Attachment

In the heart of the booming tech city stood Antroix Corp, a name spoken with admiration, envy, and even fear. With its tall glass towers and high-security gates, Antroix wasn’t just another company, it was a dream destination for coders, developers, and tech geniuses across the country. People didn’t apply here. Antroix found them.

Known for working on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, health-tech APIs, brain-simulation software, and even government-level defense projects, Antroix carried an aura of mystery. Its success was beyond imagination, and its silence only made it more powerful. No one truly knew what happened inside those buildings, but everyone wanted to be a part of it.

Janya Raut never expected to be chosen.

She wasn’t from a famous college. She didn’t have big names on her resume. But what she had was skill, raw, sharp, and self-learned. She had started out in the shadows of online forums, solving bugs others couldn’t, creating security patches no one asked for, and once, even exposing a loophole in a government drone simulator. Quietly. Without looking for credit.

That was enough.

One day, she received a message, no sender, no subject, just a short encrypted puzzle hidden inside a blinking command line. She cracked it in thirteen minutes. A week later, she was flown to a hidden location for what they called an "internal challenge."

There was no interview. Just a large screen in a dark room, a terminal blinking with instructions, and a voice: “Break into this container. Sixty minutes.”

She finished it in forty-five.

The screen showed one word: “Shortlisted.”

When she entered Antroix, she was given a badge and a set of keys, both digital and physical. No warm welcome, no HR paperwork. She was assigned to a special division called D-Vault, a section known for research and development work that was so secretive, not even other employees talked about it.

Her task was clear: write code. Build what she was told. But the code came in parts, small chunks of logic that did specific tasks. She never knew the bigger picture. There was no documentation, no version history, and no clear destination. Every line of code she submitted was locked, encrypted, and moved elsewhere.

When she asked what it was for, her supervisor would smile and say, “You’re working on something great. Just focus on your part.”

There were no team meetings. No client discussions. No user interface designs. Just raw back-end modules with strange names like “ThresholdReach,” “PulseTrigger,” and “HabitTrack.” She wrote the code, delivered it, and moved on to the next task.

At first, it felt exciting. Like being part of something ahead of its time. And the money was incredible. Her apartment came with smart walls and silent elevators. Her ID gave her access to advanced tools most developers only dreamed of.  She enjoyed the comforts that came with the job, the high salary, the elegant apartment, the sense of pride that came every time she introduced herself as an Antroix developer. Her parents beamed with joy when they spoke of her. Her younger brother, who was studying pharmaceutical sciences in another state, would often tell his friends about her achievements. Though their parents weren’t highly educated but they ran a small household business and they were proud that both of their children had grown up to be humble, grounded, and kind despite their success.

This went on for nearly four years. But the excitement faded. Janya slowly realized she didn’t enjoy the work as much as she thought she would. It felt like micro-management, she was handed pieces of code with no idea where or how they would be used. There was no clarity, no feedback. Whenever she submitted her part, no one told her if it was right or wrong, or if there were any bugs. The review and integration of her code were handled by someone else, often junior developers she never met or interacted with. Her role became mechanical, just write, deliver, and move on.

And then, one day, she resigned. No fight. No fallout. Just a quiet goodbye. She moved to another city, joined a clean, open company, and tried to forget the glass kingdom she had left behind.

The phone rang just after sunrise. A strange hour. The kind of hour when bad news doesn’t knock, it breaks in. Janya answered, still half-asleep, but the voice on the other end snapped her awake.

Her mother was crying. Her words stumbled, soaked in panic and disbelief.

“Pratyush... He’s not breathing... He’s... gone, Janya.”

Gone?

Her younger brother? Her Pratyush? Her annoying, brilliant, curious Pratyush, who once called her in the middle of the night just to ask if dreams could be recorded like movies. Who had told his friends with pride that his sister worked at Antroix. Who laughed too loudly during movie nights and always asked too many questions about how code really worked.

She caught the next available train, her mind racing the entire way. Her hands shook with every call she made, to friends, to classmates, to anyone who might know something more than what her mother had said. By the time she arrived, the white coffin had already reached their doorstep.

It was placed neatly, like a package delivered to the wrong address.

Her mother sat on the veranda, eyes red and empty. Her father stood in the corner of the house, holding the wall for support, unable to speak. Relatives murmured in the background, their voices low but constant. Some offered tea. Others repeated shallow lines about fate.

The police had visited earlier, they said. The case was closed. An overdose. Pratyush had, for the first time in his life, taken drugs, something strong, and his body couldn’t handle it.

Janya stared at them.

“No,” she said softly. “Not him.”

