I was about to throw the radio away.
It sat like a forgotten relic on my brother’s dusty shelf -an old Sony transistor paint chipped, antenna bent and heavy with silence. Two years had passed since Aarav disappeared. No note, No body Just vanished and with him, every answer I had ever wanted also. The world moved on but I didn’t.
Cleaning out his flat after it was declared "abandoned property" felt like peeling away my own skin and clearing out the ghost of someone who had once been my closest friend. Then I found it, under a pile of tattered books and unspoken goodbyes: the radio, with a single piece of tape across it.
One word written in red ink.
“WAIT” Strange.
I turned the knob out of habit. Just static. Then-
"click"
The static cut. A voice came through-
“If you're hearing this… you weren’t supposed to give up.”
My heart stopped.
Aarav !
It wasn’t live , It was a recording. A loop- his voice was trembling, URGENT.
“They’re watching everything. My emails, My phone. This… this is the only way I could hide the truth, Inside the noise.”
He gasped.
“It wasn’t suicide, It wasn’t an accident. Look inside the back panel of this radio, You’ll find it. The truth but once you do, you can't unknow it.”
The static returned, louder than before and the message had ended.
I dropped the radio.
I stood frozen for ten full minutes.
Aarav wasn’t the paranoid type . He was a coder ! Working for a Private Cybersecurity firm that handled “high-risk data protection.” That’s all he ever said. The rest was NDA-shrouded.
BUT THIS ?
This was something else.
I unscrewed the panel. It felt like touching something sacred and dangerous.
Inside, taped neatly behind the wires was a micro-SD card. I slotted it into my laptop.
One folder- ENCRYPTED .
I cracked it using Aarav’s old password - My Birthdate !
Inside:
Thousands of documents, Conversations, Surveillance footage, Internal memos, A hidden network of digital experiments - mind tracking, AI surveillance, emotional pattern mapping using smart devices.
"They weren’t just watching us, They were predicting us." And Aarav had stolen proof.
Suddenly, a message popped on my laptop screen.
“UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED , TRACKING INITIATED. ”
I yanked the laptop shut and my stomach twisted at the thought of it.
My phone buzzed- Unknown number.
1 Message : “You have something that doesn’t belong to you.”
I sat still, staring at the screen.
They knew ! They were watching me now- just like they had watched him.
What do I do next?
Burn it all?
Run?
Expose the truth and risk ending up like him?
But then I remembered his voice: “You weren’t supposed to give up.”
So , I opened my mail and I zipped the files and sent them anonymously- to every journalist, activist and whistleblower site I could think of. Dozens of emails fired off like lightning bolts into the sky.
Then I crushed the SD card under a chair leg, Smashed the radio , Burned the rest of the scraps.
But I kept the piece of tape—the word “WAIT” burned into it like prophecy.
Folded in my wallet now, it reminds me every day that truth takes time but it never dies in silence.
I did wait and it changed everything.
I don’t know who will knock first-
A Journalist with questions or someone wanting me gone.
But I do know this: Aarav didn’t leave me fear, he left me truth.
And now that it’s out there, the silence belongs to them not me !
Weeks passed, I changed cities, new name, new life and then, one morning- it began !
A headline on a global news site:
“Leaked Files Expose Illegal Surveillance by Tech Giant.”
Then another and another- Anonymous sources, International outrage, Investigations launched.
I smiled through tears and I could almost hear Aarav -
“Told you! Just make it loud enough.”
But the noise didn’t stop there.
By the end of the week, the company’s stock plummeted, Protesters gathered outside tech parks in three countries. The CEO stepped down “for personal reasons.” Government inquiries were announced- Some denied, others vanished.
Still, not a single official ever mentioned Aarav. He was a ghost to them. But to the world, he had become something else- a whisper that grew into a roar.
I sometimes wonder if he knew this would happen. If he knew that his little sister, the one he once scolded for downloading pirated games, would be the one to release the storm.
I go by a different name now. My hair is shorter, my smile tighter. I teach coding to kids in a quiet town far from the chaos. I don’t use smart assistants or cameras or anything that listens without consent.
But some nights when the air is too still, I turn on an old radio - just static now.
And still, I wait.
Not for closure, I know better than to expect that. Not for revenge either- it never heals what gets taken.
I wait for something far quieter. For someone out there reading those files, connecting the dots and daring to act.
Because truth is a slow fire. It doesn’t explode , It spreads- patient, persistent and devastating.
One day, I received a package. No return address.
Inside was an old pen drive blank on the surface but I knew better. Along with it, a note in a handwriting I hadn’t seen in years:
"If they ever come back, make it louder. – A."
My fingers trembled as I held the note.
He planned for this, He knew they might try to bury it all again. He knew they might erase headlines, spin truths into myths and rewrite the ending.
But he also knew me, that I’d wait, that I’d still be here, that I’d never let silence win.
So I got to work again. Downloaded the files, Backed them up twice, Sent them through fresh firewalls.
And this time, I didn’t just send them to journalists. I sent them to - schools, to coding bootcamps, to public libraries.
Because the truth doesn’t just belong to those brave enough to shout it - It belongs to the ones quiet enough to carry it.
Aarav once told me:
“They can kill a person But not a pattern.”
And somewhere, deep in the static of an old radio, his voice still plays on a loop.
Just one message, trembling but unbroken:
“If you’re hearing this… you weren’t supposed to give up.”
I didn’t and I never will.
And still- I wait.
But now, I wait with the world listening.
React
