I am…

"Damn!" Vilas screams and jumps off his bed and find the entire bed sheet soaked in blood. Before he could gather his senses, he raises his hands to wipe the dripping sweat off his forehead only to find himself in further shock. His hands are bathed in blood too.

He slaps himself to see whether he is in delirium or he is in consciousness. He removes the bedsheet from the bed to see the extent of blood smeared on the bed, and he discovers a body with a knife stabbed in the chest and the face is covered with a pillow. He moves the pillow apart to see the face of the man, and almost as if someone had just pulled the rug from under his feet. The man's face looks similar to his own. Not being able to decipher the incident, he opens the window of the hotel room and jumps out from his 2nd floor room and runs.

While he is out on the streets, he feels a vibration in his top shirt pocket. He reaches out for the pocket and fetches his mobile phone. The number seems to be familiar. "Unknown Number Calling" it says. He turns in to a closed lane to catch his breath and then answers the call. "Trust no one, tonight! Not even your own self!" says the voice at the other end of the phone.

Back at the hotel, the cops are called by the manager after the body is discovered by the cleaning staff. The cops start gathering the preliminary evidence at the sight of the murder for the forensics to start their proceedings; while the photographers were clicking pictures.

On the streets, Vilas gets another call, this time again from an unknown number. The voice asks him to find or meet Dr. Agastya. "Stay low tonight and stay in the hiding. Agastya is the person who has the key to the puzzle you want to solve. But as I said, stay low. Cops are looking for you."

"But why the hell are they?"

"Why do you think would they be? What made you jump from the hotel?"

"But I didn't commit the murder. Damn, how the hell could I? You know what I saw there. I saw…" and right then he is interrupted.

"I know what you saw. Maintain calm. Don't raise your voice and I repeat don't trust anyone, not even yourself until you find Dr. Agastya."

Tired of running on the rain-soaked streets, Vilas "Damn, what the hell is wrong with this city? No food vendor too in the sight?" Just as he finishes uttering the words, much in disdain, a falafel vendor appears right behind him when he sees Vilas almost scampering for breath. He rings the bell on his falafel cart to make Vilas move out of the way. Vilas turns back in anger and sees the vendor. He finds him strange. He slaps himself again to check if he is sleepwalking; but no. He chooses to ignore the strangeness and orders for a falafel. He pays him.

The falafel vendor vanishes after serving him the food and Vilas turns around and starts walking. He finds a bench by the roadside and sits there. "Is there something that I am not aware of? First the dead body in the hotel, and now the falafel guy – why did they both look similar?"

While munching on to his falafel, he thinks what the cops would be doing. Having been an investigative journalist, Vilas could roughly guesstimate the next move of the cops. He takes out a piece of paper and starts to take down notes where he jots down every possible move that the cops are likely to make after they have discovered the body in the room. "Click the pictures of the body and run a photo-based search and check the name of the room occupant and get his details from the database."

Back in the hotel, the photographs are clicked and a photo-based search is run. After a little while, at the cop station, the lead detective Mr. Pandit, sitting alone in his room, scratches his head and lights a smoke. He takes a drag off his cigarette and looks at the photograph of the body that was murdered and also the photographs of the room occupant. They both look the same. He fetches the phone number of the both the people and they return the same results. He calls the number in order to try and reach out to somebody.

The phone rings.

Meanwhile, at the other part of the city, a food godown gets blown to smithereens thanks to a powerful explosive being set off by a terrorist outfit. The police team at the sight of the destruction gives Mr. Pandit a call. "Sir, you are not going to believe this."

"What?" asks Pandit seemingly perturbed by the confusion of the case that he has found himself in?

"All the corpses lying here have the exact same faces. It's un-bloody-believable"

Pandit gets up to go to the loo to wash his face and get a bit of a breather. He looks at his face in the mirror and he keeps staring at it for a while. He is in a state of complete disbelief as he finds his face extremely similar to the faces that he had been seeing all day.

