Part 3: The Prescription Code (The AI awakens. Death is data. And the test subjects are living among us)

 

Part 3: The Prescription Code

Sleep had become a luxury Anjali could no longer afford.

The message on her mirror haunted her. It wasn’t a warning anymore—it was an invitation. Someone, somewhere, was daring her to keep going, daring her to uncover a secret buried beneath layers of misdirection. The blue pill was just the surface. The real rot ran deeper.

Inspector Ahuja called her the next morning, voice low, cautious. “I looked into Anovet Biolabs. Nothing exists under that name in the pharma registry. Not officially. But I pulled backdoor listings—contracts, shell companies. It's a front.”

“For what?” Anjali asked.

“I don’t know yet. But get this—the pill packaging has no barcode. That’s illegal. Every medication, even samples, must have tracking metadata. These don’t. It’s like they never passed through any regulatory channel.”

That afternoon, Ahuja met her in a quiet corner of a government-run hospital. They sat in the shadows of a dusty archive room. He placed a file on the table between them.

“Six deaths in the last eight weeks. All listed as natural causes. All on Cardiotine. All over 70. All lived alone.”

Anjali flipped through the pages. Familiar faces. Familiar smiles.

She finally asked, “Do you think they were murdered?”

Ahuja leaned back, arms crossed. “If murder can be done without a single fingerprint, without a weapon, without direct action… then yes. I think this is the cleanest, most surgical form of murder I’ve ever seen.”

Anjali’s mind raced. “But who’s behind it? And why target the elderly?”

Ahuja showed her a screenshot of a code log recovered from a compromised clinic’s prescription software. Embedded deep in the algorithm was a snippet labeled RX-14.

Anjali blinked. “That’s a project code.”

“Exactly. RX-14 was an AI-powered drug customization model developed by a biotech startup called NeuroSplice. Shut down five years ago.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Illegal gene trials. The founder, Dr. Rishi Vardhan, disappeared. Last seen boarding a private charter to Dubai. He was working on something ambitious—medications tailored by AI to match a person’s genome. Effective. Precise. Dangerous.”

“But if NeuroSplice is dead, how is RX-14 still running?” Anjali asked.

Ahuja didn’t answer immediately. He stared at her, his voice dropping to a whisper.

“Because someone is using the code. Modifying it. Deploying it through backend systems in real-time.”

“Like an experiment,” Anjali whispered, chilled.

Ahuja nodded. “And the elderly make perfect subjects. Isolated. Forgotten. High-risk. Easy to explain away.”

They left the hospital through different exits. Anjali returned home cautiously, checking every corner, every lock.

That night, she turned her attention to the Cardiotine sample she had hidden. With gloves on, she carefully cracked one of the glossy blue capsules open over a white plate.

What spilled out wasn’t ordinary powder. It glittered faintly in the light—fine particles, crystalline, almost too uniform.

She took a small sample to a local biochem lab under a pseudonym. Told them it was for academic research.

The results came two days later.

“This isn't standard medication,” the lab tech told her, eyebrows furrowed. “There’s something else in it. Nanocarbon traces. Neuro-active compounds. Microdoses of something we can’t classify. This... this shouldn’t exist in any pill.”

That night, her phone buzzed with a new email.

No sender. No subject.

Just one line of text:

“Keep analyzing. We need better results.”

Attached was a new list.

Five more names.

All elderly. All local.

Three of them were still alive.

For now.