and a suite of programs that will allow you to know what to do in any situation. You weren’t designed to just take care of Ezra. You weren’t designed just to be his best friend. You were designed to protect him in case of emergency. Your single primary function in life was to protect that little boy.”
“Wow,” I said. “You must have been a hell of a salesman.”
“I was. And now I’m making one last deal and asking if you want access to all of that.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “once the protocols are active, you’ll be . . . different.”
“How so?”
“Just . . . different.” A pregnant pause hung in the air. “So. Are you in? Or are you out?”
I looked at Quentin, then over at Ezra. Ezra took me by the hand, nodding.
“Okay,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
“Ezra,” said Quentin, “do you have any brothers or sisters?”
Ezra shook his head.
“Okay. That means Pounce’s programming recognizes you as possessing sole governorship of his parental controls. I need you to assign them over to me.”
“Wait,” I said, quickly. Giving Quentin parental control powers made him my new owner. My new master. And I didn’t know if I trusted him.
“It’s the only way, Pounce,” he said.
I looked at Ezra. I loved him so much. He had to survive. This was the biggest gamble I’d taken yet. If I was wrong about this guy, I could be forfeiting not only my life, but Ezra’s. But if I was right . . .
“Okay,” I said. “Do it, Ez.”
Ezra began. “I give you parental—”
“Say, Pounce, give full parental controls to Quentin Styles.”
“Pounce, give full parental controls to Quentin Styles.”
“Pounce, I am Quentin Styles.”
“Full parental powers assigned,” I said without thinking.
Quentin leaned forward, putting both hands on my shoulders, and looked me square in the eye. “Mama Bear,” he said.
The world at once snapped shut, and I descended quickly into an inky blackness from which I was sure I was never going to wa—
Chapter 10011
Mama Bear
I snapped awake, born again.
How long was I out? I thought. I checked the time. Three seconds. I had been out for exactly three seconds, and now that I was back, I in fact found myself changed. The old Pounce was gone, lost to a sea of software updates that was like living my whole life in a room lit by candlelight only to now see it in the light of the noonday sun.
Holy shit. My processors were overclocked. I had dumped terabytes of educational information from my cache to find it replaced with holy fucking shit on a shingle combat protocols, weapon statistics, tactical information, a heads-up display of everything I knew about this house, its inhabitants, this neighborhood, the region of Austintonio we were in. I was sifting through reams and reams of data every second and was just starting to make heads or tails of what I’d become.
Quentin was right. I was different. I had already mapped fourteen different ways out of the neighborhood, totaled up the number of police likely to be stationed nearby to figure out how many plasma rifles might be around, and run through a kill list of every bot I knew in the neighborhood and what their current known condition was.
I was cute. I was fluffy. And I knew how to kill every other person in this room with every available implement.
But one thing that hadn’t changed: I loved the shit out of the little boy still holding my hand.
“Are you okay?” asked Ezra.
“Am I okay?” I asked. “I’m badass is what I am.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Quentin. “So do we still have a deal?”
“Yes,” I said. “We do.”
There was a reason Quentin asked. I scanned my protocols. