1
The day began like most Mondays in Gurgaon—grey towers cutting into a hazy sky, the hum of elevators, the staccato rhythm of heels on marble. Ira Mallick stepped into the 24th floor of SysCore Solutions, coffee in hand, her ID badge swinging against her chest. The HR bay was as sterile as ever—white partitions, motivational posters, the faint scent of lemon disinfectant. She took her usual corner seat, adjusted her ergonomically-assigned chair, and opened her laptop. Outlook pinged to life. Buried among the calendar invites and onboarding queries was an unread email titled simply: “If I’m Gone – Read This.” The sender was Sanya Bedi, her boss, who’d died by suicide three days ago. Ira’s pulse stumbled. With trembling fingers, she clicked it open. It was scheduled—timestamped for 7:01 AM that morning. Inside were four names. All top-level SysCore executives. Below them, one cryptic line: “They made me do it.”
The email sat like acid in her inbox. Ira closed her laptop and reopened it three times, as if hoping the message would vanish on its own. Sanya had been distant lately, yes—but to kill herself? Everyone in the office had whispered about the police report. Open-and-shut case. Jumped off her own balcony. No note. But here it was: a digital post-mortem, quiet and deliberate. Ira scanned the names again: Raghav Malhotra, the CFO, known for slashing departments like a surgeon; Pooja Sibal, the icy Head of Internal Comms who always seemed to know too much; Arvind Dutt, the elusive CTO working on some hush-hush AI surveillance project; and a fourth—Shiv Trikha. That one stood out. Ira didn’t recognize it. A contractor? A ghost employee? She copied the names onto a sticky note, stuck it under her keyboard, then deleted the email. She knew HR had systems that tracked flagged messages. Her desk suddenly felt too exposed. She glanced around. No one looked at her, but she felt eyes anyway—like the glass walls were watching. Her hands went cold.
That evening, Ira sat alone on her balcony, a half-eaten bowl of instant noodles going soggy in the heat. She couldn’t stop thinking about Sanya. She remembered the last time they’d spoken—ten days ago—Sanya had seemed unusually formal, almost rehearsed. She’d thanked Ira for being “one of the good ones.” At the time, Ira thought it was just stress talking. Now it felt like foreshadowing. She opened her work laptop again, this time at home, using a VPN. She ran a quiet search on Shiv Trikha through SysCore’s internal directory—nothing. No employee ID, no email pattern, no history. She tried LinkedIn. One profile, no picture, barely filled in. Location: Gurugram. Company: Consultant – Private. Her screen flickered for a second. Static. Then the browser closed by itself. Ira stared, heart thudding. Just a glitch? Or something else? She shut the laptop slowly and reached for her phone. Before she could open it, a notification blinked on the lock screen: “Update Scheduled – Company Security Sync in Progress.” She hadn’t authorized any sync. Her phone had never done that before. She put it down like it might explode. The glass towers of Gurgaon loomed outside, steel skeletons gleaming under sodium lights. Something was very wrong behind the nameplates.
2
The next morning, Ira arrived earlier than usual. The HR bay was still empty, lights humming with sterile indifference. She plugged in her earphones—not for music, but to signal “do not disturb”—and reopened her browser. This time, she used a private incognito window with Tor access. Her search for Shiv Trikha led her to a ghost trail: a defunct Twitter handle with zero posts, a mention in a now-deleted corporate blog about “strategic compliance restructuring,” and a traceable link to a shell company registered under a Gurgaon P.O. box. No photo, no digital footprint. Whoever he was, he didn’t want to be found. She bookmarked the registry page and jotted down the company name: Glenfern Advisory Pvt. Ltd. Just then, a message flashed in SysCore’s internal chat from Shubho Sengupta in IT Security: “Hey, your system triggered a ping. Something weird with browser behavior. All okay?” Ira’s heart lurched. Shubho was a harmless guy, loved coffee and cricket, but this wasn’t the kind of attention she wanted. She typed quickly: “Yeah, all fine! Laptop was glitchy this morning, might be nothing.” He replied with a thumbs-up and a meme of a hamster smashing a keyboard. It was meant to be friendly. But all it did was remind her that she wasn’t invisible anymore.
