The Obelisk

Part One

"She's perfect, isn't she?"

"Who, the Obelisk?" Tim raised his eyes from the iPad in his hands to stare at the humanoid figure that was standing a few feet away from him.

"Yeah."

Tim smiled and his eyes went back to the screen of the iPad. "Of course. She's a product of Ricardo Tech. Making Innovations a Reality, remember? Of course she's perfect."

Jansen, Tim's lifelong best friend and colleague snorted. "Now you're just being overly-humble. Come on, Tim; who's the one who thought of the Diversity Algorithm, huh?"

The Diversity Algorithm was a specific programming sequence that Tim had developed when he was still in high school. It was basically a complex mathematical pattern that altered the output of a certain data in such a way that no similar data would be produced for every 20,000 outputs.

Yeah. Tim was somewhat like a mathematical genius.

Both Tim and Jansen had come a long way together. Born in the same small town of New Ashford, the two of them were neighbours all the way until high school, after which they were both – for some miraculous reason – accepted into MIT. You should've seen the local papers. "Two New Ashford Boys Make It to the Big Leagues", the headline screamed. Both their parents and the other folks from New Ashford even threw a party for them when they received the one-in-a-lifetime news.

The duo getting hired by Ricardo Tech was a completely different story, though. It was Tim who received the offer letter first, right after MIT published his thesis on – yeah, you probably could've guessed – the Diversity Algorithm. It was like a Christmas-New Year double special for him.

But when Tim realized that Jansen had not been offered a job in the prestigious technology frontier, he got indignant. Against what everybody – including Jansen – had told him to do, he went and had a discussion with Harold Robson, the CFO of Ricardo Tech. Well, discussion is a gross understatement, for he wouldn't stop badgering the man until he promised to offer Jansen a job in the company. It was more like a confrontation. He even threatened to take the Diversity Algorithm with him if they didn't let Jansen in.

But Tim was lucky. It was either Ricardo Tech was desperately in need of that particular tech of Tim's, or they just couldn't stand his persistence, for two days later, Jansen received his very own brown envelop with the words "Welcome to Ricardo Tech" written in bold on it.

Now, a year later, the duo had succeeded in incorporating Tim's Diversity Algorithm into the robot that they'd developed together, the Obelisk. However, to call the Obelisk a robot would be like to call a tiger a cat, for it was no ordinary robot. It was an ANI. Artificial Narrow Intelligence. And it was no ordinary ANI either.

"What exactly is an ANI?" Tim had asked when on one random afternoon, Harold had summoned both him and Jansen to his office and told him that he was now in charge of the Obelisk Project.

As an answer to that question, Harold had stared at Tim like he'd just asked if the moon was round.

"Forgive me," Tim clarified. "I know what an ANI is, sir. What I'm not so clear about is the intelligence level of this particular ANI that you're referring to."

Harold smiled, pleased at the clarification. "An ANI is a non-sentient computer intelligence that only knows how to perform the task that it is programmed to do. It's basically like the Siri in your iPhone, or the systems that self-driving cars are equipped with, except in the case of the Obelisk project, the ANI that you'll be dealing with is a self-improving ANI."

"You mean, like a robot that knows how to improve itself?" Jansen blurted out.

Harold nodded. "With an additional line of the self-improvement code that you wrote on your first day here, you'll be equipping the robot with the ability to improve itself continuously."

Jansen's mouth was hanging agape, his face a collage of 'I did NOT see that coming' graffiti. Beside him, Tim was grinning slyly. "Self-improvement, huh." He gave Jansen a teasing punch on the shoulder.