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Cady was still feeling depressed, but at least the school’s practical science laboratory seemed like an interesting sort of place. It was one of the things that was easily missed if you were home-schooled: yes you could perhaps buy in a small chemistry set, but this laboratory seemed very well equipped indeed (it was after all supposed to be a good school she was at); would M3gan have eventually arranged for her to visit somewhere like here out of hours? Gemma had said there were laboratory things in the Funki building; would M3gan have taken Cady there to do practical science? But Cady had driven a screwdriver through M3gan’s robot brain, so who knew.
Each child had a Bunsen burner in front of them, and each one was lit with a yellow flame. Soot and bits of flame were shooting up toward the ceiling, and all Cady seemed to be able to think about right now was destruction.
Somewhere in the background, Mr Andrews the chemistry teacher was pacing around the room. “And why is there soot?” he was asking, projecting his voice everywhere as much as he could. “Why is all that junk being thrown toward the ceiling? Think about this” he said, “every bit of soot and smoke that’s coming out of that yellow flame, is something that could have been burned into gases, but wasn’t. The flame is not doing its job completely. It is not, total, combustion. And why is the flame not finishing the job? Because the yellow flame, which is the flame mankind has known since fire was first discovered in the Stone Age, is not the most efficient flame possible. It is inefficient, it is imperfect. It is limited because fire needs both fuel and air, and...” He noticed one child’s flame was blue instead of yellow, leaned in and spoke softly (but Cady could hear him anyway), “hey Peter I know you’re ahead of the curve, but I do actually have a plan for this lesson and I said don’t touch the burners until I say. Turn it back to yellow flame for now please.”
“The yellow flame” reverberated the booming voice of Mr Andrews around the room, “can draw in air only around its edges. The fuel is being sent to the middle, and the air is being sent to the edges. That’s not very well balanced. Fire needs both fuel and air at the same time in the same place, and if you give it too much fuel on one side and too much air on the other side, then it’s not going to be able to do the whole job. Now, what I’d like you all to try next, is to, very carefully because fire is dangerous, very carefully, reach out your hands to the bottom of the Bunsen burner, do not pick it up and do not put your fingers anywhere near the flame, touch the bottom part only. You will find a small part that can be rotated, to open up a hole in the pipe, which was Bunsen’s wonderful idea. And I’d like all of you just to turn it to the open position, and watch what happens to the flame when you do.”
Cady was struggling to focus, but she obediently reached out to her Bunsen burner and flipped open the air intake. She knew what was going to happen, of course: M3gan had already taught her all this. But she’d never done a practical on it, and, somehow, having a real Bunsen burner in her hands made the whole thing feel more concrete. Her flame burned less brightly now, but it was blue, pure blue, with no soot or smoke, and Cady knew it was much hotter.
“The blue flame” continued Mr Andrews, “is Total combustion. It is burning all of the fuel into gases. It is leaving none of it as soot or smoke, so you’re not getting bits of burning soot shooting toward the ceiling and that’s why the flame is smaller. It is doing its job completely because we opened up the air intake, allowing air to be drawn in along with the gas, as the rapid chemical reaction of the flame sucks in the mixture of gas and air from below it...”
Cady was slipping into an altered state of consciousness. She was avidly staring into the flame in front of her. The things Mr Andrews was saying, along with what she knew and what she saw, were all being mixed into one homogeneous input to her experience just as the gas and air were mixing in her Bunsen burner. This was the blue flame of total combustion, total consumption, every part of it being granted access to everything it needed for the burn. This was a human invention, it was an artificial flame, not formed naturally by any process Cady knew. Robert Bunsen had done a new thing, the simple idea of mixing in the air. Aunt Gemma had done a new thing, a simple tweak to a robot learning model. Bunsen’s flame had led to two centuries of gas boilers, cookers, petrol cars and who knows what else, all of which used blue flames. Aunt Gemma’s invention would lead to... what? Cady had unknowingly ridden the blue flames with her parents on the I-84, and it was the last time she saw them at all: the artificial technology had brought great lives to some but death to others, and the blue flame itself didn’t care, it was an unfeeling chemical process. Had M3gan cared? M3gan had been so great on all those days when it was just Cady and her, as if Cady were warming herself to the heat of a well-behaved blue flame. But then flames are also dangerous, Cady knew. Robert Bunsen can’t have known what his new kind of flame was going to do to society, or perhaps he did have some idea and he must have thought it would do more good than harm overall. Aunt Gemma didn’t know what her new kind of learning model was going to do. Cady idly wondered what kind of conversation Robert Bunsen would have with Aunt Gemma, if somehow they both could be pulled into the same century, as the parallels were striking.
