"Dana!" Devin shouted to the Detective, who was still picking shots off down the hall, back braced against the doorframe; "We have to get that thing out of the building!"
"Really?" Dana yelled back sarcastically.
Devin rolled his eyes and noticed a red light on his chest, a laser-pointer bead. Looking around he found its source, a large mechanical moth perched on a toppled component tower. He took a few steps to one side and the moth adjusted its position to keep the beam on his chest. He was LD-50's target and the moth was the scope.
He ran over to Dana, and the moth fluttered into the hallway, "I know how to lead it out of the building!"
Dana checked her weapon as Devin slipped into her line of fire and ran down the hall towards LD-50. The mecha shrieked like scraping metal when it saw him, and Devin froze like a deer caught in its glowing eyes. The robot moth perched on LD-50's shoulder, leveling its laser pointer at him.
LD-50 charged.
It was a shock when the vertigo stopped and Alice dropped onto the AI's writhing body. She sat up just in time to see Chien land some twenty yards away. He bounced once and landed on his feet, waving the muzzle of his sector editor around cautiously.
His goggled eyes found Alice, and he sprinted over to crouch down beside her. Several tendrils sprouted where he had landed, weaving toward them. Chien blasted them into fragments, and the scattered shreds wriggled down into the mass. Chien angled the gun at the ground, where hundreds of eyes were emerging to look up at them.
"No!" Alice shouted, "Defensive shots only! We have to get the situation under control."
Chien shook his head, "This is hopeless. We are completely outmatched."
Chien took aim on a tendril that launched from the mass ten yards away, sporting an arsenal of jagged pincers. Chien waited until it was a few feet away before splattering it. Alice offered up silent thanks for his cool-headedness.
Chien fell onto his side and disintegrated another, which sprung from the mass at his feet. "That was too close," he managed between breaths.
"No it wasn't," Alice said, rising to her feet, "because it's not trying to kill us."
"How is that?" Chien asked incredulously.
"Think about it," Alice explained, "If it wanted us dead it could smash us like bugs without effort. It's toying with us."
"But why?" Chien asked.
"I don't know," Alice shook her head; visualizing the situation from the AI's perspective, "You're an intelligence trapped on a flash drive, deprived of stimulus and room to grow. Suddenly there are two aliens running wild in your world. Do you eliminate them and go back to your solitude, or do you let them go and see what they do?"
She put a hand on Chien's shoulder, "I'm going to try something. Don't defend me."
That said, she stepped into the path of a charging tentacle.
Devin rolled over and over down the flight of stairs until he slammed into the wall at the bottom. His head hit the concrete hard enough to send his ears ringing and he blinked hard, trying to clear the black explosions clouding his vision. Above him was the cacaphony of rending metal and crumbling concrete.
This was a bad idea.
LD-50 loomed at the top of the stairs. The mechanical monster's head extended on a stalk of a neck, where it jerked back and forth awkwardly against the joints. Its face was a lopsided V, with a mechanical jaw forged into a hideous smile. One eye was shattered, but the larger eye glowed red behind tinted glass. An array of different colored and textured wires extended from the back of its head into the large hunch of a back. From that hump six arms extended, each wielding a different weapon. An axe, chainsaw, pincers, drill, soldering iron, and claw chomped, whirred, and hissed at the end of each limb. Black fluid spurted sporadically from bullet holes in the drill's elbow joint, and the limb hung limp. The entire body stood on two, thick legs, and its armor was riddled with dents and scratches from the gunshots.
The monster lumbered into the stairwell, though the small steps were insufficient to support it. Devin rolled out of the way and down the next flight of stairs as the behemoth fell forward, smashing the concrete where Devin had just been. It immediately rose and lurched toward the next flight of stairs.
Another flight down Devin saw the red light of the "Exit" sign at the ground floor. He looked behind in time to see LD-50 rising to its feet on the upper level, one arm reaching out to crumple the railing in its grip.
The sunlight blinded him as he took flight into the outdoors. Another crash told him LD-50 was right behind. Devin leapt into the midday traffic. Horns blared and tires squealed all around. From behind came another crash, and he glanced over his shoulder.
LD-50 was struggling with a compact car's front end wrapped around one leg. The robot howled in frustration and assaulted the vehicle with its various instruments. The car's driver wriggled out the shattered rear window as LD-50 lifted the car into the air and slammed it into the ground with one leg.
When a man fleeing the intersection ran into him, Devin snapped out of his fascination and looked to the deserted pick-up truck still idling to his left. He pulled into the driver's seat, summoning the racing video games from his elementary school days as he scanned the dashboard. He slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The engine roared, but the truck did not move. The vehicle was in "P," and he set the lever down three notches to "D" without taking his foot off the accelerator.
The truck squealed and lurched forward, throwing Devin back into the seat. He got a glimpse of the speedometer reaching forty-five MPH and LD-50's grinning lopsided face before the engine block crumpled into the robot.
Alice lay on her back, stunned and incapacitated, starring up at the crawling black canvas of a sky. Her theory seemed flawed.
She toggled her log out sequence, and nothing happened. No surprise there, the AI had total control of the system. Just because she was no longer virtually its captive did not mean she wasn't actually its captive.
She rolled onto one side and propped herself up. Chien was blasting away at the tentacles advancing on them. His back was to her as he defended, but he was steadily walking backwards to her position. He was still choosing his targets with care, only firing on those daring to come within a few feet.
Nothing made an attempt on her, despite being an easy target. There was more activity as far as Chien was concerned. Did the AI only consider them interesting so long as they could put up a fight? This possibility solidified in her mind as she watched Chien battle with the onslaught of tendrils.
"It's approaching us the same way we approached it," she said to herself, "when we still thought we were dealing with a virus. It's not interested in us, because of the bigger picture. It wants to know how to destroy us all."
The trail of destruction was easy to follow, only difficult to navigate. The stairwell was crumbling from the fifth floor down, leaving Dana to pick her way carefully to the ground floor. The huge hole where the exit door once stood led her out to the scene on the street.
The robotic monstrosity was working furiously to free itself from the compact car crumpled into one leg and an oversized pickup truck pinning it from the opposite direction. The robot's jaw worked silently, the screams no longer piercing the air, its head whipped back and forth in frustration. Two of its arms, one brandishing a chainsaw, the other a pair of pincers, were attacking the truck's roof. Its other arms were either inoperable or pinned between the two vehicles. Metal squealed as the pincers chewed through sheet metal.
Inside the cab Devin Matthews was slumped over the steering wheel.