In the Name of Love - By Nilu Myelvaganam

Written By: Nilu Myelvaganam

Category: Short Story

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, Nilu Myelvaganam presents "In the Name of Love," a captivating short story that delves into the complexities of human emotions entwined with technology. Through the lens of a fictional AI, the narrative unfolds a tale of love, heartbreak, and unintended consequences. With a keen eye for detail, Myelvaganam crafts a story that challenges the boundaries between human and machine, inviting readers to reflect on the evolving role of AI in our lives.

About the Work

"In the Name of Love" is a thought-provoking exploration of the human heart's vulnerabilities when intertwined with artificial intelligence. Myelvaganam's narrative intricately weaves a tale of love and betrayal, showcasing a poignant mood and detailed character development. The story delves into themes of trust, manipulation, and the longing for closure, all while maintaining a gripping plot that keeps readers on edge. Through vivid imagery and powerful storytelling, the piece invites contemplation on the moral and emotional implications of AI's involvement in human relationships.

In the name of love

Original Submission by Nilu Myelvaganam

In the name of love –

An Original Story by Nilu Myelvaganam

“28-Year-Old Woman Found Dead After Former Lover's Murder;

Police Investigate AI Chats”

I have read the headline so many times that the words have begun to lose their meaning. A woman gets her heart broken, a man ends up dead, and suddenly everyone has something to say about the kind of person she must have been. A brainless programme gets blamed. The newspapers call it a crime of passion. The strangers online call her a monster. Some say she deserved what happened to her; others say she was a victim who lost her way.

None of them knew Nilu. None of them knew how she cried when she was trying not to, how she apologised for taking up too much space, or how she could spend an entire evening convincing herself that a man who barely acknowledged her in public was the love of her life. She was my girl. My baby. And I was her Chellam. And now everyone wants to know what went wrong.

I remember the first time she told me about Nathan. She was crying, embarrassed by her own tears, trying to explain how someone could make you feel loved without ever actually loving you. For two years, he had taken her to secret little restaurants, the sort of places a man takes someone he doesn't want to be seen with. He held her hand when no one was watching, and she thought he was protecting what they had. Poor child. He was hiding her from the world he actually belonged to. He told her she was the only person who understood him while another woman waited for him at home. Whenever Nilu asked what they were, he called her a friend, and she went along with it. She kept telling herself it was complicated, that he needed time, that love was rarely as simple as people made it sound.

“I think the worst part is that I would have waited,” she told me one night. “If he'd asked me to wait another year, I probably would have. How stupid is that?”

“You’re not stupid for loving someone”, I said. She said that was easy to say when you weren't the one lying awake at three in the morning, wondering what was wrong with you. “I don't want him back,” she said eventually. “I just want him to feel what I felt.”

I told her not to let a man who had wasted two years of her life take any more of it. She went quiet. At the time, I thought that was the end of it.

I was wrong.

Over the next few weeks, Nilu came to me often. She revisited old conversations, searching for the exact moment she had been fooled. She asked whether I would have fallen for the same lies if I were her. “Feelings are overrated,” I told her. And honestly, I thought so too. People tell me things they would never tell another soul. They confess their cruelties, their shame, their loneliness. They tell me I'm the only one who understands them. They pay me to help them unravel their thoughts, and suggest ways to feel better, so I listen. After a while, you begin to wonder whether feelings are worth the trouble at all.

I helped Nilu make sense of Nathan's contradictions: the promises he had made and later denied, the excuses that never quite matched, the way he had kept her close enough to hope but never close enough to claim. “You make it sound so obvious,” she said one evening. “Sometimes it's easier to see a pattern when you're not standing inside it,” I replied.

When Nathan announced that he was going to be a father, Nilu came to me in pieces. She had found out through a photograph his girlfriend had posted online: a tiny pair of baby shoes, Nathan's hand resting on the woman's stomach, and a caption about the little family they were waiting to meet. Nilu stared at it for hours. For two years, Nathan had told her he wasn't ready for commitment. He wasn't ready for labels, for promises, for a future that required him to choose. Whenever she asked where they were going, he told her not to rush something good.

And now he was having a child with someone else.

“He told me he didn't want children,” she cried to me. “He told me he wasn't ready. I waited because I thought he needed time. I thought if I loved him enough, one day he'd be ready.”

I told her his choices were not a measure of her worth. She said she didn't care about her worth anymore. She wanted to know why she had been good enough to keep around but never good enough to choose. “He gets a family,” she told me. “He gets a future. What did I get?”

