Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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From a long, long tradition of manga and anime about humanoid androids, artificial intelligence, and more generally, machines and their minds, comes The Gene of AI. (Probably one of many, many AI / ai puns that have been made in Japanese media over the years, but who knows maybe it is just supposed to stand for “Artificial Intelligence” and nothing else, here.) Part medical procedural, part one man’s quest to clear his mother’s name, it’s a show walking on well-trod, but always fertile, ground.

In a word, this is not a show you watch for breezy fun. It’s a cerebral and fairly stark cross-examination of big ideas like the duality of mind and body, how technology influences our lives and how we interface with it, and so on. Again, this stuff has been done before and stretches back to the dawn of the medium. So the question by the time Gene of AI ends will be whether it has brought anything new to the table. We’ll hold off on that for now, as will we any question about how this particular genre intersects with the ongoing machine art boom. Instead, let’s look at the basics.

Dr. Hikaru Sudou [Taeko Ootsuka] is a medical professional who specializes in treating android patients. “Humanoids,” as the show calls them, are virtually indistinguishable from real people. They live, laugh, love, and so forth. (The only real tell that a person is a humanoid and not an actual flesh-and-blood human is in their eyes; humanoids have sideways-turned oblong pupils.) Sometimes, Dr. Sudou works under the table, under the name “Moggadeet”, to take care of patients with problems that they can’t go to a regular medical practice about. And it’s these underground visits that form the backbone of the show’s premise.

You see, in Gene of AI‘s world, copying a humanoid’s “neural net”—what has in fiction been variously called a brain pattern, neural scan, brain blueprint, etc.—is very illegal. “30 years minimum in prison” illegal. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, to “protect the sanctity of personality;” which is to say that if you restore a humanoid’s personality from a backup of their neural net, the question of whether or not they are in any meaningful sense “the same person” is an unanswered one. Secondly, and on a much more immediately practical note, the creation of backup neural nets allows for ersatz human trafficking, where one “person” can be duplicated many times over the course of many years. Doc Sudou himself gives the example of a figure called “The Crying Man,” a series of several humanoids copied from the same backup, who is repeatedly found involved with crime rings in the Middle East.¹ I imagine both the practical and moral concerns of this whole practice are going to be a big theme going forward.

Sudou’s not helping the people who get involved with illegal neural net copying anyway out of the goodness of his heart, it must also be said. He’s using the hefty sums he collects to try to track down a pair of men who, we see in an opening scene set 25 years prior to the main story, tricked his mother—also a humanoid—into allowing them to make an illegal backup of her. Thus, we have our general premise and our main man, plus his motivation. And so, the stage is set for a fairly episodic(?) series where Sudou helps various patients in these complex, difficult situations, while also searching for those responsible for his mother’s imprisonment. It’s a pretty good setup, all told. Even if Sudou himself is kind of a dick, and notably rude toward humanoids. (Don’t make your protagonists machine-racist!)

His first case here is, one must imagine, pretty typical. An android husband and wife are in a crisis, because the wife has contracted a terminal virus. Initially, they’re both pretty willing to go forward with having her restored from an illegal backup that they’d had made a week prior.

But, it’s here that the series raises the existential questions for the first time, and the wife starts having second thoughts. And this is to say nothing of how her daughter, an adopted human child, takes all this, as Sudou is totally unwilling to back away from the tough questions; is the person who emerges from the backup the same person who is being restored from? It’s an open question with no easy answer, and the series, to its immense credit, feels non-judgmental even as both husband and wife go through several different stances on the subject over the course of the episode. (As an aside, said daughter is a fairly interesting character all around, and is a skilled hacker despite her young age. I wouldn’t be shocked if we see her again.)

In the end, they take the “obvious” compromise route. They let the virus advance to where the wife would die anyway, and then restore her mind from the illegal backup. But the show doesn’t cast even this in an entirely positive light. The memories of those weeks she spent on her temporary deathbed are never coming back, and there is a fundamental disconnect between her and her daughter over those missing memories, elegantly expressed in the form of narrative metaphor via a change in her scrambled egg recipe that does not carry over to her new mind.

There’s a lot to like about Gene of AI as it stands, and it passes the basic makes-you-think test of any show aiming to be cerebral. The preview for the next episode teases a story about a man competing against android runners. The whole “man vs. machine in a sports contest” premise is a tough one to pull off, and that might end up being the real test for Gene of AI. Still, I’m optimistic.

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^{1: In most other anime, I’d find the rather random flagging of this as happening in the Middle East to be kind of suspect. Here, I think they’re actually planning to come back to it. A distinctly Middle Eastern town square is scene for a few seconds in a brief, cryptic closing scene.}

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