The drive back to Fakhir Mohan College took Reva through a landscape that seemed designed to mock her grief—rice paddies glowing emerald under the sun, village markets bustling with the commerce of ordinary life, children in blue uniforms walking hand-in-hand along the highway shoulder. Normalcy had no right to look so indifferent. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and kept her speed steady, her mind cycling through the same loop of data: the SCADA panel at the water tank, the voltage spikes matching Vritta posts, NyayaNet Solutions in Mekhal, and now the intrusion alert from the computer science department’s own IP address. Someone inside the college had accessed her cloud storage. Someone inside the college was watching.
She arrived at the campus gates at mid-morning, when the sandstone buildings threw long shadows across the quadrangle and the air smelled of chalk dust and jasmine. The security guard recognised her from the previous visit and waved her through without question—she was the dead girl’s sister, after all, and grieving relatives were granted a certain gravitational pull. She walked directly to the Applied Informatics building, a three-story structure that had been built during the colonial era and retrofitted so many times it now resembled a palimpsest of architectural intentions. The corridors were lined with bulletin boards advertising coding competitions and mental health awareness posters identical to the one Jesht had mentioned—lotus superimposed over a glowing wi-fi symbol, as if enlightenment could be downloaded.
Kabir Moss was in Laboratory 2B, hunched over a rack of aging servers that whirred like asthmatic insects. When he saw Reva, his face cycled through surprise, guilt, and something that looked almost like relief. “I was hoping you’d come back,” he said, lowering his voice. “After I sent you that data, my terminal started behaving strangely. Files moving on their own. Commands executing without input. Someone’s been in my system, and they’re not hiding it anymore.”
Reva set her laptop on a vacant workbench and connected it to the lab’s isolated power supply—a precaution she now considered mandatory. “The intrusion into my cloud storage came from this building’s IP range,” she said. “Do you know who else has access to the department’s network?”
Kabir hesitated, glancing toward the door as if expecting it to burst open. “Everyone. Faculty, research assistants, even some of the senior undergraduates. The network segmentation here is a joke. But there’s someone you should know about.” He pulled up a personnel directory on his terminal and pointed to a photograph of a woman with sharp cheekbones and a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Dr. Ishani Varma. She joined the department six months ago as a visiting professor in cybernetics. Before that, she worked in the private sector—some company called Nyaya Netra Group. I didn’t think much of it until you mentioned that name in your message.”
Reva’s pulse quickened. Nyaya Netra Group had pivoted from predictive morality algorithms to acquiring ISPs and smart-meter manufacturers. Now one of its former employees was teaching at the very college where Ananya had been driven to her death. “What does she teach?”
“Advanced Networked Systems and Ethical Infrastructure,” Kabir said, with the hollow inflection of someone who now understood the irony. “Ananya was in her seminar. They had weekly one-on-one consultations. I checked the schedule—Ananya’s last meeting with Dr. Varma was two days before she died.”
The corridor outside the laboratory echoed with the sound of students changing classes, a shuffle of sandals and laughter that felt obscene against the weight of what Reva was piecing together. She asked Kabir for Dr. Varma’s office location and made her way to the faculty wing, a quieter section of the building where the walls were adorned with faded portraits of dead scholars and the air conditioning actually functioned. Room 307 was at the end of a long hallway. The nameplate read “Dr. Ishani Varma, Ph.D. – Cybernetics and Infrastructure Ethics.” The door was slightly ajar.
Reva knocked and entered without waiting for a response. Dr. Varma was seated behind a desk of polished teak, her fingers resting on a keyboard connected to a multi-monitor setup that displayed real-time network traffic graphs, voltage distribution maps, and what appeared to be a live feed from several campus security cameras. She was younger than her photograph suggested, perhaps forty, with silver streaks in her dark hair and the composed expression of someone who had long ago mastered the art of appearing helpful while revealing nothing.
“You must be Ananya’s sister,” Dr. Varma said, her voice smooth as polished stone. “Please, sit. I’ve been expecting you.”
The statement landed like a stone dropped into still water. Reva remained standing. “You knew I would come?”
“I assumed. Grief plus technical expertise equals investigation.” Dr. Varma gestured toward the monitors. “I’ve been monitoring the campus grid for anomalies. Your sister was my student. Her death was a tragedy, and I intend to understand what role, if any, the infrastructure played in her psychological deterioration. I have access to network logs that the administration doesn’t even know exist.”
Reva studied the woman’s face for any sign of deception, but Dr. Varma’s expression was as unreadable as compiled code. “Why would a visiting professor have access to that level of network data?”
“Because I installed the monitoring system myself.” Dr. Varma leaned back in her chair. “The college hired me to upgrade their smart grid integration. They wanted energy efficiency; I wanted research data. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. But when I began noticing irregularities—voltage spikes that corresponded with social media activity—I started keeping my own records. Your sister noticed them too. She came to me three weeks ago, terrified, convinced that someone was using the grid to harass her. I told her to document everything, to keep a physical journal in case her digital accounts were compromised. I thought I was protecting her.”
The explanation was too neat, the sympathy too well-rehearsed. Reva felt the same instinctive distrust she experienced when encountering a piece of malware disguised as a system update. “If you knew she was being targeted, why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I did,” Dr. Varma said, and for the first time, a crack appeared in her composure—a flicker of something that might have been genuine frustration. “I filed a report with the campus security office three days before Ananya’s death. They classified it as ‘student anxiety’ and suggested I refer her to counseling services. The Bharitpur police have no framework for understanding infrastructure-based harassment. To them, a threat is a person with a weapon. They don’t see a voltage spike as an assault.”
