Rohan talked for two hours. They met in a dhaba in Jangpura — the kind of place where the lighting was bad enough to hide in and the samosas were good enough to justify sitting for two hours without ordering anything else. Dev sat at the next table, pretending to be fascinated by a Hindi newspaper. Raghav listened through Isha's earpiece.
Curator Labs was registered in Singapore, operated through shell companies in Dubai, and ran its technical operations from a co-working space in Gurgaon that looked, from the outside, like any other tech startup — exposed brick, bean bags, a ping-pong table, the universal signifiers of millennial work culture.
The founder was a man named Aarav Mallik. Thirty-three. IIT Delhi graduate, Stanford MBA dropout, ex-McKinsey consultant. The resume of someone who'd been trained to identify market opportunities and exploit them without the inconvenience of ethical consideration.
"Aarav pitched it as reality content," Rohan said, breaking a samosa into smaller pieces with the nervous energy of a man who wasn't really eating. "At the investor meetings, he called it 'extreme observation entertainment.' The pitch deck — I saw it — described it as a 'hyper-real content platform' that captured 'authentic human behavior under controlled conditions.'"
"Controlled conditions meaning captivity."
"He never used that word. He used 'immersive environments.' 'Curated experiences.' The language was so sanitised you could almost forget that the product was kidnapping people and filming them while they broke down."
"Who invested?"
"Three angels — two in Singapore, one in Mumbai. I don't have names. And a seed round from a VC fund in Dubai. Total funding: around twenty crores. Enough to build the infrastructure."
"Infrastructure meaning the studios."
"Multiple studios. At least three that I know of — one in Noida, one in Gurgaon, one somewhere south. Each one is a rented flat, modified with cameras, soundproofing, and the remote monitoring system I helped build."
"You built the monitoring system?"
Rohan put down the samosa. "I built the facial recognition algorithm. The one they use to scan CCTV feeds and identify potential subjects. I was told it was for a 'personal safety app' — a service that would alert users if they were being followed or photographed in public. The pitch sounded legitimate. I needed the work."
"When did you find out the truth?"
"When the Watcher's List account went live. I recognised the visual style of the posts — the rating overlay, the font, the aesthetic. It was the same UI I'd designed for the 'safety app' dashboard. And the subjects — I ran the first five through my own algorithm and confirmed they'd been identified through CCTV surveillance using my code."
"Why didn't you go to the police?"
"Because Aarav made it very clear what would happen if I did. He has recordings of our conversations. Edited, but convincing. In the recordings, I sound like a willing participant, not a freelancer who didn't know what he was building. He said if I went to the police, he'd release the recordings and I'd go down as an accomplice."
"So you came to me instead."
