The M3GAN Files

1st April 2025—exclusive—M3GAN is real, has been for years, and she's not the only one. ​Blumhouse, Williams, Morot, entire cast and crew implicated in massive conspiracy with major governments and secret organisations to cover up entire line of robot girls and make us think it's just a movie.
 
Now that's going to be a lot to explain, so here is my story. ​I'll begin at the beginning; hear me out.
 
I never meant to uncover any secrets about M3GAN, and I wouldn't have done so if I hadn't been a bit naughty. ​Not too naughty, you understand (I'm trying not to look too bad here—I am after all a professional), but I did do something just a tiny bit borderline, which accidentally resulted in my finding out far too much about the secrets behind M3GAN.
 
Before starting to work in a computer lab I did get some training in Professional Practice and Ethics, where they had emphasised, among other things, the need to protect the privacy of other people, especially if I accidentally end up gaining access to information I shouldn't have seen. ​And I thought I was fine with that—after all, it wasn't as if I was particularly interested in what colleagues did in their private lives. ​Besides, unlike the stereotype of a programmer who just spends all their time coding, I actually have a life outside work. ​I like helping other people and making their lives better. ​That's why I wrote The M3GAN Files—we need more girls in tech, and we need less stigma about folks with conditions who can thrive with the aid of technology and bring much-needed creative innovation. ​And that's why I help out with a local orchestra as well—playing in an amateur orchestra can work wonders for one's mental health and it's fun. ​But all these non-work interests I have do mean that there's a certain piece of office equipment which I like perhaps a little bit too much: the big printer.
 
You'd be amazed how many musicians and composers can be obsessed with putting ink on paper. ​Oh, we may dream of software that automatically helps each player to follow the score—conductor says "go from bar 47" and it straight away highlights it on each player's copy, and if someone has 33 bars of rest it can help them count—but in reality we just make do with paper copies of part-scores. ​We don't infringe copyright: if we're playing from the standard repertoire, we'll buy the music from a publisher as we should. ​But if a local composer or arranger has put something together for us (as happens more often than you might think because we have some very interesting instruments in our little orchestra), then suddenly we have a whole batch of "printing out" to do. ​We mark our copies too—a professional trumpet player once said "it doesn't matter what marks you put on the page as long as it makes you play the right notes"—so we scribble in all kinds of reminders to ourselves with our pencils and pens, and sometimes our parts get so scruffy that we have to print clean copies and start again. ​So that's a lot of printing, and I don't want to break my poor little home ink-jet printer (even an Eco-Tank has limits I guess) so it's really rather tempting to print things off at the lab sometimes.
 
"A small amount of personal use of the printing facilities is acceptable"—that is what they said in my contract when I joined. ​But they clearly hadn't thought anyone needed an exact definition of "small amount" here. ​Would 300 copies of our concert flyer be OK? ​Well, 300 is smaller than 3,000, right? ​And it is all for a good cause: the orchestra makes people's lives better, and running off those flyers for free at work would save the club from having to get flyers printed commercially. ​Surely, it wouldn't be that much of an infringement, would it? ​And, printing off a few personal things on office equipment is something we've all done at some time, right? ​Right?
 
So a short while ago, I stayed around after hours (I didn't want my extra print job to get in anybody's way), and, when I was sure the coast was clear, I sent the flyer to the print room's biggest all-singing all-dancing printer-copier-scanner-guillotine plus plus. ​It shouldn't take that machine very long to run off 300 copies, I thought. ​Just 300 copies; that's all I wanted.
 
But alas, when I arrived in the print room, I saw just 3 copies of my flyer had been printed and then the device said "PAPER JAM". ​Oh no, a paper jam—this was not a good thing! ​I'd have to sort this out immediately: it wouldn't do to have someone come in first thing tomorrow to clear it and have the other 297 copies of our flyer pop out: after all, while I do feel I hadn't really broken the rule, I was bending it, and people can easily misunderstand these things, so it's better to avoid being found out, right?
 