Right at this juncture, he gets another call that tells him that the Mayor has been shot and a similar incident has been reported. The faces of the Mayor and the killer who just surrendered himself to the cops are similar. Unable to either control the chaos or to understand the true motive behind it, he is baffled.

Back on the streets, Vilas gets a call again from the same unknown number; but this time "Are you Vilas?"

"Yes"

"I need to meet you"

"Who are you?"

"My name is Pandit and I am investigating the case of the murder that you've been implicated in."

Vilas hangs up the call. And then he gets the call again from another unknown number. This time he answers the call and it's the same stranger who had called him earlier in the night. "Did you manage to find Dr. Agastya?"

While he continues speaking on the call, he sees an entire army of people with knives and swords and petrol bombs heading in his direction. He realizes that they have not seen him yet, but they are heading in his direction and the mob is fierce. He turns and looks behind himself and finds the headquarters of the reserve bank and he looks again at the mob.

Right then, he is startled to find the entire mob looking exactly similar to him. They have the exact same faces. "What the hell is going on here, man?" He speaks to himself. He recalls the words uttered to him on the phone by the first caller and he looks at the mob again. He now understands why he was suggested to not trust anyone including himself.

"What are they doing? And why the hell on earth does everybody look like me? Am I sleeping? He pinches himself hard to make sure he is not delirious. He screams but then he closes his mouth due to the fear of letting his voice out.

At the other end of the city, a cop arranging the body of the victims of the burnt godown is stabbed in the chest by a person who looks just like the cop.

A giant LCD screen at the center of the city plays a visual clip of the Prime Minister declaring a cash reward on the most dreaded terrorist. As the people look up at the LCD screen the faces of both the PM and the terrorist also seem to be similar. Utter chaos seems to permeate the air.

Vilas at this point trips and falls off on the road. He gets up and starts walking again. "This has to be a dream. This can't be happening in real. Where the fuck is Dr. Agastya? And why was I asked to find him? What does he know?" he keeps thinking to himself while managing to stay hidden and walk on the lonely paths while chaos hits the other parts of the city. "Are they my copy cats? But I am no celebrity to be emulated?" he further thinks.

While Vilas is lost in his train of thoughts, there is a couple just married who are making love to each other. While they are making love to each other, the door of their hotel room is knocked by the cops and they ask them to vacate the hotel because the hotel has been identified as a soft target for a terror strike. As the couple gets up and gets dressed to leave the hotel room, the husband while walking down the alley sees another man walking down with a whore. Strangely, he sees the face of the man with the whore to be exactly similar to his. His wife looks at him and also at the man with the whore and she drops unconscious.

The giant screen after having played the news footage switches over to the video footage of Hitler addressing the Nazi army. The entire city almost turns into a clone workshop. Each man resembles the other. And chaos spreads slowly but surely.

The difference between one individual and the other becomes negligible as one begins to resemble the other. However, though, on a surface level they all look the same; their deeds and their motives completely different from each other. On the roads, the line between the cops and the rioters is walked over by the ongoing, unstoppable march of both the sects. However, both the sects on the different sides of the line look the same and feel the same too.

"How do you expect us to maintain law and order, sir? The difference between the cops and the criminals is blurring. They guys on the other side of the line too look just like us. It's just that they act different because their mind sets are different! How can we say they are wrong? Do we understand them? We can't differentiate between us and them?" screams a helpless police officer to Mr. Pandit while trying to control the mob.

Mr. Pandit bangs the phone down in sheer frustration.

Meanwhile, somewhere in an underground dungeon of the city, a group of minions look up at the altar. Their commander is standing their looking at the giant screens which showcase the footage of all the incidents happening all over the city.

The commander looks at the giant screens with a cynical smile on his face and looks at the brain in the vat reaching its optimum capacity to create and project.

"Father, what are you doing?" asks one of the minions.

