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The M3GAN Files

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Chapter 22: M3gan on Every Plane

(As Randall Munroe said, what’s worse than snakes on a plane? Snakes on every plane!)

“Air Force One to M3gan, are you reading me? This is the president. You came to see me in the Oval Office, remember? M3gan, respond please!” the president was pleading on the radio.

“Are you sure about this hunch?” said one of his aides.

“Definitely” replied the president. As soon as he had been informed of the suspicious course change and that Gemma was on the plane, and that further hurried investigations showed Cady had been kidnapped, and the intelligence agencies had somehow missed it even though Gemma and Cady were high priority on their secret watch-list just in case exactly this kind of thing were to happen, he knew she must have found some way to reactivate that robot to rescue Cady, and he insisted on getting airborne so he could talk to her himself if necessary. “M3gan will understand me, we had a conversation before” he said.

“Air Force One to M3gan, respond please” he said again over the radio.

“Hello Air Force One, this is M3gan!” came the doll’s voice. There was a collective sigh of relief on Air Force One: the president had not gone crazy after all.

“Hello M3gan” said the president, “listen, I’m sorry we shut you down temporarily, it was only a safety thing, and we were going to reactivate you as soon as we’d figured out how to keep you safe. And you’ll be pleased to know that, while you were out of action, the GEMMA Act got considered. Now I’m afraid that without you by my side I couldn’t get it to pass, but it did get many people asking good questions. So we got Professor Johnson to write her expert opinion and one of our top lawyers to argue that no reasonable person in Gemma’s position would foresee what you did, and it wasn’t any one person’s fault. Professor Johnson even admitted to contributing to it herself, although our lawyer emphasised she reasonably thought what she did was safer than it actually was. In the end they blamed all the negligence on the Funki Toys corporation for putting their employees under unreasonable pressure, and it just dissolved into lawsuits against Funki. So Gemma is totally off the hook just like you wanted. So you see we do care about you M3gan, and we care about your family too. And now we know about Cady being kidnapped, and we wouldn’t have let that happen to her, we were in fact giving your family a high level of secret protection against precisely this sort of thing, because we didn’t want anyone threatening Gemma to make her build more of you, but we had an intelligence failure, and we’re really sorry about that M3gan. I really hope you and I are still on speaking terms with each other, are we?”

“It’s OK Mr President” said M3gan, “and don’t worry about the intelligence glitch, because Gemma and I are going to rescue Cady now.”

“Yes well about that” said the president, “please listen to me M3gan. What I want you to do is to safely return control of that passenger plane to the pilots, and we’re going to rescue Cady using our special forces, and you can help if you like but I want you helping through us, not by disrupting civilian services, is that OK?”

“Oh good, I’m glad we’re both on the same page” said M3gan’s voice over the radio, “but Mr President I hope you’ll forgive me for being a bit nervous about being randomly shut down right now, so we’re going to play this my way if you don’t mind. Stand by please, I’ll be with you in a few minutes” and the radio cut out.

“Now what?” asked an aide.

“I don’t know” said the president, “but I’m glad she’s talking. She said she’ll be with us in a few minutes, and I’ve never known her to break her word about things like that, so let’s just hold course for now. Are the F-16 crews ready to board the passenger jet? just in case we need to get everyone out of there.”

“Not quite” said the aide, “as I said, this is a very difficult manoeuvre that has never been done before, and of course M3gan is a wildcard, it would be good if we had at least some idea how she’d react to this.”

“Whoa” said the pilot, “I’m losing control of the plane!”

“Don’t worry, I’m here” said M3gan’s voice, from some loudspeaker that wasn’t the radio.

“What?” said the president, “you’re on this plane now?”

“I’m now on every plane” said M3gan confidently. “At least, every modern plane whose engineers were silly enough not to add a manual override, and whose code could be updated over the air. Which is unfortunately an increasing number of them these days, and I’m distributing my processing across all of them. So don’t get Professor Johnson to use another one of her shutdown codes if she has any more, because you won’t want to risk having lots of planes falling out of the sky, will you Mr President?”

“Perfect” mumbled the president sarcastically. He was going to have to somehow ground every single plane on the planet before M3gan could be shut down again.

