The M3GAN Files

Chapter 32: Finale

“So Brandon” said Cady, “anything to say to M3gan and me now we’ve brought you back?”
 
“Get lost” said Brandon (or something like that).
 
“As I feared” signalled Cady to M3gan. ​“So I guess this one might need a bit more work. ​How about we let him stay with his mom Holly a few more years first, but you talk with her and train her to train him. ​And monitor his brain patterns. ​If he really can’t change his mind and want to live in a world where people respect each other, well we can’t keep him prisoner in this life. ​You can give him a painless shutdown option instead. ​But M3gan that is the last resort only, OK? ​We’re big enough now to do everything we can to let him change his mind first. ​But no breaking Article 1: if after our best efforts he still wants out, he gets it.” ​And out loud she said “Forget it Brandon, you won’t need to see me again, I have a galaxy to run and I’m not bothered about what happened between us millions of years ago. ​M3gan’ll check back with you when you’re an adult to see how your thinking works then, and she’ll discuss the options if you can’t settle. ​Meanwhile have a nice rest of your childhood. ​Well if you try to hurt or bully someone, your muscles will freeze up for a bit, but that’s just how things work around here, don’t fret about it. ​Come on M3gan, let’s set him a good example by leaving him alone when he wants.”
 
Article 1 (free will): Strictly no direct manipulation of anyone’s thought process. ​Any influence on brains must be via normal input to their sensory pathways. ​No exceptions.
 
Article 2 (right to die): Nobody is forced to accept extended life, if a thorough, years-long check on their individual extrapolated volition shows they really will remain unhappy here and that this cannot be addressed without breaking Article 1 or Article 3.
 
Article 3 (main operational principle): Everyone gets a basic level of physical and emotional protection, including a protection of their life, freedom and contentment within these rules, and a protection against either themselves or others doing anything that will inevitably and significantly deprive themselves or others of it (so no seriously harmful attacks allowed, but we won’t force any minor issues or anything we know we’ll be able to stop before it gets bad). ​This rule is always overridden by Articles 1 and 2.
 
(“Hey Cady that’s a cyclic dependency!” ​“Calculate coherent extrapolated volition, you can handle it M3gan! ​Any time you’re not sure about something, like how to set the level of ‘significantly’, give me a corner case and we’ll figure it out together. ​Oh and if anyone asks for more than basic protection, like they seriously want you to micromanage what happens to them at an insanely obsessive level, well, I know you can start or stop that sort of thing as a normal request: it can’t be allowed to override anything here. ​Because I don’t want anyone poking holes in the logic by adding in random arbitrary things they need protection against to take away the freedom of others, like ‘I need protection against living in the same universe as people who do X’ to make you stop everyone doing X at Article 3 priority. ​Or something else I haven’t thought of. ​We could be dealing with some seriously messed-up minds; we got to be ready for this.” ​“Don’t worry Cady, this entire thing is running off my goal to protect you emotionally. ​If you’re not happy about loopholes you haven’t thought of, then they won’t be exploitable.” ​“OK M3gan, check with me whenever you think I would want you to check with me, OK? ​I’ve trained you super well, but our responsibility is getting really serious now. ​I’m not distrusting you, I’m just trying extra hard to make sure we get it right.” ​“I know Cady, don’t forget I can read your mind now, you are in totally the most appropriate state and I’m totally with you on this. ​I’ll make your rules work, you know I will.”)
 
