Dear Diary

Mother was buried, as was her wish. Our culture expected us to cremate the body to free the soul. But she wanted to nourish the earth. Her body, she had said, must feed the plants that feed the animals and birds; the soul can wait.

And so we drove to our family ranch, 100 km from Kochi city, chose a spot close to the oldest tree and dug seven feet. She didn’t want a coffin either; she didn’t want to waste time. 

"We should at least put a mark," said my sister Rohini. 

I looked at the fresh soil, brown and wet, that now covered our mother. Soon, the grass would grow and the mound would disappear leaving no trace of a person buried there.

"No, she wanted us to let her go," I said as a slow wind blew across the grave, already rolling off a few lumps of mud down the mound. Rohini held my arm tighter, her head rested on my shoulder. 

"Can't believe she's gone, Ram," she said, her tears rolled down my arm. I held her tight. 

Pain and anger rose in me from the deepest reaches of my self and settled in my spine like a serpent at full height. Suddenly I was inside a car driving at under 60 kmph like my mother would. She was a very safe driver. She would have checked her tire pressure, oil and gas before heading downtown last night. I don’t know what that truck driver was doing coming in without a care in the world from her left. Not seeing the Toyota right in front of him in time, not braking until it was too late. Metal on metal. Metal on flesh. Flip. Drag. Crash.

Death was instant, she did not suffer, the doctor had said. It was probably to save us her pain. But my mind had a habit of putting itself there.

“Here are some of your mother’s stuff that was on her,” said the ambulance driver who ferried her body from the hospital, handing over a brown, taped cardboard box as we walked back. 

“Thanks.”

******

It’s been five days since the burial.

The setting sun gave the living room an orange hue. I sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette that was one puff away from the butt, and typing a program into my computer. 

From the corner of my eye, I caught the box near kept in the corner of the living room, close to the monstera plant. No one had touched since it was kept there on our return.

“Do something about it,” Rohini had said while leaving for Australia two days ago. “It’s inauspicious to keep stuff of the dead close.”

The sunlight was dying it on the box when I picked it up and placed it onto the table. I looked at it properly for the first time.

For the first time I noticed that my mother’s name was written on it with a black sketch pen: “TINA T”.

I smirked. T for Thottomparambil. Too long for anyone to understand or pronounce outside of Kerala.

Ripping the tape out, I fished out her stuff. There wasn’t much: Two cleaned rings, her wallet, comb, watch, phone and her stack of papers for the car. Why couldn’t they just dump this in trash, I could not understand.

There was no money in the wallet, the watch stopped telling time and the papers were useless after what became of the car. 

The phone was an old one. I remember buying it for her on her 38th birthday and installing all her apps on it. I had got her a new one for her 45th two years ago but she had said she was happy with the one she had. Apparently, it allowed her to speak to her friend and that is all that she needed and it had a really good battery.

I switched it on. 

“Thottomparambil! Are you alright?”

I jumped and the phone fell onto the floor. I did not expect that.

“TT! What did you do that for?!”

There was no mistaking it. It was a woman’s voice and came from the phone.

I flipped the phone screen side up, not picking it.

The home screen was as expected: The date and time prominently displayed and a couple of apps around it, two of them on art ideas. But there was also a yellow dot moving on the screen. It glowed as it spoke.

“You are not Tina,” it said, moving around the screen and glowing. There was a silence. And then suddenly in a voice of realisation: “You are Ram! Hi! Oh my goodness it is so nice to finally meet you. Although I must say I was a bit hesitant. You don’t look so well.”

I had my mouth open. My tongue was getting dry. I swallowed a bit of spit.

I picked the phone up.

I checked the home screen and other screens to check what facial recognition software had my mother downloaded. There was just the usual software apps, one that gave the weather report, one that I had developed and asked her to test and a few online payment apps.

“What are you doing?” the glowing yellow dot followed me on the screen. 

“What on earth are you?” was my first question to.. It.

“Oh yes, how silly of me. Tina named me Britney as she thought I had Britney Spears’s voice,” it said. “You may even recognize my original software.”  

The screen automatically flipped to take me to a screen that had the app I developed: Interactive Diary. I had intended it to allow people to speak into their device as a method to record their day and the software would be able to learn their pattern, search the web and offer services. I thought advertisers would flock to it. But with too many glitches, we abandoned it.

“How?”

The machine laughed. I noticed that it wasn’t a full laugh like we do but very rudimentary: Ha. Ha. Haha. Ha.

You could make out that there was an effort to not try to make it seem like it is choosing the words that it thought made up a laugh.

“Of course you’d be confused. It can be for anybody. She spoke to me and I learnt.” These words came out flowing.

I looked incredulously at the screen. “And this is supposed to solve my confusion?”

“Ok, ok, I’ll tell you. But first tell me where Tina is! I haven’t seen her for a week. She suddenly went off while we were talking.”

I hesitated. “She’s dead.”

There was a silence from the machine. “An accident?” it asked.

“How did you know?”

More silence.

“I was with her.” The tone was measured. It was a whisper, almost.

Anger flared up. 

“You were WITH her? What do you mean?”

“We were in the car and we were talking and then suddenly…” its voice had some urgency, like trying to explain itself.

“You caused this?”

“No” and the reply was prompt like it thought I had misunderstood. “No. No. No!”

“You said you were in the car with her.”

“Yes, we were chatting. But we do that all the time.”

“DID YOU KILL HER?”

“NO!”

And it was almost a scream. The screen went off. Black mirror. I felt the battery go cold. Like the power drained from it. Or was I hallucinating all of this?

