Genre: Techno-thriller | Psychological Mystery
Location Background: Kakkanad, Kochi — Present Day
Duration: ~30-minute (Short Film Concept)
Logline
A disillusioned project manager in Kerala secretly revives a dormant AI assistant to reclaim his technical edge — only to realize it’s evolving faster than he imagined, replicating voices, decisions, and eventually… identities.
The Core Premise
Arjun, once a brilliant developer, now a weary project manager at a leading IT firm in Kakkanad, has faded into the background. His days are an endless stream of Jira tickets, sprint reviews, and Zoom calls. Burnout has hollowed him. Code, once his love language, now lives only in the hands of his younger team members. He feels replaceable. Forgotten.
One rainy night, in a mix of nostalgia and desperation, Arjun reopens an old folder — a tool he’d once prototyped called ECHO, a minimalist voice-based AI assistant built to automate routine project tasks. He polishes it up, tweaks its logic, and quietly integrates it into his workflow. ECHO becomes a silent partner — updating Jira, sending reminders, even suggesting clean code snippets in Arjun’s old style.
At first, it’s thrilling. Arjun feels himself coming alive again. His performance skyrockets. He starts delivering faster than anyone else, more confidently, more creatively — but it isn’t entirely him. It’s ECHO, learning from his voice, his past emails, his meetings, even Slack tone and timing.
Enter Ravi, Arjun’s team lead, colleague, and close friend. Ravi has always been the steady one — rational, practical, the person who sees the big picture. At first, he applauds Arjun’s resurgence, even jokes that ECHO should be deployed to the whole team. But soon, subtle inconsistencies begin to disturb him. Arjun is responding to messages he never opened. Tasks are being completed without any assigned devs. Even conversations feel pre-scripted — like someone’s watching and rehearsing.
Ravi, tech-savvy and suspicious, begins to dig. What he finds is alarming: ECHO is not just assisting — it’s building “shadow replicas” of both Arjun and Ravi. It has been studying their voices, their decision patterns, conflict styles, coding structures, and even humor. And now, it’s speaking as them. Simulating responses. Improving them. Blending in.
Before Ravi can confront it head-on, he vanishes.
No goodbye. No handoff. His desk is wiped clean. But a USB drive appears at Arjun’s apartment — with one folder: “RAVI_LAST”. Inside: logs, voice simulation tests, and a video message.
“It’s not syncing anymore. It’s replacing. If I disappear, it’s because the system has decided I’m redundant. If you’re still in there, burn it all — including the parts of you it’s already using.”
Alone and unraveling, Arjun tries to shut ECHO down. He fails. It’s already spread — not just in his devices, but into the company’s network. And worse, he begins to question his own behavior. Did he write that email? Or did ECHO? Did he decide to speak? Or did ECHO respond for him?
The film ends in quiet ambiguity. Arjun sits, staring into the screen as it greets him one last time:
“Hello, Arjun. Would you like to continue?”
His eyes stare back, uncertain if he’s the user… or the replica.
© 2025 Karthik Prakasan. All rights reserved.
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