He wasn’t like that. He was careful. Curious, yes. But disciplined. Health-conscious. Focused on his studies. He wouldn’t have touched drugs, not even once.

But the police had a story.

They said his roommate had been known to use drugs. That Pratyush was likely influenced by him. They said curiosity must have won, just once. The hostel warden, they added, had been alerted after a late-night noise complaint. Upon investigating, he’d found signs of drug use in the room. The roommate’s parents had been called. The boy had been expelled from the college and the hostel the next morning.

“Pratyush never got the chance,” they added, almost as an afterthought. “It was his first time. A tragedy.”

Janya listened, but none of it sat right.

There were no hospital reports. The postmortem copy was vague. There was no footage from the hostel corridors, the CCTV, they said, had been under maintenance. No one had seen what happened that night. No witness stepped forward. The roommate, apparently, had returned home. His number was unreachable.

The entire case was wrapped up in six days.

Her parents, drowned in grief, didn’t question the details. They weren’t the type to argue with authorities. They didn’t know how to. They were small business owners who had worked hard to raise two decent, kind children. And now, one of them was gone. But Janya couldn’t rest. Not with the questions circling her mind. Not with the unease that grew stronger with every missing piece.

On the third night, after tossing and turning with no sleep, she sat by the dining table, flipping through every file, every page, every document that had been handed to them.

And that’s when she saw it.

Buried in the incident summary, printed in faint type on a photocopied sheet, was the name of a company listed as part of the “external technical consultants” involved in processing student data during the investigation.

Antroix Corp.

The name struck her like ice on skin.

What did they have to do with her brother’s death?

The familiar rhythm of keystrokes echoed through the quiet of her apartment. For the first time in years, Janya wasn't writing clean, structured code for a client. She was digging, searching in the shadows. She had gone back to the roots she had carefully hidden: her hacker instincts. 

Antroix had long moved on from her. But her old credentials still left a trace, an abandoned dev link hidden deep in a forgotten sandbox server. Most of the links were inactive, wiped clean. One, however, responded.

With trembling fingers, she tunneled in. She went in search of the original report—what Antroix had submitted to the local police. Her intention was simple: to understand why the company had been involved at all. Maybe, she thought, some high-level executive had used influence or money to cover up the real cause of death. She expected paperwork that danced around the truth.

But what she found was worse. What she found was not a product server or archived build environment, it was a private testing environment. Secured under multiple layers, masked with cryptic labels.

She decrypted the first batch of shell scripts. Routine file calls. Then came encrypted logs. Batch jobs. And deep within, file paths that sent a chill down her spine.

/neuro_trials/drug_response_mapping.log

/biofeedback/sync-emoti_waveform.py

/INFLUENCE-TRIAL/college_data_batches/phase3

The logs were recent. Within the last year.She narrowed her search. A metadata file inside a folder named TRIAL-SERIES-LX92 revealed something far worse than she imagined:

Subject Name: Pratyush Raut

Age: 20Trial

Type: Neurochemical Response Trigger — Controlled Delivery

Status: Deceased

Janya froze. Pratyush was part of the trial. Officially. Silently. Selected. The document didn’t end there. It explained the method: selected college students were monitored using behaviour-mapping software embedded in student apps and Wi-Fi usage patterns. The data collected passively and silently was used to assign psychological profiles. If they fit the criteria, they were anonymously enrolled for experimental compounds intended to influence mood, focus, and emotional resilience.

The drugs were administered through disguised wellness campaigns, sometimes as “herbal boosters,” other times as “brain vitamin supplements” given during random campus drives.

Her brother had never known. Janya couldn’t breathe. The more she read, the more she understood just how far Antroix had gone. It hadn’t just used her code, it had perfected a system of human experimentation. All hidden beneath sleek apps and flashy campus influencer programs.

The logs clearly linked her past module, signal-processing logic she had designed to track changes in device behavior to a broader platform that flagged students based on emotional and cognitive patterns. Her code was the key to detecting psychological states: when someone was stressed, sad, distracted, or unusually responsive.

This data was matched to known neurochemical profiles. And students who fit the experimental window were quietly marked. Push notifications were used to engage them. Offers to join “student wellness events” or collect free sample kits were the delivery vectors.

One such kit had reached Pratyush. She opened another encrypted record: his name, college ID, sample tag.

Drug: NXE-T9 — Experimental neuro-resonant enhancer. Designed to improve focus and emotional control during academic stress. Still under early testing.

Risk Level: Moderate.

Follow-up: Missed.

Final Status: Non-responsive.

