"It wasn't a cell," Vikram said. "That's the thing that made it worse. It looked like a flat. A nice flat. Furnished, clean, good lighting. Like a serviced apartment. Except the windows were blacked out and the door was locked from outside and there were cameras. Cameras everywhere — in every corner, in the ceiling, in places I couldn't see but could feel."
"Were they filming you?"
"24/7. The cameras were always on. Red recording lights. And there was a screen — a large monitor on the wall — that showed what the cameras were capturing. So I could see myself being filmed. I was watching myself being watched."
"What were they filming?"
"Everything. Eating. Sleeping. Pacing. Breaking down. The first three days, I screamed and punched the walls and tried to break the door. The cameras filmed it. Then I stopped. I just... sat. And the cameras filmed that too."
"Did anyone come into the room? Did you see anyone?"
"Food appeared through a slot in the door. Basic — rice, dal, water. Always at the same times. Nobody spoke. Nobody entered. I was alone with the cameras for twenty-one days."
"Was there any communication? Any demands?"
"On the screen. Text messages appeared on the screen. Not from a keyboard — typed remotely, appearing as white text on black background. The same aesthetic as the Instagram posts."
"What did the messages say?"
Vikram's hands trembled harder. He gripped the blanket.
"They said my rating. Every day. A new rating. It went down. When I arrived, I was 8.9. After a week, 7.2. After two weeks, 5.6. By the time they released me, I was 3.1."
"The rating went down?"
"Over time. As I — as I lost weight, as I looked worse, as the isolation broke me down. The rating tracked my deterioration. When I cried, it dropped. When I stopped eating, it dropped. When I sat on the floor for six hours without moving, it dropped fastest."
"They were measuring your degradation."
"They were scoring it. Like a game. Like I was a stock and my value was crashing and they were watching the graph."
Isha felt nauseous. Not from the details — she'd covered horrific stories before. From the system. The methodology. The clinical, gamified nature of the cruelty — turning a human being's suffering into a metric, a number that decreased as the person inside decreased, until they reached a value low enough to discard.
"When I hit 3.1, the door opened," Vikram said. "Just... clicked and swung open. No message, no explanation. The hallway was empty. The flat's front door was unlocked. I walked out onto a street in Noida and I had no idea where I was or what day it was or if I was still being filmed."
