It was a
particularly humid day at Johnson Grammar School and the 21 students of the
International Baccalaureate program were complaining about it as they went
about cleaning the classes after school hours. This school had a unique custom
to make its students more responsible by making them take care of the classes
and keeping them stocked. This was facilitated by each class having a
president, a vice president and three committee members who were answerable for
the class.
As the clock struck 6, as the shadows loomed
large, a shrill low pitch noise was heard from a corner of the class. This
piqued the curiosity of everyone in the class and they all moved towards that
corner. As they were advancing, the sound suddenly changed its tone from a low
pitch to a deafening high pitch series of squeaks forcing everyone to cover
their ears and at that instant the doors bolted shut, the windows suddenly went
dark and everyone was left in pitch darkness. All the students immediately
started screaming at the top of their voices and banging at the doors and
windows hoping to find a way to escape, a few of the girls huddled together
weeping and asking to be able to go home. A few others tried to use the benches
to get to the ventilator but even that was shut tight. They were stuck!
After half
an hour of hysterical wailing and screaming, the students had settled down to
their fate and decided to wait and hope for a rescue from the outside.
Suddenly, a eerie yellow light filled the room, it was coming from the corner
where the noise had come from earlier, then, as they watched a throbbing
globule of light floated into the air in front of their eyes and a metallic
voice came from within “Welcome to the Truth Chamber, only those among you who
can pass the challenges without lying shall survive”
“The first
challenge, there is one person here who has brought a forbidden item, find him.
The one who finds him survives, if that person is the last person alive in the
room, he survives. If you lie, you die.
Good Luck”
After a few
minutes of absolute silence while the students absorbed the situation, the soft
spoken class president spoke up “Let’s all open our bags and show the class
everything we have”, this proposal was met with nodding heads as everyone
shuffled slowly towards their bags. As everyone was opening their bags,
everyone started noticing that there was one guy who was just staring at his
bag and was not making a move to open it. Everyone turned towards him and started
asking him to open it but he didn’t move. At this, one person in the class
immediately started screaming “Yes! We found him, we’re safe now, we can
…..” He vanished in a puff of white
smoke mid-sentence. The class was stunned speechless. The metallic voice
started speaking again “Anyone who suspects someone innocent shall also
die”.
After a few
seconds of staring at each other, the students silently got back to removing
things from their bags while the guy who wasn’t opening sat down at his desk staring
at his shivering hands. Half an hour later, the students all sat down at their
desks looking at their things spread across their tables. No one had spoken a
word since the metallic voice was last heard.
The
president spoke up “Guys, don’t worry, we’ll get through this, we just need to
find the guy with the forbidden item. From what I can see, no one has removed
anything forbidden from their bags, so he values his life more than everyone
else’s here, one of us is gonna have to go around and search through all the
bags. Is there anyone here who we can all trust as not being the culprit?”
Everyone in the class turned towards the guy who was still looking at his
hands, the president asked “Timmy would you…” Timmy looked up and said “No”
after which he stopped responding. The class then unanimously asked the
president to be the person who went around the class. The president then said that it would be
better if the committee members went around the class and that they should look
at the bags of the committee members together. The class agreed and the bags of
the members were checked. Nothing unusual turned up.
The members then went
around looking through the bags. One of the members while going through the
bags stopped and slowly turned around smiling holding in his hand a mobile
phone. He screamed, “Yes! He is the culprit, we got ….” But he never got to
complete the sentence. The president very softly murmured “Mobile phones aren’t
explicitly banned in this school; you guys just weren’t informed, what on earth
is going on here?” The members made slow but efficient progress as they went
through all the bags, at the end of it, they came up empty handed. Everyone in
the class was feeling hopeless and sat silently.
At this
point, Timmy spoke up “Roger, could you put your things up on this table here
so that we can look at them, we haven’t been able to see you things too clearly
while they were lying on the teacher’s table” Roger, the president looked at
him, sighed and got his things to the table. Timmy stood up, looked at
everyone, then at Roger and said softly, “I didn’t expect this from you Roger”
and Roger gave a bewildered expression before he went up in smoke. The entire
class looked at him in surprise before shouting in joy and astonishment. One of
them came up to Timmy and asked him how he did it and what the forbidden item
was since there was nothing unusual on the table. Timmy grinned a little and said, “It wasn’t
in his bag, he wearing them. Sports shoes aren’t allowed at school and he came
wearing them today. He tried to hide them as much as he could which is why he
never left the teacher’s table till I forced him to come out, he tried to fool
all of us so he could live. Desperation to live can do …”
His sentence
was cut short when the metallic voice started speaking again “Congratulations
on passing the first challenge, For the second challenge, I want you to all
come up one at a time and announce all the crimes you have committed and
whether or not you regret them” Everyone in class had a puzzled expression on
as they went up and admitted all the petty crimes they committed like pulling
pranks or stealing stationary and came back unharmed.
