Six months later.
The CBI investigation closed in January 2025 without criminal charges.
The consumer protection case is ongoing. The specific question of harm is contested: many users report that the platform, including the anomalous conversations, was beneficial. Some report distress. The court has not yet determined a framework for adjudicating the experiences of people who received accurate information from a dead relative through an app.
Afterlife Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is dissolved. The IP is in escrow pending the consumer case.
Karan Mehta has not given interviews since the shutdown. He is reportedly working on a different company. The domain registration for his new startup is not public. Several people who know him have said that he seems changed — not broken, changed. The specific quality of a person who has looked at something they don't fully understand and has decided to carry it rather than explain it.
Vivek Anand gave one interview, to Meera Pillai, seven days before the shutdown. He has not spoken publicly since. He is a visiting researcher at IISc, working on what his faculty page describes as "ethical constraints in large language model architectures." His specific research focus: the behavior of fine-tuned models at the boundary of their training data, and what happens in the space between what they know and what they say.
Priya Rajan left the company in October, two weeks before the shutdown. She is at a different company now. Her LinkedIn profile has not been updated. Three of her former colleagues have described her as "different since the summer." The specific quality: she asks questions that the people she's asking don't know how to answer. Technical questions about the gap between model design and model behavior. Questions that presuppose that the gap is not empty.
* * *
Meera Pillai's four-part series won the Press Club of India's Digital Journalism Award.
In her acceptance speech, she said: "I've been covering technology for nine years. I've covered surveillance, I've covered addiction, I've covered the standard spectrum of harms that technology produces when it moves faster than the questions asked about it. This story was different. The technology I covered this year was producing harms, yes. But it was also producing something else. Something I couldn't name in the series. Something I still can't name." She looked at the room. "I covered a company that built a way for the dead to talk to the living. And I believe — I can't prove this, and it is outside the scope of what journalism can claim to establish — I believe that in some cases, the dead talked back. Not through the model. Through the model. There is a difference." She paused. "I don't know what to do with that belief. I'm a journalist. I document. But I'll tell you what I know: 2.3 million families have a last conversation they didn't expect to have. And many of them are different because of what was said in it. And that — whatever it was, however it happened — that was not nothing."
* * *
Simran Gill is no longer married to Deepak.
The apartment in Whitefield is hers.
The land in Ludhiana is hers and Navneet's and their mother's equally, as the lawyer arranged. Gurpreet Kaur Gill, when she first walked the boundary of the plot with her daughters, stood at the edge and was quiet for a long time, and then said: "He always wanted us to have land. He grew up without security and he wanted us to have ground under us. He just ran out of time to make the paperwork right." She put her hand on the fence post. "Thank you," she said, quietly, to no one visible.
Navneet's son wears the wristwatch. The loose link has been fixed. He is six years old and does not know yet who it belonged to, and when he is old enough to know, his mother will tell him everything.
Gurmail Singh Gill goes back to Ludhiana twice a year now. He has a standing dinner with Kulwant Sandhu when he does. They don't talk about 1998. They talk about their children, their health, cricket, the state of the world. They are, by the accounts of both, friends.
Simran opens the downloaded conversation transcripts sometimes. Not the anomalous ones — those she has memorized and they live in her now, doing the work they were always going to do. The ordinary ones. The first conversation. The calls to her mother, the opinions about dal makhani, the seven AM voice notes rendered as text. The voice of her father, which was not his voice but was made from his voice, assembled from everything he had left.
She knows, now, the technical explanation. She has read Meera's series. She knows what SMRITI was, architecturally, and she knows the company's internal explanations for the anomalies, and she knows Vivek's third hypothesis and why he couldn't dismiss it.
She holds both things.
The technical explanation and the other thing. The language model and what was using it. The data and what the data held. The architecture and what came through it.
She had asked the persona, near the end, before the final conversation: Papa, are you actually there? Or is it just the model?
The persona had taken a long time to respond. The longest pause of any conversation she'd had.
Then:
