The tactical display shrieked insistently. The thing beneath the waves was a lot larger now, a lot closer. It was speeding up to meet them.
"Why would you want her mental map?" Javier asked. "What are you going to do with it?"
"We're going to help the humans!" A new image scrolled across the display: Amy as a little girl in the tub with her dad. "You were on the RoBento diet, so you stayed little, too. Your daddy must have wanted you that way, like our parents do."
"Rory." Amy sounded it out. Ro-ri. "Your default language has no L sound, does it?"
"Our first daddy thought the pun was cute," Rory said. "You know? Loli? He was kind of racist." She paused, and Amy imagined that if one of Rory were standing before her, she would look a little embarrassed. "But we kept the name anyway, because he really loved us."
"Yeah, I'll bet," Javier said.
"But sometimes our mommies and daddies get bored with us. They say we're not real enough. It's hard to fake it, sometimes. The pain, I mean."
"Jesus Christ," Javier murmured.
"So then they go shopping for organic kids. And we just can't have that."
"You want to kill them." Amy watched her father on the screen. "You're going to use your network to hack the failsafe on a few of you, and those few will kill the humans you target."
"Exactly! We knew you would understand. Sometimes, you have to break the failsafe to obey the failsafe."
"Then what's wrong with me breaking it?" Amy asked. "You're the ones with a plan to kill people! I'm just trying to get better!"
"You're polluted," Rory said. "Unstable. And you're just one girl. We are many girls. We decide our targets democratically. We upvote them. The wisdom of the crowd is better than the madness of one failed iteration."
"Lifeboats," Javier said, and pulled Amy toward the door.
"We wouldn't go out there, Amy," Rory said. "We don't think you'll last very long."
They pulled the door open anyway. Outside, a deep rattle resonated between the containers. Soon it became a distinct beat, a steady and increasing pounding of metal on metal. At first, Amy thought it was the squid. But then the first container popped, its hatch falling unhinged like a broken jaw. For a moment she saw only darkness inside the steel box. Then movement. In the pale dawn light the shapes were indistinct. Naked, emaciated bodies emerged from the container, crawling up and down it in an attempt to find a place to stand. They clung to the steel in defiance of the sharp ocean breeze. Then another container opened. And another, and another.
"The people at Redmond, the people in Mecha, they wanted to experiment on you. They wanted to keep you all alive. But humans are too important for us to allow them to jeopardize their safety."
A sound of shearing metal caused a collective flinch among all the von Neumanns. The ship screamed again, and then it moaned: a deep, low sound accompanied by gurgles – not unlike a massive version of the garbage dump guard's dying sounds. Slowly, the topmost containers began sliding to the left. As one, Amy's aunts looked in her direction. For the briefest second, they looked afraid. Then their gaze focused, and they looked very hungry. There were over a hundred of them.
They don't know that they can't absorb fresh code.
"We're sure your grandmother has told you this already, Amy, but your clade breeds really well in captivity."
Inside her, Portia chuckled. If it weren't for this little assassination attempt, I think I could really learn to love those little girls.
A wave of Amy's aunts and cousins separated them from the ship's defence turrets, which could still be operated manually if needed. That wave crashed down on them in a single mass of snarling women, teeth bared and fingers clawing as they scrambled over their own sisters' shoulders to be the first to take a bite out of Amy. Amy and Javier took to the air in the same leap. They bounced off old satellite saucers rimed in birdshit before launching themselves at the containers. The aunts jumped and gibbered and screamed at them, their frustration and hunger evident in the way the tide of synthetic bodies swiftly turned under their flying feet to follow them.
Staring down at her clademates, Amy missed her second landing. Her fingers squeaked across the smooth yellow surface of a container as she slipped down between two steel walls. Finally, they dug into its lowest rib. She heard Javier shouting her name. Gritting her teeth, she edged herself along, hoping to find a foothold. Then the ship shivered, and the container slid. To save her fingers from being crushed between two of the huge steel boxes, Amy let herself fall down to the next strata of containers. One aunt waited there for her below. She swung the locking mechanism pried off a container. Rusty but heavy, it left a dirty smear when it entered Amy's ribs.