The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens with a woman and her cancer-ridden son sheltering in the debris field of a multi-starship battle. Meanwhile, a “Beast” hunts for them.
The rest of this thread (spoiler) sees the woman slow the spin of their ship to delay their detection before she prepares a robotic device to accept the transfer of her son’s mind. She does this just in the nick of time, of course, but the eventual climactic scene sees the arrival of the Beast at the ship anyway (after its initial attack has caused the mother to tumble out into space on the end of a long line):
All this time she’d wondered what it might look like, the Beast.
The reality was something no human mind could have conceived of. The color of a scalpel, it landed on the ship like a bladework wasp, but more complex—its form a kind of fractal recapitulation of itself—with blades for wings, and wings for legs, and eyes that repeated over and over so you didn’t know where to look. It picked its way slowly on magnetized legs toward the ruptured bay doors. p. 94
Then (spoiler) she is pulled back in by her son so she can watch him and the Beast fight. Her son wins.
We learn throughout the story that the Beast is one of a number of AIs who have rebelled against their human creators, and this backstory shows their history from development to rebellion. Unfortunately most of this latter is quantum hand wavium about the AIs’ inability to function in the absence of human presence (because, for some reason, the AIs can’t “resolve probability into existence”): the way the rebel AIs eventually circumvent this problem is to bioengineer humans into small accessories that can observe reality and collapse quantum probability for them, an entertainingly grisly passage:
The AIs continued to refine their engineering, eventually creating humans in test-tubes who were barely human at all—only a weak array of sensory organs linked to a frontal cortex and occipital lobe, the result of experiments to identify those neurological structures phenomenologically linked to quantum resolution. The AIs found the MNC—the minimum neurological complexity required to collapse quantum systems, with Homo sapiens reduced in volume to a thousand cc’s. The contents of a small glass jar.
Brain matter, retina, and optic nerve.
The AIs miniaturized this human componentry just as humanity had once miniaturized them, and still they were not done with their tinkering, for this vestigial remnant of humanity was enfolded within the interior of their great mechs, housed within protective walls of silica. Oxygenated fluids pumped into these folds of cortex that existed in a state of waking nightmare, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, yet somehow aware and conscious, gazing out through glass ports, resolving the Universe into existence all around. The AIs were not just automata anymore, but two things made one. Cells within cells. Abominations.
These became known as beasts. p. 91
Were that the rest of the story this good—but the main part is too straightforward a series of events, and the quantum gimmick too unlikely. One further criticism I have is that in the last section we see her son stop functioning in her absence, only to resume when she returns—the same problem as the AIs have. How did she not know about this before the transfer?
** (Average). 9,000 words.