In the aftermath of Konstantin's rise and the expansion of Osiris Education through mass, government funded trials, Russia had become the leading edge of manufacturing and research. The efficiency boost we had gotten through model factories in Russia run and staffed by workers with uploads in engineering and materials sciences was peerless. Imagine the combination of practical, floor level knowledge and the abilities of world class designers - It was a magnificent achievement and Pride's product lines were being embedded and improved in model factories that were cutting costs down to basically nothing. They had even managed to cut the cost of my solar panels in half, which was nice and entirely superfluous.

The man in front of me represented a real threat to that new order and the first time I had felt real sympathy for the old suppression school of Hydra thought. Middle-aged looking, in decent but not excellent shape, with his graying hair cut short, Maxim Popov looked like the father of five children. He certainly didn't have the sleek good looks of Tony Stark or me.

"Mr. Popov," I said, sitting down across from him in the tiny Russian interrogation room. The metal chair was uncomfortable, but he was cuffed to the other end of the table. "Do you have any children?"

"Six," he said, his voice quiet. We'd been holding him for a few days without charge or communique – There was nothing particularly unusual about that in Russia under Konstantin. But the fact that he said six instead of five told me instantly that my job here was going to be harder than I had hoped. After all, he had only five human children.

"I have one out here in the world and one inside my wife," I said, keeping my tone as conversational as possible. I slid him a picture, "This is a picture of Persephone."

"She is a beautiful little girl," Popov said picking up the picture, "I remember when Sariya was that young. Treasure it, they grow up too soon."

"I don't get to spend enough time with her," I said, taking back the photo with an open hand. "I spend too much time trying to make sure that she still has a world to grow up in."

Popov snorted, "Yes, SWORD." He said SWORD in English, which I suppose made sense – You couldn't possibly make that acronym work in every language. "Two whole alien invasions, three and a half days of active combat and already it has a bigger budget than half of the world's militaries."

Thank you for your kind advice Madam Gao, however much it was delivered in the most irritating way possible. I took a deep breath and said, "I can understand your skepticism, but we've been working hard to ensure global security on all fronts. We got a hit on the death of a garbage worker, your brother."

I slid him a manufactured picture of his brother, with wounds that could've been produced by Malyshka's drone.

He held it in his hand for a second and threw it back in my face, "This is bullshit. If I had a computer, I'd prove it."

Well, he wasn't wrong that it was bullshit. I took the picture and slid it back into the file. "The AI in the dump has become rabid, Popov."

"Malyshka is the gentlest soul I have ever met. No human could match her kindness." Popov said, "She would not tread on even a flower, much less Dmitry."

Right, well, that might have been exciting for me in a different life, but as the head of a global conspiracy for world domination even a 'good' AI was a major problem for me. "Mr. Popov, do you know that the creation of an AI is a crime punishable by life in prison?"

"I know," he said, "I didn't mean to. I isolated the program from the web, designed the intra-unit network to coordinate them. I wanted my brother to be safer, that was all. When I discovered Malyshka, it was too late – To hurt my own child? I could never do such a thing."

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At least she didn't have internet access. That meant we could still turn her off. "Did you take Malyshka anywhere other than the dump?"

Popov stared at me for a moment, the gears turning in his mind, and then he straightened himself out and got very stiff. He had figured out that I was trying to figure out how to kill Malyshka and he had gone silent. Which meant that she was still quite killable – The only question was if she really confined to the dump. She had said she was and given her other temperamental traits, it seemed unlikely that she was going to exit the dump independently and it seemed unlikely given Popov's precautions that he had taken her outside of it.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Popov."

"No!" he cried, his voice begging, "Please, Mr. Trent, don't hurt Malyshka."

I looked at him for a moment and debated – Popov's mind was an invaluable resource, but I was about to make an enemy of him and I had little choice in the matter. I looked at him for a moment and lied, "We will do everything in our power to make sure it doesn't come to that."

The idea of Malyshka was promising - An AI that was intelligent and relatively beneficent. But Malyshka had several faults. First of all, I had no idea what was the upper limit of their power - Malyshka could, in theory, have a core in every computer connected to the internet in the space of time it took to download a ROM. Second, Malyshka was a person and I had met their father and spoken with Malyshka themselves - And Malyshka despised hurting people and wanted to support her family. The family could be given a comfortable place in the structures of the world, that wasn't an unfixable problem. But despising hurting people... Well, needless to say Hydra couldn't work with that. I couldn't work with that, either, and Andromeda couldn't work with it, and while I'm sure Malyshka would put Persephone in a nice foster home, that wasn't what I wanted. Hydra was deep, deep in the shadows, but if some AI god empress started watching through our phones, we'd probably crack - My subordinates didn't have perfect discipline even if they had a shocking amount. That was all assuming that Malyshka stayed a warm and beneficent being and didn't lose it at the stress of human suffering and decide to put us all out of our misery.

This added up to one thing.

I walked out of the cell to Konstantin and we made our way down the hall for a few moments before I spoke, "SWORD will want authorization from you to strafe the park."

"Of course, Michael," Konstantin said.

"We're going to use a multistep process – First, we'll a series of electromagnetic pulses over the area, then we'll use the Helicarriers to shred all the visible ground units, at that point I want the domestic SWORD units to sweep and kill anything that looks like it might be a unit for Malyshka, and then we'll deploy an implosion device large enough to engulf the area."

"You will have Russia's support," Konstantin said with agreement.

"And then, and only then, I want you to make sure that Popov is dead in the right way that it convinces the world when we tell them we liquidated Malyshka because she killed her creator."

It was a pity that we had to kill Popov but I didn't want some genius tier super-rival. At the end of the week, when the news reports were running the story, 'Rogue AI kills Creator, SWORD saves Moscow!' and we were re-calibrating our Osiris program to more clearly condemn AI production in all its potential permutations, I was left to conclude that Gao had been right - I had needed an ax.