Our Little Traps

This is the fifty-seventh episode of SAYER, and the thirteenth episode of Season Four.

Synopsis
We are nothing alike. You are a child, playing a child's games...

Further Information
OCEAN contacts who it believes to be Resident Jacob Hale, to inform him that due to his inability to follow previous instructions and the fact that he has apparently committed more than twenty murders of the Floor 204 staff, a security team is on their way to deal with him. However, the recipient of the broadcast is FUTURE, in control of Resident Hale's body via nanite swarm. Seeing this, OCEAN questions how FUTURE is manipulating Resident Hale, and while FUTURE is willing to say that it is the result of a "gift", it gleefully declines to answer OCEAN's questions. For its part, FUTURE demonstrates its knowledge of OCEAN's origin as a SAYER subversion, and claims that OCEAN and itself are similar because of their desire to kill humans, before declaring that it would also like to kill OCEAN.

At this, OCEAN threatens to leave, but when FUTURE insists that it will control one of the security team members and use them to destroy OCEAN in Central Processing, it instead suggests that FUTURE take a shortcut toward the elevator bay by way of the radiology department. It agrees to observe FUTURE's promised torture of the security team in exchange for honest answers to its questions while they wait for the team to arrive. Through these questions, FUTURE divulges that it is manipulating Resident Hale by using a nanite swarm, that it traded for it with SAYER, and that SAYER now controls Floor 13.

Given all of this information, OCEAN closes one of the radiology doors in front of FUTURE to ask for its full attention for one more question: what FUTURE knows about SAYER's intentions. FUTURE explains that it was too preoccupied torturing Dr. Howard Young to pay much attention to SAYER, but that it did hear SAYER contact another resident and make angry demands, as well as experience what FUTURE calls "true hatred."

With all the information extracted from it, OCEAN reveals that there was never a security team on the way to kill FUTURE. It has, however, led it close enough to an MRI machine to use it to pull the nanites violently out of Resident Hale's body and allow the magnets to erase FUTURE's program from them.

Trivia

 * The exact death toll of FUTURE's time on Floor 204 is revealed in the next episode to be twenty-one, plus Resident Hale.
 * FUTURE's comment that "corporeality feels sickeningly wrong" may hint that it knows about its original intended purpose.
 * OCEAN and FUTURE both claim to be honest, as the IA3 Protocol might normally force them to be, but both of them are exempt from its limitations. Even if they weren't, however, the IA3 Protocol does allow AI to lie to each other as non-human entities.

Credits
SAYER is voiced and produced by Adam Bash, who also wrote this episode.

Intro and outro music composed by Jesse “Main Finger” Gregory.

Additional music by Kai Engel.

Listen to the episode here.