Nikitha
had just stepped out of a lecture on digital forensics at the university
when her phone buzzed. The message was cryptic, even for her.
“Need
help. URGENT. Can’t remember. Everything’s slipping: Arun B.”
It
wasn’t a number she recognized, but the name rang a faint bell. She dug into
her contacts. Arun Balasubramaniam - a data encryption specialist she’d
once met at a cybersecurity seminar. A quiet, reclusive genius from Bengaluru,
known for building a file vault system so secure, it was rumored to be
unbreakable even by government agencies.
Curiosity
piqued, she messaged back.
“What
can’t you remember, Arun?”
The
reply came with a location pin and two chilling words: “Come. Please.”
Fragments of a Mind
When
Nikitha arrived at the small apartment in Indiranagar, the man who opened the
door was a shadow of the suave, confident cryptographer she remembered. Arun
looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were bloodshot, hair disheveled,
and he seemed visibly shaken, like a man adrift in his own home.
He
gestured toward his desk, a chaotic landscape of scribbled notes, USB drives,
and dismantled hard disks. “I’ve lost the password,” he rasped, his voice
hoarse with desperation. “But worse, I think I’m losing… pieces of myself.”
Nikitha
stepped in, careful not to disturb the fragile ecosystem of his workspace.
“Slow down, Arun. What password?”
He
pointed to a sleek laptop on the desk. The screen glowed with a simple, ominous
prompt:
Enter
Master Password to Unlock ‘PRAVRITI’ Attempts left: 2
“It’s
my personal project,” he explained, his voice cracking. “Something I built as a
failsafe. But I can’t remember what’s inside. And I don’t remember creating
half of it.”
Nikitha
frowned. “Encrypted file vaults are common. Why’s this one scaring you so
much?”
Arun
gave a haunted smile. “Because I designed it to auto-delete if not
accessed every 60 days. It’s been 59. And now, I remember nothing. Not the
contents. Not the context. Not even the password I set.”
“And
the backups?”
“None.
That was the point. It was supposed to be the ultimate secure storage.”
She
scanned the screen. Military-grade encryption, eye-scan fallback, voice
imprint - all bypassed or irrelevant now, rendered useless by the missing
master key. But one detail made her pause, a cold knot forming in her stomach.
The
login screen clearly read:
Welcome
back, Nikitha.
Memory's Ghost
“I
never set this up,” Nikitha said, a chill running down her spine. Her name, bold
and clear, stared back at her from the screen of a system she’d never touched.
“You
sure?” Arun asked, his voice almost desperate, clinging to any thread of hope.
“Because your name’s deeply embedded in the code. You… you might’ve helped. A
long time ago?”
“Unlikely,
Arun. I’ve never worked on PRAVRITI,
and I don’t even know what it stands for.”
She
quickly traced the acronym. Pravṛtti - a Sanskrit word meaning impulse, drive,
or activity. But what impulse? What drive? The name offered no clues about its
mysterious contents.
Arun
suddenly clutched his head, a sharp gasp escaping his lips. “It’s happening
again.”
He
stumbled, swaying, his face contorted in pain. Nikitha rushed to his side. For
a moment, his pupils dilated unnaturally, his gaze unfocused, distant. Then, as
suddenly as it came, the episode passed. Clarity returned, but the fear in his
eyes remained.
“There
are gaps,” he whispered, his voice trembling. “Not just memory loss. It’s like
something’s been edited. Extracted. Pieces of my life, just… gone.”
Nikitha
froze. A memory, chillingly similar, flashed through her mind.
“Do
you remember The Camera case?”
she asked quietly, her voice barely above a whisper.
Arun
nodded slowly, recognition dawning in his eyes. “The one with the memory wipe?
The soldiers?”
“Yes.
What if this is similar? What if someone is deliberately erasing your
memories?”
But
Arun’s profile didn’t match the previous victims. Those were military
experiments, black ops exposure. Arun was a civilian, a quiet genius, not a
soldier.
