"Sometimes, the cleanest kill is the one done with code."— Internal Memo, Crown Cyber Ops
8:33 PM – Crown Server Core, Hidden Beneath Ulsoor Lake
Six stories below water level, under noise-cancelled walls and automated drones, the Crown's mainframe pulsed like a living organ.
Its core AI — codenamed CASSANDRA — was building neural overlays of Zayen's memories, pulling from surveillance footage, intercepted messages, and old school records.
A digital brain, slowly rewriting the original.
On the far monitor, two profile charts compared side-by-side:
ZAYEN – ORIGINALZAYEN – VERSION X3.1
Below it, a note:
"Original unstable. Clone increasingly preferred."
An engineer blinked.Paused.Typed:
"But the clone remembers things it shouldn't…"
Before he could hit ENTER, the screen went black.
And a new phrase appeared:
"STOP COPYING ME."
Every monitor in the core glitched for five seconds.
Then rebooted normally.
But by then, the engineer was dead.No wounds.Just… vanished.
Kabir – Burnt Archives of Mehra Industries, Basement Level
Kabir paced through the wreckage of Vihaan Mehra's legacy. Boxes of shredded files, burnt drives, project prototypes. One corner remained untouched.
A terminal.
Offline for five years.
He forced it open manually.
Inside, a single file:
REX.vault-entry-final
Password-protected.
He entered every combination he remembered from his handler days. None worked.
Until he tried:
ZAYENLIVES
The vault opened.
And revealed footage.
A meeting.Between Vihaan… and someone in a Crown uniform.But not Zayen.
Kabir froze.
The face. He knew it. But it was his own.
The voice in the clip:
"We erase the boy after he serves the purpose. It's already in motion."
He staggered back.
Had he been part of this once?
Had he hunted Zayen because someone programmed him to?
Zayen – Hiding in a Cyber Cafe, North Bangalore
Zayen decrypted a stolen Crown chip on a patched laptop. Fragmented, unstable.
But it was enough.
It revealed CASSANDRA's voice structure. The AI Crown used to make the clone talk like him.
And buried within that voice was an echo.
His father's voice. Vihaan.
That's how the clone had said things Zayen never told anyone. Because Vihaan's voice was embedded into the clone's neural base.
They weren't just remaking Zayen.
They were trying to resurrect his father through him.
Back at Crown Facility – Minutes Later
CASSANDRA rebooted. But the glitch from earlier had left something behind:
A countdown.
96 HOURS UNTIL TOTAL SHADOW DEPLOYMENT.
Phase: Citywide Identity Swap
The goal wasn't to kill Zayen.
It was to overwrite him.
Once the clone had his memories and his mannerisms — the real Zayen would be declared a terrorist, eliminated quietly, and replaced forever.
And no one would know.
Because the legend would still live on.
Controlled. Owned. Sold.
As midnight hits – Across Bangalore
Massive surveillance blackouts sweep through government centers.Street cams reboot to old feeds.Social media floods with manipulated footage of "Zayen" committing crimes.
The clone is out.