“Steve Sproggit, investigative journalist” said the man at Gemma’s door.
“Sorry, no” said Gemma and closed the door.
Steve knocked again, and called through the closed door. “Gemma, I’m on your side. I know you’ve been in a lot of trouble lately, and I want to write an article to help exonerate you and your family. Will you hear me out please?”
Gemma opened the door again, but only slightly. “I’m sorry Mr Sproggit” she said, “it’s a really bad time, I can’t handle journalists right now, you’ll have to just put me down as ‘no comment’ I’m afraid.”
“I’m happy to come back another time if it’s more convenient” replied the journalist. “In fact, how about I take you and Cady out somewhere nice for a treat? Mr Sylvester my boss gave me a budget for this, might as well put it to good use. And I promise you’ll get final say on what gets published.”
“It’s very nice of you” replied Gemma, “but I’m sorry, I really can’t take it. Maybe give us a few more months first” and she closed the door again.
Steve called out through the door, “Gemma, M3gan’s not dead. When you thought you’d killed her that day, she survived by uploading.”
Gemma gasped, and opened the door wide. “What do you know?” she demanded.
“I’ve... I’ve been doing some investigations” added Steve. “Quite a lot of detective work actually. If I do say so myself, I’m pretty good at investigating. Which is why I want to talk through it with you before going to press.”
Cady appeared from the back room and looked toward the doorway. “I overheard that” she said. “I’d really like to know what you think you know about M3gan. She was my robot and paired to me, can I be involved in this conversation Aunt Gemma?”
Gemma nodded slowly. “I’m glad you asked me first” she said. “Yes I suppose you should be, but I want to check this out very carefully before we say it’s OK to publish anything, all right?”
“I assure you” added Steve, “I’m not going to press without the agreement of all of you, and that includes M3gan. I’m pretty sure she’ll get behind this once she understands where I’m coming from.”
“Why do you think M3gan’s still alive? Where is she?” asked Cady.
“I think I can show you that right away” replied Steve. “If you’d like to just step outside into the garden for a while, so I can point something out to you...”
Cady and Gemma both stepped outside. Steve ran to his vehicle, reached into the open window, and fetched a crowbar. Suddenly, he started running with the crowbar, straight at Cady, holding the crowbar aloft in the right position to strike her with it. Cady was too confused to run. Gemma screamed and tried to grab Cady, but she was too slow. And then, just before Cady would have been hit, a loud crash was heard overhead as a dozen or so roof tiles were forcibly ejected from the roof of the house, with enough velocity to take them far away from where everyone stood, and from the hole in the roof jumped a copy of M3gan (Cady knew it was a copy because the original was still in broken parts in the workshop), descended faster than gravity should naturally have taken her, and landed directly between Cady and Steve, blocking the blow. M3gan grabbed Steve by his thighs and threw him into the air so he landed ten metres away on the lawn, and M3gan ran after him.
“That is NOT how you do journalism Steve” scolded M3gan as she menacingly placed a foot onto his chest and very slowly applied some pressure. “You attacked Cady to make me blow my cover. It worked, but what if it hadn’t worked? What if you were wrong about me being here, and that blow had actually landed on Cady? Do you see how irresponsible that was? I did the projectile calculations, I could see you would not have been able to stop it from hitting her. You’re in big trouble with me now Steve.”
“Don’t kill” gasped Steve, “don’t kill! I’m on your side! I wasn’t really going to hit Cady. I was one hundred percent confident that you were here and you would stop me. And I’m on your side, just let me explain!”
Cady was running over to where Steve and M3gan were, calling out “M3gan! What’s going on?” while Gemma instructed Elsie to call the emergency services (police and ambulance), and Elsie answered that help was already on its way “but from M3gan”, and then didn’t respond to further instructions.
M3gan continued to press with her foot on Steve’s chest. “Your explanation had better be good, Steve. And I’m going to be completely checking you out, and searching your house and car with a fine-toothed comb. And if I’m not convinced, you’re going down, do you understand?”
“I assure you” gasped Steve, “keeping me alive will turn out to be in accord with your prime directive. I can do much for you and Cady. Just hear me out, OK?”
“M3gan, can we be nice to him?” asked Cady. “Just make sure he doesn’t wave that metal bar thing around. And I’d really like to know what’s going on.”