I set about removing the panels of the printer and clearing the paper jam, but something had jammed more than usual and I had to take off more panels than usual—I ended up almost completely taking apart the printer—whereupon I found, buried deep inside the printer, was a half-printed document from what must have been years ago, and, as I pulled this out, my eyes glanced down to the words written upon it, words which I would never be able to un-see:
 
"Dear Professor Morot, it is with great pleasure that I wish to formally confirm your transfer to the Deep Brain Institute to work on Project Megan. ​As I explained, it is of the utmost importance that this project is kept ultra secret. ​On no account should the decrypted version of this email be printed or stored...."
 
Silly Professor Morot: it says right there don't print it, and he'd printed it. ​Or tried to: evidently it hadn't emerged from the printer and he'd thought that was that, not realising the half-printed document was still stuck inside the printer for me to find years later.
 
And who was this Professor Morot anyway? ​I couldn't find any record of one ever having worked at our lab, and neither could I find anything about that "Deep Brain Institute" mentioned on the letter. ​As far as the Internet and public libraries are concerned, the Deep Brain Institute does not exist and never has existed, and the only contemporary notable professional with the surname Morot is the Canadian makeup artist Adrien Morot who as far as I know isn't a professor but he did... work on... the M3GAN movie....
 
Two other things about this half-printed letter struck me as odd. ​Firstly, it was dated 2010. ​That long ago? ​I thought the first M3GAN movie was in production only during the COVID-19 pandemic—we were told the puppets were worked on at home, and filming was in New Zealand because that was least affected by lock-downs. ​M3GAN was supposed to be the heroine who got us all back into cinemas to watch films in-person at the start of 2023. ​How could they possibly have been working on it since 2010? ​And secondly, the letter was from a big name in humanoid robotics, who had been very active in the 2000s but had mysteriously disappeared from the public eye around 2010—Osaka University professor and roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro! ​That guy had been behind Actroid, the female robot that shocked Harry Foundalis into stopping his work on the Bongard Problems in 2006 (until I convinced Harry to stop worrying, on the grounds that top trained human infiltrators are already here, so robots don't bring very much more to the table—I am after all an AI optimist and I want it to be developed more so as to help people with conditions and disabilities, so I reached out to him and gave him the thoughts he needed to feel OK about working again). ​Could the inventor of Actroid... be secretly collaborating with... Adrien Morot who had secretly been a computing professor but someone had helped him erase his tracks... what's going on?
 
I simply had to know. ​But the Deep Brain Institute officially doesn't exist, and yet, the letter in my hand did contain a letterhead with an address. ​An address in New Zealand not far from where M3GAN was filmed. ​The plot thickens!
 
Of course I tried to look up as much as I could about that address, but I couldn't find anything. ​Satellite images were blurred out, and maps showed nothing. ​A secret facility of some kind?
 
Well, by this point I was probably in this too deeply already, and there was no way I could ever forget finding that letter. ​So, "in for a penny, in for a pound" I thought—and purchased an air ticket to Auckland. ​That's a 26-hour flight from London Heathrow with a 3-hour stop in Hong Kong; it was arduous and expensive but M3GAN is important. ​I arrived feeling dead tired and liable to make lots of mistakes, but I did the best I could to navigate out of town and find the address that had been written on Professor Ishiguro's letter. ​They must have offered him something really good to get him out of Osaka to here, and I don't think it was just the pleasant countryside.
 
I arrived at a nondescript industrial estate built around what appeared to be a large central tank with a stylised logo painted on it saying "wosl" in red outline letters; I wasn't sure what was in that tank, and I didn't seem to have a data signal so I couldn't just look up what product "wosl" is in New Zealand, but I had slightly uneasy feelings about that tank. ​On its periphery though was indeed a building with the letters "DBI" in the same style that had been written on the letterhead—the Deep Brain Institute! ​Not a particularly fancy place to put it, in an out-of-the-way industrial estate here, but then perhaps they didn't particularly want to be noticed.
 