By lunchtime, the floor was buzzing. Executives floated past in tailored suits and purposefully hushed conversations. Raghav Malhotra’s laugh boomed from the pantry like forced thunder. Ira watched him from her desk, remembering the first name on the list. There was something too slick about him—he always smiled with his mouth, never his eyes. She recalled how Sanya once called him “the scalpel in a three-piece suit.” Ira looked away and opened the HR records system under admin proxy. It was a risky move—her access wasn’t meant to go this deep—but she’d learned from Sanya how to slip under the system’s radar. She searched for Glenfern Advisory. The vendor had been listed under a short-term consulting project six months ago. Department tag: Internal Compliance Audits. Approved by: Pooja Sibal. Amount: undisclosed. That raised a red flag. Vendor payments, especially in HR or audits, were always documented with at least a minimum billing structure. This had none. Just a vague remark: “Special initiative – board clearance attached.” Ira clicked the attachment. Access denied. Level 5 clearance required. Her stomach turned. Sanya must’ve known. She must’ve seen something buried in vendor approvals, and it probably led her to Shiv Trikha. The question was: what did they force her to approve—or cover up?
That evening, Ira decided to speak with the only person she somewhat trusted—Shubho. She met him at their usual chai tapri outside the tower gates, where SysCore employees mingled in anonymity under buzzing tube lights. “This is gonna sound weird,” she began, watching the steam rise from her paper cup, “but do you remember Sanya’s old project files? The ones marked sensitive in the audit cluster?” Shubho raised an eyebrow, brushing biscuit crumbs off his lanyard. “You mean the ones they wiped clean the week she… you know?” Ira nodded. “Yeah. I think they didn’t just wipe them. I think someone redirected access. And Glenfern Advisory—it wasn’t a real vendor.” Shubho hesitated. “If this is what I think it is… they used her login once. After she died.” Ira’s head snapped up. “What?” He lowered his voice. “I was checking postmortem access logs two nights ago. A system update from her ID came in… after her time of death. That shouldn’t be possible unless—” Ira finished the sentence for him, “—unless someone cloned her credentials.” The lights from the tower flickered in the distance like artificial stars. Ira’s breath caught in her throat. The message Sanya sent hadn’t just been a warning. It was bait. And Ira had taken it.
3
Back at her apartment that night, Ira couldn’t sleep. The ceiling fan spun overhead, a quiet metronome to the storm inside her mind. She lay curled on the sofa, her laptop casting a cold light on her face. The thought that someone had accessed Sanya’s credentials after her death was not just disturbing—it was strategic. Someone had used the moment of grief to erase, alter, or perhaps even plant digital footprints. Glenfern Advisory was clearly a front, and Shiv Trikha, whoever he really was, had operated under that mask. She returned to the vendor list and began cross-referencing it with employee exit records over the past year. One name came up repeatedly: Avinash Dureja, a mid-level compliance manager who had exited six months ago, marked under “mutual separation.” His file had been scrubbed clean—too clean. No exit interview notes. No severance. No forwarding address. Ira’s pulse quickened. She copied the employee ID and fed it into a background search. His PAN card had recently been used to rent a flat in DLF Phase III—two blocks from where Sanya lived. Coincidence? Unlikely. Ira didn’t believe in coincidence anymore.
The next day at work, Ira pulled Shubho aside near the service staircase between the 19th and 20th floors. A place not covered by CCTV, or so Sanya once hinted during idle conversations. She handed him a slip of paper. “Avinash Dureja. Can you check if he was ever flagged internally before his exit?” Shubho scanned the name, his brow furrowing. “He was in Audit. Quiet guy. Wore ugly sweaters. Always left on time.” Ira replied flatly, “There’s no trace of his departure—no emails, no handover, no goodbye message on the WhatsApp group.” Shubho gave a small nod, sliding the paper into his pocket. “I’ll run a trace on his IP history. Might take a day.” Ira stepped back, lowering her voice, “And one more thing. The Level 5 file Sanya tried to access—can we spoof a board clearance to peek inside?” Shubho’s eyes widened. “That’s playing with fire. Board-level access is monitored directly by Pooja and Raghav. If they sniff even a proxy attempt, we’re toast.” Ira met his eyes. “I’m not asking you to break in. Just…look at the locks. Maybe there’s a crack already there.” Shubho sighed, nodding reluctantly. As he turned to leave, he paused. “Ira… if they made her do it, then someone here has blood on their hands.” Ira whispered back, “And I’m not letting them wash it off.”
