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On the 18th floor of the luxurious Versova Highlands, Shraddha Mehra’s penthouse was all white marble, scent diffusers, curated book racks, and the purr of devices that never stopped listening. A modest name in the influencer world, Shraddha’s lifestyle vlogs had recently peaked when she pivoted to unmasking toxic brand partnerships.
By Sunday morning, her body was found sprawled on the podium garden below, fractured and motionless beside a broken pot of monstera leaves. Police closed in early with a verdict: suicide. The building’s lobby cam showed her riding down alone minutes before 3:17 AM. Her terrace railings bore the faint scratch of her ring. Her ‘goodbye’ post had gone live on her private X channel shortly after.
But Kabir Narayan, her neighbor from flat 9B, who happened to be an acoustic engineer with paranoid levels of security, watched the scene play back differently in the days that followed.
Shraddha had once asked him to help install high-end soundproofing for noise-cancelled livestreams. As a favor, he’d visited her flat two weeks before her death and noticed something she hadn’t: her new ceiling-mounted camera system had a blind spot. Just one. The main hallway between bedroom and terrace.
Curious about her setup, Kabir had later pinged her via Signal to ask about it. She’d left him on read. Now, that spot was where the ‘accident’ originated—between two offline cameras. But Shraddha’s semi-digital life, paradoxically, left too much data.
Kabir managed a half-login into her scheduled streaming platform account—it hadn’t been fully deactivated—and noticed a glitch: a preview thumbnail titled “PROJECT B” from a draft that had gone unseen, dated twelve hours before her death.
Cut to Paroma Desai, Shraddha’s college junior and now a viral skincare entrepreneur. She and Shraddha had co-developed a skin serum using user-sourced data. Then Shraddha went rogue, suspecting the formula was stripping melanin in unsafe quantities. Their fight had escalated offline.
Then there was Ravi Khaitan, an MBA-grad turned spiritual coach, who’d been dating Shraddha semi-secretly. His brand image couldn’t survive romantic entanglements, and she’d hinted at exposing a pattern of manipulation across influencers under his mentorship.
Finally, the building association president Devika Mukherjee, a retired judge, had got into repeated altercations with Shraddha over unethical filming on society premises.
Kabir, obsessively rewinding grainy security footage, noticed something eerie. A faint flicker in his own hallway camera at 2:43 AM—a power dip, rare in their zone. But not impossible.
He pulled up his backup drive, where he’d routed his own camera feeds through an independent solar buffer. There it was: a shadow in Shraddha’s hallway that shouldn’t have been there. A person, but indistinct.
An edited video didn’t align with how her posts were scheduled. A code snippet embedded in her login linked to a third-party editing software. That third camera—above her bookshelf near the hallway—was never disclosed in her flat’s layout but had an IP log.
Kabir traced that camera’s origin: an installation ordered three weeks ago, billed to none other than Shraddha herself. Or rather, someone using a spoofed e-wallet in her name, ordered from a mirror IP also used recently by Ravi’s online ashram sessions.
A clever overlay: footage had been recorded days prior, with Shraddha wearing the same outfit she’d worn on her last day. Her final ‘suicide’ video was pre-shot; the timestamp had been artificially grafted.
Kabir went to Devika with his findings. She listened in silence and asked a strange question. “Does anyone else know you’re investigating this?”
That night, Kabir’s laptop was bricked. His UPS unit failed exactly at 2:15 AM, causing data loss. His cloud backups were corrupted via a malicious sync.
So he did what Shraddha likely knew someone would: He mailed the drive’s clone to a contact he met exactly once—a subscriber of hers who operated under the alias “R3ticulatedPixel.” An anonymous archivist who specialized in livestream authenticity verification.
Days later, a deepfake debunk account posted a 4-minute exposé highlighting the splice lines in Shraddha’s “final video,” revealing audio mismatches.
The killer wasn’t Paroma. Nor Ravi. It was Devika.
Ten years ago, her son had died in an influencer challenge involving cocktail meds. Shraddha had, unknowingly, re-partnered with the same pharma sponsor that had launched the old contest. When she began threatening to expose malpractice, Devika used her access, legal mind, and society master keys to plant the third cam and edit the footage.
Ravi, panicked to protect his image, had tampered with certain logs—making himself a red herring. Paroma had gone silent out of fear, not guilt.
Devika didn’t confess. She merely asked the court, “Why are you surprised? You people created this world where illusions can kill for likes.”
The court ruled her mentally unstable, but Kabir knew better. It wasn’t madness. It was deliberate silence weaponized through the illusion of presence.
