CHAPTER 2: THE SEEKER

Somerai was born on the outskirts of Durban on the Eastern coast of South Africa. She was the youngest of eight brothers and sisters and was often spoilt by her siblings. Her father worked for the municipality as a driver but did side jobs to earn extra money. He was a clever man, ahead of his time. After work he painted houses and collected duck feathers from the slaughterhouse which he sold to bedding manufacturers. These served as further streams of income which he ploughed into building a multi-storey family home with wrap-around balconies. The structure also had additional rooms for rent outside of the main residence.

Sometimes in December, Somerai used to sleep outside on the rooftop under the stars and wonder what was out there, how did it all come about? Many families lived together in this happy home filled with love, tasty home-cooked meals and lots of laughter.

Her favourite were her mothers roti’s, a flatbread originating from the sub-continent made from wheat flour and water. She used to love eating them rolled up with vegetable curry inside. At school, rotis were seen by the other kids as being lower class so she used to eat them at the back of the schoolyard. She would soon grow out of this childhood shyness in pursuit of higher values.

Despite her shyness, Somerai was fearless. She had a strong sense of right and wrong, accompanied by a fiery temperament. If you got on her wrong side that was it. She always stood up for what was right, no matter who stood in her way.

Amongst her younger nieces and nephews she was the disciplinarian, a natural leader who kept the young kids in line. Her family was important, education was important and she spared no expense on either. Yet despite all this, she’d always felt a strange calling to a higher purpose, something from deep within her that she did not yet understand.

Somerai was always the first to do things in her family. When she bought an antique Volkswagen Beetle she used to load up all her nieces and nephews and take them swimming, passing on the knowledge of how she’d learnt to do it on her own. When they were playing on the road after school and they heard the undeniable rumble of the VW’s engine, they would all run inside the house and open their books.

In the future, her kids would do the same. Education came first, and if you felt different there was the highway.

Somerai was always trying to help others both inside and outside of her immediate circle. After finishing high school she decided to do community work with disenfranchised youth on weekends teaching English language classes and life skills.

She found that writing things out with a pen on a blank sheet of paper often helped the older kids remember what they’d learnt. One day when teaching the younger kids the alphabet, she decided to take them to the beach to get them out and free them from the constraints of the classroom.

She found that just by being outside in an energising environment and getting them to write letters in the sand helped them learn, by doing and having fun while doing it.

It was here that she was noticed by Sathya, a scout for a secret experimental school set up to safeguard humanity against AI. Sathya’s mission was to recruit gifted individuals to prepare them for the second coming. The school had asked the question “What do humans have that AI does not? What is the thing that will allow humans to supersede a machine capable of ten trillion computations?”

Out of this question came the school’s purpose, to develop young talented individuals into Human Learning Machines that could out-think AI and preserve humanity.

Recruits were trained in The Way. The Gurkal experience was designed to allow Proteans to learn how to teach themselves almost anything, even without a book.

In the event of nuclear fallout and energy shortages, they needed to be fully self-reliant, independent learners. Conditions were created to allow them to develop and use questions, their powers of observation and reflection to extract learnings from real-life experiences.

The Philosopher Gurus believed that the answer to any question lies within you, you are the book, you are the teacher, you are the university.

Proteans were trained to be elite, flexible learners that first and foremost learnt to master their own mind and realise their true self.

Above all, the moral code all Proteans lived by were Truth, Righteousness, Love, Peace and Curiosity.

It sounded exciting to Somerai, a secret school for training recruits to save humanity in the event of an AI apocalypse. She had found a cause, she had found meaning, but was this the calling she had been feeling, lying dormant inside for so long?

She still had some reservations about joining the Gurkal, not many made it through the training and she had been approached to join in such a mysterious way.

Not just anyone could join the Gurkal. Individuals with specific values were sought out in secret by influential leaders through active community networks. They extended personal invitations to promising candidates to take the gruelling selection test

Legend had it, it had been created by warrior monks of the first order. A mental and physical experiential assessment to see if you had what it took to survive, learn and adapt to harsh conditions.

Only one in five made it to the next stage. One thing was for sure, every part of your being would be tested Recruits who lacked grit and single-mindedness would be filtered out on washout lane. There was no place for weakness, at least for long periods of it. To make it through you needed to be able to find ways to conquer your own mind.

And what if she didn’t make it? Maybe like most her age she should just apply for Universal Basic Income and immerse herself in virtual reality worlds all day. She would do charity work now and again to have a story to tell people when they asked about what she did in life.

After all there were no real careers anymore. Work was a hobby. A few days afters she had been approached to join the Gurukul, her uncle gave her a small West-African djembe drum as a birthday present that had the words “Sathya” engraved in the wood.

Somerai took this as a sign that she was being called to go on this journey.

The next day she enlisted for the selection test, the Gurkal Experience.