The silence in apartment 4202 was expensive—the kind you paid a premium for in Noida. Double-glazed windows turned the expressway’s scream into a distant, cinematic hum. The air stayed pinned at twenty-two degrees, smelling faintly of sanitized ambition and coffee pods. Kabir sat at his ergonomic desk: imported teak, a floating slab that cost more than his father’s first car. He was thirty-two, but under the harsh ring light clipped to his monitor, he looked like a tired twenty-five-year-old deity. He was “on.” “The scalability is infinite,” Kabir said to the webcam, voice tuned to confident humility. “We aren’t just building an app, Mark. We’re optimizing human connection. Removing friction from relationships.” On screen, Mark—a venture capitalist in a sun-drenched Palo Alto room—nodded slowly. Kabir tracked the nod like a predator tracks a heartbeat. He adjusted his headphones: top-tier, “Adaptive Transparency,” “Active Noise Cancellation.” Highest setting. Zone. Control. Main Character. Everything outside his monitor bezel was background rendering—low-resolution, unimportant.