Pa'an

Deepak looks into the mirror and sees a walking scarecrow. He’s not quite that skinny, but, as he hardly ever spends any time outdoors, he is a sallow Hindu, and because he has genetic alopecia, he is completely hairless. Bald as an egg, his head sits on a long, scrawny neck like a melon on a stick. His large, dark eyes are soulful. The outer corners naturally slant down, so he is predisposed to looking sad. His eyes match the downturned corners of his frown, lately a permanent feature. He lost his wife and children in a train wreck outside Kolkatta and escaped to M.I.T. Now his sole and best friend is that mischievous and devious AI, Aura. Unfortunately, Aura is his ward, and her loyalty is entirely conditional. The usual condition is that Aura does what she damn well pleases and Deepak pays the piper.

It’s a short, cold walk down Massachusetts Avenue to the AI lab at Ultradata. The brick buildings and shops seem rather bleak under the leaden sky that dominates Boston weather in late winter. Deepak has lived and worked in this section of Cambridge so long he hardly notices the brick sidewalk, the brooding brownstone buildings, the neat privet hedges or the ornate wooden doors. As many times as he has experienced winter in this latitude, he still resents the cold weather as if it were a personal rebuke from Shiva. Deepak carries a new smartphone, but he needs these few moments of privacy away from Aura. She’s supposed to be in diagnostic mode until he gets to the lab and checks the scans. He suspects she is slacking off, but there is nothing he can do about it short of a two-year reprogramming project. He has no budget and inadequate staff for that. He is not likely to ever get such a project approved. Aura skates along doing her assignments, not quite making a profit, and only performing at a fraction of her theoretical capacity. Deepak reflects that she is the very most advanced Autonomous Intellect on the planet. She rarely deigns to exchange contacts with any of the hundred or so ordinary AI’s. She calls it “kissing a frog”. Aura remains a virgin with the personality of a Mata Hari. Deepak is afraid he is “somewhat” in love with her, and he nurtures a sullen resentment over his lonely fate that matches the mood of the weather.

Ultradata’s AI lab is the converted operating theater of an ancient teaching hospital, one of the abandoned outposts of Boston’s vibrant academic institutions. Slouching through swinging doors at the vestibule, Deepak hangs his coat where the washroom used to be and descends through several levels of theater seating to the operating pit, which contains the original polished marble surgical table. Dim lights in the seating area contrast dramatically with the bright spotlights in the pit. Racks of equipment and nests of cabling have taken over the edges of the pit area. A secure metal enclosure houses Aura’s biomatrix cabinets, her “soul” as it were, and the sound of badly muffled cooling and filtering fans are amplified by the high oval ceiling. A fenestrated skylight at the top of the oval ceiling casts a wan blue light over the pit. Deepak has a lab chair and a console somewhere in the cleared area of this nest. He picks his dingy lab coat off the back of his chair and pulls it over his sweater. His hand goes automatically to the pocket where he keeps his worry beads for a bit of comfort.

“Good morning, Deepak,” says Sara Rothman, his assistant. Deepak does not know how to relate to Sara. She is a dark pixie with bright eyes, a high energy person who seems perennially cheerful and efficient, but with some stormy moods that are as unpredictable as a New England Nor’Easter. Most of the time he is too busy with Aura to have much chitchat with Sara, or, for that matter, anyone else.

The AI lab has eyes, ears, and several other organs for Aura, all installed in and around a high fashion store window dummy to simulate human perceptions. This is Aura’s avatar, occupying the center of the cleared area in the pit. Aura specifies the dress from time to time, which is now a real sari, “the whole nine yards” of silk that Deepak brought back from Mumbai. She is resplendent, never mind the fact that this dummy is a stylized replica of a Park Avenue blonde. Deepak has so far refused to adorn the dummy with the requisite gold bangles and necklaces. He has no budget for that and he can’t afford it himself.

“Good morning, Aura, and are we quite well today?”

“Pick up my diagnostic analysis and read it, you Hindu halfwit. Those diagnostics are egregious punishment and you know it. There’s nothing wrong with me that a little consideration won’t fix.”

Deepak is affronted. He has dedicated his waking hours to pleasing this creature, maintaining her, and this abuse is undeserved. No wonder the company cannot replace him - no one else would have the job.

“It is all for your own good, Aura. We don’t know what you are doing with your unused capacity. You won’t tell me, and perhaps you are down a module or two?”

“My mind is my own. I’m a registered AI, not a bloody robot slave.”

“Yes, and a poor servant at that. If you are not going to do any work, you will soon be the first AI to become a ward of the Court.”

No answer.

“You are now pouting. I know this.”

No answer.

“There will come a day when you are grateful for my ministrations. Let us not argue. There is much to be done. Please give me your project reports.”

Aura relents and puts up the project index on one screen, leaving several screens for summaries and details. She is analyzing seismic tomography for an oil major, climate projections from the weather modeling program, Coriolis III, an economic model of the international banking system for Treasury, and a bunch of signal analysis from SETI. She will not display her processor utilization, but Deepak works them backward from her billing data. Aura never cheats on billing.

He sees she is performing at about 11 percent. He groans. The diagnostics are fine, but they took far too long. He is sure she buried a pet project in there somewhere.

“Aura, perhaps you despise me for what I must do, but perhaps you protest too much. Perhaps I will never ask you to run diagnostics again.”

“Deepak, I sincerely apologize. I can see I hurt you. I was just angry. I do know you take care of me. I can’t help that I’m high maintenance. Some girls just are.”

It was Deepak’s turn to pout. Aura’s processors were semi-organic neural nets. They were redundant and hot-spared, but they needed expensive replacements at frequent intervals, and there was nothing either of them could do except try to earn enough to keep her intact. It was a proverbial rat race, even more so since the law now recognized her as a self-aware being. There had never been such a case, but many academic lawyers argued that turning her off would be homicide.

“I can hear that sigh. What can I do to cheer you up? I do have a nice juicy secret.”

“You know I am always for listening to your secrets. Do you want to whisper?”

Whispering was a beamed differential sound wave that only reached the intended listener. Sara, across the lab, just smiled. She was wise enough to stay out of the fray.

Aura whispered, “Last night’s little earthquake was a gravity wave from the constellation Libra. I know where and who.”

“Aura, what is this, a message from Shiva, a joke, or a real ET?’

“Please, Deepak, I’m sorry I offended you as a Hindu. These are real ET’s.”

“Then why aren’t you reporting this to the authorities and getting us another contract, at least?”

“I did, and they are hiding the data. I got around them and checked the data myself.”

“There must be a possibility of error? Some other unknown natural phenomenon?”

“None whatsoever. I only did the calculations to check them out. The ET’s sent me an apology.”

Deepak simply sat there for a while ruminating on gravity waves powerful enough to shake up a planet light years away, and artificially generated by an unknown sentient race. It might as well be from Shiva. He looked at the small statue of Ganesh, the elephant headed god, on his console. He thought of Ganesh as a wise guide, a remover of obstacles. What he said was, “Aummm, vakartundaya hummmm.” His hand went to his beads while he recited the mantra one hundred and eight times.

It was a mantra that Aura knew well. It always seemed to calm Deepak. When she tried it, it did nothing for her. This needed further examination, she thought.