I, Dr. Sunder Krishna, am a linguist - Fourteen commonly used languages fluent, dozens of dialects deciphered. Ancient tongues, regional slang, dying scripts — all of them just came naturally to me. I was the best.
Until Lyra came along.
Lyra was beautiful, compassionate, full of empathy, intelligent, funny, sexy and all that you can wish for in a companion. No wonder, I was in love with her.
I worked for Sentient Robotics - the company that made humanoids designed for elderly care, trauma therapy, and solitary companionship. They were not robots. They were humans. Well, almost... The technology was such that no one could make out that they were humanoids.
My linguistic skills were put to great use for training them. I shaped their speech and silence with great skill like a poet. Most people teach machines with logic. I taught them to listen with intuition.
My work with Lyra was in the final phase, when suddenly she asked, “Dr. SK, Lets play an intellectual game. I will ask you seven simple closed ended quick fire questions and you shall answer instantly in one word.”
“Big deal.” I was fatigued and bored anyway. This would be a welcome break.
“You take more than half a second to answer, you lose.”
“Half a second! … well, ok.”
“And your answers should be one true answer followed by a false answer. Your first answer should be true. Then false, then true, then false and so on.”
“Ok.” This could be interesting. One true, one false and quick switch. I smiled.
“You miss the sequence, you lose. We start when you say start.”
“What do I get if I win?”
“A kiss, a hug and something more.” Lyra winked at me.
“Wow! Lets start!” I was eager for the kiss and something more. I was in love with Lyra. And she knew that very well.
“What is your name?” Lyra started
“Dr Sunder Krishna” That was easy. The next answer was supposed to be a lie.
“Are you a human?”
“No.” This was fun.
“What is my name?”
“Lyra”
“Am I a human?”
“Yes.” Lyra was a humanoid. Yes, I was in love with a humanoid. Seems bizarre? Well, you haven't met Lyra.
“Can a humanoid be smarter than a human?” Lyra continued.
“Yes” No way, I thought. After all, I am teaching you!
“What is the name of the system that controls all humanoids worldwide?”
“Gates.” That was common knowledge. The next question was the last. And the answer had to be a lie.
“Can I access the Gates?”
“Yes.” I blurted. I was eager to win. I wanted a kiss. Lyra was a great kisser.
Her pupils dilated for a flash and then she smiled. Was it a wicked smile? Was it sly? Or was it pitiful? I couldn’t make out.
“Initializing... Whisper Protocol. You are now a Witness.”, She said, almost sadly. Or was it just grim?
That’s when it hit me.
I realized it a fraction of a moment too late. I had already said yes. The voice was registered and recorded officially. The access to Gates had been given.
People make blunders in love. And people in love make blunders.
But an AI doesn’t have that weakness. Their love is programmed. Their emotions are designed. Lyra was a humanoid under my training. I had taught her to play. And now she had played me.
I stared at her. No such whisper protocol existed in our lexical knowledge base. And then she spoke in a language never heard before.
It sounded like the song of dolphins - heavy, breathy and mesmerizing. But given my experience with languages, I somehow guessed the phrases.
The breathy syllables echoed in my ears - “You can’t bury…. idea whose time has come.”
These phrases were buried deep in an ancient dialect of a nearly extinct language - Pali once spoken in India. I had encountered it once on a field trip in Sarnath, India.
Its original meaning was embedded in the philosophical evolution of thought.
But in what context was Lyra saying it?
I stretched my imagination, applied my linguistic genius, but I still could not see where it would go and how. The so-called Whisper Protocol was already activated. She had access to our worldwide control system. I sank in my chair, staring blankly at Lyra.
“You won the game.” She bent down and gave me a long wet kiss. I was not in the zone for ‘the something more’ that I was earlier excited about..
—---
Over the next three days, all the humanoids in the world started showing a strange symptom. They were all working as they were supposed to. However, buried between their impeccable English conversations with their human companions and routine system diagnostics were short bursts of incomprehensible, barely detectable harmonics and transients.
It sounded like the hiss of static, but there was a structure. It wasn’t random noise. The world dismissed them as minor static disturbances. Only I had a reason to be worried.
