Max and Max the Search Engine

Meet MACSS

Max, Lizzie and their dad get off the car, filing their way into the National Museum of Computer Science with the rest of the rather average sized crowd. It was large, but not "international pop star" large. The crowd was expectedly very organised, made mostly up of scientists and businessmen. When they finally got in, they went to their reserved seats near the front row in a very large auditorium.

The scientists wheeled in what looked like a suit of armor on a stand, with long, thick wires connecting it to the ceiling. The crowd fell silent as the sound of a large switch being toggled echoed through the room. A few beeps are heard, and the room goes silent.

Silence.

For a tense few seconds, sounds of the scientists run through racks of computers in the room behind them trying to find whether something is wrong are the only sounds heard.

Max turned to his sister and began whispering.

"Do you think it's broke-"

"HELLO, WORLD!"

The suit of armor sprang to life, jumping off the stand and greeting everyone in the front row!

"Ha! You should have seen the look on the egghead's faces! They were running around like crazy!" 

Some laughter emerges from the audience, mostly from the younger college students. Most of the older audience members cracked a smile, while some fairly uptight-looking ones scowled in anger, as though they had something important to do.

"Alright, alright. I won't keep any of you waiting any longer, I promise! I'm M-A-C-S-S, and that stands for Mechanical and Artificial Computerised Security System,  but that's a mouthful so you can just call me Max."

This prompted quite a bit of applause from the audience, but MACSS held up his hand.

"Please, no applause. I'm just out of Beta, I don't think I have the memory needed to process that yet. Questions are alright any time, though. Anyway, I'm here to give all of you a primer on what exactly I do. Most of me isn't here. I'm a net of security cameras, placed all around the world."

A young college student raises his hand.

"Isn't this considered a violation of privacy? I don't believe the government should be allowed to keep secret records of us." He says in a concerned voice.

"Don't you worry about that," Max confidently says, "Along with being designed with morality as a first priority, everything in my recordings and findings will be accessible to the people involved in them. Anything containing you can be deleted if you print and fill out some forms you can download from my website."

"That's not so bad... I suppose..."

"Besides, if I don't work out I'll just be repurposed for something else anyway. I'm sure the scientists there can find a use for me somewhere. Moving on..." Max says, with a nearly undetectable hint of uncertainty in his voice.

"How do we know it's not just a guy controlling the suit?" Max the human whispers to his dad.

"Oh, I know. Syens showed it to me himself. I actually talked to him before he was put into the suit. He used to just be a normal server rack."

"Alright, if you say so..."

 The rest of the show passed rather uneventfully, with few questions being asked and mostly being about hardware and programming. While this was incredibly interesting to most of the people in the audience, Max and Lizzie were bored out of their minds. After what felt like an eternity, they left the museum for Old Guy Taber's house.

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AN: Max Blaik is writing the next chapter. It's pretty much this one except from the perspective of MACSS.