Reva absorbed this. She wanted to believe that Dr. Varma was an ally, but the connections to Nyaya Netra Group were too damning to ignore. “You worked for Nyaya Netra before coming here. What exactly did you do for them?”
Dr. Varma’s expression didn’t change, but her fingers stilled on the keyboard—a micro-gesture that Reva catalogued as significant. “I was part of their ethics division. I helped design the oversight protocols for their predictive morality algorithm. When the government rejected the proposal, I resigned. The technology was being repurposed without my consent—shifted from behavior prediction to behavior manipulation. I left because I didn’t want to be complicit in whatever they were building.”
“And what were they building?”
“Something they called ‘Kali-Yantra.'” Dr. Varma spoke the name as if it burned her tongue. “A distributed system for remote infrastructure intervention. Ostensibly designed for emergency disaster response—shutting down power lines during floods, rerouting water during contamination events. But the architecture was too flexible. It could be weaponised. I told the board this. They dismissed me. Six months later, I’m teaching at a college, and my most promising student is dead, and the grid is behaving exactly the way I warned them it could.”
Reva filed the name away: Kali-Yantra. It matched nothing in her previous research, but it sounded like a darknet project—the kind of tool that would be sold on encrypted marketplaces to buyers who valued anonymity over accountability. “Do you have proof that Kali-Yantra was used to target my sister?”
Dr. Varma turned one of her monitors so Reva could see the screen. It displayed a complex waveform—a pattern of electrical pulses that repeated at irregular intervals. “This is the signature of a load-pulse attack. It’s the same technique used to cause the fluctuation in your hotel room last night. And it’s the same signature I found embedded in the campus grid logs on the night Ananya died. The pulse didn’t kill her directly—she lit the match herself. But the system was present. It was watching. And I believe it was encouraging her, amplifying her paranoia through targeted harassment that made her feel like the entire world wanted her dead.”
The room felt suddenly colder. Reva asked for copies of all the logs, and Dr. Varma agreed without hesitation—too readily, perhaps, but Reva had no choice except to take the data and verify it independently. She transferred the files to an encrypted external drive and was about to leave when Dr. Varma spoke again.
“Your sister was not the first,” she said quietly. “There have been other cases—students, activists, journalists—who were driven to self-harm or fatal accidents after prolonged campaigns of digital harassment that correlated with infrastructure anomalies. The police classify them as suicides or mishaps. But the pattern is consistent. Someone is using the grid as an execution tool, and they’ve been doing it for years.”
Reva left the office with the external drive heavy in her pocket. The campus had emptied for the midday meal, and the corridors were silent except for the distant clatter of the mess hall. She found a bench near the old stone water tank—the site of her sister’s death—and sat down to process what she had learned. The tank’s surface was still, reflecting the pale sky. She imagined Ananya standing here on that final night, the kerosene cold against her skin, the grid humming around her like a living thing, and she felt a rage so pure it almost burned away her exhaustion.
She opened her laptop and began verifying Dr. Varma’s logs against Kabir’s voltage data. The correlations matched. The load-pulse signatures were identical. But there was something else embedded in the data—a secondary signal hidden beneath the primary waveform, almost like a watermark. She isolated it and ran it through a decryption algorithm she had designed for steganographic analysis. The result was a string of alphanumeric characters that resolved into a URL.
The URL led to a darknet marketplace hosted on an onion domain. The page was sparse and functional—a text-only interface with listings for tools and services. At the top of the page was the symbol she had seen in Ananya’s journal and on the note left at her hotel: a stylised grid with a single node marked in red. Below it was a product listing titled “Pralaya – Complete Infrastructure Intervention Suite.” The seller’s alias was “Kali-Yantra Admin.” The price was listed in cryptocurrency. The description read: “Remote access to municipal power, water, and HVAC systems. No fingerprints. No witnesses. Perfect for untraceable interventions.”
Reva stared at the screen. The marketplace was active. The tool that had been used to torment her sister was for sale to anyone with enough cryptocurrency and enough malice. And somewhere, behind layers of encryption and anonymous routing, the seller was still operating—still selling the ability to turn a city’s own infrastructure into a weapon.
She was about to screenshot the listing when her laptop’s network monitor flashed a warning. Someone was attempting to access her connection—not through the internet, but through the campus’s local Wi-Fi network, which she had foolishly left enabled. The intrusion attempt was sophisticated, bypassing her initial firewall layers with credentials that appeared to be signed by the college’s own certificate authority. She slammed the laptop shut and severed the connection manually.
When she reopened the machine a minute later, the darknet marketplace page was gone. The URL resolved to nothing—an empty server, scrubbed clean. The seller “Kali-Yantra Admin” had detected her presence and vanished, leaving no trace except the cached screenshot she had managed to capture before disconnecting. She saved the image to three separate locations and made a vow to herself: she would find whoever was behind that alias, and she would make them answer for what they had done.
Her phone vibrated. It was a message from an unknown number, routed through an anonymising service: “You’re getting closer. So was she. Remember the orchid.”
She looked up at the water tank, at the wilted garlands and the candle wax staining the stone, and understood that the message was not a threat. It was a confession—and an invitation to keep digging.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!