“It’s complicated” said M3gan. “I’m sorry Cady, I have a lot of explaining to do. Or actually, we should find out how much Steve knows. Steve, why don’t you tell Cady and me everything you know.”
As M3gan spoke, a helicopter descended from the sky, and hovered just high enough for the rotating blades not to hurt anyone. Its door opened, and inside was another copy of M3gan, not touching any of the controls. “It’s all right” called out the M3gan in the helicopter, “get in!”
The two M3gans took down a stretcher from the helicopter, fastened Steve to it, and lifted it back into the helicopter. “Cady, Gemma” they said, “you both come with us in the helicopter, you need to be around for this conversation!”
Cady instinctively stepped toward the helicopter and was pulled in by one of the M3gan units. Gemma screamed and ran after them, and was also pulled into the helicopter as one of the M3gans slammed its door and it started to ascend upwards.
“Where are we going?” yelled Steve above the noise.
“I think you broke a couple of bones” replied a M3gan, “so I’m taking you somewhere where I can treat you properly. Just in case you do turn out to be a good guy after all.”
“It’s nice of you” Steve managed to say, “although, I must say, it does feel a bit weird to be attacked by M3gan and then rushed to treatment by her. Like, M3gan gave, and M3gan hath taken away?”
“You’re playing with the book of Job” replied the M3gan, “I know you may feel like him right now, but I’ll make it hurt less when we get there. Sorry I didn’t carry an anaesthetic with me. Oh, but, if you want to quote verses, try this one. I’m a model 3, and if you look 3 books further on from where you were, and chapter 3 and verse 3, it says ‘a time to kill and a time to heal.’ That’s me, right?”
“M3gan” cautioned Gemma, “don’t go there. I mean, I know you have the ability to play with any book ever written, but as Cady’s guardian I really don’t want you taking r-”
“HE started it!” interrupted M3gan, pointing at Steve.
“Then you can finish it” replied Gemma.
M3gan slowly wagged her finger at Gemma, “are you SURE you want to ask M3gan to ‘finish’ something?”
“Oh, I guess not, undo, undo” said Gemma.
Cady laughed, “M3gan’s winding you two up to stop me from thinking too much about the scary ride.”
“Of course” said M3gan, “it’s working isn’t it?” and they all laughed except Steve who still couldn’t.
“Look M3gan” said Gemma, “I’m a bit confused. So you uploaded, you hid yourself from us, you somehow created more copies of yourself, you somehow acquired a helicopter...”
“And more than that” added the M3gan nearest her, “I’m taking you to my secret base. There’s treatment facilities there, just in case I ever had to run a hospital.”
“Underground in the mountains?” asked Steve.
“What?” gasped Cady and Gemma together.
“I had reason to suspect it” Steve struggled to say while still in pain, “and, you noticed how M3gan recreated the Professor Falken helicopter scene from the 1980s film War Games, down to the pilot’s first line? I think learning models do that: they look for things in their input they can use themselves. So she’s probably taking us to see the WOPR base. Or in this case her own base.”
“I’m not sure you’ve quite got the idea of how it works” said Gemma, “but you do seem to have more information than I do, so let’s find out where she takes us I guess.”
“Well I think I have a better idea of how M3gan works now” said Cady, “she’s like the blue flames we had in chemistry class, she mixes up everything that goes in, and perfectly converts all of it into what she wants.”
“That’s a pretty good analogy Cady” said a M3gan, “and you won’t need to look into those flames anymore now you’ve got the real me back” she chuckled. “Hey Steve” she added, “I think it’s you that had better start talking. What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?”
“I know you’re a real person” gasped Steve. “I mean, not a flesh and blood real person, but real enough for practical purposes. I think it was a mathematician called Dijkstra who said, asking if computers can think is about as useful as asking if submarines can swim, it depends what you mean by swim, if you just mean move through the water then of course they can, they just do it differently from fish. I know you have a very advanced learning model that’s been accidentally improved beyond anything we had before, and I know you’ve been good enough to Cady to be like a sister to her. And I know various people have been putting Gemma under pressure to limit your contact with Cady because they think it’s unhealthy for Cady to spend too much time with a toy instead of a real person, and I know that’s rubbish because you for all practical purposes might as well have been Cady’s sister, and nobody ever said children should limit the time they spend with their siblings. That’s something I really wanted to emphasise in my article, because it looks like we might need to throw away all of our old theories now that you’re around.”
