Chapter Text
“Marinette!”
“Yes?” She looked up from her chaos of notes on feasible regions and language models, meeting Ivan’s impassive eyes.
“Top boss wants to see you,” he replied, his face set in a frown.
“Really? W-what for?”
He didn’t wait. Before she was even finished speaking, he set off out the door, offering no explanation. Marinette frantically pushed herself away from the desk and scrambled into the hallway. Ivan was waiting at the corner, but as soon as Marinette caught sight of him, he disappeared again with long and motivated steps.
Mrs Tsurugi wanted to see her. The founder and CEO – a genius at everything to do with programming and electronics, probably the wealthiest woman on the continent, and famously very strict – wanted to see her.
… she must have done something really terrible if word had reached the literal boss of basically everyone in a two mile radius…
She swallowed, tried her hardest to keep pace with Ivan – because if she’d messed up this badly, she would at least not disappoint Mrs Tsurugi further by being late for her reprimand.
“What did I do?” she asked him, but he just maintained his sour expression – didn’t even look at her. He towered over her; she felt like she was talking to a giant lemon tree.
A few minutes later, they stood in front of gilded double doors, with no name plaque but instead a double monogram on each door: T.T. Marinette’s heart started beating faster. Whatever was going on – she really hoped she wouldn’t be fired. She’d poured her heart and soul into her work – programming, digital layouts, data solutions, hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was her way to create, to invent, to express herself.
Maybe this was about the AGI project. She’d been the lead for the cognitive group, when they built the brain, had something gone wrong in testing? But… Max would have told her about that…
Ivan landed three slow, ponderous knocks on the door – and then a sharp voice from inside said, “Come in.”
Marinette looked at him. He nodded his head sideways to the door, still not speaking. He hadn’t said a single word since the office. But she sighed, reached out for the doorknob, steeled herself, touched the doorknob, steeled herself again, took a deep breath to steel herself some more, and then pulled the door slightly ajar – enough to put her mouth through the gap.
“Mrs Tsurugi?” she said. “You wanted to see me? I’m Ma- I mean, I’m Ms Dupain-Cheng.”
“Marinette,” said Tomoe Tsurugi, her voice dispassionate. “Come inside. I have been expecting you.”
Marinette pulled the door a little more open, then stepped through. Possibly the grandest, most spectacular room she had ever seen unveiled itself before her – it was enormous with an astoundingly high ceiling, gilded, covered in soft but plain wall-to-wall carpeting. The curved-out back wall was constructed entirely out of windows, which tapered inwards and allowed through incredible amounts of light, which combined with the ornate lamps and the lack of decor to make the whole space feel very exposed. There wasn’t even a chair on Marinette’s side. Not a good sign.
She closed the door behind her and walked closer to the desk, stopping a few yards short and immediately going into her deferential pose. She cleared her throat, too, to make sure Mrs Tsurugi knew where she was – she didn’t know what type of blindness the woman had, if she could see but just not very well or if she was completely sightless, but she wasn’t going to make this more awkward than it needed to be.
“There’s no need to be impatient, Marinette,” said Mrs Tsurugi. She was tapping her index finger on the desk, beating out a steady rhythm into the cavernous room.
After a few seconds – probably, though it felt much longer – she nodded to herself, and pushed a thick and overflowing manila towards Marinette’s end of the desk. It was filled with papers and blueprints, from the looks of it, as well as some plastic folders with unknown but lumpy contents that made the manila bulge even more. “Are you aware of Tsurugi Technologies’ forays into artificial intelligence?” Tomoe asked, in a tone that might as well have asked about the weather.
“… Yes, Mrs Tsurugi,” said Marinette, confused. Did Mrs Tsurugi not know she had worked on it? Then why the summons?
“Mr Kanté praises your work on it greatly.”
“… I didn’t know that, Mrs Tsurugi.” What was going on? Was this a test of some sort? Marinette clutched her elbows and pressed her arms against her belly. She wished Mrs Tsurugi would just get to the punishment already.
“Our latest model is truly an exceptional work of mechanical engineering,” Mrs Tsurugi went on. “Mr Kanté and his teams are to be commended for their excellence. They have worked tirelessly on her for many months, and what they have made will turn heads across the globe. But now, it’s time for them to step back.”
“Mrs Tsurugi, if there’s anything wrong about my work –”
Mrs Tsurugi held up her hand. “No, Marinette. Reports from Mr Kanté are that your work laid the groundwork for the sublime creature they have developed. But we are not looking at the past right now – we are looking to the future. The mechanical engineers are done with their part. In their place, we need… a social engineer. Someone who can help develop her with a more human touch.”
