Sarang Bhand
The silence was replaced by a screeching whistle of the pressure cooker on the burner. His mother sighed and looked at him with compassion with teary eyes and a mild smile of approval. He hugged her and muttered a bleak goodbye, asking her to take care of her and his father. This was seven years ago when Aditya had left his parents’ house.
Some six months back they had read in the newspaper that Atlas Inc. was starting its operations in India. It was a new unicorn from Bangalore with multi-billion-dollar valuation that had developed autonomous logistic services. At the helm of its operations was the founder and CEO, Atlas Aturkar. The front-page image of the cover story on the CEO was a shock to them—it was Aditya, their estranged son. The parents gawked at each other without uttering a word. The father went to his study and the mother picked the paper. Caressing his photo, she kept it nicely folded in her closet. Some four months back, on one afternoon, the mother heard the doorbell. She knew in her heart who it would be. With raised heartbeat she went to open the door, and she saw Aditya standing there.
He hugged her and asked her if baba was home. His father had retired now and came out from his study hearing his wife sobbing. He had a sense of relief in his eyes; the anger was replaced with acceptance. Aditya went to him and hugged him as well. He had seen tears in his eyes for the first time. He had spent the day with them reminiscing about his childhood days avoiding any mention of his college days as that would upset his baba. His baba went into depression when he left engineering college to pursue law and then dropped out from law to pursue coding. After all, he was just a simple man who ran a diner with his wife and who had saved all that he could to give his children a better life. They failed to understand each other, and all their pleadings to each other would turn into heated arguments. And one day Aditya left, leaving the arguments behind. But now he had changed, and his baba also had mellowed down.
His parents were all inquisitive about this whereabout for these last seven years and why he was rechristened Atlas? Did he change his religion? But he brushed it off saying, “I went on a path that brought me home.” He wanted to know about their wellbeing; he got to know that the diner was working fine and both his parents took care of it. His mother would cook her family recipes, and his father would take care of the accounts. Over the last couple of months, Aditya kept coming over on one of the weekends every month and learnt his mother’s recipes to cook for both his parents. He always wanted to take care of them, and he felt relieved that he was finally discharging his duty as a son. He even helped them expand their deliveries from the diner through his autonomous delivery drones.
His parents had a sense of contentment to see their son become this successful, but they sensed a remoteness in him—he would often go silent staring at them with a blankness of space. His mother wanted him to get settled and would present prospective offers from her friends and their acquaintances for their daughters’ hand. But he would show no interest, he would brush her off saying his lineage would only be a next version with its own bugs. She used to get perplexed with such answers but then she had her son with her, what else could she ask for? She would think it’s just a phase and probably he has too much on his mind, after all he is responsible for such a big company, he will settle down sooner or later.
***
One day while he was cooking masala bhat and as he went to check the cooker, the steam from the cooker escaped with a loud sizzle directly on his face—it was hot, he felt the burn and collapsed right there. His mother screamed and his father came running from his study, his son was lying on the floor unconscious with blank eyes. Before they could call for an ambulance, the doorbell rang and as his father opened the door, he saw four paramedics rushing in, dressed like soldiers going at the front with huge gears and consoles in their hands. The ambulance, too, looked like some war mobile with satellite dishes and gadgets mounted on its shell. He couldn’t think or say a word. They were a response team from Atlas Inc. Moving his father aside, they rushed into the kitchen where their son had collapsed. One of them, barking orders authoritatively, asked for the systems check. The junior medic removed a thick armoured cable, and tearing Aditya’s shirt, inserted the cable in what looked like a socket in his heart. The mother was speechless; it shocked her to see these strange men doing strange things to her beloved son who appeared to be even more strange now. As soon as the cable was plugged in and connected to what appeared as an army grade laptop in a hardcover suitcase, the eyes lit up and had some algorithm scrolling in them. As the strange beeps and tones settled, a message flashed in the eyes: “Boot error… File corrupted.” The man barking orders had a long face; he muttered in a muted tone, “Install the new version, this file has been corrupted for good.”
The parents were perplexed and shocked, as they sat trying to gather themselves. A person wearing a white lab coat walked in. The head technician went to report him of the incidence, taking stock of the situation the person turned to the old parents. He said, “I’m Sanjay, Atlas’s partner. Don’t worry, we’ll be able to restore him. Your son had stored his memories in multiple backups when we created Atlas. Atlas was our first prototype of a humanoid; your son had written an unthinkable code imitating consciousness, and stored his memory in multiple backup files. He had found out that he had terminal illness and won’t live for long, and in a bid to outlive his death he had spent the last couple of years working on the code of consciousness. He had locked himself in a remote cabin in an unknown village in Uttarakhand and wrote day-in and day-out for 180 days, surviving only on water and flax seeds. Rumour has it that he had a vision one day and he left for Uttarakhand, and that’s how he wrote that code, isolated in trance. He transferred his memories in the chip and integrated a code only known to him.”
His partner, who was a major in bio-robotics from MIT, fused the chip in his medulla oblongata, and it started running, powered by the currents from the spine. His entire bodily system was now a circuit. Aditya had become Atlas, the first humanoid to live an afterlife. The logistic company was something he wanted to do for a living as a normal human being would do. So he started this company, but his biggest achievement has been coding an algorithm imitating consciousness, which he never discussed with anyone. The technicians had completed their job. Sanjay took leave of the old couple assuring them of Atlas’s complete recovery in no time.
The reboot was completed in the next two and half hours, and Atlas opened his eyes. His parents were sitting next to him by his bedside in his old room, as they would sit for hours when he was a child running a fever from cold. “Aai, Baba, how long did I sleep? Did you guys have your meal? I’m hungry, let’s have masala bhat.”
Sarang Bhand is an entrepreneur working in the clean-tech space. When he is not troubleshooting projects, he likes to spend time writing over the weekends. He is a keen student of Japanese poetry forms, and likes to write senryu exploring the subtleties of day-to-day observations and human tendencies. He also likes to dabble in writing essays, creative non-fiction, and short stories occasionally. His writings can be found @ih_klektik on X.
