Share This Article
The high-rise apartment in Hyderabad’s Jubilee Hills buzzed with neon lights and caffeine. Four streamers sat in soundproof home studios, each illuminated by LED strips and dual monitors. The host, Aryan Singh aka Blaze_King, welcomed nearly 8 million viewers to the 20th episode of ‘Play & Prey’ — a digital gladiator format where top Indian gamers clashed while fans voted live. The prize? Fame, fortune, and a 3-month gaming deal with global sponsors.
Tonight’s theme: Horror Espionage. All four had pre-installed the same indie game titled ‘Ghost Protocols’. A surveillance puzzle thriller with voice-activated traps.
Between ads, banter, and gameplay, Aryan’s co-host Zara monitored the live stream comments and analytics. Viewers watched the four camera feeds: Aryan, veteran wildcard Anuj (GameSloth), underdog diva SnippyTrix (real name: Kavya Mehta), and rising star PixelRaptor aka Rishi Sharma.
About 76 minutes into the stream, something odd happened. PixelRaptor’s cam froze. Not crashed — black screen, then nothing. Zara clicked to reinitiate video sync. Aryan covered it up casually. “Rishi’s tech always betrays him at the climax!” he laughed.
The stream ended as planned. Fans raved. Sponsors clapped. Only three exited their studios. Rishi’s door stayed closed.
Two hours later, his flatmate Jaanvi forced open his door. Rishi was slumped in his chair. CPU still humming. The wireless headset on his ears. He wasn’t breathing.
Police were baffled. No signs of forced entry. Webcam connected, yet his live feed cut off at exactly 22:17:49. Autopsy revealed heart failure triggered by acute electric neurostimulation.
A week later, cyber-cop Sneha Rawat — moonlighting as an aspiring VR gamer — made the connection. During streaming, Rishi was wearing an experimental HapticFeedback suit developed in partnership with CyKoreGaming Labs. Enabling full-body immersion using neurological receptors.
Sneha noticed something others missed: the haptic suit’s signal interface had been remotely overridden. She cross-checked server pings. At 22:17, a command pulse was sent not by the game server — but manually, from a local device.
Only someone who had Rishi’s room mapped on the private multiplayer host, with override clearance, could’ve inserted custom triggers. She went back to the footage.
Aryan’s screen showed brief static dunes in the exact second of Rishi’s blackout. Anuj? Nothing visible. But Kavya’s (SnippyTrix) stream had a frame skip — right when she killed Rishi’s character in-game.
When confronted, Kavya denied it. But her keyboard logs told another story. One extra tab open: Rishi’s suit control panel. She claimed she didn’t know it sent real feedback — but her browser history showed she’d visited CyKore’s internal protocol guide three days before.
The final twist came when Zara analyzed microphone spikes. Moments before death, Rishi whispered, “No… Kavya… this was just a game.”
The motive was rivalry layered in betrayal. Kavya had lost the last sponsorship to Rishi due to a late-stage fan poll. She knew he tested CyKore’s Enhanced Haptics and had once joked on stream, “If anyone hacks this suit, I’m fried.”
She embedded a malicious command string into the voice-trigger interface — coded to activate if Rishi said the phrase “ghost incoming”, a common line in the game.
During play, thinking he was being role-accurate, Rishi uttered the trigger.
The suit delivered a microshock session designed for VR thrills — but jacked to lethal levels via forced override.
On camera, it looked like a freeze. To the audience, a technical dropout. To Kavya, just another game won.
Charged with cyber-murder under India’s emergent virtual law protocols, Kavya’s trial became a media frenzy.
Blaze_King now begins every stream with a 10-second silence. For Rishi. For the blurry line between fiction and fatality.
