A Valentine's Algorithm
Copyright© 2026 by Tantrayaan
Chapter 3
Vikram didn’t move. She was alive. This wasn’t an ending. It was a trail. She’d left him a trail because she knew, she knew, he was the only one who’d know how to pick it up.
With unsteady hands, he opened the `Gallery` folder.
Three pictures. The old stone bridge from their first real date. The bookstore they’d wasted a hundred Sundays in. The fountain in the park, her favorite.
He stared. Something was ... off. The composition felt wrong. In the bridge photo, their smiles were slightly soft, but the carved stone marker behind them was razor-sharp. In the bookstore, he was a pleasant blur, but one specific shelf in the background was in perfect, clinical focus. The fountain shot was the same. They were smudges of color in the foreground, but the brass plaque on the fountain’s base was painfully, meticulously detailed.
She’d messed with the depth of field. On purpose. She wasn’t pointing him at their faces. She was pointing him at the background.
But why?
He needed a clear head. He went to the kitchen, ran the tap cold, filled a glass. Drank it down in one long, desperate pull. Poured another. He stabbed the button on the coffee maker. While it gurgled and spat, he cupped icy water in his palms and splashed it on his face. The adrenaline and the shock were scouring the last of the scotch haze away.
By the time he slumped back into his chair with a mug of black coffee, his mind felt like a blade.
He opened his image analysis software and pulled up the fountain photo. First step: the metadata. EXIF data. It’s the hidden tag every digital photo carries around: timestamps, camera model, sometimes even where it was taken if the GPS was on. It’s just baked into the file.
He called up the EXIF panel.
Empty. Wiped clean. The timestamp field was blank. GPS data, gone. Even the camera’s make and model had been stripped out.
That doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to make that happen. Elara had cleaned these files. To anyone else, they’d just be happy snaps from a day out.
He took a sip of coffee. What else? What else can you hide in a picture?
The most basic trick is LSB steganography (Least Significant Bit encoding). Pictures are made of pixels. Each pixel’s color is defined by numbers. For each color (red, green, blue) that’s a number between 0 and 255. The “least significant bit” is the very last digit in the binary version of that number. Changing it tweaks the color the tiniest, invisible amount. A red value of 237 looks the same as 236 to your eye. But if you change those last bits across thousands of pixels in a specific pattern, you can hide a message. The picture looks normal, but it’s carrying a secret in the noise.
He ran a standard LSB detection tool. It scoured the pixels, hunting for non-random patterns in those least significant bits.
Thirty seconds later, the result flashed: `NO SIGNIFICANT PATTERNS DETECTED`.
Vikram sat back. Too obvious. Elara would know LSB is the first thing you check.
What next? He tried a frequency domain analysis. More complex. It transforms the image into a map of color frequencies. Hidden data can leave a subtle signature in the patterns.
Nothing.
He ran a color histogram analysis, checking for weird spikes in the red, green, or blue channels.
Zero.
He rubbed his eyes hard. Think. What would she do?
Their anniversary. Two years back. She’d set up a whole digital escape room weekend. They’d spent two days solving puzzles, and she’d gone deep on steganography techniques, making him swear to remember them. “You never know when you’ll need to send a secret message,” she’d teased.
And she’d made him promise to remember the date. Their first anniversary. “It’s our cipher key, Vik. April 17th, 2021. Don’t you dare forget.”
He’d thought it was just a game.
His pulse kicked up a notch. He opened his command terminal, navigated to an old, dusty directory. There it was. A steganography tool he’d coded for a university project. The one that used a custom key for encryption.