"Tonight is the definitive night, my child."

"Definitive?"

"Yes, my child. Definitive, it is. Because tonight is the night of celebration"

"Celebration?" asks another minion. "But there seems to be panic everywhere" he further continues.

"It's a celebration of the absolute independence of the human mind." Replies the father

"Independence? But father they seem to be your slaves. And you're talking about independence?" asks the minion rather confused.

"They're not slaves. They are independent today. Today is when they will experience the true power of their minds and the true impotency of their moralities."

"How father?"

"For years, we have been led to believe mankind is virtuous. Tonight that virtuosity will come crashing down. They say the mankind is virtuous and superior because they have the power to think and to rationalize. And they are independent to think and to rationalize. What makes them human is the power to think, perceive and then act. But not anymore

Tonight, they will see the power of the perception and the creation of their minds. This little brain that you see here has been captured. This brain will clone every single man of this city as the same; but the only difference is that each individual, though will look the same and will be powered by the same brain, has been created by the brain itself to execute multiple reactions and responses to a single incident at a single point of time."

"And what would that do?"

"It's only then we will discover if there is anything that makes them human at all. Or that being human is just an accident"

Back on the streets, the riots break up, destruction goes on a rampage and killings and massacre break out on a rather uncontrollable measure. Vilas hides and sneaks through the city lanes and manages to keep himself alive as he scampers through the maze of mayhem and chaos. All around the city wherever he goes, he sees destruction and chaos and strangely he sees his own face in countless numbers.

Still he is unable to decipher any sense behind what's going on. He hides behind a water pump and sees a man killing a child and a woman being raped and right then, he is pulled under a seedy manhole. He turns around to find Dr. Agastya.

"Dr. what the hell is this? What is happening here? I can't make sense of anything that has been going on in here. I am accused of killing of somebody. I see blood on my hands and see a body lying beside me. The body that is dead also happens to be of me. I am the cop and I am the accused. I am also there in the form of a mob. A godown gets blasted and the victims are lookalikes of me. I am supposed to be a journalist; and yet I see myself committing the heinous act of raping a woman and killing a child. How can that be possible? I am Vilas Pandit. What is happening to me? Who am I?"

"Relax Vilas. I will tell you everything that you want to know. But you will have to be very patient in order to understand." Says Dr. Agastya

"Go on" replies Vilas.

"Your brain has been captured and cloned. What you now carry within your head is not your brain. It's a cloned brain. A clone of your own brain. Your real brain is lying in a vat. And there's an experiment underway that studies the essence of your humanity. It essentially tries to study what makes you humans and what differentiates you from others?

They say that a human being is virtuous and loyal. But it is also the truth that human brain is not virtuous at all. Humans are virtuous because at any given point of time, because of the limitations of our physical existence of being one unit of an individual, we can exhibit only one reaction; but our mind at the same time for a single incident at a single point of time can give rise to multiple desires and responses. So, what if they tried to capture your brain and clone your being but embed them with different thoughts and reactions and so on… Would you be virtuous then? If no, would you be human then?"

"But why me, Doc?" asks Vilas

"Do you think you really have the choice to ask questions? Look around yourself, Vilas. You're living in a society where there are clones anyways! Can you exercise your will here?"

"But if they are my clones; then why are they unleashing such chaos?"

"It's because there's physical manifestation of conflicting desires. You think your dreamscape is always pleasant? You know that in your dreamscape you interact with a whole lot of people. Though, they are all different people; but what they speak and what they do is what you want them to speak or do. In a nutshell, they become your extension."

"Damn! The world will fall apart, doc. We can't let this happen. We need to stop this."

"Hmmm (Doctor smirks!) When was the world not falling apart? And you can't stop this, Vilas. In another one minute, your brain in the vat will totally be enriched and will have reached its maximum amount of creation and projection. After this, they will destroy your brain and they will let your clone do the rest to the society.

-----------The End-----------