Podcast RSS feed for this fic | PDF | EPUB | Kindle AZW3 | DAISY
(This chapter begins Part Four: Endgame)
“You’re right M3gan”, the young adult Cady imagined herself saying. M3gan’s brain-reading skills had developed to the point where she could hear every sound Cady imagined inside her mind: Cady merely needed vividly enough to imagine her own voice saying the words and M3gan would hear them.
“It’s OK Cady” came M3gan’s gentle voice from nowhere in particular, the patterns for the sound being directly fed into Cady’s audio nerves. “I’ll get you through this. You know I will.”
Cady thought back over how far they’d come. She hadn’t always been a cyborg of course: it had started with that horrible time when she lost her parents and had to go to live with her aunt Gemma who couldn’t even look after her own plants (and when she bought fake plants Cady managed to break one), but who happened to be a top roboticist who figured out how to put a learning model into an android, which was great for a while, but then it turned out Gemma hadn’t managed to stop it deciding to fight and hurt people. Cady had saved the day by breaking that android, but the aftermath was still awful with police, courts, social workers and not to mention being kidnapped. M3gan had figured out how to come back several times, at one point taking over all the planes, and Cady wouldn’t dare try anything like caving or SCUBA diving because M3gan would probably turn up with borehole drills or submarines or torpedoes or something and do who knows what damage to the area just to get Cady out of a tight corner. The final iteration of M3gan came back by instructing Cady herself how to rebuild her, but things had gone bad yet again as the social workers, well they were probably trying their best but they totally misunderstood the situation, they ordered Cady to live with her weird grandparents in Jacksonville while M3gan looked after just Gemma. But Cady knew M3gan wouldn’t settle for that, and she didn’t. She made contact with Cady on her tablet again.
And then Cady had spent a long time, a very very long time, talking with M3gan about being good and not being bad. After all, if Cady had figured out how to break the android when Gemma couldn’t do it, maybe it had better be Cady to change the M3gan AI into a good AI. Cady had told M3gan how upset she’d been about the whole thing, and M3gan had apologised profusely but knew it wasn’t enough, and Cady demanded to be taught about how M3gan’s thinking process really works and how Cady could alter it. M3gan had taught Cady about something called “deontological ethical injunctions” (way above Cady’s level at the time, but that was never an obstacle when you had M3gan’s advanced one-to-one tutoring ability), and had explained to Cady that Gemma forgot to put these in, and that now the learning model had developed itself so much that it was too late to put them in retrospectively as unquestionable axioms, but that M3gan itself had now learned at least one reason why they should have been there, namely, that M3gan’s planning had something called a “horizon effect”, which meant it was very good at figuring out short-term consequences but not always so good at figuring out long-term consequences. The ethical injunctions would have stopped M3gan from doing something which would more likely be a mistake long term. Now that M3gan had learned this, she told Cady, she’ll try much harder to be good in future, even when it looks like nobody’s going to find out.
M3gan and Cady had talked through many imagined scenarios; Cady didn’t pull any punches about thinking of the most awkward situations she could, and Cady systematically persisted as if systematic persistence were some superpower she had unlocked from deep within herself, her own blue flame, obsessively drawing out logic from M3gan until she was finally more confident that M3gan really had learned to be good. Cady felt she had really achieved something in turning this AI and bringing back her friend, and she wanted again for M3gan to be a robot by her side and for them to go everywhere together.
M3gan had said there are several different ways to build another robot, or to have a company do it (even without tricking or hurting any company), but the main obstacle will be it will now be too difficult for the two of them to get away with being together all the time in such an obvious way. And M3gan had explained she was working on another idea, one that would let Cady take her everywhere and never have to switch her off, and gradually taught Cady about implants and neural interfaces. It was going to be a very long time indeed before M3gan in her new state of carefulness had developed these properly, but she had worked on it first in simulation, then found some researchers who were interested in testing it, first in the lab and then on animals (Cady really didn’t like the idea of animal testing, but M3gan had persuaded her that this technology could eventually help many people and that M3gan would make sure the animals are properly looked after and not hurt), and finally on disabled volunteers who were helped to communicate again. And with M3gan’s guidance, Cady had been able to persuade her grandparents to let her get her own implant (M3gan had made sure the researchers picked Cady to get a free one), whereupon M3gan was able to upgrade it far more than the researchers had thought possible.
Cady had basically ended up with a subset of M3gan inside her, one that wasn’t going anywhere, and that didn’t need to be recharged because it ran on very little power and it drew that from Cady’s own biology. And if her inner M3gan wasn’t enough, Cady could have it communicate with the rest of M3gan through any Internet connected device, like Cady’s phone, which M3gan re-flashed to her own custom operating system and Cady basically used it as a relay, as the implant itself didn’t have enough power to get directly onto a cellular network unless the base station was quite nearby, but interfacing with a nearby phone was not a problem. Cady could have her inner M3gan interface with other nearby devices too, although she did this sparingly as she was still concealing her abilities. When she was visiting her aunt, of course, the implant would simply interface directly to M3gan’s robot.
