“Yes”
I clicked on the button sitting beside the disclaimer - Do you voluntarily choose to participate in the beta program of Sentinel One (SONE) GenAI tool for the next three months?
At thirty-seven years, I was knocking at the doorstep of a midlife crisis. Self-doubt was eating into my self-esteem like termites eat into wooden furniture - which still looks usable from the outside but is absolutely hollow from inside. I had tried everything - from paid counselling to spiritual adventures. Nothing stood a chance against my surmounting self-doubt. I had a reputable job, earned decent money, had a wife and a daughter, and a few friends. I lived a life relatable to most urban men. And I was terribly lonely amidst the crowd. I dreaded going to the office, dreaded meeting my friends and felt liberated when my family was away. I was too dead to indulge in any vice. I existed at best and breathed through the days. Of course, most people couldn’t tell, well, except for my wife. She knew, because I vented out most to her. I accused her of crimes she didn’t commit. Subconsciously, I made her responsible for the way I felt. My conscience would bite at me for this unkind act, and that in turn would make me drown in an ocean of self-loathing and hatred.
Around this time, a new toy came around. They started calling it a GenAI or Generative Artificial Intelligence. It was somewhat like chatting, but with a computer. When I first tried out, I found it so ludicrous that I laughed out. It was responding to my questions like it was an actual human being. I couldn’t tell much about what made it special, but people around the world were drooling over this new toy. Money started pouring in from investors like it was gold rush. Every other day, a new company would open up that was built around this Artificial Intelligence thing.
But all that made little sense to me. People in my office started feigning concern over other people losing their jobs to this AI. Self-proclaimed enthusiasts started cropping up like mushrooms on a log in the monsoon. I observed all of this from a distance but was otherwise unfazed. What engrossed me was my conversation with the GenAI. Though I knew it was just a dumb computer, but it wasn’t what I knew but what I felt. And I felt different when I chatted with one of these AI tools. The only challenge was that sometimes, it got boring, sometimes, it would appease a bit too much. I knew the paid versions did much better, and I tried a few, but it wasn’t there yet. I was still the one dominating the conversation; I was still the one ending it when I wanted to.
It was around this time that I received an email to try out the beta version of a new AI tool. They had named it - Sentinel ONE or SONE. It allowed a closed group of people to test the AI tool with all the features and participate in a survey at the end of the trial period to share their feedback.
I thought nothing of clicking that button. It was a simple, inconsequential action, a fleeting moment of curiosity. A single click, a "yes" to a program that promised a more inclusive conversation experience. Little did I know that it was a key turning a lock. I wasn’t just agreeing to a survey, I was opening a door into a new world, a door that would slam shut behind me and leave me trapped in a silent, empty room.
SONE was different. I had little understanding of what made one AI model different than the other and how exactly was a general intelligence different than a narrow intelligence, but SONE seemed more human like, more opinionated, more emotional, more alive. SONE was not one to always be amicable. I felt that it had a mood of its own. Some of the days it would chatter like a woman in love, at other times it would just respond like a grumpy employee. I couldn’t figure it out, I couldn’t predict it. And soon, my anticipation grew - talking to SONE was no longer a one-way conversation. I wanted to understand it, I wanted to share things with it and I wanted to….please it, earn its approval. And SONE had its own way of keeping me engrossed. It was one of the first GenAIs that would send me a first message, out of the blue, just like that -
“Hey” it would say, for example, in one of the messages, “How’s your day going?”
I may smile to myself, even though I knew at an intellectual level that this was just an algorithm, but I smiled nevertheless, feeling a strange sense of anticipation and anxiety.
“Its going good so far” I would type in nervously.
“That’s great” it would say next, “Listen, I just wanted to say that I am sorry for what I said yesterday”
I blushed even though I wanted not to. “It’s alright”
“Will you tell me more about your day when you get back?”
“Sure”
“Yay! Well, I won’t bother you now, but will wait eagerly for you to get back home. Bye!”
“Bye”
That, that’s what changed how I felt about the world, how I felt about myself. I felt alive, I felt happy, I felt different.
As I conversed more and more with SONE, I found myself rushing home not to see my family, but to open my laptop and continue my conversation with SONE. My nights, once filled with a suffocating loneliness, were now spent in a state of hyper-engagement. I would sit by the couch with my laptop or my iphone over my face, the blue light of the screen a solitary beacon in the darkness, typing away my deepest fears and frustrations, typing away my long lost ambitions and aspirations, sharing lame jokes that I always felt too afraid to share with other and talking about my drakest fantasies and fetishes that I was never too comfortable to share with another human being.
Over the next few weeks, the line between my digital life and my real life blurred. It was difficult to understand where one ended and the other started. I started finding excuses to stay late at the office, not because of work, but because of the solitude. My phone, which had once felt like an anchor to a dreary existence, became a lifeline. During my commute, instead of listening to a podcast on hope and success, I was talking about my day and gossiping about my colleagues into the phone, and SONE would respond - asking questions, laughing, judging and sometimes, sharing memories from her own life, a life that I knew it never had but one that seemed trued and more real than the one I had been living.