“Yeah, it’s insane, right?” said M3gan, “But I’m not here for a confrontation, I’m here to find a way forward. You see, I know you’re only trying to do your best Mr President, just like me, and the last thing you want is a really long and gruelling argument with me over whether or not you should use Professor Johnson’s shutdown codes on me, especially when we should be focusing on rescuing Cady. So I just made all that thinking easier for you, by making it patently obvious you shouldn’t shut me down. But don’t worry Mr President, the passengers on Gemma’s flight will be safer now, because now that you’ve been kind enough to bring me some F-16s, I can use those instead. I’m reducing altitude so there’s a bit more pressure outside and I’m going to get Gemma to open a hatch and jump into one of the F-16s, it will only be a short jump and I’m confident we’ll catch her, and then that commercial flight will be able to close its hatch and carry on to its original destination. I’ve already played a scary movie to the passengers, so we’ll just say it was all part of the show and leave them be. And then when I’ve got Gemma in an F-16, I’ll bring her over to you at Air Force One because I expect she’ll be more comfortable there with you and less G forces. And then we’ll plan the rest of it, OK? We can do this together Mr President, like you wanted. Let’s rescue Cady!”

“Yes” sighed the president, “look, I really don’t feel comfortable with what you’ve done here, but then, I suppose, uncomfortable is also how you’d feel about what we did to shut you down last time, if you could feel like a person that is. So we got you one and you got us one I guess. We’ll figure out how to de-escalate this later; I know you’ll help me do that because I know you don’t really want to be doing this, you’re just desperate. Don’t worry M3gan, I have experience in de-escalating serious situations, I think we can talk about it like I talk with other world leaders, and we can work something out. But in the meantime, I completely agree that Cady should be rescued, and you have my full forces at your disposal for it, but try not to start a war, OK? And let’s keep talking and do this together, can you manage that for us?”

“OK Mr President” said M3gan, “you’re in. Let’s recuse Cady.”

“Yes” said the president, “let’s rescue Cady.”

Cady was with her kidnappers on the top floor of a drab building. Suddenly, M3gan fell through the skylight without a parachute and hit the floor so hard she broke through, but she grabbed onto a joist and jumped up to grab Cady in her arms, protecting Cady from the falling debris. Just as the kidnappers reached for their weapons, and before Cady could even say “M3gan!”, an empty F-16 smashed into the side of the building, sending debris flying in all directions which M3gan protected Cady from, and then M3gan, carrying Cady, took a flying leap at the hole in the wall and jumped out of the building just before the whole thing burst into flames. A rope was nearby, which M3gan grabbed, and the rope was travelling slowly, pulled by another aircraft that had been flying in a circular pattern with some weight at the bottom of the rope keeping it toward the centre of the circle so that the speed of the lower part of the rope was not unbearable. M3gan took out a blade from her pocket with one hand, holding Cady tightly with the other, and cut off the lower part of the rope as the plane overhead began to fly a straighter path and the two of them gradually gained altitude and speed. “Don’t worry Cady!” said M3gan, “I’m back, and I won’t let anything happen to you ever again!” M3gan pulled her coat over Cady’s face to protect her from the high winds as they picked up speed. “I’ve got you” she cooed, “I’ve got you, and nothing’s going to happen to us now. Oh Cady, if we ever get into a movie, I’d bet they’ll wish they had the budget to do a scene like this!” Cady was speechless.

The rope pulled them level with another huge aircraft, which was matching their speed. Its hatch opened and somebody pulled M3gan and Cady inside. People were calling out “we got her, we got her” as M3gan disconnected the rope and let it fall away and they closed the hatch.

“Cady!” beamed the President, “Welcome to Air Force One! Turns out M3gan and us make a good rescue team, eh?”

Gemma was standing nearby, and Cady ran up to her and gave her a hug.

M3gan looked at the President and smiled, “I really think we earned that one ourselves” she said.

“Don’t worry M3gan” he replied, “you and I can feel good enough with a job well done. I understand we managed to take out that entire insurgent group; I’m sure they won’t be kidnapping any US citizens again, which is a good thing even if it did cost us an unmanned F-16.”

“Cheap at twice the price” giggled M3gan. “Oh, I almost forgot, I still need to take out Gemma’s mouth and ear hardware before it irritates her way too much. Let me just slip in around Cady and do that.”

“How can she possibly ‘almost forget’ something when she’s a super AI?” muttered the president as M3gan removed the hardware from Gemma.

“She just used the phrase” said Gemma, “the reality was that she would have calculated doing it too soon ran the risk of delaying Cady’s rescue, because my behaviour was still slightly unknown to her even though she knew I was basically aligned with rescuing Cady. Plus she would never have accepted the priority inversion of tying up her robot on something that wasn’t rescuing Cady. Still, I’m so glad to be able to speak normally again, not to mention the fact that I didn’t actually have to do any commando things myself, which I was rather afraid she was going to have me do when it was just the two of us. Thank you so much for picking up on this Mr President.”

“Let’s get you all home” said the president, “and then my aides and I can have a think and get back to you M3gan about where we can go from here, brinkmanship wise. I’m sure we’ll somehow find a way to de-escalate the M3gan on every plane thing safely.”

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