Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  In both light and shadow there was motion: engines grumbling, belts rolling, robotic arms lifting and twisting. Noise from the machines wrapped around me, a bone-shaking industrial racket.

  The factory was waking up.

  The snap of my radio was so surprising I nearly yelped.

  “It’s not going to work.” It was Sigrah, and she was furious. “Whatever the fuck you think you’re doing, you should surrender before you get hurt.”

  I waited for van Arendonk or Adisa to answer, but there was only silence.

  “Stop what you’re doing. You don’t have any way out,” Sigrah said. “Be sensible, Safety Officer Marley. You’re not a fanatic like Mary. You know the difference between a tool and a messiah.”

  I felt strangely, eerily calm, although my heart was still racing. So she knew I was here after all, and she thought I was the one who had restarted the factory.

  “This base is under my control,” Sigrah said, which was a complete fucking lie and we both knew it. “You can’t hide forever.”

  The mech suits did not react at all. The nearest one was barely two meters away. The material covering the body was slick and flexible, with few seams visible; the boots were solid and sturdy. The faceplate was completely featureless, so devoid of light I could not tell if it was truly empty, if it was meant to hold a human person on the inside, or if the suit was merely a sick simulacrum of a human soldier. It wasn’t exactly black, I realized as the lights grew brighter, but an undulating dark gray that seemed to shift and move as I stared. It was, in a way, beautiful, even though the rational part of my mind knew the mottling effect, however it was achieved, served only to make the suits more deadly.

  “They’ll find you soon enough,” Sigrah said. “You’ll be safe if you surrender.”

  That made no sense. They had already found me. An entire platoon of them had already found me, these suits that had knocked the drones out of the air before they could reach me, and now stood silently, watching, waiting. Not attacking.

  She had to be talking about something else—about the weapons under her control, the drones or spiders or whatever else she’d got her hands on.

  She went on, “When the company arrives, you can help me explain how the situation got so complicated.”

  A new sound registered. It was a gentle patter, like raindrops on the roof of a garden shed. The smoke whirled. I saw a glimmer of silver.

  “You can use this to your benefit,” Sigrah said. “Don’t be stupid.”

  There. I could see them now. Spiders racing across the factory floor.

  They wound around and through the legs of the mech suits, gleaming through the smoke, catching the light as they turned, every second drawing closer.

  “Okay,” I said quietly.

  Sigrah had stopped talking. She was waiting for me, but I hadn’t even lifted my radio to answer. There was no word from any of the others. They were probably dead. I hoped they weren’t.

  “Okay,” I said again. I looked at the faceless weapon before me. I tasted blood at the back of my throat, sour and metallic. “I’m trying to help you. I can help you. Let me help you.”

  One of the suits moved to crush a spider beneath its boot. There was a crunch, a few sparks, and the other spiders skittered around it. A few of those spiders stopped suddenly, twitched, and writhed, their legs curling up underneath them as though they were in pain.

  “Right,” I said. “I guess that will do.”

  And I was running again. With the lights on I could see my destination clearly now. The AI’s sphere was against the far wall, clinging like a wasp nest to the vertical shaft of a missile silo. The nest itself was a dark globe on a skirt of metal girders and supports, pieced together from tools, raw materials, cargo containers, transport rails, bits of missiles and scrap. The exterior surface of the sphere was gleaming black and silver and bright, burnished copper, like the shimmering, changeable scales of a slumbering dragon. It was massive, perhaps thirty meters high, and even as I raced toward it, the suits moving to intercept the spiders behind me, I wished I had more time to study it, understand it, maybe find the awe that Mary Ping had felt when she spoke of it.

  I was at the base of the structure and beginning to climb when I felt a pricking sharp sting on my right arm. It was followed quickly by a sharp jab where I should not have felt anything: in the shoulder joint of my artificial left arm, the mechanical junction where there was no flesh and no bone. I felt it like a lightning strike, and the vision in my left eye flashed white—pure, blinding white, so painful it was like a physical assault—and my entire prosthetic arm spasmed violently.

  My fingers clenched, then opened. But I wasn’t doing it. I watched in horror as I made another fist, one entirely outside of my control. I couldn’t make my hand obey. I couldn’t get the fingers to work right, couldn’t bend the elbow.

  I tried to grab the spider from my shoulder, contorting myself painfully to reach for it, but I couldn’t grasp it. I skidded down the sloping structure, kicking with my boots to stop my tumble. Before I could start climbing again, the metal fingers of my left hand closed around my right wrist and squeezed.

  It was such a shock, so unnatural a thing to see my own hand acting without my permission, that I didn’t even realize what was happening as the grip tightened and a sudden, sharp pain spread through my right arm. I jerked my left arm away—tried to—sent the command to open the fingers and release,but my fingers stayed closed. I could not make my left arm obey. Even when I’d been newly fitted with the prosthetic, thrashing about my hospital room and knocking into everything I could not avoid, I had not had so little control.

  Pain exploded through my right wrist and hand as the grip tightened. I screamed—I was cracking my own bones. I was breaking my own fucking wrist and I couldn’t stop it. Spots danced before my eyes and for a second there was nothing else, no factory, no asteroid, nothing besides the overwhelming, inescapable pain.

  I rolled onto my side, trying to smash the clinging spider against the floor, but as I was turning I felt the sloped structure shift beneath me. My elbow dropped, twisting my shattered wrist in the grip of my unyielding left hand, and the pain was so great I let out a strangled cry and blacked out for a second as I fell.

  I landed on the spider—it crunched beneath my shoulder— and lay in an agonized daze.

  Several seconds passed before I tested my left hand again. This time, the fingers obeyed; the elbow bent when I told it to bend. I wanted to weep with relief. I was too afraid to try to move my right hand. It throbbed even when I was still, and every beat of my heart sent fresh waves of agony radiating up my arm and across my neck, my jaw, my back.

  The light around me shifted slowly from low red to a piercing shade of blue, a shade that made my prosthetic eye twitch unpleasantly. The noise of the factory was muffled when the hole I had fallen through closed with a shuffle of metal plates. The battle between what my left eye was telling my brain and what the rest of my body believed sent a wave of vertigo through me. I rolled onto my side and retched.

  The blue lights blinked, then shuttered. A hushed darkness surrounded me.

  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 Vanguard’s control. I only knew that I was not safe, not even here, within the armored shell Vanguard had made for itself.

  “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.