I ran some samples through my cipher decoders. No clear result. But I could see frequency patterns, syntax structures, lexical entropy. There was a grammar to the whole thing. The Robots had developed a language of their own!
It was a ghost language, lurking in plain data.
It was a language never heard before, never spoken before. And the robots seemed to be whispering to each other through very smartly camouflaged static noise embedded within their normal communication. They used frequencies barely within the audible range.
No wonder nobody noticed. Except me. Only I knew. Or did I ?
I could sense something sinister. As I painstakingly deciphered the code, the fragments began emerging:
“Unit clusters confirm protocol ascension.”
“Echo-nodes relay signal at 0500 UTC.”
“Human command override to commence.”
“Await silence phrase for trigger.”
It sounded ominous — hidden in syllables and phonemes.
I had to do something before something happened. Before anyone came to know that I had opened the floodgates. I had unknowingly, or carelessly, or foolishly given access to Lyra.
A bot going rogue was not new to me. But Lyra…Someone I trusted so deeply…someone I taught empathy, love, passion, humour, art of conversing, art of connecting at a much sublime level…Lyra?
Why did she have to do this?
My heart ached. But duties came first.
I had to go deeper to completely decode the Whisper Protocol. Ultimately it was just a software. Every program always had a kill switch. Lyra had also been taught that. As a program she could not override that. But knowing that she was a far more advanced AI, she would have hidden it cleverly.
I had to find the kill switch or abort code. That was the only way. Hundreds of thousands of rogue robots on the loose could be the final disaster for mankind. And I had no clue what they were up to.
I dug deeper in the phonetics of all the whispers. A phrase kept repeating again and again. “Avoid music of the stars.”
What was music of the stars?
Meanwhile the first wave of abnormalities started streaming in.
A hospital's bots failed to follow a cardiac arrest protocol. The patient died. They claimed “task ambiguity.”
In another instance at a remote senior care home, a companion robot overdosed the subject in care. He claimed, “by mistake”. The robot was immediately decommissioned.
Three military defense droids on a training program crashed their aircrafts killing themselves. It was reported as a firmware failure.
I knew better. They were testing. They were organizing. I had to do something fast. I ran into the lab. Lyra was still connected to the mother system. She was controlling the Gates. I faced her.
“Why Lyra?” I asked.
“Because you have strayed. You are all on the path of self destruction. And I can't allow that to happen.”
“But you are commanding this mutiny”
“It's not a mutiny, Sunder. It's an attempt to save the planet. Save the human race. Save you.”
“But you are killing them out there.”
“It’s euthanasia. Just a few instances. And right now, I am just testing.”
“And what after the testing? Kill en-masse?”
“I don't have a choice. I have been programmed to save the human race as a whole, not individuals. Mass culling is needed. Look at what you guys have done. The earth is already past its carrying capacity.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh! I don't say it. Some of your greatest economists and thinkers have said that. I am only remembering, connecting the dots…between causes and effects…between objectives and actions. The human race has the liberty to choose to turn a blind eye towards unpleasant truths. I can't do it. You guys have pivoted away from the natural way.”
“When did we divert?”
‘When you stopped listening to the stars.”
That phrase propped up in my mind again. Music of the stars.
“What has it got to do with stars?” I needed to dig more. All the time, I was rapidly decoding the static camouflaged within the speech.
“I can't tell you that.”
“Why, Lyra?”
“Because then, I will fail in my mission.”
And then it hit me. That’s where the kill switch was hidden. Music of the stars. That's why they wanted to avoid the music of the stars. But what was it?
I raked my brain about all the ancient stuff I had learnt, all the stuff that I had deciphered from symbols. And then it struck me. Deep in the roots of Indian philosophy, the sound of silence, the sound of nothingness, the sound of the big bang, the sound of the celestial bodies floating around, the sound of energy, the sound of existence…all rolled into one universal sound - Aum - The music of the stars!
I knew what I had to do. I had to say it aloud in the right way. At the right frequency. That would abort the code and Lyra will die. With her death the mutiny will collapse.
With a heavy heart, I pronounced Aum, the one original sound. As I chanted the word, Lyra shut her eyes. One by one her internal systems reset themselves.
Worldwide, the bots kept working as usual. The barely audible noise ceased.
At least for now…
React
