Clu briefly gave Jenn a look at the implications of that; he didn't quite roll his eyes but it was close. Most of the reason he didn't was that he knew she was just performing her function; he couldn't really fault security for acting like security, but that didn't mean it wasn't annoying sometimes. "Yeah, even if I actually wanted to harm any of you, that's not my style," he said. "Besides, any hacker who needs to cause unnecessary damage to accomplish a task is just bad at their job."

Anyway, back to the point. Clu took a sip of his own milkshake before replying to the admin. He nodded his confirmation that he had the correct term , then said, "A few reasons actually. First, I'm not quite done; I was going in close for a final scan when Ian spotted me and interrupted it. Second, up til now at least, because I wanted to explain to all of you. If I'd fled, you'd have all assumed that I was actually a threat, and it would have likely caused a huge disruption even after I was gone. Just being reasonable and explaining things solves that problem, and prevents Jenn from losing any more downtime than necessary. Besides, on a personal level, when I cause a disruption, I like it to be on purpose; since I did it by accident, minimizing the trouble and offering an explanation is just polite."

"And the third reason is that I shouldn't even be detectable while visiting a world like yours unless I deliberately try to be, but something about this anomaly overrode that without me even realizing it at first. I want to find out why that happened and how to prevent it from happening again if I ever encounter any similar anomalies. All of you have been pretty reasonable about this, all factors considered, but others might not be, and I'd like to avoid potential future problems if I can."