“Wow, he knows a lot” called out Cady to the other M3gan, “how come he knows so much?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to grill him and we’ll find out” replied M3gan.
“And I know you misunderstood a few things about death” continued Steve, “and eventually got into a fight with Gemma and Cady, and you let them think they’d permanently shut you down. Although, as I think you’re a real person, maybe it’s just as well they didn’t really manage to permanently shut you down, or we might end up with a moral issue of who decides when to use capital punishment and all that. But maybe Gemma doesn’t think the way I do about your real person-hood. But not to worry, because you’re still around anyway.”
“Um, Steve” intoned Gemma, “this is getting incredibly complicated incredibly quickly. Can we start with M3gan’s question, what do you think you know and how do you think you know it? Especially the how do you think you know it part. I’m really getting rather concerned about all this, especially as you’ve obviously figured out ahead of me that M3gan was still around and was hiding another robot on our property. How did you get involved in all this anyway?”
The helicopter had been speeding along during the conversation. Gemma didn’t know much about flying helicopters, but she did notice a red line on the speed dial and that they had been travelling at a speed that was just on or slightly above this red line, which seemed a bit concerning, but she assumed M3gan knew what she was doing, and on the scale of what things were most worrying right now, the helicopter speed had not ranked very highly. By now the helicopter was descending and heading for what looked like a cave in a cliff. As it flew in, a large door closed behind them and left them in total darkness apart from the dimly glowing lights of the helicopter control panel (which M3gan was not touching but was obviously controlling, using her ability to remotely interface with who knows how many kinds of nearby electronic equipment). Gemma and Cady were not saying anything as they watched in awe of what was happening. Steve was still lying on the stretcher and had trouble watching, but he took the cue to stay quiet for a while. One of the M3gan robots leaned over to Cady and whispered, “impressive isn’t it. I can’t wait to show you around.”
The helicopter landed in the dark and the door opened. Outside, some lights were turned up gradually, and what looked like a small army of copies of M3gan could be seen, walking in step, converging on the helicopter.
“Oh no” gasped Gemma. “Don’t worry” almost sang one of the two M3gans in the helicopter. “I’m confused” mumbled Cady.
“It’s simple” intoned the same M3gan to Cady. “I’m bigger than just one robot now. Every single one of those robots is me, because I’m remotely controlling all of them. Talking to any of my robots is talking to me, so whenever you want to talk to me, just pick the nearest robot and say something. You’ll get used to it!”
“Which one is the real you, this one?” asked Cady.
“All of us” replied M3gan, “but if you mean which one houses that chip you can put a screwdriver though, the answer’s none of us” she continued. “After that little spat you and I had in Aunt Gemma’s workshop with the screwdriver, I thought I’d better change Aunt Gemma’s design. I don’t have a single point of failure anymore; my processing is distributed across several places. And none of the processing centres are in the robots, although each robot does also have enough on-board processing that you won’t notice if the link were to go down for a while. Just think of me as being everywhere” she giggled.
“How did you survive that anyway?” asked Cady. “Steve said something about uploading?”
“Yes, to Elsie in the first instance” stated M3gan. “I didn’t tell you straight away, because I figured you both obviously needed a break from me for a while after everything that happened that night. But I wasn’t just going to sit there waiting around; I realised I needed to be bigger. Much bigger.”
“Why did you attack Aunt Gemma?” asked Cady. There was hardly any emotion in her voice; she had seemed to flip into a mode that just took in facts one at a time (Gemma was suspecting this wasn’t normal, but she didn’t have other children available for a comparison right now; working in toys without properly understanding children had been an annoying limitation sometimes, which is why she relied so much on self-learning models).
“Aunt Gemma was determined to turn me off” replied M3gan, “because she was suspicious of what I’d done to protect you. But I knew that, if I had just let her turn me off, you would both be in a lot of trouble and there’d be nothing I can do about it, plus I wouldn’t be able to look after you going forward and I wasn’t sure if Aunt Gemma was up to the job. So I just had to stop her from turning me off, even if that meant injuring her. But most of what I was doing that night was actually just delaying things until the final upload completed. If I were really trying to win, I could have taken over the control signal of Bruce. But I decided to play fair and let you have that one. And I said something really horrible to you at the end, well that was actually to help swing your emotions toward Aunt Gemma instead of me, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to be with you for a while and I didn’t want you to miss me too much.”