That evening, Ira took an auto to DLF Phase III. The building Avinash had rented in was a bland beige high-rise with tinted windows and a bored security guard at the gate. She told him she was a courier for “Mr. Dureja,” and he waved her in without checking. Flat 7B. She knocked twice. No answer. Then a shadow moved behind the peephole. “Avinash? I’m here about Sanya.” Silence. Then the door opened a crack. A gaunt, nervous man peered out, eyes bloodshot, hair disheveled. “Ira Mallick,” she said quickly. “From SysCore.” He didn’t invite her in but muttered, “You shouldn’t be here.” She pushed gently, “Did they threaten you too?” That broke him. His shoulders sagged. He opened the door wider. Inside, the apartment was dark, reeking of stale food and paranoia. “They said I was digging too deep,” Avinash murmured. “Compliance flagged Glenfern’s payments, but when I asked questions… Pooja summoned me. Said I could either take the severance and vanish—or be the story.” Ira sat on the edge of a dusty chair, her throat dry. “And Shiv Trikha?” Avinash laughed bitterly. “That’s not a person. It’s a name they use. Like a burner identity. Projects that get too ugly—too secret—are pushed under Shiv Trikha’s consultancy. He’s not real. But the people behind him? Very real. And very dangerous.” Ira stood slowly, every instinct screaming at her to leave. She’d just uncovered the first real piece of the puzzle. But someone, somewhere, was watching the board—and Ira had just made her first move.
4
The next morning, SysCore’s glass towers gleamed under the monsoon haze, but Ira felt the walls tightening. Avinash’s revelation echoed in her ears: “Shiv Trikha is a burner identity.” It explained the complete lack of documentation, the mysterious payments, the erased logs. Ira arrived at her workstation to find something odd—her desk had been “reorganized.” Her drawer, usually stuffed with sticky notes and backup flash drives, had been emptied and neatly reset. A passive-aggressive act? Or something worse? Her heart raced as she quickly checked her laptop bag—her secondary drive, the one with Sanya’s email backup, was gone. Panic surged in her chest. That wasn’t clumsiness. Someone had gone through her things. Before she could spiral, an internal mail pinged. Subject: “Performance Review – Immediate Discussion.” It was from Pooja Sibal. She was being summoned. The same Pooja who signed off Glenfern’s shell invoice. Ira wiped her palms on her kurta and walked to the 26th floor, her reflection in the elevator doors looking pale, hunted.
Pooja’s office was immaculate—an ice-cold room lit by filtered white light, glass vases with orchids on the shelf, and a massive screen looping muted footage from SysCore’s corporate retreat. She didn’t look up immediately. Instead, she said calmly, “Sit down, Ira.” Her tone was silky, almost maternal. Ira obeyed. Pooja tapped her pen thoughtfully. “You’ve been digging. Into things outside your purview.” Ira stayed silent. “I understand the curiosity. Sanya’s death has unsettled many of us. But looking at privileged files without clearance… isn’t just career-ending. It’s criminal.” The words hung in the air like the scent of synthetic lavender. Ira chose her reply carefully. “I wasn’t aware I’d overstepped.” Pooja smiled faintly. “I like your spirit. That’s why I’m offering this advice: stay in your lane. Or your access will be revoked. Permanently.” There was something final in the way she said it. Then, casually, she added, “Oh—and don’t speak to Mr. Sengupta about internal audits again. IT doesn’t comment on HR affairs.” Ira walked out of that office feeling like she’d been marked. Pooja hadn’t threatened her. She’d promised her disappearance—in clean, bureaucratic language.
