No one was afraid of death.
No one felt any desire to live, either.
While the human body was preserved with flawless precision, unexpected impulses arising from life, personal choices, and behaviors whose outcomes could not be calculated in advance had gradually diminished. People relied on the Central System’s assessments to learn when to rest, how much nourishment to consume, which tasks they could perform most efficiently, and with whom they should share a living environment.
Making choices was considered unnecessary.
Because the system produced more accurate outcomes than any person could choose for themselves.
Located on the 142nd floor of the Livara Region, the Central Experience Archive was one of the structures in which there was no distinction between morning and night. The building’s exterior changed color according to the light of the sky, while its inner corridors were maintained at temperatures suited to the biological rhythms of the employees. Every detail required to make people feel comfortable had been calculated in advance.
As a result, no one entering the building ever felt cold, perspired, or experienced discomfort in their surroundings.
The corridors were silent. The vibrations created as feet touched the floor were absorbed, doors opened before anyone approached them, and workstations changed shape according to each person’s spinal structure.
The body no longer needed to adapt to its environment.
The environment adapted to the body.
Everything was perfect.
NONFUNCTIONAL EXPERIENCE REMNANTS
Lavanya sat alone in the scanning room at the lowest level of the archive.
Personal records from past centuries flowed across the transparent screen before her. Her task was to examine the unstructured data left behind by human lives, identify records that made no contribution to biological development, and mark them for deletion from the central memory.
People’s arguments, unrequited love, financial struggles, fear of failure, family resentments, sleepless nights, and personal thoughts that led nowhere were collected in this section.
The Center classified all these records under a single category:
Nonfunctional Experience Remnants.
These remnants were not regarded merely as unproductive memories. According to the Central System, allowing personal sensations to guide one’s response to a situation, evaluating options through individual judgment, and emotionally participating in the outcome created unnecessary fluctuations.
Emotions could alter outcomes, sensations could disrupt the planned direction of movement, and individual choices could cause deviations from the behavioral order predicted by the system.
For this reason, throughout humanity’s development, risks had first been reduced, uncertainty had then been eliminated, and finally, behavior had been organized according to outcomes.
People no longer had to think about what to do.
Nor did they need to consider what they felt.
Lavanya had been doing the same work for seven years.
Every morning, she underwent a body scan, drank the nutritional fluid prescribed by the Central System, and settled into her workstation. She examined, coded, and deleted the records that appeared before her.
Today had begun no differently.
An image from the year 2089 opened on the screen. A man sat alone in his living room, repeating the words he had been unable to say in a relationship that had ended forty-three years earlier.
Lavanya scanned the man’s facial movements, breathing rhythm, and muscle tone. The assessment appeared on the right side of the screen.
Biological contribution: 0.02
Social contribution: 0.00
Effect on lifespan: Unmeasurable
Recommended action: Delete
Lavanya touched the image with her finger.
The man disappeared.
Next, the record of a young woman opened. She stood outside a building before a job interview, repeatedly checking the laces of her shoes. Her breathing was irregular. Her lips moved as she silently repeated the same words.
“I am capable. I am capable. I am capable.”
The Central System completed its assessment within seconds.
Repetitive cognitive behavior.
Low functionality.
Deletion recommended.
Lavanya closed the image.
She did not wonder whether the woman had entered the job interview. Nor did she consider what direction those words had created within the woman’s body, or what she had experienced while standing at the door, caught between turning back and going inside.
The system did not require this information.
Every movement that failed to produce an outcome was marked for deletion.
The next record did not open.
The screen went dark for a moment. Then a symbol Lavanya had never seen before appeared. Three thin lines moved toward one another, forming a small circle at the center, then separated again without touching.
Lavanya straightened.
The system did not make errors.
The concept of error had been eliminated from the Central Archive 110 years earlier.
A warning appeared at the bottom of the screen:
UNSCANNABLE DATA CLUSTER
2026 — THE ELVARA COAST
Lavanya placed her fingers on the control panel.