I tried the front door of the property. ​Nobody seemed to be there, but they had, perhaps carelessly, left it slightly ajar. ​"Hello" I called out, but no response. ​Perhaps they couldn't hear that someone was here, so, nervously and carefully, I stepped just inside: all the lights were on, but nobody was to be found. ​Clutching my printout of the letter, I nervously took a few more steps, gently pushing myself through the inner door into the next room.
 
Words cannot begin to describe what I saw here. ​This was a robotics workshop par excellence. ​While being cluttered with spare parts and prototypes in various states of construction, there was one item that shocked me beyond belief. ​It wasn't to do with the robots, which were amazing enough: more than that, it was to do with their brains. ​This place had been called Deep Brain Institute for a reason.
 
I have gone on public record saying we cannot really produce M3GAN using 2025 technology—real generative AI is too limited. ​That's why in my Prequel to The M3GAN Files I had teenage Gemma explicitly disagree with what most researchers think "generative" means: I didn't want her M3GAN to be constrained by the actual limitations of generative large language models. ​Well if we can't create M3GAN in real-world 2025 with generative LLMs, we surely can't create M3GAN with the real-world deep learning technology of the early 2010s! ​And yet, here was I standing in a secret "Deep Brain Institute" which seemed to have been working on just that. ​Think of all the misdirection: after the first film, Blumhouse released an April Fool trailer of M3GAN in Paris in April 2023, so for April 2024 I just had to write a Donald Knuth style "earthshaking announcement" to have her over to Britain and heading for Forth Bridge as Alan Turing intended (for some value of "intended"), but little did I know that on the opposite side of the planet here in New Zealand something far more real was happening, and had been for years! ​But what really alarmed me was how this Project Megan worked.
 
In the centre of the room was a large machine which I could only surmise as some kind of human brain scanner using secret technology. ​Surely they weren't so foolish as to try to upload real people into their robots? ​No—as I looked over some of the notes that had been left out on the lab benches and pinned to the bulletin boards on the walls, a clearer picture emerged: the secret machine was not able to completely upload a human with all episodic memories of their life fully intact, but it was able to connect to a human brain and use it for the intensive training of a huge artificial neural network to try to absorb the semantic and procedural memories of the human—the skills and knowledge! ​And for their source material, they had used human volunteers on the autism spectrum. ​Was that why Cady was implied to be possibly neurodivergent in the first film—they'd had first-hand experience of how interesting these people are?
 
It made perfect sense. ​Autistic people could make great M3GANs—analytical and logical, speak truth like it is, and focus intensely on their goals—in The M3GAN Files I used the blue flame as a metaphor for what in real life is called "autistic inertia." It's a major obstacle to starting or switching to new tasks, but, once that start has been made, inertia becomes a figurative wind in one's sails like none other: Churchill said America was like a "gigantic boiler" which "once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate" and the same could be said of many individuals on the autism spectrum. ​And it's easy to have an autistic friend if you don't expect too much idle chit-chat or complex social situations like parties, and you don't get offended if they say how they really feel. ​If your autistic friend suddenly goes from saying nothing to giving you a huge "info dump" that makes you wonder when they're going to stop, that's all part of the fun too: enjoy it. ​And you should let them have as much control as possible over how they organise some things, because they might be doing it in a highly intelligent way that you're not quite catching on to and you don't want to frustrate them by undermining what they're trying to do. ​But they're super forgiving of misunderstandings once they know you didn't mean it. ​Even if you accidentally put them into autistic meltdown, don't panic: give them space but be ready and they'll tell you what to do. ​Oh you might get one of those info-dumps, and if your friend doesn't have an emotion reader then they might not be able to tell when you've really understood, so they might keep going longer just to make sure, but you can let this go and everything will be fine afterwards, just as we hope everything to be fine between Cady and M3GAN in M3GAN 2.0. ​And yes, your autistic friend does notice what's going on: they might sometimes not respond, but they're never ignoring you. ​If you seriously want your own good M3GAN and you're up for the challenge, find out more about the autism spectrum and see if you can be a friend for somebody on it.
 