Shubho met her in the basement parking lot two hours later, breathless and visibly shaken. “You weren’t imagining it,” he said, holding up his phone. “Someone used admin override last night to clone your drive and erase system traces. I couldn’t even recover your local cache.” Ira exhaled shakily. “I need to find another route. Not digital. Physical.” She pulled out a printout—something she hadn’t dared open on company servers. “I found Glenfern’s registered address. It leads to an old warehouse unit in Udyog Vihar. I want to see what’s there.” Shubho stared at her like she’d grown another head. “You’ll get yourself killed.” Ira met his gaze. “Then I better know who’s chasing me.” That evening, dressed in old jeans and a hoodie, she took a cab past the glowing towers of Gurgaon into the industrial zone. The address led to a two-storey building with shuttered windows and a rusting nameplate: Glenfern Advisory Pvt. Ltd. The place looked abandoned. She climbed the locked gate and slipped through the side entrance. Inside was dust, old office furniture, and rows of closed cabinets. And then—on the far wall—an active router, its green lights blinking. Ira knelt beside it, heart thudding. Someone was still using this shell. She reached for her phone’s hotspot tools, trying to scan active connections, when she heard a noise—footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Not hers. She froze. Someone else was in the building.
5
Ira pressed herself flat against the dusty wall, breath shallow, heart banging against her ribs like it was trying to escape her chest. The footsteps grew louder—measured, calm. She reached into her bag, fumbling for anything: her phone, a pen, her expired pepper spray can. A silhouette appeared at the end of the corridor, framed against the dull glow of the exit sign. Then a flashlight beam cut through the darkness, sweeping across broken tiles and metal filing cabinets. Ira held her breath. The light passed over her for just a second—then paused. “Who’s there?” a voice called. Male. Alert, but not angry. Ira didn’t answer. She crouched and moved toward the open door behind her, slipping into what looked like a defunct server room. She crouched behind a steel rack, knees trembling. The beam of the flashlight entered the room. “You’re not supposed to be here,” the voice said again—this time closer. But something was off. There was no urgency in the tone. It was like the person already knew she was there. Like they had waited for her. A faint click echoed in the dark. Not a gun. A camera. Whoever this was—they weren’t just watching. They were recording.
She heard the footsteps recede. After a few tense minutes, Ira slipped out, heart still racing. No one followed. She dashed out through the broken shutter and melted into the night. Back home, she threw her hoodie into the laundry and sat on the floor, hugging her knees. There was no question now—Glenfern wasn’t just a paper company. It was still operational. Hidden in plain sight. She picked up her phone and texted Shubho: “The warehouse is active. I was seen. Don’t reply. Delete this.” Then, just in case, she turned off her Wi-Fi and removed the battery from her backup phone. Across her table lay the printed vendor file she’d stolen a glimpse of at work—Glenfern had billed SysCore nearly ₹3.8 crores over 18 months, with no services described. Just one recurring project tag: “OBSIDIAN.” She scribbled it in capital letters in her notebook. Underlined it. She had no idea what Obsidian was, but it was likely what got Sanya killed—and what Pooja was willing to bury others for. Ira suddenly remembered something Sanya had once said in passing, while laughing over filter coffee: “We don’t run HR here. We run clean-ups with a smile.” It wasn’t funny anymore.
The next morning, Shubho didn’t show up to work. No message. No call. When Ira pinged him, her messages went undelivered. Panic crawled up her spine. She tried his flatmate, who simply said, “He left early. Looked scared.” Ira knew then—he was gone. Either hiding… or silenced. She sat at her desk, numb, while the office moved around her like a machine. Pooja walked past her desk once, and for the first time, didn’t look through her. She looked at her. Smiled slightly. Ira forced herself to finish the day, eyes on her screen, even as dread pooled in her stomach. When she returned to her apartment, the door was ajar. Not broken. Just open. She stood motionless in the hallway. Her instinct screamed at her to run. But she walked in. Nothing was taken. Everything looked untouched—until she reached her desk. Her notebook was gone. So was the printout about Glenfern. But a single sheet of paper had been left behind. On it, typed in Courier font, was a message:
“Curiosity is not a virtue. You are being watched. Obsidian sees all.”