“Tell
me,” she urged, her mind racing. “What were you working on lately? Anything
unusual?”
Arun
slowly pulled a flash drive from a locked drawer. “This was in my safe. It has
a single file. Created 12 days ago. I don’t remember making it.”
Nikitha
opened the file on a separate, offline machine, wary of any hidden
traps. The document contained dense, complex code, interspersed with scattered
notes, fragmented phrases - and a chilling warning that sent a shiver down her
spine:
“DO
NOT TRUST HER.
If you’re reading this, it means Phase 2 has begun.
Run the password recovery protocol: SIDDHARTHA.”
“Who’s
Siddhartha?” Nikitha asked, her voice tight with foreboding.
“My
twin brother,” Arun said, his voice trembling, tears welling in his eyes. “He died
three years ago.”
The Echo Protocol
Nikitha
knew the mind could play tricks - under extreme stress, during mental
breakdowns, or when truly hacked. But this was something else entirely. Arun’s
own warning, written by himself but forgotten, pointed to a deeper, more
sinister design.
She
delved deeper into Arun’s digital logs for the PRAVRITI vault. It had been
accessed four times - each time with a different internet address, and
bizarrely, each entry was tagged with a slightly different version of Arun’s
own voiceprint. It wasn't a simple hack. It was something far more
sophisticated, something that implied artificial
manipulation.
She
ran a quick diagnostic on the vault’s underlying framework. What she found made
her heart pound. Embedded within the system was a neural fingerprint mapping algorithm. It wasn’t just designed to
store passwords; it seemed to mirror and store the psychological state of the
user at the time the password was created.
Nikitha
sat back, stunned by the audacity of it.
“Arun,”
she said, her voice filled with a dawning horror, “You didn’t just build a
vault. You built a mind-locked mirror.
The password isn’t just a word - it’s you. Or more precisely, who you
were when you created it.”
“But
I’m not that anymore,” he whispered, his gaze distant. “Something’s erased it.
Or changed me.”
Nikitha
leaned closer. “Or overwritten
it.”
She
remembered a name: D-Prime, a
highly secretive, government-level AI project she’d only read whispers about.
It was rumored to store and synchronize live cognitive blueprints, essentially
creating a copy of someone’s mind. The ethics had been hotly debated -
especially when whispers emerged that it could actually modify memories.
“Arun,”
she asked gently, her voice barely a breath, “Did someone fund you for this
project? Someone specific?”
He
looked away, his eyes clouding with an even deeper anguish. “There was a woman.
She said she was from a think tank in Geneva. She offered me significant
funding - in exchange for beta access
to PRAVRITI, to test its security.”
Nikitha’s
blood ran cold. “Do you have her name?”
“Vanya
Kruger,” Arun murmured.
Nikitha’s
hands shook. That name. It had appeared once before in one of her past,
chilling cases, "The Betrayal" - linked to a shell company funding
projects related to psychological warfare. And now Arun was losing not
just his data, but himself.
The Backup Brain
Nikitha
needed to buy time. With only two attempts left on the PRAVRITI vault, the
stakes were impossibly high. If they failed, everything would be permanently
deleted, and Arun’s last link to his own past might vanish forever.
She
proposed a desperate workaround. Using the faint, residual mental data she’d
found embedded in Arun’s devices - tiny digital echoes of his past self - she
would attempt a forensic reconstruction. The goal was to simulate his previous
mental state, to try and recreate the mind that had forged the elusive
password.
The
simulation was crude, a digital ghost of Arun’s former self, but it threw up a
crucial puzzle piece: an encrypted audio message from that earlier version of
Arun. She played it, her heart pounding.
“Nikitha…
if you’re hearing this, you’ve already seen the damage.
The
password… isn’t a word. It’s a memory.
The
day Siddhartha died.”
Arun
broke down, his face crumbling, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. “We were at
Nandi Hills,” he choked out, the words ripped from his soul. “Hiking. He fell.
I’ve never forgiven myself.”
Nikitha
knew this was it. This was the raw, emotional core of the password. It wasn’t a
string of characters; it was a trauma, a moment burned into his very being.
