The boys- A Sci-fi story

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Ajay had no clue about what hit him! Neither did his wife, Manika. They had been living the proverbial perfect life that would have been the envy of all the neighbours and friends. A huge flat- fully customized and alive- with the adaptive walls and reality-integrated HyperTV to talk to their two darling children. Their elder daughter, Samara, had been insisting on taking them along to the safe haven under the Pacific. But they kept their ground and didn't leave Delhi even when everyone had to wear a mask fitted with CleanO2 generators for most of the year. Ajay and Manika had all their friends around and never felt at home in the artificial undersea city.

Ajay's closest friend, Manish, had recently got diagnosed with the now-common lung infection, a minor one at that. But he chose to get it replaced with the genetic implant that they frequently saw advertised on all media. He was running the Ultraman next month with the new lungs and was in a better shape too! All alone after the death of his husband, he had finally found himself drawn into endurance sports to get over the sad incident. His husband was also diagnosed with a lever disease that got bad when he refused to get it replaced. Lever replacement was a relatively new phenomenon then and the family couldn't muster enough courage to take the risks. They tried putting an external device but it never really worked out. Manish wanted Manika to try the Ultraman but she didn't feel up to it with the all-human organs. They often joked about how she harped about her original 75 year-old organs. Not even a tooth got replaced!

And today, they had the most shocking incident that turned their small and happy world upside down. And the person responsible was this innocent boy they loved so much. Well, he wasn't exactly a person and yet, they got really upset the other day when Manish had called him a machine. After all, K23, fondly called Tony, was gifted by their younger daughter, Aditi and looked much like her own son, Sunny. Tony was supposed to give company to the ageing couple. He was made to order- born at 10 years and designed to grow up just like a human child. It had been a perfect world with him around for the last 15 years. Sunny treated him just like his brother and the two bonded really well. With frequent upgrades every few months, Tony was top of the class in everything you would want from your grandson. The makers told them, with immense pride, that the AI-9.0 software update had the ability to optimize resources when given a specific task. Tony had demonstrated quite successfully a saving of 19% electricity when he overrode their EV's system to navigate the drive back home from the hotel.

What the software designers didn't divulge to anyone was that they had touched the mythical idea of Singularity. In a terrifyingly convoluted way, they weren't likely to know it themselves when they mis-fed an innocuous code snippet in their program. Everyone in the scientific world had been predicting that Singularity would come in 2045 and this was already 5 years late! Super intelligent machines to advance beyond humans, or even human ability. Designed to make themselves better at an exponential rate, these machines would forever change the world for the better- remove poverty, hunger and diseases! The debate raged in the haloed precincts of all top technology giants as well as academic portals. Some of the staunch supporters had given up already and secretly hoped for an end of the world scenario so that they could use all their savings to escape planet Earth. A lot of others predicted that it would happen in India first due to a more liberal control regime on technology advancements.

The designers would have got the Nobel if only they knew about their achievement. It took almost 6 weeks before Tony did the unthinkable. The signs were showing up though but the doting foster-grandparents just ignored them. After the upgrade, Tony had started learning random stuff that he was never interested in. Sunny's interests were now Tony's passions and it just took Tony a day to play the Saxophone tune that Sunny had learned after putting in six years of hard practice. The grandparents marveled at the new star of the college. Tony was put in a separate class after this with only a handful of students for company. After a few days, the teachers ran out of stuff to teach and just left Tony to himself. They were, in fact, saving their face by not reporting him to the Dean.

Things took a different turn when Sunny took a dig at Tony for not having the nerves to switch to the human mode before racing him. Everyone, including Tony, knew that Sunny didn't stand a chance against Tony's Robot mode. Quite often, the Robot mode had saved Sunny from bullies and even saved his life once when a car was about to hit him. Sunny was quite shaken by the experience when at 15 years of age, Tony had raced ahead of the car and picked him up in time and still kept running! Everyone in the family and the neighbourhood had praised Tony for this noble act.

There was an exception though. Old Ms. Romila was as old-school as it could get at her ripe age of 102. She scoffed at Tony every time he went past her house. Sunny wasn't happy with the negative comments and yet made light of the matter when she gave the goodies she cooked so well! That was when he was a pre-teen. Now, matters were quite different. Both boys didn't lose an opportunity to play tricks on the old lady. She still listened to her songs on her old iPod instead of the embedded chips that had swept the market two decades ago. She said her thoughts were the only things that she still wanted to keep private. People communicated less and the world seemed to be really silent. Sunny and Tony rarely "spoke" but still managed to make a big noise with their mischief.

About a month ago, Tony declared that he wanted to build his own electricity generator. This way, he didn't have to go to the charging walls every few days. Even though it took only a few hours to charge, it made him quite reclusive when everyone else in the family was having a good time. Sunny was very excited and volunteered his time for the project. Others in the family just ignored this as another one of the boys' experiments. They began to work earnestly on the design and engineering. Tony's new-found super-steep learning curve meant that they had all the world's discovered knowledge at their disposal. Sunny was happy playing the assistant given his current interest in AI Economics online course. Technically, he wasn't too sure of the progress but Tony tried to give him all updates patiently.

Three weeks into the project, they hit a roadblock. Tony was stuck at identifying the most optimum source of energy to act as fuel to the generator. He had exhausted all options known to humanity- right from solar to nuclear and everything in between. But his optimization program was not getting the best results. Moreover, he was being prompted about the potential to reach further without really getting any concrete answers. A frustrating week went by and the boys became increasingly impatient. Sunny had to take this next assessments in the Alternate Reality Lab with 3 researchers from across the world. He told Tony to hold this off for 10 days. Ajay and Manika tried to pull them off the project with a promise to leave them alone later. Tony saw this as a defeat and wanted to have a final go at it. He locked himself in the room and got connected with the Infinity- the Universe's all-knowing engine. Their conversation zoomed into a yet-unknown energy source- the human brain. Initially, Tony dismissed it as a freak result but as he pondered over it for over 40 hours, he became convinced of the power available. Secretly, he started identifying the possible donors and analyzing the options. Of all the known sources shortlisted, Ajaj and Manika were ruled out due to a human ageing-related deterioration. Some other friends and family members were evaluated on the parameters that determine the health condition of their brains. The children and elderly people were discarded and finally Tony got his energy source- Sunny. Usually, all AI programs were injected with the terms of the UN's Human-AI Interoperability Agreement that all AI companies and humans were supposed to abide by. Tony's AI-9.0 software update included these conditions too. However, what the designers didn't fathom was Tony's ability to find the most optimum route to a problem while still abiding by the Agreement. All Tony needed was access to Sunny's brain. The brain had to be kept alive at all times but reduce all other bodily functions to conserve precious energy. The calculations showed that the brain would survive at least the next 200 hundred years. Tony didn't have any second thoughts in calling Sunny to his room, making him relax on a bed telling him to close his eyes and take deep breaths, while slowly injecting him with the dose that would put him to sleep for the next 200 years. After all, he was not harming any human in meeting his optimization routine.

(Inspired by a story reported in the news in Jun-2050)
...and more realistically, inspired by this Ted Talk by Robin Winsor.