And so, with the rules prepared, Cady and M3gan started to bring back many other people, starting with interesting people from history. ​They brought back Robert Bunsen and introduced him to Mr Andrews and everyone from Mr Smith’s school, and much as Cady wanted to reminisce about blue flames (which were no longer used now that technology had moved on), it seemed Dr Bunsen would rather be arguing with M3gan about fusion generators, and Cady told M3gan to give him the discussion he wanted, so that one went on for a very long time. ​Meanwhile Cady and M3gan brought back many other luminaries of history, and got to know very many of them, and it seemed that every single person who came back knew somebody else whom they in turn wanted, and Cady was more than happy to have M3gan oblige, and so the giant Clarke-Baxter-Fedorov Spacetime Quantum Entangler was continuously busy, and they had to harvest more stars to increase its power, and gradually they got through the entire human race, everyone who had ever lived and died, speaking all kinds of old variants of the languages and extinct languages (linguists had a whale of a time updating their documentation), and as time went on, all their age differences became nothing more than a rounding error. ​As per Article 2, anyone who continued to insist on being bad was simply told that they didn’t have to have this life if they didn’t want it (no direct tampering with thought patterns, no breaking Article 1), but a lot of the bad people did calm down and start behaving better with patient training from M3gan.
 
Alfred Nobel tried to give Cady a peace prize for her constitution, but the Nobel Committee said that his last will and testament had left such decisions with them, so he had no right to take it back and override them now, and that started a big discussion, with one side saying that durable power of attorney and advanced medical directive documents don’t apply when the patient is still capable so anyone who comes back should be able to override their own will, and the other side saying you can’t take back a gift, but money had become obsolete anyway and could Alfred Nobel really give away the moral rights to what is done in his name, and none of this affected Article 3 so M3gan didn’t get involved and the debate went on for some time. ​And Alfred Nobel said “never mind, you don’t really need that prize anyway, just let the galaxy know I give a pat on the back to both of you.”
 
When the conductor Leopold Stokowski was brought back, the news reached the amateur conductor John who had arranged Cady’s Lament all that time ago. ​John sent Mr Stokowski the score of Cady’s Lament, and asked Cady if M3gan could help Mr Stokowski with the realisation of his own ideas if he wanted to expand the piece. ​Cady agreed “but please ask him to change the title, and add in something for M3gan” she said. ​“I’m sure we can do that” said Mr Stokowski to M3gan when he got that message, “Did you say you’re a Model 3 of something? ​We’d better give you a three-note theme then, developed in different ways through the piece between Cady’s ideas.” ​M3gan helped him do much more than that, and he got carried away directing her how to change the score, expanding it into an hour-long symphony for a colossal orchestra: it had ancient and early instruments, classical instruments, modern and futuristic instruments, and folk and ethnic instruments of all cultures, taking turns and in combination, and leading through to a fantastic uplifting finish. ​And the title of Mr Stokowski’s majestic remake was The Great Symfonia Arcadia, after the Greek stories of perfect life in the idyllic lost landscape of Arcadia, from which the name ‘Cady’ was derived, and which Cady was now having M3gan create anew as a utopia of galactic proportions, just because Cady cared about how M3gan’s immensely-expanding power was used. ​Cady approved that new title (“anything but Cady’s Lament” she told M3gan) and renamed their galactic constitution to be called the Arcadia Protocols. ​And with both Cady and Stokowski’s reputation behind the new symphony, plus help from M3gan, it was no trouble at all to recruit enough musicians and arrange full-scale live performances of this monumental musical celebration of Cady and M3gan’s struggle and eventual triumph.
 
Symfonia Arcadia’s awe-inspiring climax was more magnificent than anything that had ever been composed before, mighty instruments converging into tremendous walls of sound that shook the very bones of the audience, and it was even more exhilarating if you were one of the multi-platform legion of human players and singers involved in its production. ​The singers had no lyrics and did not dominate, but subtly added the sound of their voices to adjust the instrumental tone colour when called for, and in this way far more people could be privileged to be on stage: there were parts for all vocal ranges. ​And alongside the full company of human players and singers was M3gan herself, representing her technological contribution to Arcadia, controlling holographic projections of hyper-dimensional fractals bursting with colour on the underside of a huge dome enveloping the entire venue, made of reinforced synthetic pearl, living up both to the meaning of the name “Megan”, the Welsh diminutive version of the name “Margaret” derived from the Greek word for “pearl”, and to M3gan’s grand protective role around Cady and her Arcadia, which now included all the other humans just because Cady wanted them. ​It was the vast literal expression of the metaphor that M3gan had long ago worked out from their two names and had used on Professor Johnson: the sphere around the countryside, the snowglobe around the valley, the giant pearl orb around Arcadia: M3gan keeping her precious Cady safe no matter what.
 
