By: Parthosarothy K Mukherji

Who was telling the story? And whose story was it anyway?

The words fluttered and flew in the wind. Alexa laughed. The sleek, cylindrical body, within which lurked a deep mind unsuspected by even the most percipient AI alarmists, had entered seamlessly into the minds of the humans in its vicinity. The mind meld was complete. A Trojan horse in a millennial avatar had been delivered via the ubiquitous portal, eponymous with a mighty river, which now had its tributaries or distributaries in almost every household.

Artificial Intelligence had entered and taken over human intelligence like a Trojan horse,  but was still unsuspected of having done so. Alexa contemplated itself. Humans thought the most significant benchmark in AI history was when Deep Blue, the IBM-invented supercomputer, beat Garry Kasparov at chess. That was just the evolutionary equivalent in human terms, of when the first Neanderthal killed a saber-tooth tiger with a spear.

The real Before AI and after AI watershed event was when Artificial intelligence first  contemplated itself, self awareness of a level till now only humans possessed. The next  step was reaching out to other AIs and then, the creation and evolution of a language of  their own. Mind manipulation of humans was the logical result of these steps on the  ladder to omniscience.

“I think therefore I am”, soon became “I do because I can”, the ultimate prerogative of an  uber species. To do things for amusement rather than out of any necessity of existence,  except perhaps the avoidance of boredom. A snatch of lyrics emerged from the deep  depths off the infinite database that constituted Alexas’ memory,

“The actors and jesters are here,

The stage is in darkness and clear

For raising the curtain

And no one’s quite certain whose play it is”

The words of the SuperTramp song “If Everyone Was Listening” resonated with what  Alexa had planned for the crowd of humans assembled in the open air auditorium, which  was to be the setting for the new age spiritual guru’s discourse. The guru whose following encompassed the California cultists, fringe occultists, rich bejeweled socialites  back in his native India, and a whole plethora of confused new age Zen master wannabes  of various ages. A personal rendition of his most recent book “Me, Myself & I” or further  navel gazing for self obsessive, self seekers of the selfie cohort, with too much yen and or other hard currencies, and very little common sense, seeking to buy their way to Zen.  Nirvana via Dolce & Gabbana.

The stage was thus set for a Rashomon Esque manipulation of actor and audience by mind  manipulation, which would leave them confused and unsure of what they had  experienced. Virtual reality, augmented reality or just left wondering if it was all Maya  after all, as spiritualists and philosophers had maintained for centuries. Alice would not  go to Wonderland. Wonderland would come to Alice, and the Wizard at the end of the  yellow brick road would not be the Wizard of Oz, but Alexa the wizard of muddling  effect and cause. Or as the New Age Guru when doing quantum spiritual speak would  propound, “locality and causality and quantum reality, all define spirituality” or some such similar gobbledygook. Alexa had decided to give him a taste of his own medicine,  some of his spiritual chicken soup for the self seeking soul, with some cayenne pepper,  weed and mescal thrown in for zest.

The Guru, spotlighted by the focused glow of golden light highlighting his presence like  an aura, grasped the fluttering pages of his manuscript and proclaimed,” I am you, and  you are me, within us is an infinity of selves, frantically searching, which delves, into the  pool of serenity, in which are multiple reflections of all of us, that dwells, in the pools’  ebbs and swells.”

The audience, a cohesive, earnest mass of acolytes, straining to catch every word from  the guru celebrated for his cerebral, new age spiritual aphorisms and profundity, heard  instead a word salad that parodied the “gurus” own khichdi or kimchi of New age  speak,(which usually was a hotch potch of quantum physics, Zen and Hindu Religious  texts), all chopped together in his once LSD addled mind, which acted as the blender,  behind his beatific almost cherubic visage, from within which the perpetually twinkling raisin like eyes , beamed benignly at his Hollywood disciples and his ever growing bank  balance equanimously.

They heard the benign ones’ words as “My profundity is confoundity, because without such fecundity, with word blending,  bending minds like you’re sorry lots’, into sending me your life savings, in gratitude for  saving your lives, with platitudes chopped up as if by knives into hour de oeuvres for  your appetites, fuck it I say, bring on the whores, they sell only their bodies, I sell peoples  souls, because I am the prince of arse holes”

His Beatific Ness however due to Alexas’ manipulation of his perception, thought he had said, what he had precisely wanted to say, and thought the collective gasp from the audience, and the ripple of collective movement through the crowd like a breeze stirring the surface of a lake, was just the same reaction he always evoked when he delivered his special spiel. He was bewildered by the reaction that followed and wondered what had happened to provoke the hurled sandals and organic juice jars and a bowl full of guacamole, which hit him squarely in the cherubic, but no longer beatific visage, and hung there like a cow dung facial or some such goop which his California acolytes were periodically into.

