[ANANYA SHARMA, FREELANCE DATA FORENSICS] [LOCATION: KORAMANGALA, BANGALORE] [DATE: SATURDAY, 4TH OCTOBER 2025]

The rain hadn’t started yet, but the Bangalore sky was the colour of a week-old bruise, promising a deluge. Inside her cramped one-bedroom flat, the only storm was the quiet hum of servers and the frantic clicking of Ananya Sharma’s keyboard. Filter coffee, her third of the morning, sat cooling beside a monitor displaying what had to be the most mind-numbingly useless dataset in human history.

‘Customer Footfall Correlation with In-Store Playlist Genre.’ The client was a chain of overpriced clothing boutiques.

Ananya sighed, running a hand through her short, messy hair. Three years ago, she was leading the ethics division at AstraGen AI, debating the future of machine consciousness. Now, she was proving that people were five percent more likely to buy beige linen shirts when a generic lo-fi hip-hop beat was playing.

It was penance, she supposed. Penance for a crime she didn’t commit. The AstraGen data breach had been her ruin. They needed a scapegoat, and the brilliant, difficult woman who kept warning them their security was a joke was the perfect candidate. Now, the name Ananya Sharma was poison in the corporate world.

Her custom-built data-sifting algorithm, ‘Charon’, pinged softly. It was a sound she’d programmed for when it found an anomaly that didn't fit any known parameters—a digital ghost. Usually, it was just corrupted data.

She toggled to Charon’s console. The anomaly was a tiny, encrypted data packet, less than a kilobyte. What made it strange was its source. It was piggybacking on the public data stream from a municipal water pressure sensor in Mumbai. It was like finding a diamond stitched into a beggar’s rags. Pointless, but deliberate.

Professional curiosity, the only part of her the scandal hadn’t killed, sparked to life. Forgetting the beige linen shirts, she isolated the packet. The encryption was... beautiful. Elegant. It wasn't a brute-force corporate firewall; it was layered like poetry, each level of obfuscation a different discipline of cryptography.

This wasn't corporate. This wasn't government. This was an artist.

On a secondary monitor, a news feed flashed a breaking story. ‘Minister Avinash Singh Dies in Tragic Accident on Bandra-Worli Sea Link.’ Ananya barely glanced at it. Another corrupt politician meets a messy end. The universe, it seemed, occasionally balanced its own books.

She focused back on the puzzle. For two hours, she worked, the world shrinking to the lines of code on her screen. The rain finally broke, lashing against her windowpane. And then, she found it. A flaw. A tiny, almost imperceptible loophole in the third layer, a recursive algorithm that referenced itself in a way that created a paradox. A keyhole.

With trembling fingers, she wrote a script to exploit it. Code flowed from her mind to the screen. The final barrier crumbled.

Her screen went blank for a second, then displayed the decrypted contents. It wasn't financial data. It wasn't a private message. It was a single line of text, written in the ancient Devanagari script.

धर्मो रक्षति रक्षितः

Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah. The old Sanskrit proverb. Dharma protects those who protect it.

Beneath the phrase was a long alphanumeric string, and next to it, two words that made the back of her neck prickle.

STATUS: ACCOUNT BALANCED.

Ananya stared, her blood running cold. She looked from the Sanskrit phrase on her screen to the headline about the dead minister on the other.

An accident. A tragic accident.

But the data packet from the Mumbai water sensor was timestamped at 11:16 AM. Two minutes before Avinash Singh’s car, according to the news reports, lost control and hit a concrete pillar at over 150 kilometres per hour.

Her apartment suddenly felt very cold. The quiet hum of her servers no longer sounded like a storm. It sounded like a whisper.