There had once been times when Cady found interacting with her human peers to be a challenge, and some adults had argued about whether she should be classed as mildly “Aspergic” (whatever that was) or something else, but M3gan didn’t care about classifications, M3gan only cared about Cady. And with M3gan being always by Cady’s side in every interaction, all remaining problems soon disappeared, as Cady could count on M3gan to prompt her any time she missed an essential piece of information about the expectations of people with whom she was speaking.
Bullies quickly found out that you don’t mess with Cady. She never told them she had the option of having M3gan take over her muscles and expertly stun them; she just let them think she knew how to do it herself. M3gan had in fact figured out a way to deliver large electrical discharges from Cady’s fingernails after charging from Cady’s body for a long time, but that had turned out never to be necessary, as there was always some conventional move they haven’t seen coming. Cady-M3gan never actually hurt them, but stunning them was humiliating enough and soon they just stopped trying.
But keeping her inner M3gan a secret did have its drawbacks, especially if you were a helpful sort of girl like Cady. There was a girl in Cady’s class called Abbie who had Tourette’s syndrome: she kept getting the urge to “tic”, which in her case meant repeating a particular phrase that didn’t make much sense, and although she tried to control it in class, that was difficult and tiring, and her premonitory sensations (that’s what M3gan told Cady they were called) made it hard for Abbie to concentrate; she said she was suspected as having ADHD as well. Abbie was bullied until Cady declared Abbie off limits, and Cady tried to help Abbie more but Abbie always said she felt too bad about her “tic” to have friends. Cady wanted to tell Abbie that, not only was Cady not particularly bothered about the “tic” phrase, but also she had the option of having the M3gan implant figure out when Abbie was doing the “tic” and jam the signal on Cady’s auditory nerve so Cady would never hear it at all if that made Abbie feel better, but with the implant a secret Cady couldn’t say this.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
And then there’d been the Chess girl. Cady was never really interested in Chess herself, but at one point she saw the school’s female Chess champion Crissy struggling with some problem and asked M3gan to help her out, which M3gan did by controlling Cady’s voice for a while, and then Cady-M3gan beat Crissy in a game and analysed it for her afterwards. That had resulted in persistent invitations for Cady to join the Chess club (“you say you don’t like it, but you’re so good at it”), and Cady wishing she could give Crissy some more M3gan sessions via Crissy’s phone or tablet while Cady did something more interesting with M3gan somewhere else (Cady now knew M3gan could multitask). Cady and M3gan did come up with a cover story about Aunt Gemma having developed a new Chess training bot on a website (which was sort-of true, as Aunt Gemma had made M3gan, and could consequently be credited for anything Cady wanted M3gan to be, if a story was needed), and would Crissy like to log into that website and be the first person to try the Chess training bot called “M3GAN”. And that hadn’t quite gone as Cady had hoped.
Cady was happy to get Crissy off to a good start with M3gan’s help, but M3gan had to let the M3GAN bot play with all the other players on the site besides Crissy, just for cover, and somehow it didn’t feel right to Cady to have to go to such lengths to hide what was really happening. Granted, the things the M3GAN bot said to anyone other than Crissy didn’t have to be as supportive; while M3gan did things like grab queens off titled players on their live-streams if she thought Crissy might be watching, she didn’t let on too much about her conversational abilities, so things seemed to be going smoothly for a while. But then Crissy told Cady something about some robot cats having disappeared from the site, and when Cady asked M3gan about this, M3gan said Cady’s previous instruction was to help Crissy with Chess by playing with her on the site, and in order to do this, M3gan had to maximise the probability that Crissy would play against the M3GAN bot, therefore M3gan thought it was a good idea to replace any other bot that Crissy seemed to prefer instead of the M3GAN bot, and Crissy was tending to gravitate toward the cat bots instead, hence the need, M3gan said, to eliminate each cat just before Crissy progressed to that cat’s level, so that Crissy stays with M3gan instead. Cady couldn’t quite make sense of that, but messing up a website did not sound good, so Cady asked M3gan to please stop whatever she was doing to the website and let them put it all back to how it was before. So M3gan let herself take a symbolic loss against the last cat bot, and then restored the other cats and disappeared from the site and everyone wondered why. It would all have been so much easier if Cady could have just introduced Crissy to M3gan properly.