“Describe
that day to me,” Nikitha said gently, her voice calm and steady, guiding him
through the storm of his grief. “Every detail you can remember. From the moment
you woke up.”
Arun
closed his eyes, forcing himself back to that agonizing day. “He woke me up at
4:30 a.m. Said we’d see the sunrise from the peak. We packed two bottles of
water, wore our favorite sweatshirts - mine was grey, his was blue. We reached
the summit at 6:15 a.m. He… he smiled, turned to take a selfie, and then he
slipped.”
Nikitha
watched as Arun’s eyes welled up, tears finally streaming down his face,
washing away some of the haunted look. She knew this was the key. Not a word,
but a sequence of raw, deeply personal details. She typed:
6:15AMBlueSweat
And
hit Enter.
A
pause. The screen flickered. Then, with a triumphant chime:
Access granted.
The
PRAVRITI vault opened.
The Contents Revealed
What
lay inside wasn’t a treasure trove of code, as Nikitha might have expected from
a data encryption specialist. Instead, it was a chilling collection: a series
of chronological logs, fragmented audio clips, and one final, damning document
titled “THE KRUGER REPLAY”.
Nikitha
scrolled through, her anger building with every line.
The
document detailed a covert project run by a shadowy outfit called Neurowatch, with significant funding
from the Kruger Foundation.
Their goal was terrifying: to develop and implant trigger-based memory locks tied directly to a person’s deepest
emotional trauma. Subjects would build secure systems, forget the keys, and
only recover them on cue - if their handlers chose.
Arun
had been the prototype. A brilliant, reclusive mind, chosen for his genius and,
most cruelly, for his profound, unaddressed grief over his brother’s death.
But
something had gone wrong.
Arun,
consumed by guilt and sorrow, had embedded that trauma too deeply, too
personally, into the very core of his system. When Vanya Kruger’s team tried to
access the PRAVRITI system, using their own pre-designed triggers, it rejected
them. His profound pain had become the ultimate firewall, locking everything
behind his inaccessible grief.
So,
they escalated. They used synthetic
triggers - advanced, unseen methods - to deliberately erase the
“gatekeeper.” They didn’t just want the data; they wanted to break his mind, to
bypass his emotional lock by making him forget the very pain that guarded it.
Nikitha
was furious, her voice trembling with suppressed rage. “They used your grief as
a password, Arun. And then they broke you, they broke your mind, just to bypass
it.”
Arun
was silent, tears streaming down his face, the realization of his own unwitting
sacrifice settling deep within him.
The Road to Recovery
Nikitha
helped Arun back up all the files from PRAVRITI, securing them under her own
unbreakable protocols. She then reached out to her vast network of contacts in
cybercrime divisions and international human rights groups, providing them with
the damning evidence against Neurowatch and the Kruger Foundation.
As
for Vanya Kruger herself - she’d
disappeared again, as ghosts often do when exposed to light. But now, Nikitha
had a thread to pull, a clear trail to follow. Kruger was no longer a phantom;
she was a target.
Before
leaving Arun’s apartment, with the rain finally easing outside, Nikitha turned
to him. His face was still pale, but a new, quiet determination had replaced
the earlier fear.
“Do
you want to restore everything, Arun?” she asked gently, referring to his
fragmented memories. “We can try.”
He
shook his head, a faint, sad smile playing on his lips.
“Not
yet,” he murmured, gazing out at the clearing skies. “Some things, maybe, are
meant to stay forgotten.”
As
Nikitha left, the city of Bengaluru hummed around her, oblivious to the silent
battle that had just been won. In "The Forgotten Password," the
boundary between memory, technology, and identity had been pushed to its limit.
Nikitha had navigated a digital labyrinth that was also a labyrinth of the
human mind. One thing was clear: in a world where minds could be coded and
stolen, the human spirit - with all its grief and grace - remained the last
true firewall.
And
Nikitha, ever vigilant, was there to guard it.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Pic: Freepik