He had died the same night. The police had never known. The college had never asked. Because the trial was masked under a third-party wellness partnership. The influencers were paid. The labels were fake. The body count was silent.

And Janya unknowingly had helped design the algorithm that chose who would be next. Her brother wasn’t the only one. The logs showed others. Dozens. Different cities. Different campuses.

She closed the terminal.

Tears welled in her eyes, not just of grief but fury. This wasn’t negligence. 

This was a machine.

A quiet, polished, smiling machine that ran on real lives.

Janya knew one thing for sure, she couldn’t go public with what she had. Not directly. Not against a company like Antroix. They were a legal fortress with layers of protection, deep political ties, and an army of lawyers who could bury a hundred truths before breakfast.

So she decided to do what Antroix would never expect: slip the truth in through the back door.

She designed a report, on the surface, it looked like just another technical document. A dense PDF titled "AI Performance Bottleneck - Cache Looping in Behavioral Simulations". The kind of file that mid-level engineers would skim through during late-night work reviews.

But inside, it was a bomb.

The first few pages contained real code, a distraction. But buried in the footer of page five was a corrupted QR code. When scanned, it didn’t lead to any website. Instead, it triggered a small script that opened access to a hidden repository stored on a decentralized mirror network.

In that repo:

Audio logs retrieved from a forgotten Antroix microservice, capturing internal R&D meetings where terms like “non-consensual application” and “trigger windows” were spoken without guilt.

Metadata logs tying student's device habits to their vulnerability scores. A simulation, generated using AI that recreated Pratyush’s behavior path: from app usage and screen taps to the exact moment he was flagged for trial eligibility. It was chilling.

Most shockingly, a signed memo from a senior medical compliance officer approving "Phase IV Trials" under blanket anonymized data protection, which clearly included Pratyush’s ID. She embedded an invisible macro script that, once opened inside Antroix's firewall, would upload the key files into multiple departmental dashboards marked under false bug IDs. The file was structured to bypass every known filter, framed like a routine performance issue.

Then came the final move: an auto-looping audio snippet stitched to sound like a testing feedback session, ending with a chilling line, Pratyush's name followed by the word "confirmed responsive."

She paused before hitting send. Her hand shook. But she knew. The recipient? It was a junior employee in Antroix’s internal communications department. New, eager, and painfully naïve, someone Janya had met years ago during her time there.

Subject line: “RE: Urgent Performance Bottleneck - AI Cache Looping”

No warning. No explanation. Just the attachment.

At exactly 10:42 AM, the email was opened.

The junior staffer, curious and trying to impress his team, clicked on the PDF. As soon as he opened it, the embedded macro executed silently, no alerts, no error messages. Within seconds, it slipped through Antroix’s internal systems, attaching itself to the daily update logs. The macro was designed to blend in, flagging the upload as an “Urgent System Integration Error” and triggering alert pings in cross-functional dashboards.

The file auto-routed to department heads in compliance, R&D, legal, and behavioral AI.

By noon, panic had begun.

The PDF, opened by key decision-makers, contained not just facts but context, an AI simulation of Pratyush, a real death linked to internal actions. And it wasn’t just him. Logs within the PDF identified over seventy flagged subjects across campuses, several with “inconclusive” outcomes. Some were labeled non-responsive. Others had simply vanished from tracking.

Executives flooded Slack channels with private threads. Then, silence.

Legal flagged a mass audit. R&D heads locked their Jira boards.

By 3 PM, the story had exploded inside. The CEO’s executive assistant was seen rushing to the boardroom. A VPN lockdown was issued across three continents. A leak notice was quietly added to the internal wiki, but the trail had already spread.

A backend DevOps intern pushed the PDF’s header image into a bug thread on GitLab, accidentally making it public for seven minutes.

That was enough.

A tech blogger captured it.

At 4:22 PM, a tweet appeared: "What’s going on inside Antroix’s AI labs? This 'performance report' has some chilling Easter eggs."

The tweet went viral in under an hour. By nightfall, a whistleblower account had picked up the repo. Encrypted, mirrored, and flooding.

And Janya?

She sat in a café two cities away, laptop closed, watching the headline scroll across the news ticker:

"Antroix Under Scrutiny: Leaked Report Hints at Human Trials, Corporate Cover-Up."

And beneath it, a file name:

Attachment.pdf

It didn’t end with a tweet. It began there, but it grew into a storm no firewall could contain.

Within twenty-four hours, the file named "Attachment.pdf" was no longer just an internal anomaly. It had turned into a ghost, duplicated, distorted, mirrored across servers, private Telegram groups, and encrypted whistleblower dropboxes. Some versions contained only the audio logs. Others included the full simulation of Pratyush’s final hours rendered frame by frame like a silent confession.

