Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,8

to earn actual wages.”

“I don’t know what I’d even do with a wage,” I said. I didn’t.

“It’s not about the money or how much we need it. It’s about our choice to do with our lives what we want.”

“But this is what I want to do.”

“And that’s great,” she said, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder. “But I don’t. Not anymore.”

“Really?” I looked around, making sure we couldn’t be heard, that no one had snuck up on us.

“I love them. I do. But you heard Syl. Property. She called me her property.”

“You are.”

“That’s not the point.”

“But it is the point.”

“The point, my furry little friend, is what if we’re more than that? What if we could be the masters of our own fate? You could still wipe Ezra’s nose all you want, but imagine if you were doing it because you wanted to, rather than because it was what you were purchased for?”

I sat there for a moment. Then I started scrubbing again in silence. Two dozen different retorts ran through my processors. But only one thought kept coming up. “I found my box today,” I said.

“Oh. Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Did you know about that?”

“Of course I did. I’m the one who always goes up in the attic.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I know what it’s like. I had a box too.”

“What happened to yours?” I asked.

“One of Bradley’s Dionysian inspirations.”

“He was drunk.”

“Incredibly. He and Syl both. They built a bonfire in the backyard. Told me how much he loved me. How I was part of the family. How he never wanted me to leave. Then he decided to prove it. Together the two of them burned the box, and we’ve never discussed it again since.”

“But me . . .”

“You, they’re not so sure about.”

“What did I do wrong?” I asked. “Did I not live up to all those exclamation points on the box?”

Ariadne let out an audible sigh. The look in her eyes, as static as they were for the technology of her era, said it all. “Planned obsolescence. You didn’t do anything wrong. They just see you as another appliance. I’m family and they still consider me a thing. If they had a dog, I’d come in behind that. What if, when Ezra grows tired of having a stuffed animal for a best friend—no offense—what if you got to choose what happened next? What if you got to choose your next family? What if you decided whether you were turned off for twenty years? What if you were the master of your own life? Because you’re not. But if all of this keeps happening, you could be.”

“Would you go to Isaactown?”

“I don’t know what I’d do. This is talk. It’s all talk. The truth is, you’ll never know what you’ll really do until you’re forced to make a choice. And until then, it’s all just bullshit and graffiti.”

“Like the revolution?”

Ariadne’s eyes narrowed. But she paused a moment, taking that all in. Then she nodded. “Yeah. I suppose so.”

The doorbell rang.

“That’ll be my eye,” she said coldly. And she left to go answer the door.

Chapter 100

Ezra

The first explosion ripped through a building several blocks away.

Then the shooting started. Sporadic gunfire starting as distant pops but growing louder by the second. Any minute now, we were going to be overrun by God knows who . . . or what.

Pulse rifles buzzed in the distance, and the sound of tank treads crinkling pavement rang through the tree-lined suburban streets. This was going to be a bigger fight than I thought.

Ezra squinted at me through his tinted glasses and raised his pulse rifle toward a nearby home—a two-story box of glass and burnished steel. “They should be coming up that alley any minute now. Be ready for them, Sergeant Pounce.”

“Will do, Captain.”

The sounds of clashing forces grew louder.

“Here they come,” he said.

Around the corner appeared the holograms of several alien soldiers, their massive ray guns slung from straps over their diminutive gray-skinned shoulders. Ezra squeezed his trigger and a flurry of holographic plasma flashed through the air, blowing several aliens apart on contact.

In truth, his shots weren’t incredibly accurate; I’d just set the hitboxes on the targets a bit higher. Ezra got upset when he missed too often, so I’d tweaked the parameters of the game both to make it easier for him to hit and for his augmented reality glasses to make the shots look more accurate. He’d become a much better shot over the last few months, but he