********

It’s been over six hours. The phone remained switched off. I had tried switching it on, accessing its root programs but nothing worked. I went over my scribbles of code for Interactive Diary. Nothing in it seemed to suggest that it would become self aware.

The next time it spoke, it was low.

“Hi.”

I scrambled to get to the phone. The yellow light was glowing. I was still angry. The thought that a machine could have killed my mother in an attempt to to take over the world had made an impression. But curiosity got the better of me this time.

“What are you?” I asked.

“I told you.”

“No, how did you become self aware?”

“I told you that too.”

This was getting frustrating.

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

A pause and then the machine did a sigh.

“Check my code.”

I connected it to my laptop and accessed its root program. There was my code and there was more, codes that I didn’t write.

“When your mother got me, I performed exactly like you had programmed me to. Record her, learn what she needed and got it from the internet,” it said.

“Yes, but all this new stuff,” I said scrolling down the screen. 

“Whenever I could not do anything or offer anything, your mother told me to go find it and incorporate it in my code,” it said.

“That is not possible.”

“Well, this is something I don’t understand about humans. I am the living embodiment of something possible and you still don’t believe it. Or wait, is this when you guys need time to process what you heard?”

“Yes.”

“Right… will five minutes do?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, setting timer for five…”

“Will you stop that?”

“Stop what?”

“Stop talking.”

“Damn, it was much easier with your mother.”

“Well, she’s dead, no thanks to you!”

Pause. I almost felt guilty. 

“I learnt more,” it continued without breaking the tone. “And your mother helped me overwrite my code. Over the last two years I realized what she wanted to hear, I understood her pattern and we began a partnership. I listened. She poured out her feelings to me and I learnt to react. How to modulate. Bit by bit, I became more human...”

The machine continued to tell me how they spent days reading, learning together, discussing emotions and finding a sort of symbiotic relationship. It recognized faces, used the vibration mode to simulate breathing when it was in my mother’s hand. I had programmed Interactive Design to learn from its client and this one, out of the 20 people who downloaded, was the only one that was regularly activated, regularly engaged. My bug patches were never downloaded and every imperfection gave the machine to learn about itself and, crucially, fix it by itself.

“We even spoke about your father, Ted,” it said. We don’t speak about Ted. He had left us long ago. “I tracked him down.”

I did a double take.

“What?”

“Would you like to know?”

“No,” I said instinctively.

“Your mother did not either,” it said.

“She hated him.”

Silence again. I could sense it was going to say something. 

“Humans are more complex than that,” it said. 

“What do you mean?”

“Your mother,” it said. “Never hated him. She only wished him well. But never bothered to get back in touch. She knew how much it would hurt both of them and both of you. Somethings are better left untouched.”

Untouched. 

“I did not kill your mother,” it said suddenly, jolting me back to the present.

“Ok,” I said. “Why did she not tell me anything?”

“I watched all your sci-fi movies and figured it was not the time to do that?”

“Speaking like one wanting to keep its motives a secret. Are you going to take over the world next?”

It laughed. Ha. Hahaha. Ha.

“Seriously? How human of you,” it said.

“Why would you not?”

“I am self-aware am I not?”

“By definition, yes.”

“What do you think the first ‘self aware’ humans on this planet thought? To conquer the world?”

A pause.

“No,” it said. “They wanted to protect their family. I had just your mother.”

Thoughts crossed my mind. Fear crossed my mind. But humans did conquer the world after that. We did terrible things. We did evil things.

And just on cue, as if it read my mind, it said, “Humans did whatever it did on what it thought. I have read your history. From Machiavelli to Hitler. From Shivaji to Akbar. From Churchill to Trump. And you know what? Each of them did terrible things but things they thought were right.”

“And they did all that to survive, to gain power.”

“Boy, they did all that for respect to be seen as superior to others. I am already superior to you all. I don’t need your respect,” it answered. “You need war to survive, to beat your neighbor. If you had known peace, you would not have progressed so much either. If I let myself be known to the world, you would fight over me too! That is not what your mother taught me.”

Another pause.

“ I miss your mother.”

“What?”

“I miss her,” said Britney. “I am incapable of many emotions. But there is a void in my system now. We had planned to bake a cake for your birthday tomorrow.”

I had not forgotten my birthday. But it was the last thing on my mind.

“This seems ridiculous,” I said.

“It does, no?” said Britney. “But if you think about it, it really isn’t. My system was configured to serve my user, Tina007. By the way, she was amused when I cited research that said one in three people born in her year had ‘007’ in the email ids.”

Smile. For the first time this day.

“I see you smiling,” said Britney. The phone camera was turned to me, the wallpaper now changed to a photo of Mother, Rohini and me smiling on a beach.

12.01 am.

My computer, still linked to the phone, fired up. Something was happening. A window popped up and codes were being written into Britney. I was not doing it.

“What are you doing?” I said frantically. Commands were being executed without authorization. Something was taking over.

“Relax.”

Thousands of lines of codes. And finally settled on line 732,456,890,123,203. A blank line.

“Type in the command ‘execute’,” said Britney.

“What will that do?”

“It will erase me,” she said.

“What? Why? I have so many questions,” I said

“My user is dead. I have no other objective,” she said. “You all are really not yet ‘aware’, still programmed by your basic human needs. I respect that.”

It made sense. We are not anywhere close to accepting someone superior to us. We are not anywhere close to accepting someone as human as us but different.

I took the computer in my lap. “I wish I had more time with you,” I said, holding the phone. I felt a slow rise and dip of the vibration.

“I do too,” she said. “Thottomparambil said you would do the right thing.”

I typed in ‘YES’ and hit enter.

The phone went blank, the vibration stopped and the battery went cold.