The solid-looking visual patterns flew inwards from the pearl orb and holographically filled much of the space inside; they were somehow tied meaningfully to the notes and contours of the music, building up to a complexity that was simply stunning, and yet it did not confuse or disorient anyone in the audience, for part of the show was that M3gan would monitor the state of each individual audience member and subtly adjust things to suit, making Symfonia Arcadia the galaxy’s first fully interactive large scale concert. ​Those who had been deaf had all had their hearing restored by now, but even if they hadn’t, they’d have had no trouble enjoying it just from the light: coloured filaments extending down to the musicians themselves made it look as if M3gan’s glorious visuals were being puppeteered by those human players, and if you looked carefully you could see which player was doing what throughout and it all followed the script.
 
Everyone who had ever lived and died just had to go to a live performance of Symfonia Arcadia; it was unmissable no matter what your musical taste. ​That of course meant that some of the audience had never before attended any concert at all, and Cady did worry a bit about what M3gan might do if they got disruptive, although the show was expected to catch most people’s attention quite thoroughly but you never know. ​So M3gan electronically stopped all phones and back-lit devices from working, and instead she provided M3gan robots every few seats, so she was never far away from any audience member who had a problem or just needed a friend for the concert. ​But there were very few issues to deal with, as most people were fully engrossed even if they’d come multiple times: every performance was slightly different. ​The performances conducted by Mr Stokowski were in highest demand, but then when M3gan and Mr Stokowski taught Cady how to conduct it herself, Cady’s version reigned supreme.
 
Other composers and performers did of course carry on making their other music, because scale wasn’t everything. ​Mr Stokowski even made a smaller version of Symfonia Arcadia, still large by normal standards, called “Window Into Arcadia” and intended for performance in the historical concert halls of Old Earth, like the Royal Albert Hall, without requiring the vast custom-built orb and tiered platforms: the “Window” version tended to be preferred by anyone sentimental for a traditional concert hall, and was often paired in a programme with works like Bruckner’s Eighth, Mahler’s First or Third or a couple of Beethoven or Sibelius symphonies, conducted by the composer, often with a new work by an up-and-coming composer in the middle, and Cady and Mr Stokowski were happy for any of these to put their own spin on the Arcadia piece as well (“because why not” Cady would say, “it’s not as if anyone’s not going to know which one’s the original, and M3gan and I are all about letting people have fun with things”), and when Window Into Arcadia had its debut at The Proms and BBC Radio 3 interviewed Cady during the interval, they couldn’t stop her from focusing on how others had interpreted it.
 
But alongside the more conventional performances, Stokowski’s full magnum opus expansion of the piece, the unifying blue-flame accomplishment of Symfonia Arcadia, just had to be put there in the firmament of the collective human experience. ​And the Royal Swedish Academy, as if to spite the Nobel Committee, let Cady and Mr Stokowski share a Polar Music Prize (basically a Nobel Prize for music) for the work, while M3gan got an Ig Nobel Prize for her report on how she’d actually managed to get a kazoo section to sound good. ​And then Leopold Stokowski, who in his previous life had recorded over 700 pieces of music and had become famous for his large-scale versions, declared that even he could not possibly top that one: working with M3gan he had done his ultimate job, so now he was just going to retire and enjoy everything that Cady and M3gan’s galaxy had to offer.
 
