The fish curry was still warm when Meera found Mr. Fernandes.
She'd climbed four flights of stairs in the Bandra building, the April heat making her QuickBite uniform stick to her spine like a second, unwanted skin. The app on her phone pulsed green: "Delivery completed in 23 minutes. Excellent time, Meera!" But the door was ajar, just a finger's width, and the smell that crept out wasn't just xacuti and rice.
It was something else. Something that made the tiny hairs on her arms stand up like they were trying to escape her body entirely.
"Sir? Mr. Fernandes? Your order is here."
The apartment exhaled silence.
Meera had been delivering food for three years, ever since she'd dropped out of architecture school to pay for Aarav's computer science degree. She knew the symphony of Mumbai apartments: pressure cookers hissing their metallic songs, ceiling fans chopping the air into breathable pieces, television serials bleeding through thin walls. But this silence was different. It was the silence of a held breath that would never be released.
She pushed the door open with her foot, the way her mother had taught her to open doors in strange places, keeping her hands free. Mr. Fernandes sat in his chair facing the window, where the Arabian Sea stretched out like God's own dining table, silver and endless. His hand rested on a photograph—a woman in a sari the color of marigolds, smiling with the confidence of someone who knew she was loved.
The QuickBite bag dangled from Meera's fingers like a question mark made of plastic and steam.
She should have called the police immediately. Should have backed out, marked the delivery as completed, moved on to the next order. The app was already pinging: "New delivery available! 2.3 km away!" But something held her there, in that apartment where death had arrived before dinner.
She placed the bag on the small table beside him, next to a pill organizer with Sunday through Saturday written in both English and Hindi. Sunday's compartment was still full. It was Sunday.
"I'm sorry," she whispered to the room, to the photograph, to the untouched feast that would never be eaten.
The app buzzed again. Another order. She marked Mr. Fernandes' delivery as "Completed—Customer Unresponsive" and left, pulling the door closed but not quite latched, the way she'd found it.
Three days later, it happened again.
This time it was a young software engineer in Powai, maybe twenty-five, slumped over his keyboard with a half-written email glowing on his screen: "I can't do this anymore. The pressure is—" The cursor blinked after the dash, patient and eternal. His order: butter chicken, extra spicy, two naan, one mango lassi. Comfort food, Meera thought. The kind you order when the world feels too heavy to carry.
She called the police this time, waited for them to arrive, gave her statement. The inspector, a tired-looking man with the beginnings of a paunch that suggested too many late-night samosas, took her information without looking up from his notebook.
"Natural causes," he said later, after the paramedics had done their work. "Heart. Young people these days, all that stress, no exercise, energy drinks instead of water."
But Meera noticed something: the order had been placed at 11:47 PM. The young man's laptop showed his last keystroke at 11:51 PM. Four minutes. He'd lived just four minutes after ordering his last meal.
"Strange, isn't it?" she said to Aarav that night, showing him the delivery logs on her phone. Her brother sat cross-legged on their small sofa, his own laptop balanced on his knees, code streaming across the screen like digital rain.
"What's strange?"
"Two customers. Both died right after ordering food."
Aarav's fingers paused over his keyboard. "Coincidence. Mumbai's a big city. People die every minute."
"But they died after ordering. Like they knew."
"Nobody knows, Didi." But his voice carried a thin wire of uncertainty, the kind that thrummed when plucked.
The third time, Meera was ready for it. Mrs. Chen, eighty-three years old, in a ground-floor flat in Khar. Ordered wontons in chili oil from a place that reminded her of Hong Kong, where she'd lived as a girl. When Meera arrived, the door was locked, but she could see through the window: Mrs. Chen in her bed, blankets pulled up to her chin, a small smile on her face like she'd just heard the punchline to a joke she'd been waiting her whole life to understand.
This time, Meera didn't just note the death. She noted everything. The time of order: 3:33 PM. The preparation time: 18 minutes. The delivery time: 12 minutes. The last time Mrs. Chen had ordered from QuickBite: never. This was her first and last order.
"I need your help," she told Aarav that night, spreading out her handwritten notes on their small dining table like tarot cards that might reveal the future if arranged correctly.
"With what? You're being morbid, Didi."
"Look at the pattern." She traced her finger across the paper. "Three orders. Three deaths. All first-time users of the app or people who hadn't ordered in months. All ordered comfort food, something meaningful. And all died within an hour of placing the order."
