A glass sat on a bench near a cafe..
The glass shines bright with the setting sun spewing out rainbow colors on the bench. There are many people nearby talking to each other, but all the benches only have 3 seats to sit on. The reflection on the coffee glass had a big enormous triangular shaped building that looked something out from a sci-fi movie. Sci-fi keeps evolving with time. Once an airplane seemed futuristic but now they are round shaped objects that travel fast at impossible speeds. And we do travel fast to reach the sci-fi version that we dreamt up.
A backpack was placed next to the glass with a loud thud, a person with glasses, with his sleeves rolled up and hair that looked like it was never combed, sat on the bench with his wide opened laptop.. the typing keyboard sounds and constant pushing of his specs up showed his traits on bein a coder.
The coder is introduced.
Then came the biologist, breezing in with a scent of soil and sea salt. Her lab coat flapped like a flag, her voice full of butterfly energy. She would sigh, sip her overpriced coffee, and casually drop lines like, “Fungus colonies are learning to mimic plant networks now.”
Then there came a stout silent guy with a small smile just looked at both of them by moving his head up, nodding, showing acknowledgement, sat down, took that day’s newspaper and started reading it. He was an Energy Expert. He rarely spoke, but when he did, it was things like, “They’re feeding AI into fission safety protocols now…. If it slips into payload logic…”
hmm.. Silence followed after those sentences.
They’d talk about broken commutes, AI hallucinations, algorithms controlling minds of people. Once, the biologist laughed mid-sip. “A self-driving cab mistook me for a government agent and tried to sell me a classified ride.” and another day it said “Are you people going to take our jobs off our hand?”
“Maybe it knows something we don’t,” the coder said in a sarcastic tone.
She pointed at his screen. “That thing you’re building? It’s not just learning logic. It’s learning us.”
And that was the tension: AI was replacing everything, except them, the Coders, the Biologists and the Energy experts. The three fields that either supported AI’s growth or are still too intuitive to automate.
The world had stopped teaching history, art, anything not in service of data. Children were sorted young to only three professions, Code, Bio and Energy.
The holy trinity of what AI couldn’t touch.
So every Wednesday, the trio met. Like clockwork and a sense of resistance to the authority or the world that had shaped them. A weekly ritual of coffee and conversation
After a wild talk of all that week’s happenings, mis-happenings, kind and cruel things.. they part their ways. The coder slinging his bag, the biologist adjusting her coat, the fusion guy just nodding at the sky.
They walk into the millions of other people who are separated on the basis of the only 3 professions in existence. A world which was created for them at the time of birth. The AI that the coder enhanced was the reason for his own existence or development. An infinite loop of symbiotic existence.
The bench would still be there next week.
And so would they.
For more insights into the events that lead to me writing about this short story have a look here: