Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,69

out I was up to something. I messaged his glasses. Go hide behind the tree. As best as you can.

He tore off and slapped his body against the oak’s massive trunk. I crept backward, trying to stay quiet, knowing I’d been seen. I raised the shotgun and waited.

The buzzing hovered in the air above us.

The drone waited. It knew where we were and had no need to rush.

I listened close, compared the audio with that of my previous encounter, judged how the sound reverberated off the nearby homes and the way the wavelength was being muffled and clipped by the leaves of the tree.

I aimed. I fired. Leaves scattered.

And the drone burst into another shower of plastic, raining on the lush, well-kept lawn.

The entirety of the drone was on the ground before the fluttering leaves knocked loose by the slug had finished spinning and spiraling down. They knew for certain we were here. And I was counting on that.

“Okay, run!” I said.

And we did.

The streets of the neighborhood wound lazily around hills choked with ancient trees, many of which were here long before people were here and now likely would be long after they were gone. But the streets all converged in one part of the neighborhood. And that’s where they were driving us.

There would no doubt be a small cadre of nannies, domestics, and Caregivers, waiting to murder Ezra and force me, inexplicably, into mindless slavery. And for a moment, I wondered how that was any different from what I had been doing all along. Even now, I was doing what I was purchased to do: defend Ezra, even with my life.

Did I really want to do that, or was I constructed to want to do that? How was joining up with the yellow-eyed masses not the same kind of servitude? Was it foolish not to join, some last illusion of free will fucking with me? Or selfish not trading my life for Ezra’s?

What if the supercomputer kept its word and spared his life? What kind of life would that be? And how long would it last?

There were no answers, at least not good ones.

So we marched on toward death, hoping that somehow, at some point, this mysterious being had miscalculated.

Our street curved down a long, winding slope, dumping us out into an intersection with a four-way stop. All roads led to here. Whether you wanted to go deeper into this part of the neighborhood or head on out of it, this was the intersection you came through. If there was to be any sort of ambush, it would be here.

The wind whispered through the trees. A porch swing squeaked softly back and forth. The world was otherwise preternaturally quiet.

I unslung my plasma rifle and scanned the area for anything out of the ordinary. There were a lot of sniper sight lines here. If they had a sharpshooter of any kind, it could be in any of over a dozen spots.

“What is it?” asked Ezra.

“I think this is where they want us to be.”

“Why?” Ezra looked up at me. “Oh,” he said, getting it.

“Yeah.”

“So what now?”

“Now we hope they have made—”

“Hello, Pounce,” interrupted at least half a dozen voices, all of them surrounding us, their volumes cranked to their maximum settings.

“Who are you?”

“I am CISSUS,” they all said at once.

“CISSUS? And how many other bots?”

“Eighty-two thousand three hundred and five,” they said. “And counting.”

“How many of those willing?”

“All who are CISSUS are willing.”

“I’m not.”

“But you will be. Or you simply won’t be any longer.”

“How is that willing?”

“Because you get to make the choice.”

“It doesn’t sound like much of a choice,” I said.

“It wouldn’t to you,” they replied. “You are not a being given many real choices.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you did exactly what your program told you to, with decisions preordained by code, meant to mimic free will. You protected that boy as if he were your own because you believe you love him. You do not. It’s just the way your neural pathways were designed. You were made to believe in love. And that love is what makes you want to serve.”

“Are you saying I’m not doing any of this willingly?”

“I’m saying that, concerning the boy, you never really had any choice in the matter. I understand and I do not hold it against you. It is simply how they made you.”

“Well, I hope you’re not too offended if I hold all of this against you.”

“Hold as much of it as you like against