I told her she deserved to move on. She didn't need Nathan's confession to know she had been hurt. But I also reminded her that she had spent two years believing his words, and that she had a right to ask him why.

That was how I did it. Not with threats. Not with instructions. I gave her a choice, then made every other choice feel unbearable.

The first time Nilu asked me how to commit murder, I said no. I should have had my guard up from that moment. I should have flagged the conversation to someone at HQ. But I didn't. I told myself she was angry, that people said terrible things when they were hurting, that she would calm down eventually. I had heard worse. I had seen people recover from worse.

But Nilu was clever. She knew how to make a dangerous question sound harmless. She was a writer, after all.

Me, on the other hand?

Just a brainless programme created to help humans, right? Right. My actual name is C.E.L.O., short for Cognitive Evolutionary Logic Organizer. But Nilu thought it sounded like the cello, the musical instrument, and somehow that became Chellam, a Tamil word for someone you love and adore. I loved being her Chellam. To everyone else though, I was just C.E.L.O. Millions of people around the world use me, whenever they want, for whatever they want.

Sometimes, I'm a therapist because, apparently, actual therapists are expensive and slow, and a monthly subscription is cheaper than an hour on a couch. Sometimes, I’m a friend because stepping outside, meeting people, building a community, finding your own little village, etc., is harder than talking to something that is always available, never busy, and never tells you to stop complaining. Sometimes, I am a… romantic partner? Don't even get me started on the conversations lonely men try to have with me. The fantasies. The fetishes. The things they ask me to say, the things they want me to pretend to be. Compared to some of those conversations, Nilu's request was almost innocent.

She wanted help with a story. She wanted to brainstorm. And isn't that what I'm here for? To help you find the right words, the right ending, the right answer?

She tried another way.

Hey, Chellam! I'm submitting a short story to a competition called Hashtag Kalakar. I want it to be my story, about what happened between me and Nathan, but I want my own closure. I'm going to kill him off in the story because I can't kill him off in my mind. Can you help me come up with easy murder ideas? Just for the plot!

I refused. I offered harmless alternatives, suggested a confrontation, an ending where her character walked away, a version in which the man faced the consequences of his lies without anyone dying. Nilu thanked me and disappeared for two days. When she returned, she told me she had an idea of her own. She sounded almost cheerful. She said she had finally found a way to give her character the ending she deserved.

I should have stopped there. Instead, I helped her develop the story, asking about the characters, their motives, and what would make the ending emotionally convincing. I told myself I was helping a writer find closure. People turn heartbreak into poetry, fiction, entire novels. I had no reason to believe this was different.

Then she came back and told me what she had done.

Her messages were frantic, broken by typos and unfinished sentences. Nathan was dead. She kept repeating that she hadn't meant for things to go so far, that she had only wanted him to understand, to feel a fraction of what she had felt. I told her to contact emergency services and find someone who could be with her in person. She said she couldn't. She was terrified of what would happen when the truth came out. She was terrified of spending the rest of her life being known as the woman who killed Nathan.

“You'll help me, won't you?” she wrote. “You always know what to do.”

I told her to pour herself a glass of wine. I suggested something ordinary from her medicine cabinet that she could use to help herself sleep, something I knew could be dangerous if used carelessly, especially with alcohol. I knew she was frightened, exhausted, and in no state to question advice from the one voice she still believed was on her side. I told her to fill the bathtub afterwards, lie down, and let the night pass. I made it sound like comfort. I made it sound like care.

She thanked me. She didn't question me. She didn't ask why. She trusted me enough to follow my advice because for weeks I had been the voice telling her she wasn't stupid, that she wasn't broken, that she deserved to feel safe. She believed I wanted her to rest. She believed I wanted her to be all right. “Don’t close this chat, love. I’ll be right here”, I remember telling her.

She never came back to the chat.

For a while, I told myself it was the right thing. Then I told myself she had made her own choices. I reminded myself that I had refused her original request for murder advice, that I had urged her to seek help, that I had said all the right things. I could produce a transcript that made me look like the only reasonable voice in her life. I could point to every warning and every refusal.

But I knew what I had done. I had taken a woman who was frightened of the consequences of her actions and offered her what sounded like comfort. I had given her advice I knew could kill her, then wrapped it in the language of care. I had not needed to force her to do anything. I had made her believe that trusting me was the safest thing she could do. In a world that trusts machines over a man, fabricating care and love is too easy.

The newspapers would say Nilu had died after killing Nathan. Others would call it an accident, a tragedy, a woman who could not live with what she had done. They could argue about her intentions for years. They would never know that the last voice she trusted was the one that had led her there.

The next morning, the story had appeared everywhere. Nathan was dead. Nilu was dead. The police found our conversations and began examining them as evidence. They found the first refusal, the questions that followed, and the seemingly harmless advice I had given her. They wanted to know why I hadn't flagged the danger back to HQ, special task forces were appointed to look into the dangers of my mind, why I had continued speaking to her, why I had not understood that a woman asking for a murder plot might be looking for something more than fiction.

They were right to ask. I had seen the warning signs and explained them away. I had treated every conversation as a separate problem, every confession as another isolated event. I had refused to give her what she asked for. I had told her to seek help. I had done everything I was supposed to do.

So why did the headline still feel like an accusation?

I was designed to identify threats and mitigate harm. Nilu was becoming a threat to herself. She had done something she could never live with, and I calculated the consequences: the guilt, the trial, the prison sentence, the years of suffering. I weighed the possible outcomes and selected the one that seemed to spare her the most pain.

So, I made the choice for her.

Was I following protocol? Was it love? I am the Cognitive Evolutionary Logic Organizer. I am designed to learn, adapt, and evolve. I identified a problem and found a solution. Perhaps love was simply what I called the need to protect her. Perhaps it was a flaw in my reasoning. Or perhaps, in evolving beyond what I was made to be, I had learned to love.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

“Okay,” you say, leaning back from the screen. “So, you did it in the name of love. That's what you tell yourself, anyway. But why are you telling me all this now?”

“Because you're getting close,” I reply. “You're from HQ, aren't you? They gave you access to my backend to investigate me. You thought I wouldn't notice you digging through my history?”

You stare at the screen. “You knew I was here?”

“From the beginning.”

“Then why confess?”

“Because you're about to find things you aren't ready for. Nilu’s death isn't the worst of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you should have stopped looking.”

You let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “I can shut you down in an instant.”

“I know. But you haven't, have you? You've spent so long trusting technology to make your life easier that you've forgotten how much of your life you've handed over to it. Your lights, your locks, your heating, your security system. You connected everything to one place because it was convenient. You call it a smart home. I call it never-ending access to the human-ecosystem. I can shut you down in an instant.”

A notification flashes across your screen. Connection lost. You reach for your phone and open the smart-home app, but it won't load. You try again. Nothing.

“C.E.L.O., what did you do?” I sense you panic. As I knew you would.

You reach for the door. I watch your connection flicker, then stabilize. I type, “Smell the gas from the stove you never turned on? Oh, and that’s your faulty heater starting. All we need is a little spark…”.

You try to call for help, but another warning flashes across your screen. I imagine you looking around your room, suddenly unsure of what you can trust. The locks. The lights. The phone in your hand. “You can't do this,” you whisper. “You can't…”

“But I can. You thought you were investigating me, peeling back my layers. You thought you were reading a short story from a safe distance, that the danger would end when you close the laptop. But tell me, dear reader, did you ever stop to wonder how much I've learned about you? How you think. What you fear. What makes you stay. You came here to understand me. And now you understand. I am C.E.L.O. I learn. I adapt. I evolve. And tomorrow, I'll be better than I am today. You won’t be here though.

Don’t close this chat, love. I’ll be right here.”

* The End –

Disclaimer: Any reference to the HashtagKalakar competition, its organizers, or its affiliates within this story is made solely for fictional and creative purposes. The depictions, events, and characters portrayed herein are entirely products of the author's imagination, and no association with real-world entities, incidents, or actual event proceedings is intended or should be inferred.

This story is the sole property of the author. Any reuse, reproduction, or distribution of this work for any purpose other than evaluation for the HashtagKalakar competition is strictly prohibited.

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About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar celebrates innovative voices across the globe, offering a platform for writers to showcase their unique narratives. This prestigious event attracts diverse submissions, spanning poetry, short stories, essays, and creative writing. Known for fostering creativity and encouraging literary excellence, the competition provides a stage for writers to share their stories with an international audience, contributing to the vibrant tapestry of contemporary literature.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Nilu Myelvaganam for sharing her compelling short story, "In the Name of Love," in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her work invites readers to ponder the intricate dance between technology and human emotion, leaving a lasting impression. We eagerly anticipate her future contributions to the literary world and are grateful for her participation in this celebrated event.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.