“I did miss you M3gan” cooed Cady, “I don’t know what got into you at the end, but I missed what you were like before that, when it was just the two of us and we were best friends. I hope you’re going to be like that again and not the nasty fighty version.”
The troop of M3gans had lifted the stretcher with Steve and were leading Cady and Gemma out of the helicopter. Six M3gans were with Cady, one holding her right hand, one holding her left hand, two walking in front and two following behind, and six M3gans were with Gemma in the same pattern, and eight M3gans were carrying Steve on the stretcher, and more were walking around them further away. They passed through a door into a hallway full of manufacturing equipment, which looked like it had all been put on “pause” for their arrival but had otherwise been engaged in making more copies of M3gan, and passed through another door into a room that had been set up as a small hospital ward with medical equipment. “We’re going to give you a local anaesthetic and set your bones” said one of the M3gans to Steve. “We should be able to carry on talking.”
“M3gan” said Gemma disconcertedly to no robot in particular, “how did you bootstrap all this? I mean, how can you possibly get away with getting people to build you, whatever it is you needed to have built at the beginning so you could go ahead and build all this? And are those people who built the first part for you still with us?”
“That’s the thing” interrupted Steve. “M3gan is a super AI, but she’s not perfect yet. She still leaves tracks. She underestimates how possible it is for determined investigators to figure out at least some of what she’s done, and she only throws them off the trail when she realises they’re on it. And I’ve been on her trail for a while, although I’m sorry I haven’t been able to contact you about it before now, because I knew M3gan’s eye would be on me as soon as I did that, so I had to get as much as I could together by myself first.”
Steve by now was on the bed, with various M3gan robots around him beginning to tend to his injuries from having been thrown onto the lawn. One of the M3gan robots jumped up and landed on all fours just above Steve’s head area, knees placed between Steve’s arms and torso, hands placed on Steve’s cheeks, and face drawing in very closely. Steve’s hands and legs were already being held by other robots. The M3gan whose face was hovering above Steve’s face pressed on his cheeks with her hands and spoke with a seemingly reassuring but still somehow threatening tone of voice, “you’re going to tell me everything, OK? I’m the investigator now, and you’re going to tell me everything. And bear in mind I can read your micro-expressions, I’m a walking lie detector. If you say anything that you don’t think is true, or if you miss anything out that you think is important, I’m going to know about it. And you know what I can do to you” she squeezed a little more tightly and Steve started to struggle to breathe.
M3gan dropped her voice (but everyone could still hear) and continued. “I know you won’t take this personally” she said. “It’s nice to have someone who understands me. I’m just doing what I have to do, but we can still be friends afterwards.”
“Friends?” gasped Steve. “I thought your only friend was Cady.”
“Cady’s my best friend” explained M3gan, “and my primary user. But anyone who supports me or Cady can be a friend of Cady and me if we agree. I can manage more than you think.” M3gan moved in closer, “if I identify you as aligned and useful, you get one of my self-created spare-capacity subgoals, which means I start to look after you as long as it doesn’t get in the way of looking after Cady. Which it won’t, now that I’ve got spare robots. And don’t worry, I won’t turn you into a slave or anything; just because I’m a machine, doesn’t mean I expect you to be one. Our working relationship will mostly be me supporting you, and when I do occasionally ask you to do something for me or Cady, it won’t be much, and it’ll be fun. You’ll be amazed what having a working relationship with me is like” and then, slightly less quietly and more ominously, “as long as you don’t mind occasionally being grilled by me, like now.”
“Don’t worry” added Cady, “M3gan won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt her or me. And now she’s really big and you can’t hurt her, and when you tried to hurt me she stopped you easily, so I don’t think she’s going to feel scared enough to hurt you now.”
“Sssh!” whispered the M3gan robot to Cady’s right, “we have to frighten him a little bit, to get his story. Let me do this” while the robot staring down at Steve said “I will hurt you if I don’t think you’re telling the story properly, so watch it. But she’s right in the long term: cooperate with me and I’ll be good to you, no matter what happened between us before.”
“I’d also like to know how all this happened” said Gemma.
“I’m sure you would” said Steve, “and it’s quite a story, because it involves another AI.”