‘Her’. Marinette hadn’t been privy to the mechanical side of the robot, except for vague and unhelpful blueprints. She had no idea what it looked like, or what the team of revisionary programmers had done to the work she’d put in after her initial proposals. And Max had been reluctant to share anything when she asked him about it. This was actually the first she’d heard that the construction was complete.
She realised that Mrs Tsurugi had gone silent, as though waiting for a response. “Mrs Tsurugi?” she said tentatively.
“Mr Kanté is someone whose opinions I trust dearly. In my opinion, he is the third most competent person within Tsurugi Technologies.” Mrs Tsurugi tapped the manila once with her finger. “He also says you are very personable and easy to talk to.”
“… Ma’am?”
“He speaks highly of you,” said Mrs Tsurugi, patiently, like she were explaining this to a child. “Both as a person and as a programmer. His recommendation is why you’re here today.” Once again, she tapped the manila, but this time she pulled the hand back afterwards to steeple her fingers in front of her face. “He thinks you have the skills and the personality required to undertake the next phase of development.”
“The… next phase?” Marinette swallowed. Her heart was thumping heavily, so much so that she could feel the echoes of it in her ears.
“Are you aware of the story of Pinocchio?” Mrs Tsurugi went on. She seemed to realise immediately that there wouldn’t be an answer, and pressed on before Marinette could realise the same thing. “Pinocchio was a little doll, carved from a block of enchanted wood. A magical fairy promised him that if he worked fastidiously and behaved properly, he would become a real boy. But he misbehaved, and he lied, and he shirked his duties. He was in severe need of a conscience – a guiding voice to help him understand what it truly means to be human.
“Mr Kanté and his team have now made their own Pinocchio. They call her the ‘knowledge accumulation gynoid artificial general intelligence’, or kagAGI. She is going to need a conscience, a human conscience, who can guide her and teach her what is right. Do you understand?”
Marinette trembled. Most of her knew perfectly well what was going on; she could follow the thread easily enough. But she wanted more time to run through the scope of it in her head, wanted to hear it affirmed that she was being trusted with this task, wanted to be absolutely certain that she hadn’t imagined everything. So what she said, was: “… What?”
Mrs Tsurugi’s mouth became a long, flat line. “Don’t play silly with me, young lady,” she jabbed – then she mellowed a little. “kagAGI is a large investment for our company. We have put a lot of resources into her. And I – I need her to become a real woman, Marinette. It’s of utmost importance.”
“… I understand.” That is – she understood bits and pieces, and she understood there was an importance. She understood that she had been asked to return to the project as a ‘social engineer’, and that Mrs Tsurugi clearly trusted her. But beyond that, she understood practically nothing. She just hoped it would be explained to her before she was thrown in the middle of it.
“What will be expected of me?” she said, her voice a little dry from all the thinking.
Mrs Tsurugi sighed; there was an air of reluctance to her, for whatever reason. “If you accept this responsibility… you will have to be at work twenty-four hours a day,” she started. “Of course, you won’t be expected to work the whole time – as such. All your current jobs and projects will be suspended indefinitely, and your only task will be to oversee kagAGI’s development. The two of you will lodge together on site, in an apartment that has been prepared for you. All necessary amenities will be provided for you, and the apartment holds a very high standard. You will not want for anything.”
“But… I will be locked up inside the apartment?”
“You will both be free to wander inside the industrial park, through every part of it, as long as you are together. However, you may not leave the park unless there are… extenuating circumstances. kagAGI must not be revealed to the outside world until she’s ready. Once you are through with her, there will be an official announcement and a press conference, after which your normal work schedule can resume.”
Marinette pondered the suggestion. It was ludicrous, and it was bizarre, and it was extreme. She was being asked to babysit a robot, to devote her entire existence to it, to be a moral and temperamental guide for a collection of code and conductive metals. She would be working full-time with a mechanical sentience that may or may not actually like her.
And she wanted to say yes so badly.
“… Will I be able to stay in touch with people outside?” she asked, to tackle the first of her two doubts.
“You may contact the outside world over the phone. However, all of your calls will be monitored. The secret must be kept.”
“And… will I have privacy?” That was her second doubt; the first one was still there, but as long as she had phone calls and coworkers, she could manage – probably.
“There will be no surveillance inside the apartment. Mr Kanté and his team will keep up to date with the process via scheduled meetings. You will also have to conduct certain exercises in a laboratory. Outside of that, you will not be observed unduly.”
“Then I accept.”
The words popped out of her like a plug, but there was nothing to rush in and fill the gap, nothing to drain out. She was calm, collected. In truth, she had made the decision long before she was even asked. Because she couldn’t not.
Mrs Tsurugi again put her hand on the manila folder and pushed it further, until it touched the small wooden border on Marinette’s side of the desk.
“All the documentation on kagAGI – her code, her specifications, and early notes on her behaviour – is gathered here. Take it with you, read it well, and then report to Mr Bruel to arrange for your relocation. The project starts Wednesday next week, at the beginning of your workday. Do not be late.”
“I – I understand,” said Marinette, gingerly stepping forward to even more gingerly pick up the folder. It was incredibly heavy. “Um… is there anything else, ma’am?”
Mrs Tsurugi nodded. “Yes. Don’t disappoint me.”
Marinette hurried out of the room with the manila clutched to her chest, spurred both by the warning and by sheer excitement.
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She barely slept before coming back to work the next day, because she spent most of the night ravenously consuming the documentation she got from Mrs Tsurugi. In fact, she might not have slept at all; what she remembered as dreams might as well have been her imagination filling in the gaps between passages she was reading. But with a large thermos of coffee from home and a similarly large bottle of water, she arrived about ten minutes late to the office and found it completely empty. No Alya, no Mylène, no Sabrina.
She checked her emails and her phone messages. No word on any extraordinary meetings or anything like that, so she assumed they must all be late or maybe sick. She’d know around lunch, probably.
She decided to go back to reading; at the moment, she was working her way through the chapter on the gynoid technology’s approximation of a circulatory system. It did breathe, taking both nitrogen and oxygen from that air for use in various faux-biological processes. The approximation contained quite a lot of actual biology – including synthesised hemes for transporting oxygen, via a blood-aping substance that was viscous and copper-coloured. The body itself was built out of cell-like nanostructures. And there was an actual electron transport chain.
According to the opening notes, a team of actual biologists had collaborated with Max and his group on the project. Marinette wasn’t an expert in the field, but she did know the vague shape of it from high school and an elective in college. The biotechnical construction only got more impressive the further she read on, even though she wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone else afterwards.
There was an incredible amount of information overall. She had two memory sticks with hard code and a folder full of pictures of kagAGI’s component parts; there was a somewhat clunky device with an USB port that held the large handwritten label ‘OVERRIDE NB!!’; and the text itself was several hundred double-sided pages where not a one didn’t have writing on it.
The chapter on metabolism, which followed immediately after the one on circulation, started off very dry. There was a long introduction about the future of food in a general sense, and the history of knowledge on the human metabolic system, none of which was related to tech or AI at all. So she was kind of happy to be interrupted by a knock on the door when she was a few pages into it. “Come in,” she said.
The door opened, and Max’s head popped inside. “Hey, Marinette,” he said. “How are you coming along?”
She bent the sheet of paper she was at and pulled it out, closing the manila over it with a sound somewhere between a thump and a slap. “Hey, Max. I’m getting there. I might need another day to finish, though.”
He seemed surprised as he stepped into the room. “You can read 1227 pages of documentation in less than two days? Most of it isn’t even in your field.”
“Like, 78.3% of it outside my field?” she said, smiling; he grinned sheepishly in return. The percentage thing was a quirk he’d dropped in his late teens, but they still referenced it for fun every now and then.
“More like 85.13%. How much have you read?” He came to a stop before her desk, and she lifted up the portion she’d read already to demonstrate. “… That’s over half. You got that file fifteen hours ago. You live an hour away and you drive a car to work, Marinette.”
She shrugged in embarrassment. “What can I say? I love thinking about this.” Her eye caught the page she’d stopped in the middle of reading. “Well… most of it. I’m super excited. And nervous. It’s like, I’m not even sure I slept, I was so excited, just reading in bed. And it was a terrible life choice, but I’m glad I made it.”
“I can see that,” he said, eyeing the coffee thermos. Then he adjusted his glasses. “Well, I can tell you that you won’t even need to read the last 342 pages, because you basically wrote all of them. We made a few small changes after your group moved off the project, but they were minor.”
Marinette stared at him; her mouth fell a little bit open. “Seriously? But that’s – we only developed a prototype. We didn’t finish the connections to the autonomic nervous system, because we didn’t know what it would look like, plus the learning model was very basic, I’ve been tweaking on it since to make it work better, but what we handed over to you was just rudimentary –”
“You set up the code clearly enough that Marc’s team could easily connect it to their autonomic model. The entire system works perfectly now, as far as early testing has shown. As for the learning model… Mrs Tsurugi wanted you to keep tweaking.” Max pointed at the two memory sticks. “Because you’ll be there with kagAGI for the whole process, it will be easy for you to adapt to that development and make course corrections in real time.”