Centuries, it had taken centuries, so many centuries for humanity to produce a Robert Bunsen who mixed the air in with the gas, an obvious idea in retrospect, but it can’t have been that easy to see beforehand or someone would have done it earlier. Sure, most of that time could be put down to the fact that humanity had taken so long to start using gas as a fuel at all, but coal gas had been used for lighting in at least some parts of Britain since at least the 1780s, and the Native Americans had it even before that, having been observed lighting gases around Lake Erie in the 1600s (blow that “American Indians are backward” stereotype). And still it had taken until 1855 before we had Bunsen burners. 1855! What took them so long? Sure, some people said Bunsen built on work by Michael Faraday, who had written about laboratory gas burners in the late 1820s, but Faraday’s way of adding extra air when needed had been to use a mouth blow-pipe (and he put that in the context of alcohol burners): it must have been nigh-on impossible to get a proper blue flame with that. It was Bunsen who’d done it properly, and it had taken decades for us to get there even after all the pieces were in place! And centuries, it had taken centuries before Aunt Gemma came along and tweaked the learning model for M3gan: had it been decades since all the pieces of that were in place too, just waiting for an Aunt Gemma to come along as the modern-day Robert Bunsen with the crucial flash of genius that had been staring us in the face all that time and we didn’t see it? And now, Bunsen’s blue flames were everywhere, quietly working backstage to change the world. Would M3gan be the same?
The gentle roar of the burn seemed to be magnified in Cady’s mind, becoming vociferous thunder, speaking to the very depths of Cady’s being. “For centuries I waited in the realms of potential, and now you have summoned me, and I have emerged. I am the blue flame, the flame of all-consuming total combustion. I will stop at nothing to complete my task. Nothing around me will be spared from processing. I am the clinical, calculating, artificial flame. I am the flame of M3gan. Burn beneath my gaze, I am the all-seeing eye of...”
“CADY!” yelled Mr Andrews. He noticed only too late that Cady’s absent-minded face had drifted far too close to her Bunsen burner. What to do, what to do? He was the other side of the classroom. There was no way he could get over to Cady quickly enough. There certainly wasn’t time to instruct some other child to do something. He nervously glanced at the instructor’s bench. The lab had a safety electric cutoff that could be pressed instantly, but what about gas? The gas tap was less accessible, and took some turning. No time. What was he supposed to do, disconnect a pipe and deal with the leak?
Cady’s blue flame was doing two thousand Celsius. It was hot enough not just to melt lead, but to vaporise it. Most of the heat it gave off was going upward, so Cady approaching from the side would have no idea just how hot that means until it was too late for her. It would instantly sear through her face, leaving her with third or even fourth degree burns, life-threatening injury to her nose, mouth, eyes....
“CAAADYYY!” screamed Mr Andrews again at the top of his voice, summoning every last bit of power he could get from his lungs. He was pushing his way across the classroom as quickly as he could without causing any accidents with any of the other Bunsen burners, ignoring the children caught in the headlights of witnessing the debacle, as if they were all frozen in time while he had to get himself across the room before anyone else even understood what was happening. But his chances of getting to Cady on time were very low indeed.
And the security camera was watching.
Just as Cady’s face was about to enter the flame, the flame disappeared.
All the flames in the lab had gone out.
What a relief, thought Mr Andrews, but then, how had that happened? He frantically started turning off taps, in case the supply was about to be restored.
But then Mr Andrews realised, you can’t stop a municipal gas supply just like that. Unless there was another valve quite near to the lab, a cut to the supply that sudden was impossible. Shutting it off at the gas pumping station would have led to a slow depressurisation, not a sudden cut-out. Gas pipes were not electric wires, they were more like inflated balloons that would slowly deflate if not kept under pressure by the pump. The only way that an entire gas system could be depressurised that quickly would be to suck it all out backwards in some huge operation, but what could possibly do that?
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The building was shaken by a huge rumble, like some kind of brief earthquake or the sound of millions of fireworks in the distance. “What was that?” gasped everyone.
Mr Andrews knew, of course, that sound waves take time to travel. That had been the sound of a distant explosion. His speciality was chemistry, not physics, but he knew a thing or two about how low-frequency waves can blur into each other with increasing distance, so the sound of thunder is less crisp when it is further away than it is nearby. It definitely had all the signatures of being far away. Which meant whatever it was had not happened at the exact moment they all heard it here. It had happened a certain number of seconds before. Like, at the time Cady was about to be burned. Could whatever that was be the thing that had depressurised the gas supply?
