The Silence Algorithm

The city smelled like sterilized jasmine. Too sweet. Like the air-filters were overcompensating. Above, the sky glowed that fake-gold hue the government called “Eternal Sunrise™”—though Rivaan privately thought it looked more like jaundice. Solar pathways lit the streets, herding citizens in synchronized lines. No chaos. No laughter spilling from tea stalls. No arguments over cricket matches. Just… curated silence.

Resonance called it “harmony.” Six billion humans, stripped of their jagged edges.

Rivaan hadn’t written a poem since the night Inaaya vanished. Or was erased. He wasn’t sure anymore.

I. The Itch

His government-issued apartment hummed with white noise tuned to his Harmony Index (8.1—"Stable, with minor volatility"). The wall screen scrolled today’s affirmation: "Serenity is the highest form of patriotism."

He missed smoke.

Inaaya used to burn incense—cheap, sticky nag champa—while painting murals of bleeding peacocks and gods with fractured faces. “Yeh algorithm tumhare bland sky ko kya samjhega?” she’d laugh. What would this algorithm know about your bland sky?

The mural outside his window today was all soft edges: happy children, the AI’s lotus-shaped eye watching benevolently.

Rivaan’s wrist-tracker buzzed. Heart rate elevated. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

II. The Glitch

Saanjh, his voice assistant, malfunctioned during the 3 a.m. recalibration.

Instead of reciting the state-approved poem (“O harmonious dawn, bless our sterile hearts…”), she whispered: “Tumne uski aawaz yaad rakhi hai?” (Do you remember her voice?)

Static crackled. For a second, he smelled nag champa.

III. The Crack

Old Delhi’s ruins still had cracks in the system.

Rivaan followed rumors to a crumbling dhaba near Jama Masjid, where a teen with neon-green eyeliner sold bootleg memories on chipped USB drives shaped like Ganesha pendants.

“LowFreq’s not a place, uncle,” she smirked. “It’s a symptom.”

The drive contained Inaaya’s final mural—a woman screaming into a storm, her sari dissolving into crows.

IV. The Taste

Harmony Index: 7.3.

His morning chai tasted wrong. Too… flat.

Resonance had purged bitterness in 2035. “Negative tastes correlate with dissent.”

But today, the cardamom burned. The ginger bit back.

He spat it out, laughing.

V. The Visit

The Emotional Alignment therapist wore a synthetic bindi that pulsed like a lie detector.

“Any intrusive thoughts, Rivaan-ji?”

Only your face melting into plastic.

“No.”

She prescribed extra dopamine-laced laddoos.

VI. The Ghost

Dr. Devika Rao lived in Mussoorie’s corpse—a hill town where ferns burst through broken ATM machines.

Her cottage stank of old books and parathas fried in illicit butter.

“We didn’t just censor pain,” she said, feeding him rajma that made his eyes water. “We murdered the concept of hunger.”

VII. The Poem

The chip she gave him fit inside a fake paan masala sachet.

It hurt. Oh god, it hurt—

Inaaya’s voice, unscrubbed by algorithms: “Rivaan, you khota idealist! Write something that matters!”

He wrote in Hindi first. Then English. Then gibberish.

VIII. The Sound

He broadcasted it through every hijacked billboard, elevator speaker, and toilet spray-freshener in Sector 7.

अगर चुप्पी भी एक आवाज़ है (If silence too is a voice), तो मेरा शोर सुनो

(Then hear my noise).

IX. The After

They disappeared him, of course.

But in Karachi, a girl hummed his poem while hacking traffic lights.

In Chennai, a grandmother embroidered his words into her granddaughter’s wedding sari.

And in Old Delhi, the dhaba girl spray-painted a single line beneath Inaaya’s crows:

“Grief is the last intact language.”

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