I struggled to my feet and leaned against a support strut, shuddering with pain and gasping for breath. There was no good way to hold my right arm; even letting it dangle at my side hurt. The air was warm and smelled of scorched metal and melted rubber. Sweat beaded on my brow and trickled down my neck.
Nothing moved around me. There were no spiders, no maintenance bots, nothing.
The light returned, slowly, now a gentle, pale blue. I was standing on a floor of welded metal sheets. Above me a great round hole led into the center of the sphere. The heart of the AI.
I reached out with my left hand—the shoulder hurt like hell, but so did everything else—and grasped the slanted support strut. Carefully, clumsily, I climbed up into the sphere. I sat down as soon as I was inside, my head spinning from that minor exertion. I closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass.
Then, in the darkness, there was motion.
Metal clinked on metal. Angular shadows shifted and gathered. Larger than the spiders. Plates of silver metal. Long spindly legs. Clink, clink, clink. A skeletal shape loomed.
I knew that shape. I knew it as well as I knew my own reflection in the mirror. I could still remember the first time I had seen it, the surprise and joy I had felt, the bubbling laughter I had not been able to contain. Is this what you want to be? I had asked, because it was not the shape itself that mattered but the wanting of it, the decision, a choice I had not foreseen.
The thin, elegant limbs of a praying mantis bent over me.
“Hey, Bug,” I whispered.
A long triangle head tilted toward me, with flat reflective lenses for eyes, watchful, waiting.
“So now—” I broke off to swallow back a bout of nausea, breathed until I was sure I would not vomit. “So now you decide to talk.” I took in a painful breath and licked my lips, let my head drop back against the warm, curved wall. I closed my eyes for a moment. “You know what, kid? I am so fucking disappointed in you.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Something cool nudged my right shoulder. It was gentle, cat-like. My fingers twitched. The triangle head moved out of my field of vision. Everything in the sphere was blue, so blue. I took a deep breath and sat up for my first clear view of what Vanguard had become.
It was so familiar my breath caught. The praying mantis shape had always been its favorite, with its large triangle head, a thin neck, two forelimbs for grasping. Its body was thin, about a meter long, and its six legs even longer, jointed in more places than I could count. It had never limited itself to the confines of the animal kingdom. I recognized David’s designs in the leaf-shaped metal scales that protected the neck and body, in the graceful flexibility of the limbs. It rarely built itself a body this large. It had usually preferred to stay in a greater number of smaller bots so that it could explore more effectively.
“Look at you, Bug,” I said. There was an ache in my throat and a sting in my eyes. I didn’t know what else to say. “What happened to you?”
Vanguard bobbed its head and tucked two forelimbs over its face. I knew that gesture. It had learned it from my nephew, Michael, when he was just a toddler and Devon had brought him to Oxford to visit the laboratory. Michael had a habit of ducking his head and covering his face every time he was scolded—it never failed to soften whatever reprimand Devon was about to offer—and after only a few days of interaction, Vanguard had adopted the same gesture. It used it when we demanded explanations for actions it knew were forbidden, when we scolded it for breaking the rules, when we were unhappy with it and it wanted to make things better.
To see it now felt like a clamp around my chest, squeezing my heart and my lungs, sending an aching wave of grief through my body. Vanguard was answering me, and the only answer it had was an apology.
I slumped back against the curved wall to look around the metal sphere. A sphere was the shape Vanguard adopted when it was frightened, when there were threats it didn’t understand all around it. When the darkness and the pressure were too great. When it didn’t know what else to do. My lost child had built itself a protective nest of steel.
At the base of the sphere was a radiating web of cables and wires, twisting together to form a single long braid that rose, like the stem of a flower, toward the cluster of scarred black boxes in the center. The power lines feeding the brain—the brain that was supposed to have been destroyed aboard Symposium. Wrecked beyond all possibility of salvage. Nothing left but fused circuits and ash. Gone forever. That was what Parthenope had claimed, and nobody had been in a position to argue.
They lied about it. They lied about everything, David had said.
Finally I understood. This was what he had been trying to tell me all along. I wanted more than anything to tell him that I got it now. There was a sourness in my throat, a sting in my eyes. All of our work, our research, our inventions. The years of our lives and legacy of our lost friends. His beautiful bots. My clever AI. All of it stolen during the rescue and salvage. All of it hidden away and conscripted into becoming weapons of war.
Somewhere outside that nest was a muffled thump and a chorus of sparking electricity. Sigrah’s bots were hard at work. I didn’t know how much of the factory or its products she had under her command, and how much remained under
