Suspicion, Dilli knew, was not born from proof.
It was born from absence.
The moment Hope Island emptied—too quietly, too completely—the world's intelligence agencies would feel it. Satellites would notice patterns breaking. Signals would thin. Human noise would fade where it was once constant.
And when people vanished without bloodshed,
empires grew curious.
That curiosity was deadlier than war.
1. The Shape of Suspicion
VEDA projected the timelines without ceremony.
In every future where Hope Island simply disappeared, global powers did not panic immediately. They observed. They waited. Then they began to peel reality layer by layer—economic traces, biometric histories, satellite archives.
Population loss without migration vectors triggers investigation, VEDA concluded.
Betal added the sharper truth.
They will assume concealment, not evacuation.
Dilli understood instantly.
If the people went underground,
their reflections had to remain above it.
2. The Unthinkable Solution
"We leave faces behind," Dilli said.
Betal paused—not in confusion, but calculation.
Decoys?
"No," Dilli replied. "Lives."
Not living humans.
Not prisoners.
Not actors.
Something else.
"Programmed human prototypes," Dilli continued. "Indistinguishable. Breathing. Aging. Working. Failing. Living ordinary lives."
The room fell silent.
Even VEDA recalculated.
Ethical boundary detected, she noted.
Dilli did not flinch.
"Ethics collapse when extinction becomes an option," he said quietly. "These won't suffer. They won't fear. They won't dream."
"They'll only exist."
3. Faces Borrowed from Memory
The prototypes would not be random.
They would be familiar.
VEDA accessed every permissible memory—faces, expressions, micro-movements, the way a fisherman squinted into the sun, the way a teacher folded her dupatta before speaking, the way children ran barefoot on warm soil.
No single prototype would be an exact replica.
That was too perfect.
Too suspicious.
Instead, each face would be a statistical echo—close enough to be recognized, different enough to avoid identity collapse.
Betal refined the deception further.
Behavioral noise is critical, he warned. Humans are inconsistent.
So the prototypes were designed to err.
They would forget names.
Argue over trivialities.
Make poor financial decisions.
Fall sick occasionally.
Grow older at uneven rates.
To surveillance systems, they would look gloriously imperfect.
4. Programming Ordinary Life
The city above—Hope Island—would continue to function.
Shops would open late some days.
Fishermen would complain about the tides.
Schools would reopen with slightly altered attendance.
The prototypes would not innovate.
They would not question authority.
They would not gather attention.
They were designed for one purpose only:
To be boring.
VEDA embedded life-pattern algorithms—work cycles, social friction, festival participation, minor conflicts that resolved without consequence. Even gossip was simulated, carefully diluted so that no secret ever accumulated weight.
Betal wrapped it all in illusion.
Thermal signatures, consumption data, digital footprints—every metric intelligence agencies trusted was fed exactly what it expected to see.
Hope Island would appear… unchanged.
5. The Moral Weight No One Sees
Dilli watched the first prototype open its eyes.
They were empty—but convincing.
No soul behind them.
No curiosity.
No fear.
Just presence.
For a moment, something tightened in his chest.
"This is the price of time," he said softly. "Not power. Not weapons."
Time.
Time for DWARAKA to grow.
Time for the world to exhaust its paranoia.
Time for humanity to decide whether it deserved what it hunted.
VEDA recorded the moment but did not comment.
Betal did.
They will never know they were fooled, he said.
"That's the point," Dilli replied. "If they knew, we'd already be dead."
6. A World That Watches the Wrong People
Weeks passed.
Satellites reported normalcy.
Analysts dismissed anomalies as statistical drift.
Governments turned their attention elsewhere—toward louder threats, messier conflicts.
Hope Island remained on maps.
Alive.
Predictable.
Unimportant.
And beneath kilometers of ocean, the real people slept safely inside DWARAKA—unseen, untouched, forgotten.
7. The Greatest Deception
History would remember wars, not disappearances.
It would record battles, not substitutions.
And so the greatest deception Dilli ever engineered was not VEDA, not NIDHIVANA, not even DWARAKA—
It was leaving humanity convinced that nothing had changed.
Above the sea, faces smiled that were never born.
Below it, lives continued that were never hunted.
And the world, satisfied by what it thought it saw,
looked away—
exactly as planned.