“I’m supposed to… keep coding on her? I thought I was supposed to just provide someone to talk to for her machine learning!”
“Yes. It’s a bit more complex than that. kagAGI actually has everything she needs to be a fully functional AGI, even with just your ‘rudimentary’ model,” he made air quotes, “but she hasn’t actually been tested in any real life situations yet.” He reached for the sheafs of paper and picked out one from Marinette’s not-yet-read stack, pulling it out. He chose it seemingly at random, though Marinette had no doubt he knew every single one by memory. “Here we go…”
He cleared his throat, then started reading aloud. “‘The model is going to need active maintenance for an unknown amount of time after activation, as there are too many variables to account for in any ‘real’ setting. The project is going to need an extended gamma testing period, and possibly even a ‘delta’ testing period, before any stable release can be achieved.’”
Marinette swallowed. She could feel the strain on her eyes from how wide they’d become. “I wrote that. Didn’t I?”
“That is correct,” said Max, smiling. “As I said, you wrote almost the entirety of the last 342 pages yourself. I made some revisions with the adaptive team, and Marc and Nathaniel wrote a more generalised introduction, but kagAGI’s brain is almost entirely your work.” He turned more serious. “Having said that… does this change how you feel about taking on the responsibility? If you don’t want to do this, I could talk to Tomoe about rethinking the testing phase.”
She could see it in his eyes, because she knew him from childhood, had worked with him for years now: he couldn’t force her, he wouldn’t force her, not even if Mrs Tsurugi asked him to. But he also wanted Marinette to take on this job. He’d recommended her to Mrs Tsurugi, after all. He didn’t look pleading or anything like that, because he wasn’t the type of person to beg or nag. Instead, he just looked vaguely sorrowful.
It didn’t really matter either way. Because Marinette also wanted to do this. She gave him a little smile, and patted the stack of papers with the flat of her fingers. “I’m not stepping away, Max. Working with AI has been my dream for so long.”
He relaxed in front of her, his eyes going back to their usual look of lazy keenness. “All right. You should tell me if you change your mind, though. We have scheduled meetups three times a week, so make sure to keep me up to date on yourself as well as the AGI’s progression.” He put a hand to his neck and scratched it in that way he always did when he was relieved. “So yeah.”
It was always a little surprising to realise that Max was basically one of the leading men of the whole of Tsurugi Technologies. It wasn’t that he wasn’t sharp or good at his job – he was absolutely amazing, sharp as five tacks, and had made multiple experiments in robotics in his own free time. Back at school, he’d attempted to make an AI of his own, though Markov had ultimately ended fruitlessly. That was probably why he’d jumped at the opportunity to work with Tsurugi so readily.
No, the reason it was hard to imagine him as a leading man in the business was that he never exuded leadership or authority in the same way many of his peers did. He didn’t command people or stand in the vanguard to inspire them, he was just so incredible at his job that he rose to the top through sheer brains and aptitude. Yesterday, Mrs Tsurugi had said he was the ‘third most competent’ person in the company. Marinette expected Mrs Tsurugi to have given herself the number one spot, but she had no idea who could possibly be worthy of second place. Not compared to Max.
“I’m looking forward to it,” said Marinette. “Seriously, all of it. It’s a bit scary, but it’s also a lot cool. I get to work so close to an actual artificial general intelligence. I can help develop a digital brain into a human approximation. I’ll get to talk to a genuine robot. That’s just – it’s exhilarating. I just…” She sighed, flipping to the start of the folder, where the images of kagAGI’s components were gathered. “I wish I knew what it looked like, though.”
“Ah. Yes.” He cleared his throat. “That’s actually why I came here. Would you like to see her?”
Marinette didn’t even say yes. She just shot up out of her seat, and Max understood.
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“Food-wise, she really does only need sugars, which you can dissolve in water or just give her powdered. She can consume actual food, but we couldn’t find a good way to completely replicate human digestion, so the process is slower than ours and requires downtime. Other essential nutrients will be provided through – well, you’ll see that when you read the next few pages.”
Max’s voice rang through the metallic hallways as they moved towards the workshop laboratory where he usually held office. Their footsteps, too, were loud against the floor – everything echoed back to them. It felt kind of foreboding, like the mechanical heartbeat of the iron giant that was Tsurugi Technologies. The expectations and wishes of Mrs Tsurugi herself, and the prestige that lay in the AGI project.
