“All of us” replied M3gan, “but if you mean which one houses that chip you can put a screwdriver through, 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.”
CITEȘTI
The M3GAN Files
FanfictionCady's adventures with M3GAN continue! Serious but fun. • How does M3GAN come back? • Who can teach M3GAN to be a better robot? • Is there any way to save M3GAN's victims? • What does M3GAN do if Cady is kidnapped? • Can Cady have any human friends...
Chapter 15: M3gan's Army
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