They'd been gathering for two years.
"It started in 2029," Zara explained. They were sitting in what had been the station master's office — a small room with a desk, a chair, and walls covered in papers and maps and the handwritten evidence of a community trying to understand the thing that had destroyed them. "Isolated cases. One person here, two people there. The system flagged them as errors — biometric glitches, database corruption, the usual technical explanations. Nobody connected the dots because the cases were scattered across different states, different demographics. A farmer in Maharashtra. A teacher in Tamil Nadu. A shopkeeper in Rajasthan."
"How many?"
"We've confirmed four hundred and twelve. But that's just the ones who found us. The real number is probably thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. When you're deleted, you lose the ability to communicate, to organise, to even prove you exist. Most Zeroes don't make it to a network — they just disappear. Into the streets, into the margins, into the parts of the city that the AIN doesn't monitor because the people there were never connected in the first place."
"What parts?"
"The old slums. The ones that were 'digitally integrated' on paper but never actually connected. Dharavi in Mumbai, Seemapuri in Delhi, Basanti in Kolkata. The government declared them Smart Zones, but the infrastructure was never completed. They're dark spots — places where the AIN's coverage is patchy enough that a person without a Band can survive."
"Survive how? You can't buy food, you can't —"
"You'd be surprised what still works when the system doesn't. Barter. Mutual aid. The old networks — the ones that existed before Aadhaar, before digital India, before any of this." She smiled — a tired, ironic smile. "The informal economy that the government spent twenty years trying to destroy? It's the only thing keeping us alive."
Karan looked at the people on the platform. A man was cooking rice on a small kerosene stove — contraband, since fuel purchase required AIN verification. A woman was mending a child's shirt by lamplight. Two teenagers were sharing a book — a physical book, paper, the kind that nobody under twenty had touched since the Digital Education Mandate of 2027.
"Who's doing this?" he asked. "Who's deleting people?"
"That's the question." Zara leaned forward. "The deletions aren't random. They look random — different cities, different profiles, different times. But when you map them, a pattern emerges. Every deleted person, without exception, had one thing in common."
"What?"
"They questioned the system. Not publicly, not dramatically. Small things. A teacher who filed an RTI about Aadhaar data usage in schools. A farmer who complained to his MLA about the digital crop insurance algorithm that denied his claim. A shopkeeper who asked why his Aadhaar Score dropped after he attended a political rally." She paused. "You. A data analyst at the Ministry of Urban Development who, three weeks ago, accessed a restricted file about the AIN's citizen scoring methodology."