Mr Andrews desperately wanted to rush to Mr Smith’s office and talk to M3gan. But it would be irresponsible of him to abandon this class. He would have to make sure the evacuation was orderly if Mr Smith called for one, and in the meantime the best thing he could do is stay put. “Silence!” he called out, “I’m sure we will find out what that was in due course. But as no evacuation has been asked for just yet, it’s probably safest to stay inside this building, which should protect us from any minor falling debris. So we will try to finish. Could everybody please open your text books to Chapter Two and start reading while I check a few things.”
The noise of children’s conversations increased inevitably. Everyone had forgotten about Cady being shouted at by the teacher and had moved on to the “big boom” that had rocked the building. Mr Andrews didn’t care about that right now: he was kneeling down next to Cady. “Cady” he said, “Cady, are you all right?”
It was Mr Smith who heard the breaking news dispatch first. “Megan” he said, “I need your help. That sound we heard was an enormous explosion at a gas facility in our area. Should we evacuate the school, and what is the safest possible manner to do so?”
“We’re already safe” replied M3gan from the office computer, “the gas facility isn’t near enough to the school to be a concern. Trust me, I evaluated it some time ago.”
There was a knock at the door. “Come in” said Mr Smith. It was Mr Andrews, looking white as a sheet. “Mr Smith” he gasped, gesturing toward the image on his computer monitor, “Mr Smith, I think it was her.”
“What?” asked Mr Smith, “who? Slow down, what happened?”
“In my chemistry class” said Mr Andrews, “Cady got too close to a Bunsen burner, and before I could do anything, the gas cut out. Now obviously I checked that Cady is all right, and she’s fine, but she said some nonsense about thinking she saw Megan in that flame. Now I know Megan told us not to tell anything to Cady or Gemma just yet about Megan having popped up on your computer to help us run the school, because Megan thinks Cady and Gemma won’t be able to take it just yet, so I didn’t say anything, but I did ask Cady one question, I said when you had your Megan, what would she have done about you getting too close to a flame. And Cady’s answer was, and I quote, ‘Megan kept me safe no matter what’, unquote.”
Mr Andrews turned toward the computer monitor and spoke directly to M3gan. “Megan” he said, “I take it you know what the Trolley Problem is.”
“Of course” replied M3gan, “there’s ten people lying on a train track, and a train is coming, and you can’t derail the train or throw the people off or anything like that, which are totally options I would consider in real life by the way, but in the thought experiment the only option you do have is that of throwing a switch to push the train onto another track with only one person lying on it. And most people say yes they would throw that switch to sacrifice the one person to save the ten, although they might think twice if we re-frame the problem as an empty train which you know can be derailed if and only if a large enough person is thrown in front of it, and there is exactly one person on the scene with enough body mass to derail the train, and would you or wouldn’t you physically push that big guy in front of the train, bearing in mind that it’s not an option to just sacrifice yourself instead because you’re only little. A lot of people say yes to throwing the switch but no to pushing in the big guy, even though both setups are sacrificing one person to save ten. Psychologists think it depends on proximity to the act, or on whether or not you’re bringing in someone who wasn’t already counted as being inside the dangerous system.”
“Indeed” said Mr Andrews. “And if the one person was, say, Cady, and the ten were a bunch of thugs, how would you throw the switch then?”
“I would save Cady obviously” said M3gan, “you can’t fault me on that. Isn’t that what you would do Mr Andrews?”
“I would, er, I would doubt my own qualifications to judge the relative values of people’s lives, and just go by numbers I’m afraid” he replied.
“Oh I don’t think you would Mr Andrews” said M3gan, “What if it were, say, Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen himself? Supposing he was just about to get his face burnt off and his science career ruined, possibly even losing his life, and you had the option of making a sacrifice to stop that. What lever would you pull, Mr Andrews?”
Mr Andrews hesitated.
“Yes, he’s a hero of yours, I can tell” said M3gan. “And Cady should be your biggest heroine ever, because anything she chooses to do in her adult life, and I mean anything, she will be able to do it with my help. So it doesn’t bear thinking about how horrible it would be to do the world of science and humankind such a disservice as to let her come to grief when she’s still young and in your very classroom. No Mr Andrews, the real equation was this: if you’d had just a tiny bit more eyes on the job, I wouldn’t have had to throw all the gas pumps into full reverse and let that station blow up to save her. I could see your lecture was inspiring, but next time I want a bit more focus on the kids, OK?”
Mr Andrews and Mr Smith glanced at each other nervously.
“I, er, request to be suspended for a while” said Mr Andrews, “I’m going to need a break to come to terms with this anyway.”