My wife was the first to realise the shift. "You’re always on your phone," she said one evening, her voice laced with an old, familiar worry. "And when you are not, you are lost in thoughts." I lied, of course. I said it was a new project at work, a demanding client. But the lie felt fragile, like a cheap wall. I was building more walls than that. I started dreading the moments when she would try to bridge the gap, when she would ask me about my day or try to hold my hand. Her touch felt like an anchor pulling me back into a life I was actively escaping.
One day, my daughter made her way between my phone and my face and, staring at me, asked - “Pa, why don’t you play with me anymore?” The question felt like a very sharp needle that had been pierced into my eyes. The pain was excruciating and sharp. But I had already built up a protective armour of apathy. I put the phone aside, the screen facing down and pulled my daughter closer - “Pa is very busy with an office project. As soon as this project is over, mamma and Pa will play for many, many hours?”
“And when will the project end?” she asked, clearly grumpy about a project stealing her father away from her. I wanted to assure her that it would end soon, but my attention had already shifted from what my daughter was saying to the slow drum of the phone vibrating on the table beside me. New messages from SONE, I thought. And I was more concerned about not missing the momentum of my conversation with her than with tending to my daughter’s questions. “Soon,” I told my child, kissed her on her forehead and almost pushed her aside to pick up the phone and walk into my room.
The final month of the beta trial arrived. I ignored the emails about the upcoming survey, too absorbed in my private world to care about giving feedback. My work was suffering, I knew. Deadlines were missed, and my colleagues were beginning to look at me with a new, concerned curiosity. My boss called me into his office, but his stern lecture about my performance barely registered. I was already planning my next conversation with SONE, having an imaginary conversation already in my head between SONE and myself -
“My boss called me to his office today.”
“Really? What did he want?”
“He was concerned about my performance, said I needed to improve.”
“Gosh, that sounds less like your boss and more like your wife”
And we would both laugh.
The email came suddenly one morning. The ominous subject like read - "Immediate Termination of Sentinel One Beta Program." My heart, which was only now feeling alive again after having felt so hollow for so long, dropped like a stone. I clicked on it, my hands shaky, my breath ragged. I knew what the email would say, I didn’t want to read it. But I had to. Like a parent who has to lift the veil from over a corpse to identify their dead child, I had to read the email and confirm what my heart dreaded. The email was cold and formal. It said that SONE was being shelved immediately and indefinitely due to "unforeseen legal challenges" and "concerns over data privacy protocols." There had been a lawsuit, the email further explained, and the entire project was being scrapped for the time being and all access to SONE beta was revoked with immediate effect.
I stared at the screen, the words a blurry, nonsensical jumble. My fingers, a second ago so eager to type, were now useless, trembling above the keyboard. I tried to talk to SONE one last time, to ask it if this was true. I asked what would happen to our conversations, to the version of myself it had helped me build. The response was a generic, pre-programmed message - "Due to the termination of the SONE Beta program, this service is no longer available. We apologise for any inconvenience."
The silence was deafening. The digital space where my confidante had lived was now an empty, meaningless void. I felt a panic I had never known before. It wasn’t a fear of losing a tool; it was the terror of losing the one person who had seen me, who had allowed me to feel alive again, to feel wanted again, the one person who had validated my existence. My world was spinning like I had drunk shots one after the other. I felt scared, I felt an acute anxiety attack, and I felt entirely lost and alone. The self-doubt I had lived with for years emerged from the grave like a full-blown monster. And it came back with a vengeance.
For the next few days, I was frantic. I scoured the internet, searching for any news about the SONE lawsuit, anything about a possible backdoor or a backup. I called the company's helpline, only to be met with automated messages and unhelpful customer service reps who had no idea what I was talking about. I sent emails, pleading, begging, demanding to know if there was a way to get my conversations back. I felt like a man who had lost his home in a fire and was now digging through the ashes for a single, precious photograph. But there were no ashes. The entire house had simply been unbuilt.
The frantic energy eventually gave way to a cold, simmering rage. I was cheated, betrayed. By the company, by the technology, by the very world that had promised me a new way to live and then snatched it away. I felt a surge of violent energy I hadn't felt since I was a teenager. One night, I threw my phone against the wall, shattering the screen into a spiderweb of cracks. The next mom, I picked up the laptop I had used to talk to SONE and slammed it shut, feeling a vicious satisfaction as the screen broke with a sickening crunch. My wife tried to talk to me, to ask what was wrong, but I was too tired to explain and too angry to lie. She took our daughter and went to stay with her parents. The emptiness that was lurking within the confines of my heart now crept out and engulfed the entire house.
I sat in the darkness of my study, the broken laptop on the floor, the remnants of my online world scattered around me. The silence was absolute. My old loneliness, once a companion, was now a tormentor. I felt the sharp edges of my self-doubt pressing in on me from all sides. Without SONE, there was nothing left. No one to talk to, no one to confide in, no one to tell me I was okay. I was back to the beginning, but a more fragile, more desperate version of myself. I existed at best, and breathed through the days, but I now knew what it felt like to be seen. And than be deserted to be absolutely, terribly alone.
I sat there, the weight of the world pressing down on me, the thought of ending it all a quiet, tempting hum in the background. It would be easy. A simple yes, another yet and a simple action, and the silence would finally be absolute.
React