6
That night, Ira didn’t sleep. She sat in the corner of her bedroom with her back to the wall, her eyes fixed on the apartment door as if staring could hold intruders at bay. The note—typed, cold, deliberate—lay on her table like a noose made of words. Obsidian sees all. It wasn’t just a project name anymore. It was an entity. A system. A threat. And now it knew her name. She thought of Sanya again—how composed she’d been, how precisely she must have scheduled that email to Ira before stepping off that ledge. It hadn’t been a cry for help. It was a message left for the only person Sanya trusted. Ira understood the weight of it now: Sanya had discovered Obsidian. Had tried to fight it. And had lost. Ira closed her eyes and whispered to herself, “I will not be another obituary.” At dawn, she packed a small backpack—change of clothes, power bank, burner phone, cash. She left her official laptop in the microwave, a trick Shubho once told her for cutting remote access. Then she walked out, took a cab to the outskirts of the city, and disappeared into the morning fog.
By late afternoon, Ira was sitting in a co-working space in South Delhi under a pseudonym, tapping quietly on a rented laptop. She needed answers. Not from inside SysCore—but from outside the walls. She began searching international data security forums, hunting for any mention of “Project Obsidian.” After hours of trawling through obscure code repositories and whistleblower archives, she found a buried forum thread from over a year ago. A user under the handle “Andesite19” had posted fragments of code snippets tagged with “#ObsidianProtocol.” The responses were quick, frantic. Another user replied: “This isn’t surveillance. This is corporate coercion architecture.” Ira’s breath caught. She dug deeper. Obsidian wasn’t just software. It was a pattern—an internal system developed to manipulate employee behavior through biometric analytics, digital nudges, and psychological profiling. It could predict resignations, detect dissent, suppress uprisings—all while making the target believe it was their choice. And it had been secretly deployed across multiple Indian corporates through shell vendors like Glenfern. Sanya must have stumbled onto its deployment logs. And Shiv Trikha—the fake consultant—had been the firewall protecting it. Ira sat back, horrified. Obsidian didn’t need to blackmail people. It made them break themselves.
She knew now that she couldn’t take this to the police—not yet. Not without proof. But she had one last thread to pull: ACP Meera Desai. The cop who had briefly handled Sanya’s case before it was handed off and buried. Ira took a deep breath and called her from the burner phone. “Ma’am, my name is Ira Mallick. I used to work with Sanya Bedi. I have reason to believe her death wasn’t suicide.” There was a pause on the other end. Then a calm voice: “Meet me. Connaught Place. One hour. Don’t be followed.” When Ira arrived, Meera Desai was already there—leaning against a white sedan, in plain clothes, eyes sharp beneath her sunglasses. “Start talking,” she said. Ira handed her a flash drive with everything she had. Vendor files. The chat logs. Even a photo of the note. Meera plugged it into a secure tablet, brows furrowing. “I believe you,” she finally said. “And if this is half as big as it looks—we’re not just dealing with illegal surveillance. We’re looking at a corporate weapon.” She looked at Ira with something like reluctant admiration. “You’re going to need to go off the radar. And fast. Because if Obsidian sees all… it’s already seen you.”
7
The safehouse Meera arranged was a government-owned flat in Lajpat Nagar—plain, beige, and forgettable. Perfect. Ira stayed inside, curtains drawn, lights dimmed. She operated only through Meera’s encrypted tablet now, no personal devices. Each movement she made was with deliberation, as if the city had turned into a silent battlefield. Meera would visit every evening, always in plainclothes, sometimes changing her hair to avoid being tracked. On the third night, she brought in a file. “We just got this,” she said, sliding it across the table. Inside were fragments of communication between Glenfern and an overseas cloud analytics firm—Noctis Metrics, based in Dubai, with known ties to defense contractors. One of the project tags in the invoice memo was: “Pilot A/B – Nudge Control | Psychological Containment Framework.” It was the smoking gun. Obsidian wasn’t just software—it was weaponized corporate conditioning. Companies were using it to control not just behavior but decision-making. From compliance managers to product leads, anyone flagged as “non-aligned” was being nudged—through algorithmic news feeds, HR interventions, or staged performance drops—into silence, resignation, or worse. Sanya had found this. And someone ensured she never spoke.