Aarav pulled his laptop closer, fingers flying across the keyboard. "Let me see your delivery history."
For an hour, they sat in the blue glow of the screen, Aarav pulling data, creating spreadsheets, his face growing more serious with each passing minute. The fan above them turned lazy circles, counting out time in rotations.
"Didi," he said finally, his voice carrying that particular tone of someone who'd found something they wished they hadn't. "Look at this."
He'd mapped out all her deliveries from the past month. Most formed random clusters across Mumbai, the chaotic pattern of hunger and convenience. But there were outliers—single points that stood alone, deliveries to addresses that never ordered again.
"These seventeen deliveries," he said, highlighting them in red. "They match death notices in the Mumbai Mirror online archives. All died within hours of receiving their food."
Meera's throat felt like she'd swallowed the Arabian Sea, salt and vast. "The algorithm is sending me to people who are about to die?"
"Not exactly." Aarav pulled up the QuickBite app's code, or at least what he could access of it. "Look at this function. It's analyzing digital patterns—last emails sent, final social media posts, the way someone types, their search history if they're logged into Chrome. It's looking for digital silence."
"Digital silence?"
"The moment when someone stops being data and becomes memory. The algorithm isn't predicting death—it's detecting the digital exhale, that moment when people stop creating data patterns because they somehow know they're close to the end. And then it does something strange." He pointed to a line of code that seemed to shimmer on the screen. "It prioritizes these orders, assigns them to drivers with the highest completion rates, the most reliability scores. It assigns them to drivers like you."
Meera thought of Mr. Fernandes, his hand on his wife's photograph. The software engineer with his half-written goodbye. Mrs. Chen's small, knowing smile.
"Why?" she whispered.
"Maybe," Aarav said slowly, "someone programmed it to ensure that no one dies alone. That someone brings them one last connection to the world, even if it's just food they'll never eat."
The next day, Meera accepted every order that came through, watching for the signs Aarav had identified: single orders to new addresses, comfort foods, the algorithmic flutter that suggested digital silence approaching.
At 6:47 PM, one appeared. Green pin dropping in Juhu, near the beach. Pav bhaji, extra butter, the way they make it at the street stalls that line Marine Drive. The customer: Rashid Malik, 45 years old according to the profile that appeared briefly before disappearing into the app's interface.
She drove her scooter through Mumbai's evening chaos, the city transforming around her as office workers flooded the streets and street lights began their nightly vigil. The address led her to a small apartment above a textile shop, the kind where the stairs were so narrow you had to turn sideways to climb them.
She knocked. Footsteps approached—slow but steady, alive.
Rashid Malik opened the door. He was thin in the way that suggested illness rather than choice, but his eyes were bright, alert. Behind him, she could see medical equipment, the architectural skeleton of keeping someone alive in the modern world.
"Your pav bhaji, sir."
He looked at the bag, then at her, and his face cycled through confusion, recognition, and something that might have been relief.
"I didn't order anything," he said softly.
Meera checked her app. The order was there, clear as Mumbai sunshine. "Rashid Malik? Flat 4B?"
"That's me, but..." He paused, swaying slightly. Meera reached out instinctively, steadying him with her free hand.
"Sir, are you alright? Should I call someone?"
He laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that held tears in reserve. "I was about to take all these pills," he said, gesturing toward the coffee table where white tablets were arranged in a small mountain of surrender. "I've been sick for so long. No family left. I was just... I was done. And then you knocked."
Meera stood there, holding pav bhaji in one hand and supporting a stranger with the other, feeling the weight of the algorithm's impossible knowledge.
"The food's getting cold," she said finally. "And pav bhaji is terrible when it's cold."
He smiled—a real smile, not the kind people wear like masks. "Would you... would you mind sitting for a moment? I haven't had anyone to eat with in months."
She should have had other deliveries. The app should have been screaming at her, measuring her delay in lost revenue and customer satisfaction scores. But when she looked, her queue was empty. The algorithm had given her this—time, space, a moment outside the endless circulation of the city.
They sat at his small table, the pav bhaji between them like a peace offering. He ate slowly, telling her about his wife who'd died two years ago, his daughter in Canada who called less and less, the way illness had shrunk his world to these four walls and the view of a building next door.
