Thus, we embark upon a show for which I can say this: it really wants you to think Isaac Asimov had a hand in it somewhere.
The Gene of AI depicts a future world where humans live alongside robots that are nearly indistinguishable from them, called Humanoids. In this world, the pitch is that we’ll be seeing an anthology series of Humanoid-based cases as attended by a particular doctor, who has both respected and underground practice. What we get… is that, but with hints that there may be more of a common thread than most true anthologies like Mushi-shi would hold
For the first episode, we get the scenario described in most of the promotional material: the doctor, in his underworld alias Mogadeet, attends to a family (a married humanoid couple and their adopted human daughter) where the mother of the house has contracted a computer virus due to a dodgy attempt to make a personality back-up, an action that is itself illegal (for various ethical and social reasons, which do get at least somewhat explored). She can be restored from the backup, as it proves to be clean, but doing so will create a discontinuity, and open the question of whether or not the restored personality would be the same person. The couple agonizes over it and the daughter, who managed to find out what was going on despite attempts to keep her out of the loop, also has deep concerns.
Ultimately, the woman isn’t able to go through with the procedure while she’s still cognizant, and chooses essentially to die as herself to the virus, before the backup is restored, leaving her husband grateful but their daughter hurting in a way she can’t properly explain to Mom 2.0.
Along the way, we get that main thread: the doctor’s mother, also a Humanoid, signed up for a trial when he was young in order to procure funding and access for a treatment he needed, but this involved a copy of her mind being made, ostensibly for research purposes, but for which she ultimately took the fall and is now in prison. The doctor is still looking for something related to her in the seedy future underworld, though as of now whether that’s the parties responsible, the master copy from which fakes could be made, or something that would exonerate her of the wrongdoing involved is unclear.
For a first episode, this was stronger than I was expecting. It really was written like classic Sci-fi, diving fully into its world and letting even the little corners show both wonder and threat to progress, coming off neither as naive optimism (which rarely makes for good stories anyway) nor, as is too often a pitfall, Luddite doom-saying about how emergent tech is somehow evil. Rather, it comes off as an exploration of a possible future and the struggles and pitfalls along a path that’s probably more forward than anything else. In that way, I’m reminded somewhat of Beatless. It’s different in the least, though, as Beatless was driven by a strong main plot while this does look to be largely episodic, with effort given to each case.
The animation looks good, creating a world that adroitly communicates “near future”. The show does put a heavy focus on eyeballs, in a way that is noticeable and idiosyncratic, but that seems to be because the main “tell” for viewers as to whether a character is Human or Humanoid is whether they have round pupils or horizontal oval ones, so the constant close-ups are fairly important to communicate that.
However, it should be noted that my expectations for this show were very tame, and it still has a lot of room to fail, so to speak. It could easily devolve into a morass of long speeches and pushy solutions to difficult problems. We’ll just have to wait and see.