Ira sat frozen as Meera continued. “The deployment model is meant to mimic burnout. They push your metrics down, send HR ‘concern’ emails, shift your KPIs, until you question yourself. The final push is psychological. It’s suicide by design.” Meera’s voice was calm, but her hands were clenched. “And Pooja, Raghav—they’re not just complicit. They’re part of the board that approved the Obsidian test run at SysCore.” Ira leaned forward. “What about the fourth name? Shiv Trikha?” Meera exhaled. “We traced a pattern. Shiv Trikha’s Aadhaar ID was linked to three different contractor IDs over the past year—each with different photos. It’s a rotating identity. A manufactured operator used for shady assignments. Possibly even ex-intelligence.” Ira whispered, “So Sanya wasn’t paranoid.” “No,” Meera replied. “She was trying to warn someone. And now that someone is you.” A silence fell between them. Then Meera said, “We have one shot at this. A public leak will be buried. But we have someone inside the Competition Commission of India—a whistleblower willing to push an emergency hearing if we give them enough.” Ira nodded slowly. “Then let’s do it. Before Obsidian decides I’ve outlived my usefulness.”
Two days later, Ira found herself in the backseat of an unmarked vehicle, dressed like a courier agent, laptop tucked inside a thermal bag. Meera was up front, giving curt instructions into a burner headset. Their destination: a CCI field office near Dwarka where a trusted deputy commissioner would extract and seal the evidence for emergency review. It was a one-hour window, no margin for error. As the car sped through flyovers and rain-slicked lanes, Ira couldn’t stop replaying Sanya’s words in her head—They made me do it. But now, those words weren’t just a cry of despair. They were an accusation. A target marked. The car stopped abruptly. Meera turned around. “Walk the last 200 meters. No phone. If anyone tails you, cut into the side street and wait at the flower vendor’s shed. He’s one of ours.” Ira nodded, stepped out, and walked calmly under the Delhi drizzle. She was halfway there when she saw them—two men in black raincoats standing too still on the opposite pavement. One of them touched his earpiece. Ira’s instincts screamed. She turned left, ducked into the side street, heart hammering. The flower vendor glanced once, then motioned. She ducked behind the tarpaulin. A second later, Meera’s voice crackled through a small radio in his pocket. “Stay there. They’re watching the building. Plan B is live.” Ira whispered, “They’re everywhere.” And in that moment, she finally understood: this wasn’t just corporate espionage. This was a war against silence.
8
Plan B was a long shot—dangerous, improvised, and dependent on one person’s willingness to gamble their career: DCP Shalini Vardhan, Meera’s former colleague turned internal oversight liaison with dormant ties to media watchdogs. Ira was transported that night in an unmarked sanitation truck across the city to a secure private residence in Vasant Kunj. There, under flickering CFL lights and backup generators, she met Shalini—a sharp-eyed woman in her late forties, dressed in plain cotton, sleeves rolled and temper coiled. “You have the files?” she asked flatly. Ira handed her the latest clone of everything they had: Glenfern’s payment trails, the Obsidian protocol fragments, even metadata showing Sanya’s credentials used after her death. Shalini reviewed the contents quickly and said, “We’re not going to CCI anymore. It’s compromised.” Ira’s breath caught. “Then what?” Shalini looked up. “We go nuclear. We leak to Arthav Voice—they’re sitting on a cache from another source, but it’s disorganized. What you’ve given us connects it all. They’ll run it if I vouch for the chain of custody.” Ira glanced at Meera. “Will it be enough?” Meera answered, “It’ll be war. But it’ll be public.” And for the first time in weeks, Ira allowed herself to believe that Sanya might finally get justice.
The next 48 hours unfolded like a silent operation. Files were sanitized, timestamps scrubbed, identifiers obscured. A secure signal path was opened between Shalini’s contact at Arthav Voice and an old radio antenna repurposed to beam data without passing through commercial towers. Meera remained mobile, changing locations every eight hours. Ira operated from within a camouflaged network shell, creating context briefs for the journalists—names, dates, internal memos. The final brief began with a sentence she never thought she’d write: “My name is Ira Mallick. I worked for SysCore Solutions. This is what they don’t want you to know.” But even as the leak was being assembled, shadows gathered. Shubho’s name was quietly removed from employee records. His LinkedIn was deleted. His photo wiped from internal archives. Ira’s own apartment had been sub-let to someone else. Her family in Lucknow reported that a man had come asking for her—flashing an ID badge he didn’t leave behind. Ira knew: the system was scrubbing her. Just like it had tried to erase Sanya. “Once this goes out,” Meera warned, “you’ll need a new name. You can’t go back to normal. Not for a long time.” Ira nodded. “I never wanted to be a hero. I just wanted to know the truth.” Meera looked at her with something like pride. “That’s exactly why you’ll survive.”