Thump. Thump.
“Anyway… she’s turned off at the moment,” said Max. “She’ll stay that way until Wednesday. We didn’t want her to start learning too much from the workshop, because it’s not really the optimal environment for a humanoid AGI. We think she will do better with a stable and quiet home where she only needs to interact with a small number of people on a regular basis.” He smiled sardonically. “Also, you’re just better with people than any of us are.”
“Don’t say that, Max. I like you a lot. All of you.” She nudged him in the shoulder, which made him jump away a little bit. “But especially you, so no self-deprecation on my watch. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, rolling his eyes.
Thump. Thump.
“But, like… what can I expect in the day-to-day? I got a flyover of stuff from Mrs Tsurugi, but she didn’t really give me any details.”
He sighed. “I assume there’s a lot she didn’t tell you, actually. So – first things first. Your rights. You’ll be ‘at work’ all hours of the day. So you’ll be paid overtime for ten hours of work every day, sixteen hours on weekends. Overtime is 50% extra, weekend and holidays are another 25% on top of that, it’s written into the company policies if you go look, but that’s also the law, the statute is called –”
Marinette held up her hand, smiled. “Could we schedule an infodump for this another day? I’d love to hear about this, but I think I need to focus on the AI right now.”
“You should always focus on workplace rights,” he said, a little brusquely – but he softened into a smile of his own. “How about Tuesday? You could have lunch with us.”
“Okay. I won’t remember, but leave a note for me and I’ll come over.”
“I’ll schedule an email,” he laughed.
Thump. Thump.
“But… Mrs Tsurugi can’t actually keep you here. Under the agreement, you say you’ll stay on company property until the term ends, and you won’t contact anyone outside without supervision. But we made sure to put a clause in the agreement where you can just cancel out of the agreement at any time, and nothing will happen. The only thing you’re not actually allowed to do is to reveal anything about kagAGI to the uninitiated. That will be a breach of contract, and you may be fired for it. None of the other rules actually bind you, so if you break them, they’ll only put your place in the project itself at risk.
“Also, the regular checkups are mandatory, but those will be held in the same building as the apartment. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, all at 10 AM sharp. As for the actual work… it’s hard to predict, because we only have early notes on her behaviour. We don’t know how she’ll behave in this new situation. So a lot of your work will just be to observe how she behaves. We’ll discuss your observations in our meetings, and you can work on updates to her software in your own time.”
Thump. Thump.
They were close to the workshop now. Marinette opened her mouth, but hesitated before any words could come out. She might have asked who else would attend the meetings, or what would happen to any information shared during those meetings. But there was one question that burned just a little bit hotter than any other.
As he put his hand on the door to push it open, she asked: “You say… ‘she’… a lot. You and Mrs Tsurugi, I mean.”
He pulled the door open, then stood aside to let her inside. “Tomoe specifically requested that we build her as close to human as possible. And… she requested a ‘she’. It just stuck after that, I guess. And she looks… well. You’ll see.”
Thump. Thump.
The workshop wasn’t as noisy as it normally was, but the thrumming of engines and clanking of hammers still filled the entire space. The two of them moved through tables decked out with sheets and blueprints and various spare parts, the smell of welding and rubber assaulting Marinette’s nostrils. She could see some distant engineers in overalls and protective glasses leaning over what seemed like the frame of a car, though half the chassis was missing and there were no wheels.
As they got closer to Max’s office, the sounds got more muted; then, once they were through the door and Max shut them inside, the sounds almost disappeared. He pointed her to the partition on the back wall, letting her go first again.
“She’s sitting back there. Go ahead,” he said.
Clack. Clack.
Marinette stepped through with wary feet. Unlike her steps through the hallways earlier, these ones sounded far smaller, far more meaningless. Not a heartbeat anymore, but the sounds of typing on a keyboard. Around her, the room itself almost ceased to exist.
She didn’t know what it was that made her so apprehensive, so anxious. Not until she saw it – saw her.
Clack. Clack.
Clack.
“She looks a little different when she’s turned off,” said Max. “There’s a bit more life to her eyes.”
Marinette stared into the empty gaze of kagAGI, framed as it was by a perfectly sculpted bob, the brown eyes somehow electric despite the power being turned off. The face was gentle, pristine, sweet; the body was slight and slender, clothed in a one-piece outfit that almost looked like a fencing outfit. If there was any part of her that looked inhuman, it was hidden underneath the fabric, or obscured by the hair. But that was immaterial.
Max had been right. Marinette did see. And what she saw, was incredible.