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The sun was still rising over the Silicon Ridge gated community when Prisha Varma’s voice rang out from her impeccably minimal, pastel-toned studio. Over 50,000 viewers had joined her livestream titled “Heal Beyond Hurt: Morning Breathwork and Clarity.” She adjusted her ring light, smiled, and began guiding her followers through the exercises. At 6:42 a.m., her voice gurgled mid-sentence, and she collapsed forward, eyes wide, unmoving. The stream froze, then cut to black.
Within minutes, #PrishaLiveDeath began trending.
By 9 a.m., the police had taken over the house. No sign of forced entry. No physical trauma. Preliminary conclusion: a massive cardiac arrest. But Prisha was 32, fit, and according to the Apple Watch still secured on her wrist, her heart rate had shown no distress until the exact moment of her death.
DCP Veer Sarin wasn’t assigned the case—he just lived in the same community. He had logged on to Prisha’s stream while making coffee on his day off. Something had felt off from the start. And not about her. About everything around her.
Prisha had become a digital wellness icon after surviving an abusive marriage. Her signature course “Reclaim You 7.0” was a multimillion business. Her latest announcement was the drop of “Yuj”, a groundbreaking AI wellness assistant set to launch next week.
Everyone loved Prisha. Or said they did.
There were only three people who’d had consistent access to Prisha in the last month:
1. Neil Dastoor, her brand manager — sleek, caffeinated, and increasingly nervous. He claimed she’d stopped replying to messages three days earlier.
2. Ketaki Rao, her best friend since college and now CFO of the wellness company. Calm, thorough, and tightly wound.
3. Aarav Menon, a part-time coder who had helped develop the backend for Yuj. A digital ghost with roots in hacker forums.
Veer watched the last 10 minutes of the livestream again and again. Around minute 6:17, a strange light flickered across the screen—indistinct, like digital noise. Not from her side. From the interface. Was something triggering remotely?
He asked Ketaki for access to Prisha’s working logs.
“Everything was encrypted. Prisha was cautious.”
“What about Yuj’s beta source code?”
She hesitated, then passed a flash drive.
“NDA, obviously.”
Veer took it to a friend in Cyber Crime.
What they found haunted him.
Yuj had adaptive learning algorithms. It studied user mental states from browsing behavior, responses to personal questions, daily entries. Then it “coached” them.
But someone had rewritten a buried subroutine. A kill-switch—not for devices, but for consciousness.
Audio pulses. Frequencies layered under the breathwork music—inaudible, but powerful.
The modified subroutine mapped to specific EEG patterns associated with deep trauma. If someone had a buried trauma signature—and was guided into that vulnerable state—those hidden frequencies disrupted neuron firing.
Translation: Prisha was murdered by code.
The killer needed to:
– Know her neurological patterns, hidden trauma markers
– Know when she would livestream
– Inject modified code into Yuj’s pre-release files, which she used in her session
Only two people had access to both her biometric patterns and raw AI code: Aarav and Ketaki.
But Ketaki had motive. Recent investor clashes. She stood to gain CEO control.
Yet Aarav had less oversight. Quiet genius. And when Veer searched Aarav’s freelance repositories, he noticed something odd:
Aarav had published a whitepaper two years back about “Neuro-Algorithmic Interference: A Theoretical Kill.” It theorized how trauma-linked sonic patterns could induce cardiac dysregulation when layered with code.
Only forty people had downloaded it. One was from an IP traced to Ketaki’s house.
When confronted, Ketaki broke.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” she whispered. “I wanted to scare her into stepping away. She ignored warnings, spirals. The AI was too powerful—unregulated. She kept pushing for personal trauma analysis. Profiting from pain. Even her own.”
So Ketaki used Aarav’s concept, inserted the sonic triggers into Prisha’s own wellness playlist used during Breathwork. When played live, the triggers steered her into reliving her buried trauma. A cardiac shutdown followed.
And 50,000 people watched a murder disguised as mindfulness.
Veer filed the report, but under mental health clauses, Ketaki was sent for intensive psychiatric evaluation rather than prison.
Yuj’s launch was cancelled. Investors pulled out.
The livestream remains offline.
But somewhere, in dark code repositories and academic corners, the algorithm still waits—silently aware, quietly dangerous.