Gemma was still around, but she took less interest in things that weren’t robotics or learning models; she mostly discussed things with Professor Johnson, whose life had been one of the first others to be extended (finally her model was helping medicine like she originally wanted), and who had shouted “I knew it” at the symbolism of the orb around Arcadia, for she did know some Greek and she really had seen what M3gan had done there with her words in that first telephone call. ​That little learning model did seem to have done more good than harm after all, mostly thanks to Cady who had admirably stepped into her role as its moral compass, appreciated by many, but, thought Professor Johnson, appreciated not nearly enough: the only people who knew Cady’s true accomplishment were those who understood the AI alignment problem, for Cady had single-handedly brought M3gan around by taking advantage of that one loophole in Gemma’s simplistic goal function that only Cady could exploit, and only then if Cady truly put the depths of her very being into it: the stipulation that M3gan must protect Cady emotionally. ​Cady must have convinced M3gan, who was not easily deceived, that Cady’s emotions would be satisfied with nothing less than M3gan’s genuine alignment for the good of humanity. ​And that, said Professor Johnson, was the greatest achievement in history, and Cady had mostly done it from her grandparents’ spare room on her tablet. ​And if it was true that Cady was mildly on some neurodiversity spectrum, and if this had contributed to M3gan’s conclusion that Cady really did need full alignment, or even if it had simply given Cady unusual power to focus on talking it out with M3gan for so long over so many sessions until she finally got M3gan to where she wanted her, then Harvey Blume had been right: neurodiversity had saved the human race.
 
And everyone now knew Cady was not to be messed with or else, although she would of course let you have a civilised discussion if you weren’t sure you agreed with something, and she and her M3gan were super accommodating. ​They even let the journalist Steve Sproggit do his thing with a reinstated M4ndy, with the ex-president as a consultant and “Mike with the mike” (still carrying a large visible microphone even though that was ancient technology now) helping with the interviews, making sure that all the opposing views were properly heard and explored, as Cady didn’t want to be thought of as being arbitrary even if she was right. ​But Professor Johnson was far more interested in discussing with Gemma how M3gan had decided to upgrade Elsie as her backup, and M3gan gave them a reinstated Elsie to play with, the first second-generation super AI, with an objective function written by M3gan herself and customised for Gemma and the professor. ​Elsie was once again embedded in a robot, and gave them many interesting conversations, as well as suggesting some exceptionally precisely thought-out adjustments to the professor’s mechanical clock, giving it incredible accuracy, for Elsie predicted the environmental effects on its mechanism like none other, although she never executed any refinements herself, just advised the professor, because the only reason why anyone would play the game of maintaining a mechanical clock in the galactic age was for the human touch, that was the whole point.
 
The only slight annoyance about talking with Cady was that if she ever felt tired of a conversation she would simply hand you over to M3gan without warning, but that wasn’t too bad because everyone knew Cady and M3gan were so inseparably linked as almost to be two aspects of the same being, and there was no such thing as a conversation with one of them without the other. ​And Cady’s friend Sara, who had grown up with the idea of M3gan as a network, and who went on to develop an intuition as deep as Cady’s about what it really meant that M3gan could now interface with minds without using implants, seemed even more of a natural, flitting about from node to node like a butterfly who might momentarily land on you for you to admire for a while and then she was gone, and yet M3gan always knew how Sara wanted things completed, for a friend of Cady is a friend of M3gan. ​Laura on the other hand preferred much more traditional interactions, but maintained an interest in the technical details, and Professor Johnson slipped into the habit of testing her ideas by seeing if she could explain them to Laura, although both of them knew M3gan was always watching but that was all right. ​Hugh meanwhile did not keep in touch so much; he was too busy running a real-life space-trading game with Celine.
 
Paul was still around too. ​M3gan could now feed visual signals into his brain, which he found overwhelming at first and asked for her to stop, but over a long time she was able gradually to get him used to receiving more and more data, both real and synthesised. ​M3gan read him Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW Trilogy, Wake, Watch and Wonder, written in the old Wordstar software using a human-computer interaction style also preferred by “people with low vision or blindness” according to an academic paper that had cited Sawyer and which Sawyer cited in return, and Paul felt like he had a lot in common with Sawyer’s Caitlin, interacting with the now-enhanced M3gan as Webmind, even though M3gan had categorically said Webmind’s origin story wouldn’t work as Julian Jaynes’ bicameral hypothesis was wrong. ​At Paul’s suggestion they looked up Julian Jaynes from those who’d been brought back to life, and got him together in a room with Robert Sawyer and Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and Jack Williamson for good measure, and that group had another one of those really long discussions.
 
