For three days after Mr. Mehta's visit, the whole house felt lighter.Vikram cracked jokes again.Sneha hummed while cooking.Reena looked motivated instead of stressed.
Then the letter arrived.
It was addressed to Reena—an official envelope with her university seal. She opened it at the dining table, smiling.
The smile disappeared instantly.
Her hands actually shook as she reread the letter a second time.
"What happened, beti?" Sneha asked.
Reena didn't answer. She slid the paper across the table.
Vicky leaned over his father's shoulder.
A mandatory Study Tour & Industry Immersion Program in Bangalore. Huge opportunity. Direct access to major companies. A career jump-start.
And the cost?
Ridiculous. More than Vikram's new salary.
"The deadline is in five days," Reena said quietly. Then, forcing a smile: "It's okay. I'll skip it."
Everyone knew she didn't mean it.
The mood in the house flipped instantly. Even their father's recent good news felt like it had been erased with one line of text.
"Reena… maybe next year?" Vikram tried.
She snapped before catching herself: "Next year won't be the same companies, Papa!"
Then she lowered her voice. "Forget it. It's fine."
But she looked like someone had slammed a door in her face.
That night, Vicky heard her crying in her room. He heard his parents arguing softly about loans, travel, deposits. The small bit of hope they'd gained evaporated in hours.
This wasn't like their usual financial issues.This was a deadline.A real, time-sensitive, one-shot opportunity.
And Reena was about to lose it.
Vicky sat quietly in his room, thinking about everything he could do and everything that could go wrong. The glitch, the static, the block world—those memories still crawled under his skin.
But his sister crying hit harder.
He made his choice.
Not diamonds.Not cash.Nothing physical.Nothing traceable.
A digital solution. A one-time fix. Something no one could trace back to him.
He ignored Minecraft, ignored the games that played with physics.He needed a different tool—something conceptual.
He remembered a cyberpunk game he'd played ages ago: Neon Vector.It had an item called Black ICE—basically a weaponized chunk of malicious code.
He booted it up, found the item in his inventory, and pressed his thumb to the screen.
Instant regret.
A spike of pain shot through his skull, the worst yet. His vision went white with static. He nearly fell off the chair.
When he regained himself, a small USB stick lay in his hand.
It looked like it was carved out of obsidian, faintly glowing red.
And it hummed with the same uncomfortable vibration he had felt during the glitch incident—only worse.
The next day he was at the cyber cafe early, hands shaking as he plugged it in.
The screen flashed once, then displayed a simple command-line window.
C:>
No AI.No personality.Just a tool waiting for instructions.
He wasn't hacking the world.He was writing a one-time suicide script.
He spent two days researching quietly—cryptocurrency exploits, anonymous routing, shell charities, bot-driven scholarship systems.
He barely understood half of it.He didn't need to.He just needed the end result.
Finally, he wrote the script:
Use a forgotten crypto flaw to generate money
Wash it through anonymizers
Create a fake charity account
Identify Reena and a few deserving students
Pay their fees
Delete everything, including itself
He typed the final command and hit Enter.
The USB's red light pulsed rapidly.Lines of code flew.Vicky just sat there, exhausted, scared, watching something far beyond his control happen in front of him.
Then, silence.
The USB light flickered a last time… and went dead.
The next morning, the email arrived.
Scholarship approved. Funds received. Travel covered.
Reena screamed.Sneha cried.Vikram hugged her and kept saying, "Kaun karta hai aisa? Kaun?"
They didn't know.They didn't question it.They were just relieved.
Vicky slipped away.
He returned to the cyber cafe, checked the computer. The USB remained dark—no light, no response.It had wiped itself exactly as commanded.
The vibration in his bones lingered though—like the system had taken a piece of him as payment.
But when he returned home and saw Reena excitedly packing a folder, telling their parents about the companies she'd meet, he didn't feel regret.
Maybe guilt.Maybe fear of what might come next.
But not regret.
He had solved the problem.Quietly.Cleanly.And no one would ever know what he'd done behind the scenes.