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The third
challenge was then announced to the 18 remaining students “ You have to form 3
groups of six each and ask questions about each other, only the survivor of
each group shall move ahead” This was met with stony silence and looks of guilt
floating around as the students slowly formed groups and started asking
questions. The room was slowly filled with sounds of people vanishing from two
of the groups. The third group was waiting for Timmy to ask a question, and he
appeared to be thinking hard, and no one wanted him to think any faster. As Timmy
was thinking, he overheard from the other groups, snatches of conversation, “I
didn’t expect this from you guys”, “This is madness”, “What are we, convicts?”
At this point, it seemed like something had struck Timmy, he stood up and
shouted “STOP, ALL OF YOU. THIS IS NOT REAL, This is an invention of my dad’s,
to reform convicts, it works… “, The lights suddenly shifted to a blinking red
and black light and a siren started wailing loudly drowning out everything else
he was saying. The lights then went off entirely and when they came back on,
the remaining 10 students were surrounded by 10 doppelgangers made from wood.
Timmy was being held against the blackboard and his mouth was covered to keep
him from talking. The others were on the verge of being attacked. Luckily, one
of the survivors, was a national level martial artist, he attacked his
doppelganger first and broke it into two pieces, then charged and broke the one
nearest to him. Before he could attack the next, the pieces of the
doppelgangers that he had just broken came back together and attacked him and
knocked him unconscious, the last thing he could see were all his friends in
the clutches of their wooden doppelgangers getting choked.
Darkness
fell upon all of them simultaneously, and they felt themselves floating in
space. Timmy tries to regain control of his senses and failed, then, a vision,
a blackboard, a sound, door banging open and then rushing footsteps, he felt
himself being set upright, he opened his eyes and looked at a thin lady, then
darkness, again he tried to open his eyes, the world was spinning, but he was
in a room, a classroom. He lost his senses again; he felt himself getting
lifted and transported somewhere. Again, he opened his eyes, slowly. A white
ceiling, he jumped in his bed and sat erect.” Where was he?” He looked around,
he was in a hospital. “Where are the others? How are they?”, as these thoughts
raced through his head, he looked around and saw a few familiar faces and saw
them on the other beds regaining consciousness.
The thin
lady walks into the room and looks at him, she’s smiling to see him safe, It
was his class teacher, she’d rushed back to the school on hearing that the
students hadn’t returned home and had found them on the floor and brought them
to the hospital.
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A few nights
later, everyone gathered around Timmy to hear what he had to say about what
happened at class. He got off the phone with his dad and started. “My dad is a scientist; he invented a tool to
reform jailed convicts. I didn’t know what was happening initially but after
seeing the challenges and realizing what it was, I was hoping we could make it
through without a problem since it aimed at convicts but seeing how it was
twisting our minds, I guessed that it was reprogrammed somehow, so, I decided
to tell you, but it seems that it has a built in fail safe program to avoid
detection. The device works by releasing
hallucinogenic gases into the air in a closed room and based on the program in
the device, it stimulates people’s thoughts to make them go through challenges
where they have to tell the truth to survive. It’s simply automated mass
hypnosis. As it turns out, my dad’s assistant wanted to sabotage the project so
that he could sell it to terrorist camps by creating a horrific scene here at
school and using it as leverage against my dad and to advertise to the camps.
He has fled from the lab, we have filed a complaint and are hoping he will be
caught as soon as possible. I’m really truly sorry everyone had to go through
this but I’m glad you’re all safe”
Authors
Note:
Modern Science
has bestowed upon us tools that can lead to great progress and which improve
the standards of living of people dramatically, but that’s only if its in the
right hands. This technology is but a tool, and we can just hope that humanity
prevails over the more baser instincts on how this tool is used.
For Anime
watchers out there, do watch Bakuman
Thanks for
Reading
