Moon Machines
Genre: Sci-Fi / Psychological Thriller
Tone Keywords: moral ambiguity, systems vs individuals, psychological pressure, technology, and politics
Logline: In a pandemic-ravaged future, an Indian family journeys to a machine settlement on Moon where a father and son must enter machine consciousness to solve a sinister A.I. alignment crisis.
Synopsis
It is March 2022 and the pandemic has worsened globally to such an extent that the only way around is up in the sky.
Machine settlements had developed on the Moon since 2008 when India sent universal constructors to Mare Cognitum, a lunar mare about 350 kilometers wide. Moon villages formed and led to an industrial society of self-replicating machines; a no man’s land.
In New Delhi, Palak Shah, a housewife, closely escapes the grasp of the virus during the third wave of pandemic. Jagan, her husband and researcher of brain-computer interfaces at Chaitanya Research Pvt. Ltd., decides to bring forward his ideas, about a man among machines, into reality by offering himself to be augmented with such an interface. By doing this, he could participate directly with scientists at Machine Applications Laboratory in Ahmedabad and lead the upgradation of a moonbase for human inhabitability. This is his chance to secure his family’s future, including his fourteen-year-old son, Umang.
Success of indigenous experiments spanning AI embodiment with the rover Kriya, development of helmets to enter machine consciousness across IoT-enabled machinery, and medical breakthrough in sensory AI with the digital doctor Vedana, pave the way to an unprecedented team of gaganyatris.
Upon reaching moon Umang leaves his mother, Palak, in the orbiting spaceship with Vedana, and lands with Jagan and Kriya only to find a problem prevailing in a settlement of intelligent machines in a mare close to Mare Insularum, their to-be home. Palak can’t come down being unaugmented and Jagan can’t figure out what is causing the machines misbehave.
Earth is not ready to take them back, and Moon is in chaos. With BCI helmets, Umang and his father enter machine consciousness. It is the key to solving the alignment problem, and to uncovering the origin of human mind itself.
When the pandemic subsides, the family chooses to remain on the lunar settlement, helping guide the new era, even as Umang wonders if the machines truly aligned… or simply evolved.