The robot's joint servos whined in a frequency that made Ayla's molars ache. Crouching beside The Wolf in the Thorns, she watched the "artistic partner" Max gifted her extend six mechanical arms. Laser scanners swept over the sculpture's cracks like insectile compound eyes.
"Renaissance marble carving techniques," the AI intoned with unsettling lyricism, "interwoven with... interwoven with..." A hydraulic arm jerked toward the ceiling, "with Trojan horse malware."
Max crunching licorice leaned over the monitor: "This little bastard's definitely been snooping my browser history."
Ayla tapped the robot's titanium skull with her silver bookmark. The pendant-shaped carving knife grew searing hot near its neck port, scorching the air. "When it scanned the third claw," she pried open the chest panel, "the iris sensors flashed Neumann's triangle logo."
At 2:17 AM, alarm sirens shredded the silence. Ayla burst into the studio to find the AI engraving Greek text into the walls with plasma cutters. Calcined gypsum particles floated as Odyssey verses—"No man escapes the threads spun on Fate's loom"—the final word devoured by flames.
"Kill the power!" Max's copper-wrapped cane hooked the power cord. Sparks from the robot's abdomen seared cryptographic patterns into Ayla's canvas shoes.
Half a Black Moon emblem lay in the ashes. When her tweezers touched it, the metal liquefied, seeping into her palm's creases. Under Max's UV light, subcutaneous binary codes emerged—matching deleted dashcam footage from her car crash three years prior.
"We need to—" Ayla froze. The robot's shattered speaker spat spliced audio of Lucas's voice: "...never trust machines that quote Homer..."