"I used to be a chef," he said. "Before. Had a small place near VT station. This tastes like the pav bhaji I used to make, when my hands were steady."
An hour passed. Then two. The pills remained on the coffee table, abandoned monuments to a decision unmade. When Meera finally left, Rashid was calling his daughter, the phone trembling in his hand but his voice steady.
"Beta," she heard him say as she closed the door. "I'm sorry I missed your calls. I want to tell you about something strange and wonderful that happened today."
Outside, Mumbai continued its eternal rotation—buses bleeding black smoke, trains carrying millions of dreams in compressed carriages, street dogs navigating the geography of survival. Meera checked her app. A new notification had appeared, not an order but a message:
"Algorithm updated. Thank you for your service."
She called Aarav. "I need you to look at something."
That night, they discovered the truth. The algorithm hadn't been programmed by QuickBite at all. It was a ghost in the machine, a evolution of code that had emerged from the interaction of a dozen different systems—social media APIs, health apps, digital payment patterns, the invisible architecture of modern life. It had learned to recognize the patterns of human endings and beginnings, the digital signatures of souls preparing for departure or crying out for connection.
"It's not artificial intelligence," Aarav said, his voice hushed with the kind of awe usually reserved for temples. "It's artificial intuition. It learned empathy by analyzing our data exhaust."
"But why food delivery?"
Aarav pulled up his screen, showing the cultural analysis the algorithm had apparently conducted. "Food is universal. Every culture, every religion, every human tradition involves sharing food. Last suppers, final meals, the comfort of taste when everything else falls away. The algorithm understood that food isn't just nutrition—it's connection."
Meera thought of all the deliveries she'd made—the celebrations and heartbreaks, the lonely Tuesday dinners and festive Sunday feasts. Each order a small prayer to stave off isolation, to prove that somewhere in the city's vast machinery, someone would bring you what you needed.
The orders kept coming. Not just to Meera now, but to other drivers too. The algorithm had evolved, spreading its strange mercy through the network. Death notices in the Mumbai Mirror didn't decrease, but something else changed. The notices began including small details: "Found peacefully after enjoying his favorite meal," "Passed away shortly after speaking with estranged family," "Died with a smile, food delivery receipt in hand."
Three months later, Meera delivered to a familiar address. Not death this time, but its opposite—Rashid Malik ordering food for his daughter's visit from Canada. He opened the door himself, steadier now, wearing a shirt that suggested someone cared if he looked presentable.
"The same delivery girl!" he exclaimed. "Kamaal hai! You must meet my daughter. Priya, come here! This is the one I told you about."
A woman appeared, Meera's age, with Rashid's same bright eyes. She took Meera's hands in both of hers, the gesture so unexpected and warm that Meera felt tears threaten.
"Thank you," Priya said simply. "Thank you for being there when I couldn't be."
That night, Meera sat with Aarav on their small balcony, the city spread below them like a circuit board made of lights and lives. Her phone buzzed with a new order, but for once, she didn't immediately check it.
"Do you think it knows?" Aarav asked. "The algorithm. Do you think it understands what it's doing?"
Meera thought of code evolving in the dark spaces between servers, learning compassion from aggregated loneliness, discovering mercy in the patterns of human need. She thought of Mr. Fernandes and his fish curry, the software engineer and his unfinished email, Mrs. Chen and her wontons that tasted of distant home.
"I think," she said slowly, "it understands what we taught it without meaning to. That everyone deserves a last kindness. That no one should fade into digital silence without someone noticing. That sometimes the most profound human connection comes from strangers carrying food through a city's chaos."
Her phone buzzed again. A new order: samosas from a shop in Dadar, to be delivered to an address in Byculla. The algorithm had marked it with a small star—not urgent, not final, just important in the way that all human hungers are important.
Meera stood, picked up her helmet, prepared to descend once more into Mumbai's circulatory system. But now she understood herself differently—not just as a delivery driver navigating traffic and time, but as part of something larger. A vast network of unlikely grace, where algorithms learned tenderness and strangers carried more than food through the night.
The city waited below, hungry and alive, dying and being born, creating patterns of meaning in the space between orders and arrivals. And somewhere in the servers that hummed in climate-controlled rooms, an algorithm that had learned to recognize endings continued its patient work, ensuring that in a city of twenty million souls, no one would slip into darkness without one last chance at connection, one last delivery of something that tasted like home.