Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,4

old enough to want something more than plastic and steel whirring and chirping beneath microfiber fur. For when he’d want friends of flesh and blood to spend his life with. When he would realize that I was just a toy for children and not a companion for life.

But I was more than just a toy. Wasn’t I?

I honestly didn’t know.

Chapter 10

Sunny Afternoon

DUH NANA NANA.

DUH NANA NANA.

DUH NANA NANA.

DUH NANA NANA.

Chugging guitars bullied their way through the house, shaking the walls, rattling the windows, a tidal wave of sound flooding out the moment we opened the front door.

The Kinks. “You Really Got Me.” It took a second. It really is the exact same song as “All Day and All of the Night,” a fact Sylvia would point out once a year whenever she was planning her lectures on the incestuous nature of the ’70s London music scene. She and Bradley both were humanities professors. He taught Latin, Greek, the literature of both, and their mythology. She held a Ph.D. in pop culture, with a focus on the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This was the time of year when she would begin rattling on about Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie and how the breakup of one hitmaking group would invariably result in a genius album from another. Today she had clearly gotten to her lecture on the influence of the Kinks and how the rise and fall of Argent would breathe new life into their discography. It was a nice lecture, and it was a pleasure hearing it piecemeal every spring for the last six years as she rehearsed it while cranking their albums eighteen decibels higher than she should be.

I was hoping she hadn’t already played the Argent. Ezra loved “God Gave Rock and Roll to You.” Most arena rock, really. “They were meant to sing along to,” he would say, echoing his mother. “Anyone can sing them. Even eight-year-olds.” But “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” was a particular favorite.

I closed the door and loaded “You Really Got Me” into my audio profile, allowing me to filter out every sensor-shaking note. The house grew eerily quiet all at once, though Ezra’s bobbing head made it quite clear that the music was still on full blast.

Sylvia danced around the corner, her hands balled into tiny fists, her shoulders bobbing with each chug of the guitar, a punk-rock disco queen lost in the rhythm of a song over a century old. Her eyes were pure light, her smile loving. Ezra was the very center of her world, as he was mine, and no matter how happy she was submerged in the soundscape of the Kinks before we’d gotten there, it was made all the better by his having dove into it at that moment along with her. She reached out to take his hands, pulling him into the living room, each step a dance.

“How was school, sweetie?” she yelled over the music, a fact made all the stranger to me as I was no longer hearing it. To my ears, she was someone shouting in an empty house, a woman gone entirely mad.

Ezra shrugged, his face a blank smile trying to hide his real feelings. Sylvia picked up on his dour mood immediately.

“Jarvis, music volume eight,” she said.

The music level dropped at once, the dull rattling of the windows falling silent. Sylvia fell to one knee and put her hands on Ezra’s shoulders.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“Nothing,” he said with the lilt of a buried sigh.

“Something’s wrong. What is it?”

He tried to hold it together, he really did. But he couldn’t. The dam burst, tears pouring out of the corners of his eyes, and he began, almost at once, sobbing. “I don’t want Pounce to go!”

For a second, Sylvia looked confused. Then pissed. She looked at me with a death glare that could have melted steel. She was a sweet woman, she really was. But it was layered over a dark, angry center peppered with bitterness from a less-than-fulfilling childhood that, when allowed to rise to the surface, made her spectacularly terrifying. She had a tone of voice, every note of which suggested that she would immediately shut you down, without warning, box you up and ship you off for scrap, just to spite you, and her current tenor was rapidly approaching it.

“Honey, Pounce isn’t going anywhere. Not until you’re ready.”

“I know, but I don’t want to be ready. I don’t want him to ever go. I want him