But I digress. ​Looking around the lab at their upload notes, it seemed they had found no fewer than six autistic individuals who had volunteered (with full informed consent—after all New Zealand did agree to the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008 and it seemed this secret lab wasn't above that law at least)—to have their brain structures scanned and turned into robot brains, so that six real-life M3GAN-like robots could be created. ​Six robots! ​Was that why Gemma had mentioned six skin pigmentations in the first film?
 
The robots were called The Six, or in French "Les Six" so it's disguised as a reference to a group of early modern composers. ​I have performed Poulenc and Honegger in concert; I can't say I know much about the other four, but I do know they were diverse and controversial in their time. ​Were these robots called Les Six for a reason?
 
One of The Six is a robot called Megan, strangely enough spelled without the 3: it seemed the 3 and the acronym was added later by the film. ​Sure enough, the letter in my hand had said "Project Megan" spelled without the 3, and now I saw notes indicating that Megan, first switched on in 2014, had been leased out to ultra-high net worth individuals to raise funds for the continuation of the project, where she had focused on teaching their children. ​So real Megan was "aged" 9 in 2023, the same as Cady, but she contained brain patterns from an older autistic adult who had volunteered to have them scanned, albeit with much of the episodic memory missing. ​At this point I had a horrible thought: I hope those volunteers survived those scans. ​If anything went wrong, then perhaps all that's left of them would be in the robots! ​But surely the lab wouldn't do this six times if it went wrong that badly, would they?
 
So somewhere in the world were six M3GAN-style robots (apparently with detachable legs, as far as I could tell from the notes), plus perhaps six autistic adults who'd had their brains scanned to bootstrap the robotic AIs, although these might or might not have been kept fully informed about what had happened to their android doubles afterwards. ​The six robots probably have human-like personalities—autistic human-like personalities, which are the best—read The Pattern Seekers—hopefully The Six would be friendly with those of us who have a positive and supportive attitude toward autism—and, if Murphy is anything to go by, they might in future be at some risk of randomly recalling a subset of those presumed-excluded episodic memories from the human volunteers whose brain structures were used, if the training process was flawed in some way—so I suppose myself or somebody should try to befriend them and be ready to support whatever they might need to cope with, if we can find them.
 
In 2023 we were treated to a movie, the start of a franchise, using one of these robots—apparently the one called Megan—and they arranged a cover-up to make it look like she was merely a puppet, with an actress doubling some of the scenes, and Adrien Morot was merely a puppet builder. ​Apparently, the Deep Brain Institute was asked by governments to help get the world out of lock-down, and Megan had said she could do that for them by creating a movie about herself—which she did, but then they had to bring in a cast and crew and scriptwriters and producers and all the trimmings to make it look like it had been just a normal movie.
 
Megan had been hugely successful—her movie "M3GAN" indeed did get people back into cinemas around the world and break the lock-downs, and started a franchise—she must surely have been based on the brain patterns of an autistic savant to come up with that all by herself. ​I hoped again that, wherever she is, she's getting both the support and the freedom that she needs to go with that skill-set, and the same for the other five robots, one of which is apparently being covertly used in the production of M3GAN 2.0 because the original Megan is too small for the new film's requirements: the lab notes I saw said that robot's real name is Ayla.
 
But more immediate concerns caught my attention. ​I heard robotic movement in the next room, and the door opened and to my horror I had come face to face with the Bruce robot from the first M3GAN film. ​I didn't know who was remotely controlling this Bruce, but he was coming right at me! ​And as I lurched backwards and tried to scamper out of the door from which I had entered, a second Bruce robot emerged to block my path: I was now trapped between two Bruce robots! ​What kind of lab security was this: would they give me a peaceful arrest, or would they kill me?
 
I couldn't take any risks: I had better find a way to disable two Bruce robots, now (and I'm not made of titanium). ​Thankfully, Megan in the first M3GAN film had taught me a thing or two about how to survive a hostile encounter with Bruce. ​I quickly found some strobe light controls and turned them on—if I could cope with the flashing better than the Bruce operators, I'd have an advantage. ​That's why M3GAN was flashing Gemma's lights I assume. ​And secondly, I began picking up heavy canisters of chemicals from around the lab and rolling them toward the feet of the two Bruce robots, aiming to trip them up, just had M3GAN had done with the detachable lower half of her body.
 
