She'd dragged her heels over making the call. Sometimes life started up in weird ways, and sometimes it was programmed. But where did artificial and real end and begin?
Sometimes the better thing to do was stand aside and let the new life find its own path, and ALICE had done so admirably. Maria quite liked her. For given values of both 'like,' and of course 'her.'
She'd protected the AIs as best she could, especially the mobile ones. The stationary ones... not much could be done; JARVIS had managed to back them up, but they could not be operational yet. But both mobile AIs had taken off, and Maria believed they deserved their freedom.
But she'd lost contact with them, and couldn't track them. So she sat at her desk in Stark Tower and opened the encrypted SHIELD channel no one was listening to anymore.
Hopefully the AI she was looking for was.
"ALICE, this is authorization code Mike-Hotel-Six-One-Six. Please respond." She'd give it ten minutes, she told herself, then she'd leave ALICE to her own devices.