The Forgotten Password

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.

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Pic: Freepik