“Show the source.”
The system did not respond.
“Open the data source.”
The three lines on the screen began to move again. The circle at the center expanded, and distorted images started to appear within it.
First, a blue expanse came into view.
Then sand.
The sound of wind.
Lavanya instinctively lifted her head. Archive records did not contain real environmental sounds. When images from the past were uploaded, ambient sounds were removed as noise, leaving only spoken voices.
But there was no speech in this record.
She could hear waves breaking against the shore, the low rush of wind passing through an open window, and a metallic sound in the distance. A vehicle door closed, followed by the bark of a dog.
The sounds did not overpower one another. Each carried its own movement within the space it occupied.
The image became clear.
A small house.
Parts of the white walls had darkened with damp. Mismatched chairs stood near the window, while papers, pens, a half-finished glass of tea, and a communication device with a cracked screen lay on the table.
Nothing in the room appeared to match.
And yet, there was a movement within it that did not exist in the central buildings.
The curtain lifted in the wind, the edges of the papers stirred gently, and the light coming from outside shifted across the wall.
Lavanya moved closer to the image.
The record details appeared on the screen.
Year: 2026
Region: Elvara Coast
Record owner: Lavanya
Occupation: Unclassifiable
Economic status: Critical
Scientific value: Undetermined
Archive decision: Not deleted
Lavanya remained motionless for a moment when she saw her own name.
FOOD FIRST
“Check the identity match.”
A white ring began rotating on the screen.
No genetic match found.
“Check for a consciousness-transfer match.”
No match found.
“Show the source of the name.”
Source access denied.
Lavanya raised her hand to close the control panel. Before her fingers reached the screen, the image changed.
The woman from 2026 entered the frame.
She wore a loose, light-colored shirt. Her hair was gathered carelessly at the nape of her neck, and her face carried a weariness that resembled sleeplessness. She sat at the table, picked up one of the sheets of paper in front of her, and stared at the blank page for a long time.
Lavanya studied the woman’s eye movements.
In those years, human mental activity could not be measured from the outside. Body scanners were primitive, nervous-system maps were incomplete, and emotional-resonance records were almost entirely unreliable.
Even so, there was a movement in the woman’s face that the Central System could not classify.
She looked tired.
But something within her was more alive than the exhaustion on her face.
The woman picked up her pen.
Just as she began to write, a faint sound came from outside.
She stopped.
She turned her head toward the door.
The sound came again.
Short, broken, and persistent.
The woman rose from her chair and walked toward the door. Because the recording device did not move, she disappeared from view. A few seconds later, her voice could be heard from outside.
“Where did you come from?”
Then came other sounds.
Three faint meows in three different tones.
When the woman returned to the frame, she was carrying three kittens in her arms. One was dark gray, almost black. Another had a white stripe across its face. The third had dark markings among its pale yellow fur.
She placed the kittens beside the table.
“My life is already an organizational disaster. Your timing is perfect.”
Lavanya paused the image.
The phrase “organizational disaster” existed in the system’s vocabulary. Yet the woman’s tone of voice did not match the words she had used.
According to the Central System’s emotional analysis, she should have been complaining.
Instead of anger, however, her voice carried a lively warmth.
Her words expressed frustration with her circumstances, while her behavior made room in her living space for three newly arrived beings.
The system could not evaluate both at the same time.
Lavanya resumed the recording.
The woman placed a small dish in front of the kittens. Then she picked up the communication device from the table and looked at the screen. The vitality in her face withdrew in an instant.
The device’s screen was visible in the recording.
Account balance: 0.00
The woman remained motionless for a few seconds.
Her gaze shifted from the screen to the kittens. Her breath caught briefly in the upper part of her chest. Her fingers tightened around the device.
Lavanya waited for the system to produce an assessment.
No result appeared.
The woman in 2026 closed her eyes, slowly released her breath, and looked at the kittens again.
“All right,” she said. “Food first.”