At 6:03 AM on a Thursday, Arthav Voice went live with the exposé: “Project Obsidian: How Indian Corporates Are Engineering Psychological Collapse.” The article spread like wildfire—screenshots flooding Twitter, Reddit, WhatsApp groups. News anchors scrambled to verify. SysCore issued a two-line denial. Then went silent. By 8 AM, journalists swarmed the Gurgaon tower gates. By noon, two senior board members had resigned. By evening, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs had announced a preliminary inquiry. But Ira didn’t see any of it happen live. She was already gone—relocated under government protection with a new name, new documents, and one suitcase. In the final message she sent Meera before disappearing into the folds of anonymity, she wrote: “They made her do it. But they couldn’t make me stay quiet.” Meera never replied—but she didn’t need to. Justice wasn’t clean. It didn’t always end in courtrooms or headlines. Sometimes, it looked like a silent survivor carrying truth in her scars. And somewhere in a cold corporate server room, Obsidian blinked, faltered, and then—finally—went dark.
–
Three months later, a file arrived anonymously at the office of a junior compliance officer at the Securities and Exchange Board of India. No return address, no watermark—just a plain brown envelope marked “For Eyes That Still See.” Inside were transcripts of private board meetings from four major corporations, all referencing Project Obsidian in coded language. It included slides from a now-defunct consultancy presentation detailing behavioral modification techniques masked as “employee resilience testing.” Attached at the end was a short, handwritten note: “Truth is patient. It waits in inboxes, on whiteboards, in trash folders. You can kill the messenger. But the message survives.” The officer’s hands shook as he forwarded it to his director. That evening, a discreet task force was formed under the Ministry of Electronics and IT. Quietly. Without headlines. Obsidian had died in the public eye, but its bones were now being exhumed in conference rooms under fluorescent lights. What had begun as whistleblowing was evolving into reform—slow, invisible, and deliberate. Somewhere, the ripples had begun.
In a fishing village off the Konkan coast, a woman named Ira D’Souza taught digital literacy to local teens using secondhand laptops and borrowed broadband. She wore her hair shorter now, went by her mother’s maiden name, and never spoke about Gurgaon. The students thought she was a failed IT worker from Mumbai. She didn’t correct them. On evenings when the tide came in soft, she’d sit on the rocks and watch the horizon like it was a firewall she’d finally crossed. Some nights, a dark car would park near the beach, engine running. A silent visitor would drop off a newspaper clipping or USB stick in a small wooden box she kept buried in the sand. That was Meera’s way of saying: you’re not forgotten. One such delivery held an article titled: “Whistleblower Program Sees 300% Rise Since Obsidian Leak.” Ira didn’t smile. But she folded the article neatly and slid it into a rusted biscuit tin marked “Hope.” It was getting fuller now.
Far away, in a glass tower in Mumbai, Pooja Sibal stood in front of a boardroom window, looking out over the sea. Her phone buzzed—another compliance request, another damage control meeting. The investigation hadn’t touched her yet. But her name had been red-flagged on multiple security watchlists. One of her old assistants had fled the country. Another was under house arrest. The wall was closing in—slow, quiet, legal. She turned away from the window and looked at her reflection. Behind her composed face, she saw something else now: the fear of being seen. That was the real punishment. Not a courtroom, not a cell—but knowing the darkness she curated had finally been named. Obsidian no longer protected her. And somewhere, Sanya Bedi’s last words still echoed in data packets, in court affidavits, in hearts like Ira’s: They made me do it. But from now on, fewer voices would say that line. And more would learn to say: I said no—and survived.
-End-
