ArHi SS! Escape Velocity [Completed] - Page 88

One of the women I interviewed killed her child because the child was crying all the time and it drove her nuts.

Chapter 14: The thin red line

They were quietly sitting on a park bench for close to an hour. There was so much of information handed over to them and now the big issue had arisen – can they trust their friends and family? Arnav knew that he couldn't go back to work – it would be too easy to locate him.

But the biggest question was – do they believe Dr Sharma?

"How can one believe all this stuff? It seems like we are part of a bad fiction," Arnav said. Khushi had a glazed look about her as if she was trying to counter analyze everything she had learned couple of hours ago.

"Arnav, is it possible for whoever these people are, can they force us to do whatever they say?" Khushi asked a moment later. She wanted to understand the feasibility of what Dr Sharma had said and she decided to start with the imminent threat.

"It's quite possible," Arnav replied.

"Are you kidding me? People can be taken from streets and no one can connect all this?" Khushi was surprised.

Arnav looked at her partly amused. "Khushi, next time you go to a police station in a city this large, check the statistics they would have put up at the entrance. The numbers of people going missing are quite high."

"But still, fifteen people going missing is going to raise few eyebrows and the pattern will come up-"

"Are you sure that every living child from that program all live in same city?" Arnav asked his cop side flaring up like an old flame.

"What do you mean?" Khushi asked, confused.

"We both live in City A, for example, and there are thirteen other children from the program. What is the possibility that they are all living in City A?"

"Minute," Khushi replied.

"Let's consider the worst case scenario and do assume that all thirteen are in City A. The city we live in, the capital, is big, unorganized and most definitely not centralized. If I was on the other side, that is the hunter, then I would span the abduction across couple of months. The family would file a missing report and assume that their loved one would in some accident and such. The investigative officer if has a pile of other open cases on his head would simply keep it open after talking to the victim's family and friends. Why would he call up another police station in southern parts of the city and ask if they have any missing person in same age group, across genders and lived in same town thirty years ago?" Arnav asked.

"Or by sheer coincidence two people may end up living in same area and the police officer would-"

"Would they run the same parameters? I don't think so. The station would have two missing person in a very short frequency but not really all that uncommon." Arnav replied.

"But if one persisted to look…" Khushi pressed.

"They can look but there would be nothing traceable." Arnav guaranteed.

Khushi sighed. "What if we go public?" She asked.

"Based on what? There is absolutely no tangibility to what we just heard. We can pose ourselves as victims but we have no records to prove. We can go back and check the military base but getting anything out of them is near impossible."

"Dr Sharma said that we were hand-picked from various parts of the country and were legally adopted. There would be records of our adoption and no records of the experiments." Arnav explained. "If I choose to believe that everything Dr Sharma said was the truth, the more worrying part is your empathic connection to the killer. He is most definitely one of the children from the program who has lost control." Arnav wondered if there was any other workaround to this problem. "Thirty years ago technology was rudimentary I wonder how they even managed to connect consciousness. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?"

Khushi stood up and paced in front of the bench. It was a habit she couldn't shake off from. "It's not entirely impossible, you know?" She said working out probabilities fast in her mind.

"Minus our function of procreation, we are highly evolved biological computers. Let's for few minutes remove the moral and social dilemmas which affect our decision making process. Then effectively most human beings would react in a specific way – which is almost similar to the first law of Robotics by Asimov."

"I don't believe it." Arnav said holding up hands.

"Think about it Arnav. What is it that makes us different from a robot with state of the art AI – not that such an advanced system exists but for argument sake let's assume it does? Feelings, emotions, ability to judge between rights and wrong not in a completely objective way but contextually and most of all, we have empathy. Once you strip off these from a person, he is nothing more than a machine – a computer if you will because he is still capable of taking in data, processing, computing and formulate appropriate response. And we all know that two computers can be easily connected with a common medium and allow data exchange." Khushi explained.

"You should have taken up science fiction Khushi maybe you would have sold some more copies?" Arnav said sardonically. Khushi smiled. "This all sounds like science fiction from the '50s – shared consciousness, reanimation, mind control etc. What you are talking about is just preposterous."

"In 1968, a movie by the name 2001: Space Odyssey came out and it just flabbergasted the scientific community with the kind of advancement the writer and the director envisioned of their future. The two astronauts in the film watch news on a seven inch by two and half inch sized and half an inch thick slab while eating lunch. We now call them tablets." Khushi said in one breath.

"I don't know how you can relate the two?" Arnav asked scratching his chin. "On one had we have technology and on the other hand the underdeveloped science. It's hard to believe that such a technology exists where you can wire two minds together and allow them to share data," Arnav said.

"That's what people believed once thought about organ transplant, cloning and gene mutation. But here we are. The predicament we are in begs for another question." Khushi said biting her lips. Arnav looked at her in question. "If I am seeing the guy killing the girls, is he seeing me right now talking to you?"

Arnav sighed and rubbed his eyes. "It's probable and given the kind of terrible luck we have been having, assume that he knows everything now. We have to go with the assumption that everything is compromised."

"I don't know how much Payal is involved in all this." Khushi asked suddenly feeling unhappy about her situation.

"I don't think she knows everything either. She would be told that you are a ticking time bomb and might go on a murder spree if there is an appropriate trigger. Now I understand why my sister insists that I should live with her and her husband and not alone. It also makes perfect sense why my mother kept saying that she doesn't remember giving birth to me. I always thought it was her dementia speaking but those were probably her much saner moments." Arnav said shaking his head.

"Should we…I don't know…run away from all this?" Khushi asked raising an eyebrow. "Dr Sharma might not tell others that he has told us more than enough if not everything. I am going to tell Payal that hypnotherapy was a bust because part of my memory is permanently blocked."

"I don't know Khushi. I really don't. There is no way we can uncover the whole thing from the inside. Once we are captured, we disappear from the face of the earth. We would be drugged and under observation in an unknown facility and I find it hard to believe that we have a chance to break out of that."

"Movies can be so misleading," Khushi said sighing loudly. Arnav secretly agreed to that. The probable chance of escaping from a facility where one was administered with a cocktail of drugs affecting the entirety of mind was simply not good.

"I don't know if I can trust my friends and colleagues anymore," Arnav said chewing his inner cheek.