She slipped the phone into her pocket, put on her slippers, and left the house.
A SIGN OF LIFE
For a moment, the recording room, the small house in Elvara, and the Central Experience Archive merged within the same light.
Lavanya felt the floor beneath her feet.
For the first time, she noticed the hardness of the surface she had walked on every day for seven years. She felt her right foot pressing more firmly against the floor, her left heel lifting slightly, and warmth spreading through her toes.
A rapid, intermittent movement began in the center of her chest.
It resembled neither pain nor fear nor any symptom defined by the Central System.
A direction was forming within her body. Her thoughts were trying to understand the movement, while an emotional participation she had never known before was opening inside her.
The system measured these as separate pieces of data.
Lavanya, however, felt them occurring simultaneously for the first time.
A new line of data appeared on the screen.
Cellular behavior: Unclassifiable
Source: Record owner Lavanya
Direction of transmission: 2026 → 2144
Lavanya’s throat went dry.
“This is not a recording.”
The Central System remained silent.
Lights outside the door began to flash, indicating that security units were approaching.
The image on the screen changed again.
Lavanya from 2026 had returned home carrying a small packet of kitten food. She was laughing as she opened it.
“I’ve invested all my money in you. I hope you know how to give investment advice.”
The kittens gathered around the food.
The woman returned to the table and opened the blank page in front of her again. This time, she began writing without hesitation.
The camera did not capture the entire sheet of paper. Only the first line was visible.
In trying to extend human life, humanity is losing its connection with life itself.
Lavanya’s heart rate increased further.
The security door was about to open.
The woman wrote a second line.
A cell does not remain alive through renewal alone. It continues to exist within a life in which the body is guided by sensation, the mind participates in choice, emotion makes the experience one’s own, and a new behavior emerges from this wholeness.
ENTHUSIASM
The screen had gone dark by the time three officers entered the room. Only the calming white light of the Central System remained.
One of the officers approached Lavanya.
“Your biological behavior has exceeded standard parameters. You will accompany us to the medical unit.”
Lavanya did not respond.
The officer checked the measurement band around her wrist.
“Your heart rate is elevated. Your breathing pattern has changed. There is an unexplained movement within your cellular renewal cycle.”
Lavanya looked at the dark screen.
The movement that had begun in her body moments earlier was still continuing. It was as though a door that had opened on the Elvara Coast 118 years ago had passed through time and reached her cells.
This movement was more than a biological deviation.
For the first time, Lavanya’s body had responded to a situation through its own sensations. Instead of accepting the explanation provided by the system, her thoughts had begun to consider different possibilities, while the emotion opening within her allowed her to participate in the moment as an individual.
Together, they produced a behavior the system had not determined.
Lavanya looked into the security officer’s face.
“What is this movement called?”
The officer performed a brief scan.
“There is no equivalent for it in the system.”
Lavanya smiled for the first time in her life.
The system had not recommended her smile.
It had not appeared to regulate the environment, reassure the person before her, or alter her biological readings.
It was the visible expression of the movement that had begun within her.
The word emerged from a place in her memory that had never been used before.
“Enthusiasm,” she said.
The Central System immediately issued a warning.
Prohibited emotional expression detected.
Lavanya’s smile widened.
The system classified enthusiasm as an emotion.
Yet Lavanya could simultaneously feel the direction forming within her body, the choice opening in her mind, her emotional participation in the moment, and the behavior emerging from all three.
This was not merely an emotion.
It was a sign of life.
Humanity had extended the lifespan.
But it had been measuring the duration of life from the wrong place.
THE STORY DOESN’T END HERE
This first sign of life encountered by Lavanya is only the first crack in the system’s perfect order.
The unknown connection carried by the three kittens, the passage opening between 2026 and 2144, and the enthusiasm the system cannot classify develop into a far greater movement in the chapters that follow.
Read the complete novel to discover what Lavanya will encounter next and how humanity will begin to rebuild its connection with life.