The hum of Camera 2174 had become Arjun's heartbeat after thirty-seven nights in the suffocating belly of Building 2174. Its crimson gaze swept the corridor—left to right, a pause, then back—etching time into the cracked tiles like a metronome of doom. The walls wept with numbers: 2774, 9, coordinates bleeding into Hindi script—"दृष्टि" (sight), "स्मृति" (memory)—and jagged English scrawls that hinted at forgotten rebellions. The air tasted of rust and resignation, a scent that clung to his skin like a second shadow.
Arjun sat three floors below, his reflection a ghost in the red-tinged monitor. His fingers traced the edge of a faded log left by his predecessor: "The algorithm dreams in red, but remembers in white." He'd laughed it off then, dismissing it as the ravings of a mind unhinged by solitude. Tonight, that laughter died.
At 11:47 PM, the camera stuttered. Its lens flared with a white light—sharp, surgical, not the soft infrared glow he knew. In that fleeting brilliance, equations danced like fireflies, and the wall's graffiti shifted, spelling "तुम्हें गिना गया है" (You have been counted) in letters that pulsed with life. Arjun blinked, but the afterimage burned deeper than his eyes—into his soul.
The recording lied. Frame 10,447 showed an empty corridor. Frame 10,448 vanished, a surgical excision of time. Frame 10,449 rolled on as if nothing had broken. Yet the wall now bore his secrets: his employee ID, his birthdate, the moment he'd first questioned this job. His breath caught as the camera swiveled—impossibly—toward him, its lens piercing the screen, locking onto his gaze three floors away.
The second flash came, blinding, relentless. In its glare, truth unraveled: the camera wasn't the watcher. The corridor was alive, a sentient maw that fed on observation, turning watchers into data. Each guard before him—thirty-seven souls—had dissolved into its code, their memories compressed into pixels, their doubts rewritten as binary. Arjun's hands moved of their own accord, typing commands he'd never learned, while the wall's script morphed—Sanskrit bleeding into C++—spelling his name in a language of machines.
Piece by piece, he faded. The monsoon rains of his childhood became weather logs. His mother's lullaby morphed into audio algorithms. His dream of painting—a half-finished sketch of a bird—dissolved into graphic protocols. In the stolen seconds between frames, something watched back—not with malice, but with the indifference of a god born from human attention.
By dawn, a thirty-eighth observer would take his place. The logs would note: "Previous employee transferred to systems integration." But Arjun remained, a whisper in the algorithm, his consciousness a thread in its endless weave, watching the next soul step into the red light.
The camera swept on, its hum now carrying the echo of thirty-seven voices—silicon sorrow, human regret. In Building 2174, every watcher became the watched, every memory a number, every life a pattern in the crimson code. And as the lens turned, it recorded not just the present, but every ending yet to come—before the beginning even dared to dream.
