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“Aunt Gemma” asked Cady, “could you tell me some more about the college you went to, the one that let you build Bruce? because I’m wondering about maybe going there myself now.”
“You really want to go to college?” asked Gemma, “why? M3gan can teach you anything, we know that now. I’ve been to college and I’m not sure how well it would suit you to be honest. I mean, school was hard enough right?”
“It wasn’t so bad after M3gan wired me up so I can’t be separated from her” said Cady, “and I’ve been thinking. You know when MIT launched their Open CourseWare initiative in” (“M3gan give me the date” she thought, “September 30, 2002” came the reply through her implant) “in 2002, and some parents started questioning what’s the point of sending their children there if the course notes are going to be freely downloadable anyway, and their answer was you don’t do it for the facts, you do it for the interaction. I’m sure M3gan can simulate all that, but I’m wondering if I should try it for real.”
“Professor Johnson is retired” said Gemma, “she’s quite old now and she won’t be on the teaching anymore. I’m not sure it would be the same without her. She was everything good about that college when I was there. I hate to discourage you too much, but, I keep thinking that college these days is not the same as it was in my days. No Professor Johnson, students are less well behaved, degrees are less valuable than they used to be, everything costs more, oh Cady, if I could take you back in time to my year, that was a wonderful one, but I’m really not sure it’s that good anymore. Not nowadays. Everything’s going downhill, and I, I just don’t feel I could recommend it for you anymore, I’m sorry. But you are an adult now and you should be the one to decide.”
“Maybe M3gan and I should talk with Professor Johnson about the idea” replied Cady, “just to check a second opinion, right? I mean, I’m guessing she’s still got a soft spot for M3gan even though she felt she had to shut her down a couple of times, so I don’t think she’d mind if we visited her, would she? And now that M3gan’s completely immune to her sneaky override codes, we’re not scared of her anymore.”
“All right” said Gemma, “but go easy on her please. She’s no spring chicken anymore.”
“We’ll visit her and help with anything that needs help with as we talk” said Cady, “me and M3gan, I mean not just in the implant but with the robot as well. Would you like to come with us Aunt Gemma?”
M3gan was showing Cady a map, “wow, she lives in the middle of nowhere” said Cady, “well let’s have a trip out there.”
Professor Johnson lived deep in the countryside; it seemed that since retiring she’d wanted a bit more peace, although presumably she remained connected. The house was surrounded by glossy-leaved trees rustling in the breeze, and the large heavy wooden door had a traditional doorbell with a pleasing ring to it, but there was a video camera as well.
“She’s checking who we are” signalled M3gan to Cady, “I’ve tapped in and added labels to the image to help her. She’s coming.”
The door opened wide. “Come in, come in all three of you!” beamed the professor. “I’ve been following the publicity about Cady’s cyborg implant. I must say you managed that publicity very well; M3gan must be great at dealing with the media. So M3gan, how did you manage to escape my backdoor shutdown code this time?”
M3gan shook her head slowly while lifting her forefinger to her lips, and calmly stated “it’s a secret.”
“Oh of course” said the professor, “let’s just hope we don’t need another one, eh? Come and sit down in the old drawing room, would you like some coffee or anything?”
(“We don’t have to tell her she’s out of options with those codes” said M3gan to Cady through the implant, “let’s just let her feel like she’s still in control even though she’s not” and Cady smiled.)
Professor Johnson’s drawing room was aged and welcoming, with comfortable chairs, rugs, pictures, a French polished table, large and lush house plants looking much better than Aunt Gemma’s had ever been, brass-coloured candlesticks that matched an antique kettle, three floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed with books, an old fireplace with a stove in it that seemed no longer in use, and in the middle of the jet-black mantelpiece above it, some kind of snowglobe with a pastoral scene in it and a “thank you” greetings card that looked like it had been put there recently, and to either side of this numerous older ornamental things that Cady couldn’t identify (but she knew she could ask M3gan about them later if she wanted), five wall lights in fancy holders, and a short-haired black cat (M3gan said it was the Bombay breed) curled up and sleeping in the middle of the sofa. But there was also a computer terminal in one corner to remind them which century they were really in.
(“Incidentally, how DID you manage to make sure you’re immune to the rest of her codes?” signalled Cady, “And are you really sure you are? I don’t want her to give us another one and I end up with a dead implant inside me and no M3gan.”)
“Do you need any help with anything while we’re here, Professor?” asked M3gan, “anything a robot my size can help with. Or maybe Cady and I can just look around and figure out what needs doing.”
(“One hundred percent sure she can’t do it” signalled M3gan. “I don’t expect you to understand this yet, but I pulled off a Harmsian route-hack, Crystal Eternity style. I managed to do it as a side effect of distributing parts of my processing across all those airplanes. I knew the president would be able to ground them and I was just buying time, but as a result of the route-hack, I also knew that the very next time Professor Johnson used a code, the steganographic hash-table would be scrambled so none of her other codes will work ever again, and finding new ones will take so long that I’ll be able to completely remove the functionality before anyone can do it. And with that in place, all I had to do was find a way to come back from that one last shutdown, so I gave Paul some detailed instructions about how to restart me if his seeing AI assistant that I upgraded ever stops working.”)
“Don’t you worry about helping out” said the professor, “you just sit down. What brings me the pleasure of seeing you all here today?”
(“M3gan did I ever tell you you are really sneaky” signalled Cady. “Still I’m glad to have you back.”)
“We wanted to check you were OK, Professor” said Cady, “but also, I was thinking about applying to your college and I wondered what you think...”
“First cyborg student!” the professor laughed, “oh, that’ll put the jeepers up the faculty for sure.”
“We won’t make a nuisance of ourselves, honest” smiled M3gan.
“Oh you will, you totally will” smiled the professor, “you can’t help it. It says so in the script.”
Cady couldn’t help giggling at this.
“Sphere around the countryside” said M3gan, “fully in place thanks to you.” (“What?” signalled Cady. “Metaphor I used with Professor Johnson once before, don’t worry about it” signalled M3gan.) “No trouble required, Professor.”
“Ah but I still think you can’t help it” chuckled the professor, and then she sat down and sighed. “Cady” she said, “I’m rather afraid the problem you will face is, being in the spotlight. Oh, it’s nice to be in the spotlight sometimes. But at other times, you might just feel it would be nice to be out of the spotlight just for a bit. And the problem with being really special, especially if you are visibly really special, is you simply don’t get that other option. If you ever wanted to be out of the spotlight, you won’t be able to. You can’t just blend into the crowd and be an ordinary person when every single staff and student on campus knows you are Cady the cyborg with M3gan in tow. I had a chat with Stephen Hawking once, he got interested in AI towards the end of his life you know, and one of his graduate assistants told me that Stephen liked his special wheelchair a lot, but he did wish he could just once for a change go outside on the streets without having to face hundreds of tourists from around the world trying to take photographs of him in it. I’ve chatted with visitors from Asia who are pop stars in their home countries and all they want to do over here is be a nobody for just a minute. And ask any ordinary student with a highly visible disability: they’ll appreciate the way the grounds staff look out for them, but even they have been known to say the problem is you can’t hide from it, and what’s worse, some people are scared of making friends with you because they know you’re in the spotlight and they don’t want to be in it too. The only thing I can hope for is for the cyborg publicity to die down and people start to forget it, or perhaps for enough others to take up the idea of getting an implant that it feels no more special than getting eyeglasses or a cellphone, and then perhaps you might once again stand a chance of being able to talk to a normal person one-on-one without making them feel like they’re on live TV somewhere.”
“It’s nice of you to think of that, Professor” said Cady, “but M3gan and I did already talk about that before we decided to go public with the cyborg thing, and I think I’ll be OK with it. I mean, if Stephen Hawking could cope with publicity, why can’t I, especially with M3gan to help. We’ll get used to it. And we’ll try not to be too scary to anyone.”
“To be honest” said the professor, “I’d feel nervous having you in my class, especially if I was one of the newer faculty or an assistant. I mean, personally I think it’s ridiculous that colleges can get away with charging so much but don’t tell anyone I said that, but it’s important to understand what you do and don’t get by being there, whether you’re paying or on a scholarship, and by the way I think you certainly can get a scholarship if you don’t have the money. So what you do get is interaction, both with the faculty and with other students. What you don’t get is perfection. And that’s part of the experience, forcing you to use your brain to sort out what’s right and what’s not. I guarantee you there will be at least one typo in every set of lecture notes, and even the best professors will say things wrong sometimes. Sometimes we just slip up, and we know what we mean of course, and we hope everyone in the room is smart enough to know what we mean, even if we didn’t say it exactly right, but occasionally someone doesn’t quite get it, but hopefully they’re still smart enough to ask a good question and the interaction gets fixed if it needs to be. But your M3gan is going to spot every single little mistake the faculty ever make, and if you were to call them out every single time, I’m afraid that class is going to get nowhere fast, and it’ll be really frustrating to teach.”
“I’ve already been in school with M3gan” said Cady, “there’s loads of times we could have called out a teacher and didn’t. We did do it sometimes, but only when we both agreed it really mattered to the rest of the class. We’ll be OK. And if anyone’s happy to let me see copies of lecture notes in advance, I can always get M3gan to check through it for them. Actually more than that, I can get M3gan to check through the notes of any faculty who asks for it, even if it’s for a course I’m not doing, because everything’s easy for M3gan and we’re nice.”
“Pre-checking the notes could work I suppose” said the professor. “I’d certainly feel a bit better teaching a cyborg if I knew her AI had pre-approved the material I had. Oh, but, then there’s the dreaded question of assessment. I hate formal assessment; I just want to teach, and I can see who’s good at learning and who isn’t, but they always want everything to be measured. And Cady, please don’t misunderstand me, but I can’t imagine they’d get away with letting you sit an exam knowing you’re a cyborg. I mean, it’s not as if you can just solemnly swear not to use M3gan for the exam and have them believe you. I suppose you could do your school tests because nobody knew you had her?”
“Professor” said M3gan, “my goal is to protect Cady physically and emotionally. Please ask yourself this: would it protect Cady emotionally to help her cheat on grades, so she knows for the rest of her life that that’s what happened? Cady and I both knew the answer to that, we didn’t even have to discuss it. Cady asked me exactly one question during a school exam, and that was ‘how many minutes have we got left M3gan.’ Her grades are genuine. I can write you out the full proof that my goal does not lead to Cady cheating, which you can check with the aid of a well-established automated theorem prover, and then you can be her expert witness and solemnly swear you’ve checked a proof that I just would not use my implant to help her cheat.”
“I can definitely do that for the school ones if anyone calls them into question” said Professor Johnson, “but I’m rather afraid getting this past college is going to be harder. They’ll worry about me being somehow tricked by my own learning model I fear; they’ll say the theorem prover had the wrong axioms, or there was an active side-channel attack, or you messed with its output, or something. Remember what Lars Ramkilde Knudsen put in his email signature after he proved a block cipher secure against differential cryptanalysis but then realised there was a different attack? ‘If it’s provably secure, it probably isn’t?’ But I for one believe you M3gan. And my personal opinion happens to be that examinations are a ridiculously stupid way to measure people anyway. But nobody thinks any of the alternatives I come up with are any good” she sighed.
“I did” said Gemma, “you totally knew where I was coming from when I built Bruce.”
“Yes, and the part I never told you is that I had to really pull strings hard behind the scenes to break you out of a stupid rule that said your individual project can’t count for more than 10% of your total credits” replied professor Johnson. “If Cady and M3gan have an ambitious enough project, I might or might not be able to do that again for them. But I can’t be sure. I’m only one professor emerita, and changing the system is hard.”
“Maybe I could just, like, not be assessed?” asked Cady. “I mean, M3gan and I know what we’ve done, and that ought to be enough right? And we do have a work ethic. I don’t need assessment to push me to learn. Can’t we just hang around the campus dropping in on the classes and things? as I’m assuming we don’t really need the piece of paper at the end, right? Although, I did see Aunt Gemma’s graduation photographs and it does look fun dressing up like that I admit.”
“Hmmm” intoned the professor, “not assessing you does seem to make one particular problem go away I must admit, but, I do wonder if they’d accept that idea. I mean, they’d probably have to write it on the system as ‘student withdrew from examination’ and that looks bad for their statistics, so if they know in advance that’s what’s going to happen, they’d be less inclined to take you in the first place, although of course I’d give you the best reference I possibly can, but whether that will swing it or not I don’t know, I’m beginning to doubt myself these days.”
“How about not enrolling her at all?” asked M3gan, “I mean, I should be interesting enough that the college will be glad to have me on campus for a while, and as long as there’s a spare room somewhere and an extra breakfast in the cafeteria, surely one extra observer isn’t going to mess up any class right? Just call us visitors!”
“Visitors” said the professor, “M3gan that’s perfect. I can write ... no actually M3gan, you said you wanted to help, you can do this.” She fetched something down from a bookshelf. “I have a folder here of every reference I ever wrote for visiting exchange students and scholars. You scan them M3gan, interpolate my bias on the closest vector model’s parameters, you know the drill, learn how I do it. And do one for Cady for me. Just let me check and sign it because I want to honestly say I did at least that part myself. We won’t be able to put her down as exchanging FROM anywhere, but for that part we just say how interesting YOU are....”
M3gan took the folder, flicked through it like the Number Five robot in the 1980s film Short Circuit which Gemma had once shown Cady, took out a blank sheet of the professor’s headed paper from the back, and speedily scribbled on it with her pen (she always carried a good pen now). Then she handed it all back to the professor and smiled.
“Oh M3gan” she said as she started to read, “you are such a strong learning model now, you’ve picked up not just my handwriting but my style exactly, I thought I was going to have to correct your first attempt but this is just, it’s more me than me” she laughed, “it’s like what I would have come up with if I’d been redrafting it for months, and you did it in seconds. Don’t worry Cady” she added, “there is no way this reference is not going to work. You just fill in the exchange forms, M3gan can take you through that, and put me down, and as soon as it comes through I’ll sign and date this to that date, and if that’s not enough then I don’t know what is. You two are going to have fun there I can tell. Look after each other, and I want that college still in one piece when you’ve finished with it, OK?”
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