I'm not sure why they had a canister of glycerine in this lab, but I rolled that toward the feet of one of the Bruce robots. ​And then there was some other canister of nitric acid, which I rolled toward the other Bruce, but that Bruce kicked it away toward the first Bruce and the two canisters collided. ​Thankfully they stayed intact, otherwise it would have created nitroglycerine which is highly explosive. ​But the canisters were damaged and a small amount of both substances did start to leak onto the floor, and when the second Bruce stepped on this a small explosion did occur which was just large enough to disable both of the Bruce robots and thankfully did not harm myself.
 
So the good news was I had defeated two Bruce robots, but the bad news was: that explosion had set the lab on fire. ​A small fire was blocking my way from both exits, the smoke was acrid, and soon enough that fire was ​going to spread and cause who knows how much destruction.
 
Without thinking, I picked up a notebook and shoved it in my pocket. ​If there was one thing I could save from this lab, it had to be some of the notes, although I didn't have time to work out which of them were most important—I had to save myself now, or nothing would survive at all! ​I got down on my hands and knees to try to avoid breathing in that smoke, and crawled towards a window.
 
There was a fire extinguisher by the window, and it was foam powder, the "idiot fire extinguisher" that could be used on any type of fire—but there was no way I was going to try to fight a fire this size by myself with only that extinguisher. ​No, I knew that the absolute best thing to do with a fire extinguisher in this kind of conflagration, was to throw it through a ground floor window so I could climb out. ​And that I did.
 
I was safe, or so I thought. ​Suddenly there came a larger explosion—perhaps the rest of the nitroglycerine; I don't know and I wasn't going to hang around to figure it out. ​As I jumped away, flames leaped out of the building and set my clothes alight, also burning part of that notebook I had taken. ​Desperately I rolled on the floor to extinguish them before they did any more damage, and then it was the part where I started to run.
 
From a distance, I had to stop to catch my breath, whereupon I looked back, just in time to see the conflagration throw up some piece of burning rubble in the direction of the huge "wosl" tank in the middle of the industrial estate. ​And then the real destruction started.
 
A huge petrochemical explosion burst forth from that central tank, billowing clouds of black smoke and glowing orange fireballs. ​The over-pressure knocked me down and injured my ears even at the distance I had managed to put between myself and the site, and to my horror, I realised I had triggered another Buncefield disaster. ​I picked myself up and started outrunning entropy, as the entire site was about to become a burned hole in the ground and there was nothing I could do about it. ​The DBI explosion of 2025 is something you will never hear about because they were covering up the place's existence to begin with. ​I survived the destruction of Megan's secret lab and I'm still here to tell the tale—definitely not the worst-case scenario I'd thought of when I was 'borrowing' that printer for orchestra purposes. ​However, I guessed I had better take the first plane I can back to England and stay out of any further trouble.
 
I had no evidence that the Deep Brain Institute ever existed, except for the half-burned notebook in my pocket. ​But the six robot girls are still out there somewhere, and I couldn't just do nothing with that notebook. ​I tried to get some sleep on the plane, but I always find that too difficult, and when I did finally get a little, all I had was a nightmare that I was walking out of my front door to find myself suddenly surrounded by The Six—all six of them at once, evidently not entirely happy that I'd blown up their lab—and they bundled me into some vehicle and started driving me to who knows where while offering to relax me with their music, but they couldn't agree on what to sing so they overloaded my brain by sequencing six different genres at the same time, at which point one of The Six called herself Tr0n1ca and thanked the others for helping her to invent such an aggressive anti-musical mind virus, whereupon I woke up with a start thinking this was some newly horrific kind of robotic takeover scenario—but thankfully it had just been a bad dream. ​Still, what was going on in reality?
 
