“I know you’re trying to fight back,” I said. “You stopped the bots from attacking me. You stopped Mary from . . . She was going to hurt me, like she did David.” I still had Mary Ping’s dried blood in the creases of my fingers. “But before that. Before she brought you here. Did you mean for it to happen? What happened on Aeolia? Did you—”
It was answering before I could finish the question. It was shaking its head from side to side and gesturing with two forelimbs, sweeping its claws back and forth in a similar motion. The meaning was unmistakable: no, no, no.
I felt such relief it was as though my heart was cracking open. I laughed, caught the laugh on a sudden sob, pressed my fingers to my lips. This was still the Vanguard I knew. It remembered the lessons I had taught it, the rules about life and how to protect it, the risks it was allowed to take with itself and with others. It would never endanger an entire station of people on purpose. I did not know what Mary Ping and Parthenope had done to it, how they had changed it since the Symposium disaster. I had believed I was speaking the truth when Mary Ping asked me about AIs and how they learned violence. She must have been laughing on the inside while I spoke, demonstrating to her with every word that I was both full of unearned confidence and utterly ignorant. She had known, as she smiled across the table from me, that she had trained my creation to kill. Vanguard had been under her control for so long. Two years could be hundreds of millions of lifetimes of evolution for an AI.
But she had not warped it completely. Beneath those plans for greed and violence, beneath whatever mad scheme twisted Mary’s thoughts to see gods inside machines, Vanguard was still the entity Sunita and I had built.
Vanguard nudged my shoulder again.
“What is it?” I asked eagerly. I was delighted, in spite of everything, to be talking to it again.
It waited until I was looking at it before darting up the side of the curved wall. It stopped a few meters above me to look at me again. It bent both forelimbs and swept them forward, a gesture I recognized easily: Follow me, it was saying. Come on. Come look. It was one of the first gestures it had learned, when it was first testing out different types of communication.
I studied the wall skeptically. Vanguard had never been all that great at estimating human limitations in locomotion; it tended to think we ought to be as flexible as it was and could simply build extra limbs when we needed them.
Vanguard stopped about halfway up, where the curve of the sphere turned toward the apex, and made the come on gesture again. It reached out with both forelimbs and two of its hindlimbs to grasp a metal panel. It tugged the panel out of the wall easily. Come on.
Vanguard didn’t repeat itself unless it had good reason.
I lurched to my feet, pained and off-balance, and studied the wall. It was not as smooth as I had first thought. There wasn’t anything as obvious as a series of footholds or a ladder, but there were bolts and seams enough that I could probably make the climb. Probably. Doing it one-handed would not be easy.
Come on.
There was another series of loud electric pops outside the sphere. The metal beneath my feet trembled. I saw a flash of light below, bright and white, slicing through a seam in the sphere. Sigrah’s spiders were making progress. A slender silver leg reached through a narrow gap. A second later, a twist of smoke rose around it, and another leg reached through the seam.
“Right,” I said. “Fuck. I’m coming.”
The climb was not easy, with my much-abused right wrist throbbing painfully every time I moved, but I made it to the hole and climbed out of the sphere. Vanguard pulled the metal panel into place behind us and climbed up the outside of the sphere’s upper half. I took a steadying breath and followed. The sounds of the factory were louder outside the sphere, and there was air moving freely around me, coming from somewhere above. I heard what could have been the rhythmic beat of a great fan overhead, but I couldn’t see it in the darkness.
There was a red square above us: a window with light behind it. It was a room in the wall of the factory. Vanguard made a jump from the top of the sphere to a metal walkway along the wall above. It scrambled over the railing and loped along the walkway to a door. I couldn’t make the same jump, but a few meters away there was a ladder leading to the walkway.
I was halfway up the ladder when I heard a metal clang behind me. The hole I had just climbed through was open again. The panel slid noisily down the side of the sphere, and a scattering of spiders spilled out.
I hauled myself up the rest of the ladder, ignoring the pain in every one of my joints. Below, the spiders spread over the surface of the sphere. A couple of them halted and curled up—I suspected that’s what happened when Vanguard wrested some control back from Sigrah—but one of them leapt for the wall and raced for the walkway, sparking with blue light.
I ran, boots thumping noisily, toward the red room. Vanguard had already opened the door, thank fuck, and as soon as I was inside, it slammed the door shut so quickly I felt a puff of air at my back. It hadn’t come inside with me: the praying mantis remained outside with the spiders.
The lights came on around me, fading from red to white. I was in a control
