Share This Article
The clock blinked 10:12 PM on Manav Joshi’s laptop as he twisted in his gaming chair, stretching. Tonight was the ‘Virtual Hour’—an after-hours social thrown by the team at Plyntrix, the fast-rising tech firm behind the hit mental wellness app, MindDen. Everyone, from interns to one of the co-founders, had logged in from across the country. Drinks in hand, laughter unmuted, and cameras on—Nikhil, Neha, Tushar, Aratrika, Rehaan, and Tara lit up the screen grid like a constellation of corporate cheer.
At 10:57 PM, Aratrika’s video suddenly froze.
Her head tilted slightly, mouth ajar as if she’d just heard something shocking. “Frozen again?” Rehaan chuckled.
Tara laughed, “Poor Aru. Her WiFi’s moodier than her.”
But then her image pixelated violently. A faint shriek burst through, then silence.
By 11:05, her tile had gone blank.
Calls went unanswered. At 11:30, a panicked Neha dialed 100. Aratrika was alone in her serviced apartment in Gurgaon. When the police forced the door open an hour later, she was dead on her bed.
No signs of struggle. No forced entry. But her laptop was still running the Zoom call.
The preliminary report said cardiac arrest. But Aratrika was 28, fit, and healthy.
It was Nikhil who pushed for deeper digging. He was the other co-founder and also, as Tara whispered to Neha later, “Aratrika’s on-off guy.”
Three days later, the autopsy slipped like poison into the narrative: she had been dosed with a custom-compounded, untraceable neurotoxin not available on any pharmaceutical registry. Someone had engineered it.
Custom poisoning. But when? How? And… why?
The police examined delivery records. A single cup of iced chamomile, from ‘Sleep Sips’ café, had arrived at her door around 8:45 PM. Rehaan had joked about it on the call: “Your sleepy tea again? You really live the brand, Aru.”
But the cup was fingerprinted. Gloves. No prints.
CCTV from the café showed a delivery guy, helmet on, face obscured. A bike. Plate smudged. Off-grid.
It was Tara who noticed something odd when she re-watched the Zoom recording (yes, MindDen automatically backed calls up): in the last fifteen minutes, Aratrika had stopped drinking. But before that, she drank from her cup exactly three times—once every five minutes. Then she stopped. As if she sensed something.
They zoomed in. On playback, you could just barely make out a pale yellowish layer clinging to the ice after the second sip. She must have tasted it. Been alarmed. But instead of logging off, she continued on the call. Maybe someone on it was connected.
That’s when it clicked for Nikhil. “Playback speeds. Let’s watch at 1.2x.”
On faster playback, Rehaan seemed to shift uncomfortably every time Aratrika touched the cup. At 10:56:47, she said something indecipherable. The AI caption tool rendered it, faintly: “Why would you—” before her voice cut off.
Rehaan had no connection to the café. But he had access to Aratrika’s fitness tracker data through a debugging feature he’d helped code last year. And more chillingly, he had just been disinherited by his father—massive stake gone to his sister, who happened to be Aratrika’s best friend.
Motive? Thin. But there.
Yet he had a solid alibi: in Pune, timestamped login records minutes before and after. So how could he have delivered the tea?
That’s when Tara remembered an old Slack convo. Aratrika had once mentioned a stalker—someone who’d DM’ed her fake therapy tips through MindDen DMs. The handle? “VeritasAnon.”
The police traced it. The code used to create disposable accounts had a flaw. Only developers knew it.
Only Rehaan had that specific admin branch access.
A deeper scrape of his laptop’s metadata showed encrypted video feeds. He’d run a dry run a week ago: hired a task rabbit-type gig worker in Gurgaon, trained via VR headset, to follow exact physical movements. Feed came from a borrowed phone taped to Rehaan’s chest. He’d effectively remote-controlled someone through an apartment building, passing them off as a typical food delivery guy.
He’d even used haptic gloves to simulate movements, phone audio as cues, and a GPS-override tool mapped out through Google Maps’ API.
Rehaan had plotted a murder where he never left his flat.
But the real twist came during the final Zoom call the police set up.
They reassembled the team. Led by Nikhil, who asked Rehaan direct questions. “Why did you stiffen right before her freeze?”
“I didn’t,” snapped Rehaan.
“But your mic spiked. Background noise. A whisper.”
They replayed the audio. Slowed. Isolated.
A faint voice: “She knows.”
Rehaan logged out abruptly.
It took them 36 hours to track him trying to cross the Nepal border. As he confessed under pressure, Aratrika had traced VeritasAnon back to him. She planned to report it—MeToo meets corporate espionage. But Rehaan was always one step techier.
Only this time, his own code betrayed him. Both in-app and in execution.
And her last drink told the tale, one sip at a time.