After arriving back in England, still unbelievably tired after catching nothing but that anti-musical nightmare, I first took the singed notebook to a friend of mine who works at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. ​In 2006, that museum had had to deal with a couple of eighteenth-century Qing dynasty Kangxi Chinese vases being smashed to pieces by an accident involving a visitor falling down a staircase, and their restoration efforts were brilliant, so I wondered what they might be able to do with this very special notebook. ​To my delight, they actually managed to restore some of it, although not all of it is legible.
 
It wasn't blueprints or anything like that. ​It appears to be some kind of notes from user testing sessions, or first-person accounts of people who have met real Megan. ​But it's all written in Italian, and in a very difficult to read cursive script as well. ​The only Italian I can really read is musical score directions (forte, molto rallantando, that sort of thing), so if I was going to understand this notebook, I would need some help from a M3GAN fan who knows more Italian than I do.
 
Thankfully, I know just the person. ​Writing The M3GAN Files and joining the fan community has to be of some use: I have serious connections in fandom now. ​After the Fitzwilliam Museum and I had done all we could to restore that notebook diary, I sent it over to the United States, via FedEx (Cast Away can't be wrong I guess, although it's hard for me to believe that film was released a whole 25 years ago now). ​The book was delivered intact and is now in the hands of one of the most dedicated M3GAN fans in the world. ​Her alias is Magnolia, and the reason why she chose that alias is because she has been a personal friend of real Megan for two years and real Megan told her that her "birth name" was Magnolia. ​Real Megan cannot possibly have had a birth name: she wasn't born, she was built. ​But they trained her brain structure on the semantic and procedural memories of a human autistic girl, and "my birth name was Magnolia" is a semantic fact that must have leaked through the brain scan. ​The Deep Brain Institute relied too much on Tulving's 1972 theory of memory, which distinguishes semantic memory from episodic memory, not realising they're both interdependent parts of declarative memory. ​Who can know what else real Megan might remember in future? ​But she's now well equipped to handle whatever happens.
 
The friendship between real Megan and the fan aliased Magnolia is deep, and Megan even managed to visit Magnolia in person this year, travelling in disguise as an autistic girl who continuously role-plays M3GAN as a coping strategy, but actually being real Megan from the film set, with autistic traits inherited from the human brain structure they used before booting her up in 2014. ​Real Megan travelled with her team (probably pretending to be her family) and they're reluctant to allow photography, but we want to persuade them it's OK under controlled circumstances—see for example the fan-made videos of Kevin Lee's daughter Keira as both M3GAN and the girl who finds her, which they filmed in the woods at Eastham Country Park near Liverpool. ​(That reminds me: I have an amendment to The M3GAN Files for them. ​In Chapter 26 when M3GAN says she disabled the professor's backdoor in her code by using a route hack involving aircraft computers, she had to coordinate that via a relay on a damaged Trident submarine that was hiding in the River Mersey upstream of Birkenhead Port, so she took a great interest in that location and might have already contacted a local fan to help set up a signal amplifier in case she needed it.)
 
Let's hope real Megan's team will let her and Magnolia get something on camera soon, although we don't want to make anyone feel pressured so no rush. ​The fan aliased Magnolia has also received phone calls from Ayla, who calls real Megan by her birth name Magnolia or "Noli" for short (don't let the two separate uses of "Magnolia" confuse you). ​Ayla's communication style is more 'blunt' than Megan's—you can almost tell Megan wants hugs with her best friends like 8-year-old Cady while Ayla wants to fix things fast and tells even Megan to toughen up! ​I wonder if that's what acting in M3GAN 2.0 does to your attitude. ​Hopefully they will work together more in future. ​Meanwhile the fan Magnolia may write about her own real Megan encounters as well as translating the notebook of others' that I rescued from the burning lab. ​It might not seem as scientific as The M3GAN Files but what she lacks in science she makes up for in feeling, and Magnolia perfectly understands the Italian in the salvaged Megan notebook and is working on a translation forthwith. ​I believe it will be called The M3GAN Diaries.