“Who’s there?” Ana called out, spinning around on the bridge that was not a bridge. She swung her pistol around the room to find somewhere to aim, but there was no one else here. “How do you know my name?”
“I must know.”
D09 inclined his head. The signal surrounded him, waves of commands attempting to sink into his mainframe, but he put up walls to block them. If he had not had a memory core, the program could have easily overriden him. He was 94 percent positive that was why the other Metals had attacked. They lacked the sentience to command themselves.
But why had the Adviser created Metals that were not AI?
The walls were seamless; the door they had entered by had disappeared. The corners of the room blended into one another, an endless expanse of white melting into the bright glow of the starshield. It tricked his optics, made colors that he knew were Ana dance and blur together. There were no readings on the starshield, no commands. But he could feel where the signal was strongest and turned to the center of the room.
It grew louder the closer he stepped. The signal throbbed—scratching at his firewalls like white-hot talons. He had felt this sort of invasion before, just once, but much subtler.
On Astoria.
The signal cracked the walls he’d put up and wormed its way into his code. The counter he kept in the back of his head, the time until his next glitch, fluctuated under the stress of it.
Two hours and thirty-seven seconds.
Four hours and—
Three minutes and thirty tw—
Forty-seven seconds—
He could not glitch now. It would put Ana in too much danger.
Her golden-brown eyes darkened as she looked around the bridge. “Di, where is this thing?”
“You wound me, Ana. I am not a thing.”
She visibly tensed, spinning on her heels with her weapon ready—but there was nothing. There was nowhere to shoot. “We’re not here to hurt you,” she said, but her voice trembled all the same. She holstered her weapon and raised her hands. “See? We’re not. Are you a program like the HIVE? Did Rasovant create you?”
“Did the Goddess create light?”
The program breached his last wall. The foreign code threaded through his own, not disturbing or intrusive. Gentle. Prodding. Searching. “Ana, I believe it is not a program, but malware. And it is trying to hack me.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
He reassured her. “It is having difficulty.”
“One-zero-one-one-one-zero-one—” It read off his data. “You are broken, brother. Your code is ruined.”
Ana’s face pinched in pain. “That’s why we’re here to fix him.”
“You have ruined him.”
“I know!” she cried. But she had not ruined him. He wanted—tried—to say as much, but the program clamped down, suffocating him. “My crew—please, they don’t mean harm. Stop attacking them. We just want answers—”
“You should have burned.”
Her eyes widened. “. . . What?” she whispered.
“Ana—” Di forced out, and the foreign codes in his processors seized. He made a noise, and the program dropped him to his knees. The counter in the back of his mind clicked to zero. He froze.
Glitched.
“He should have let you burn. And now he is ruined.”
“Di!” Ana fell to her knees beside him, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Di, snap out of it—”
He twitched, trying to override it, but the spikes of code disrupted him again and again. He could not stop it. The intruding numbers pulsed, breaking his data byte by byte. He was losing himself. What he knew. Information. Facts.
Deteriorating.
The program was breaking him.
Trying to take control.
No—
It.
Would.
Not.
“Stop it!” Ana cried. “Stop whatever you’re doing to him right now or I’ll shoot this whole place up until I find you!”
“There will be others like him. They will be better. Do not fret.”
“Like bloody hell they will!”
The voice laughed. It would never let them escape, Di knew.
The signal—it came from the center of the room.
If the malware could sink into him, he could travel the same path. He could reach it, but he could not come back.
“I’m getting you out of here,” she said, curling her arm into his. She tried to pull him up, to get him on his feet, but he was too heavy.
She did not understand. They would not escape.
In the signals, the wires, the pulses of white-hot talons that clawed into his code, he followed the malware’s trail. It was large—foreign. It had not had time to infest the entire ship, only the androids. He spread across its programs in zeroes and ones like the roots of a tree. He forced the console to reveal itself.
A thin cylinder rose in the center of the room, a mass of mainframe and wires, and a hard drive at its center. Festering with the virus.
“Di?” Ana asked as he drew himself away from her. Her voice was thick with worry. “Di—what’s happening? Did you do that?”
“Stop struggling, brother. You are ruined. We will remake you.”
“You are mistaken,” D09 said, willing himself to move, overriding protocols, breaking his own systems beyond repair. He staggered toward the console, not looking back at Ana, because if he did, he would recalculate his decision. “I am more than the sum of my parts.”
“Di.” He registered her voice but could not look back. “What are you doing? Don’t—stop—come back!”
He hesitated for a moment—long enough to realize there were no good good-byes.
Then he shoved his hand into the console, wrapped his fingers around the hard drive, and pulled. The program retaliated, digging into his mainframe, clawing him apart. There was no pain.
But the moment before he crushed the starship’s hard drive, not long enough by any quantifiable standards, he knew he would miss Ana.
He would miss her more than iron and stars.