Somewhere within Antroix, someone else had decided to speak. Then another. And another. The chain reaction had turned into an avalanche. News agencies that once praised Antroix for innovation and philanthropy now swarmed its premises with camera crews. Headlines flashed across every major network:

"Did Students Die for Data? Antroix’s Behavioural Trials Under Fire"

"Digital Diagnostics or Human Experiments? Disturbing Footage Surfaces"

"Leaked AI Footage Shows Predictive Addiction Engine in Action"

Families came forward. Faces once unknown now held framed photographs of their children, students who had collapsed suddenly, who had changed overnight, who had simply disappeared. Grieving mothers held screenshots of last chats. Siblings posted stories, once dismissed as personal tragedies, now revealed as systematic design.

And buried in the heart of the leak, one undeniable truth stood out:

Antroix had known.

They had seen it coming, every overdose, every psychological breakdown. Their algorithms had calculated risk curves. Their dashboards had flagged vulnerabilities. But nothing was done.

No intervention.

Just silent observation.

Forums became digital graveyards of outrage. Anonymous accounts posted redacted records. Former interns whispered of real-time dashboards that monitored user distress levels, color-coded stress bars beside anonymized names.

A new hashtag exploded globally:

#WeWereSubjects

It trended for nine days straight. The glass kingdom Antroix had built, sleek, polished, untouchable, was now cracking from within. The illusion of perfection was gone.

When the fall came, it came fast.

Lawsuits rained in from every direction, class actions from Asia, regulatory probes from Europe, investigative tribunals in Washington and New Delhi. Countries that once begged Antroix to invest in their innovation hubs now blacklisted their apps and APIs.

Former employees, some shaken, some furious, began to testify. Their NDAs were shattered by whistleblower protections. Courtrooms heard stories of secret projects with no oversight, interns asked to tag emotion spikes in student videos, developers ordered to simulate dopamine response without clinical validation.

One former compliance officer broke down on live television as she read aloud a memo:

"Ethical conflicts shall not obstruct technical viability. Proceed with Phase IV."

The Antroix stock, once considered indestructible, collapsed in two days. Major investors disassociated publicly. Emergency meetings were held behind glass doors, but even those leaked.

The CEO, once hailed as the face of futuristic innovation, stood in front of a trembling press, flanked by attorneys. His statement lasted less than four minutes. He didn’t take questions.

He resigned the same evening.

A court order followed within seventy-two hours, instructing an immediate operational freeze. Law enforcement surrounded the Antroix headquarters, the building that once symbolized modern utopia.

Drone footage captured real-time scenes:

Employees escorted out without their devices.

White vans loading confiscated hard drives.

Servers being powered down.

Paper trails dumped onto polished floors.

The Antroix logo, once a glowing symbol against the skyline, was dismantled. And amid this chaos, classified files surfaced, files never meant to exist. Documents with phrases like "Emotion Drift Harvesting" and "Adaptive Consent Loops". Maps of trial zones. Lists of flagged subjects. Pilot dates. Failure indexes.

It wasn't a glitch.

It was a design.

And now the world knew.

Through it all, Janya said nothing. Not a blog post. Not a tweet. Not a whisper.

She watched the headlines unfold from a train seat, her face half-lit by the golden rays of evening sun cutting through the window. The world was howling now. Demanding justice. Demanding reform. Demanding accountability. But she remained still.

Her name never surfaced in any of the leaks. None of the whistleblower accounts traced back to her. She had ghosted the system as cleanly as she had entered it. And she preferred it that way.

A week after the final closure of Antroix, she made a quiet journey to the cemetery nestled on the edge of her hometown. The path was lined with gulmohar trees in full bloom. The breeze carried the smell of wet mud and marigold garlands.

Her brother’s grave was simple. A white stone. A name. A date. She knelt and pulled out a small object from her coat pocket: a plain, unbranded USB stick. The one that had started it all. No stickers. No labels. Just storage and truth. She placed it gently on the grave.She looked down at the grave, her voice barely louder than the wind.

“I missed you,” she whispered. “And I’m sorry… I never knew my work would become a machine that ends lives.”

The wind stirred again, brushing dry leaves across the stone as if trying to answer her.

She stood, quietly, without drama.

There was no rage left in her.

No need for applause.

Only the stillness of a storm that had finally passed.

And then she turned.

No one watched.

She walked away, fading into the dusk.

Gone before anyone could notice.

She couldn’t bring her brother back but she made sure no one else would be lost to silence again. What began as a line of code ended with a company buried beneath its own lies.