Rohan delivered the data in eleven hours. A hard drive containing the facial recognition algorithm's source code, access logs showing which CCTV feeds had been tapped, and a database of two hundred and fourteen potential subjects who'd been identified but not yet posted to the account.
Two hundred and fourteen people, rated and ranked, waiting to be photographed, posted, and potentially taken. A pipeline. A production queue.
Isha's name was at the top.
Raghav's team took the CCTV data and traced the access points. Curator Labs had hacked into Delhi's municipal surveillance network — the CCTV system installed under the Smart City initiative, managed by the Delhi Police but maintained by a private contractor. The contractor had a security vulnerability — a default password on the admin portal that hadn't been changed since installation. The kind of mistake that a systems administrator makes on a Friday afternoon and that a startup founder exploits on a Monday morning.
The streaming platform was harder. Raghav's cyber team found it — a .onion address on the dark web, accessible only through Tor, requiring a cryptocurrency payment of 0.5 Bitcoin for a monthly subscription. The site had approximately three thousand subscribers worldwide. The content: hours of footage showing people in the studios, filmed from multiple angles, rated in real-time by a scoring engine that tracked their psychological decline.
The subscribers could interact. They could vote on subjects. They could request specific scenarios — "stop feeding Subject #019," "turn off the lights for Subject #023," "play audio of Subject #031's family." The interactivity was the premium feature. The subscribers weren't just watching. They were participating.
"This is gamified torture," Raghav said, looking at the platform's interface with the particular disgust of a man who'd seen the internet's worst and was still capable of being surprised. "They've turned human suffering into a multiplayer game."
"With a revenue model," Isha added. "Three thousand subscribers at 0.5 Bitcoin each per month. That's approximately seventy-five crores a year. Enough to fund the operation, pay the staff, and return a profit to investors."
"We have enough to raid Curator Labs. The co-working space in Gurgaon. I can get a warrant within hours."
