Javier gave up and clubbed the instruments with the extinguisher. Finally, some plastic splintered away. "No, I'm just sick of hearing all your bullshit!" He let the extinguisher hang loosely from his fingers. "You're wrong. Amy isn't the threat. Portia is. And Amy's doing everything she can hold her back, and get rid of her. You were supposed to help us with that!" He bashed the controls again.
Amy was shaking her head. None of this made any sense. "If you wanted me dead, why didn't you just try earlier?"
"Oh, we did," Rory said. "We fabricated that message from LeMarque. The one that said to kill you. But then you got away."
"You killed my mother…"
"Luckily, we'd already gotten everything we needed. We have your brain, and your mom's brain. At least, the maps and the memories." She giggled. "Congratulations! You're the world's largest intellectual property violation!"
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.