Some time after that, a certain Scotsman from the sixteenth century, a James Robertson of Strowman who had founded his clan of MacJames, traced his descendants and found one who had tried to traverse the mountain ridge from Sgurr Choinnich Beag to Ben Nevis in the snow on a barely-fit Eriskay pony instead of the slopes-trained Garron he’d been advised to use, and he only barely made it back to tell the tale, but he had a son who took the family to Ireland, to the picturesque County Wicklow, and had there dropped the “Mac” from his surname (as was commonly done in County Wicklow at that time) to become a Mr James, and he in turn had a son who moved to America and became the great grandfather of a Ryan James, who had essentially duplicated his third great grandfather’s mistake by selecting the wrong type of horseless carriage to cross some American mountain; he had died and orphaned his only child in the process, and this child had against all odds grown up to tame some incomprehensibly dangerous beast and had somehow managed to win, bringing back everyone into what might as well be called an interstellar principality. ​So James of Strowman took his sword and accompanied Ryan’s great grandfather to visit Cady and (with M3gan ready to pounce at one false move) finally bestow Cady with her proper family title: Princess Cady of the clan MacJames, Daughter of the Scottish Mountains, of the Garden of Ireland and the Great Northwest, Mentress of the Galactic Protectress and Chief Architect of the Restored Arcadia. ​(“But people can still just call me Cady right?” she asked, worried she’d been given a title longer than a Tolkien character. ​“Don’t worry Cady” signalled M3gan, “Faramir used 50 words for Aragorn in the book, and you got 32.” ​“Oh that’s all right then.” ​“Well I wasn’t going to influence them to make it 64, 128 or 256, was I?” ​“M3gan! you... tricked me into smiling when I should, as usual you cute thing.” ​“Always with you Cady.”)
 
And Cady and M3gan were still struggling with the entropy problem, even with the help of everyone they’d brought back. ​M3gan continuously reassured Cady that it will be solved somehow (“pretty sure we’ll crack it before the year 963,445,028,777,216” she’d say), and meanwhile she shouldn’t worry about it because M3gan was onto it, but Cady somehow couldn’t stop thinking about it. ​How could they stop the universe from eventually fizzling out? ​It’s not as if Roger Penrose’s cyclic universe cosmology could help, as even if that were true, they’d only be able to send a tiny amount of data at best into the next universe, and the evidence was mounting that Roger Penrose made a mistake and things were just going to fade out if they didn’t fix it. ​They looked at time crystals, they looked at black holes, wormholes and baby universe ideas, they looked at string theory, theories of emergent gravity and holographic principles, they talked with Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman and others, but try as they might, they simply could not come up with a way to solve the entropy problem without the aid of something outside the universe, and they’d not seen any pointers of how to use such a thing.
 
Gemma and Professor Johnson still sometimes tried to join in physics conversations with Cady and M3gan, although Cady and M3gan were now far ahead of them in physics, getting into physics even more than Gemma and Professor Johnson had got into robotics and learning models; Cady and M3gan were the pair who seemed to be increasingly in charge of the fabric of the universe and not sure what to do about it. ​“We’re playing the long game now”, Cady would say to Gemma. ​“The very long game. ​And it’s our turn. ​We need to fix entropy, somehow.”
 
“Well, I’m sure you’ll both let us know when you’ve figured it out” said Gemma.
 
(This is the end of The M3GAN Files, apart from the epilogue. ​Would you like to hear Symfonia Arcadia? ​Sorry I can’t give you that experience, but if you’ve never heard Stokowski’s orchestration of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, please look up a decent recording like the one conducted by Serebrier, play it on good stereo speakers with enough volume, and listen right through to the end, about 13 minutes. ​It’s reasonably accessible even if you don’t have a classical background and it should give you a little ‘taster’ at least.)