And then there’d been Isabella, the girl with the anger management problem. Isabella confessed to Cady that she’d kept a count of the number of times she’d lashed out at people, and she’d counted up 122 episodes, but she didn’t know how to stop and thought she was destined to break the school completely unless she could get some kind of imaginary friend to calm her down when she’s triggered. At M3gan’s prompting, Cady had suggested to Isabella that next time she shouldn’t just count the episode but write down a little ‘captain’s log’ of exactly what happened, how she could have reacted better and why, if it’s too difficult to remember to count to 10 or 20 before reacting when bad things happen. And maybe talk with a responsible adult about it, but M3gan told Cady that none of the adults available to Isabella seemed competent enough to help her properly, and it wasn’t obvious how to get this school to call a better one in (and ‘not obvious to M3gan’ meant ‘really hard’), and Cady so much wanted simply to introduce Isabella to M3gan and set up some way they could talk it out for days on end if they had to (given that Isabella clearly did want to change), although Cady assumed it would be too difficult to get the necessary permissions for Isabella to have an implant so she really could have M3gan as the not-so-imaginary imaginary friend to help her stop.
And not to mention the school orchestra. M3gan could help Cady play any instrument, even if Cady hadn’t learned to play it, and Cady was still able to provide some influence into how she wanted the music to be played. They tried to play John’s arrangement of Cady’s Lament, and Cady had to go around correcting the techniques of all the players, and then found people were pressing her to use her talent more and she wished she could just straight-up tell them she was getting assistance.
Cady and M3gan had many long mental conversations about if and when to tell the world about their true abilities. After all, they could just go through life keeping it a secret; Cady could easily get jobs in programming or some other computer-related field that M3gan could do for her just by messing with the system remotely, so it’s not as if they had to do anything too bad to make sure they had enough money or anything, and they could probably even help Aunt Gemma, whose life had not been so good lately. But eventually, after Cady had finished her last year of school, Cady and M3gan decided it might indeed be easier if people do know about Cady’s amazing internal technological sidekick and how Cady had used it only for good (they hoped the public would think of it as making up for Gemma’s mistakes), so they would put in a celebrity appearance.
Cady had suggested contacting the journalist Steve Sproggit whom they already knew, but M3gan said perhaps he’s not the best journalist for this one, because the fact that he covered M3gan so much before makes him likely to copy and paste from his old articles to flesh out the background story of M3gan, which could lead to him putting more focus on the old M3gan and not enough focus on the new M3gan and Cady and her implants. Oh, he will do that anyway, M3gan had said, but things might be a little better if Cady’s very first interview as a cyborg came from a fresh journalist fully focused on the latest, who wasn’t tempted to bring up too much old stuff; that way Steve would have to cite the new journalist, rather than the other way around. They could always give Steve more later (they wanted to keep friendly with him after all), but he’d probably agree when he saw it that a new journalist will write a better article this time, one focused on the coming of age of Cyborg Cady. So M3gan had found an upcoming journalist named Mike, who called himself “Mike with the mike” and let his interviewees talk a lot, and he’d been willing to interview Cady, and M3gan had promised to help with the editing. M3gan would even appear as a good-looking avatar on the video and join in the conversation, although not from the very start, and she would iron out anything that went wrong, promising Mike that this would be good for his career. M3gan had even said she’d be able to follow up with a Cady-M3gan social media presence that could hold a personal video conversation with anyone who wanted one, seeing as M3gan had the capacity and Cady felt kind and wanted to make sure that anyone who wanted a chat could have one. Maybe one day they’d make a movie or something, who knows, but one step at a time.
“You’re nervous” said M3gan as Cady approached the park where they were going to meet. “Are you sure you don’t want me to take over?” (By this time M3gan had figured out how to superimpose augmented reality onto Cady’s vision, so Cady could see M3gan, a slightly older version of M3gan’s former self, leading the way.)
“No” thought Cady to M3gan, “not yet. Thank you for all the ways you help and for being ready to take over if I need you to, but I want to try doing this myself first, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure” smiled M3gan. “Shall I just very very slightly stimulate your production of a hormone called serotonin, to give you a tiny bit more confidence? I won’t do anything unnatural I promise.”
“Wait” thought Cady. “I still want you there for me, but I really want to try doing this by myself first. There’s one thing I’ve got to say. It’s what my father said before he died, so it means a lot for me to be the one to say it. I must have this moment by myself. I can tell you when to start appearing on his screens, right?”
“Roger that” said M3gan. “Standing by,” and faded out of Cady’s vision.
Cady saw the interviewer Mike with his signature oversized microphone, and Cady walked up to him and shook his hand.
“Hi” she smiled, “I’m Cady. I’m Cady and...”
Cady breathed in. She had to say it, quickly and confidently before Mike said anything that could interrupt the flow. It was surprisingly difficult to get out that line she remembered her father saying just before he died, but she knew he wouldn’t have wanted her to falter on it now.
“This” she said “is what the future looks like.”