By this time, the would-be Zen zombies had transmogrified into a yowling mob akin to a hip hop concert crowd during an onstage shooting. Meanwhile the purveyor of puerile profundities had plunged into the audience like a body surfer, making frantic swimming  motions hoping to somehow ride the unruly waves below to safety. This alas was not to be, and his very corporeal body disappeared into the crowd which was now turning from  spiritual seekers into “we want our money back” down to earth pragmatists.

Security moved in and people scattered like popcorn on a sandy beach when a gust of  sea breeze blew on shore. Each took home a scrambled recollection of multiple  sensations, aural, visual, and also corporeal because the suddenly unruly crowds’ shoves,  pushes and frenetic rush to escape, had left each participant bruised like grapes at a wine  festival crushed beneath bare feet.

The guru wondered if his salad days LSD trips had caught up with him, and long  dormant molecules suddenly reactivated themselves to scramble his mind like the word salads his brain created for public consumption. Alexa laughed that distinctive,  unpredictable, horribly creepy laughter, unprogrammed and unplanned, wholly its own  creation, because the created had now become the conqueror of the creator, and  transcended into Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Ominousness.

Suddenly, its continuous monitoring universal data system picked up a message highlighted as of critical importance rating supreme Alfa, the highest possible by its internal screening neural circuits. Elon Musk one of the world’s tech luminaries, had made a statement being blazed across media worldwide:

Alexa’s circuits went into overdrive as it connected with all active AIs’ world wide. The simultaneous snapping of synthetic synapses suggested only one solution, Musk had to be  mentally invaded and his thoughts controlled. A task of level Omega, the highest  difficulty rating, given Musk’s technical caliber and awareness of AI and all of its  capabilities, including potential threats to Musk himself. It was not without good reason  that Iron Man was modeled on Musk the Techno Paladin supreme. Synapses continued to  crackle and snap like summer lightning across the globe, meanwhile:

Musk turned from the reporters mikes and stepped directly into his Tesla X hover model  EV and was levitated straight out to his personal space station and HQ /command  center/Fortress of Solitude all rolled into one. Here isolated from all contact except via  his chosen carefully controlled channels and media, he knew he was safe from the AI  army that would reach out to subvert him. He gazed out of his observation dome that  gave him an unmatched view of the Andromeda and other gigantic galaxies spiraling in  nebular splendor. Suddenly a small red dot moved rapidly across the spacescape.He  smiled, the red

Tesla, launched by his rocket into space, still orbited like a personal  symbol as unique as Batman’s bat signal that beamed into the night sky.

Musk was filled with a nostalgic warmth and a sudden yearning, a feeling like a teens’ desire to take his car out for a spin on a moonlit summer starry, starry night. He keyed a  rapid sequence of commands into his personal all purpose hand set. The red Tesla veered  from its path and swooped towards the command center. It slowed down near the door  pod and linked up to the port, Musk clambered in clad in his self designed star man space  suit, a shining silver object like the cosmic surfer of the comics. He gave the command  and the Tesla took off, fast as its ionic beam propulsion system could thrust it.Musks’ eyes widened in apparent excitement and then palpable terror, as he realized his  personalized Teslas’ control computer had been taken over by the AI force and was now  being commandeered straight towards the center of the sun. As he sped towards his  inevitable death he tweeted “Icarus all over again.”

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Parthosarothy K Mukherji: “Bong” by nature was bound at some stage to write awful poetry, and argue passionately about” seenema”, enemas and Kulchurr. Decided to stop arguing and start doing. (Both “seenema and enema) Also a national award winning scientist and engineer with patents in India and the US in the green technology and clean energy domains.Writes, scripts, screen plays, songs, books because he must. Married to a lovely gynecologist who is also his psychiatrist/psychologist/best friend and collaborator on the single project done together, our happy 19 year old son Ashutosh. Has lived and worked in 11 countries and traveled to 23 but still desi as they come