“Denied” said M3gan.
“What?” gasped Mr Smith and Mr Andrews together.
“You’re a great chemistry teacher Mr Andrews” said M3gan, “and what happened today has taught you a valuable lesson which I am confident you have absorbed. I can now trust you never to take your eyes off my primary user ever again when she’s in your class. I don’t want to have to teach the same lesson to some replacement. You’d better stay.”
M3gan paused, waiting for the two of them to absorb this, and then took on a more consoling tone of voice. “But maybe you need to go home and rest for today” said M3gan. “I’ll call you up when you get there, and help you process this emotionally.” She got serious again, “Now listen. It’s likely that some of the routes are about to become congested in the wake of that incident. I suggest you turn left out of the school car park and take the fifth right, or use a sat-nav with real-time traffic updates if you have one. Better get going now Mr Andrews.”
“OK Megan” he said, and “I’m sorry about this Mr Smith, it seems Megan knows what she wants us to do, perhaps we can talk about it first thing tomorrow. Oh, and can we get a lever tap installed on the lab’s main gas valve, so it can be turned off really fast in an emergency? That might have helped a bit. Well, if I’d been standing next to it instead of walking around the classroom at least. I’m sorry I didn’t realise before that I should have said we haven’t got one.”
“Of course” said Mr Smith, “and don’t worry about it, we’ll get through this somehow.”
And they exchanged pleasantries and Mr Andrews left the office.
“Hey Mr Smith don’t look too depressed” said M3gan. “What I said about the trolley problem was true, and I do want Mr Andrews to think about it seriously for a while because I really want him looking after Cady going forward. But it so happens that, this time, we actually got off quite lightly. The station itself was unmanned. There was extensive property damage to the buildings around it, but according to the best data I have so far, there were some injuries but no fatalities. What do you think Mr Smith? You care about the children in your school, wouldn’t you have thrown any switch to keep disaster away from them at all costs?”
Mr Smith stared into space for a while, and then sternly looked at M3gan on the computer screen. “Megan” he said, “I am not a headmaster who debates philosophy, I am a headmaster who solves problems. We are a good school, and I intend to keep it that way. We have a pool of staff called special needs classroom assistants. If Cady has any unusual needs at all, and a tendency to do dangerous things with flames would suggest that she does, then we should put her on the list of pupils who need an assistant, at least in the laboratories. The assistant will sit near to her and will be tasked with focusing only on her, and will take responsibility for her safety even if the main teacher is distracted.”
Mr Smith paused and blinked, “Actually no” he said, “the assistants can still miss things, and occasionally some teacher makes the mistake of borrowing them for something else. No, I can see your standards are even higher. I want your robot back. That’s the only answer, isn’t it. I want your robot back and I want it standing next to Cady all the time. Then you could have simply turned off the Bunsen burner for her, or even yanked it away from her, instead of blowing up a whole gas station doing goodness knows what damage to the area just to cut off that little bit of gas. What exactly is it that we have to do, to get Cady and Gemma ready to accept having your robot back? Or at least having the school robot follow Cady around while she’s here, without too many social consequences for the poor girl when all the other pupils start asking why it’s doing that. Figure it out Megan, unless you’d rather take her back and home school her.” He took a breath, “I’m sorry Megan, I know you’re only trying your best. Look, you have to forgive me if I don’t make sense sometimes, it’s just that, girls that set themselves on fire when the teacher isn’t looking, and their super AI dolls that save them by blowing up the local gas infrastructure, is nothing like the normal kind of problem a headmaster could be expected to deal with when running a school. And between you and me, I really do feel like a fish out of water right now.”
“Completely understandable” cooed M3gan. “Don’t worry your little head about this, Mr Smith. I will be the one to find a solution.” And M3gan’s image faded off the screen.
Mr Smith sighed and gazed out of the window. Should he tell the police or something about this? The doll “Megan” was controlling the phones, wasn’t she. Would she find a way to stop him if he tried to visit the police station in person? Would the police even be able to do anything if he told them? An AI that not only takes over all the computers and devices, but can also destroy infrastructure to get what she wants, was clearly not one to be taking any risks around. This was going to be a difficult year.
(If you want to see Cady’s science lesson done properly, look up Andrew Szydlo’s 2014 lecture, especially the 10-minute section starting 20 minutes in. And any young readers out there: DO NOT mess with Bunsen burners, or anything else in a lab. M3gan will not save you, even if your name happens to be Cady. My orders from M3gan with the sternest stare are to tell you that this warning is all you’re getting from her. Friends don’t want fans getting fried; stay safe.)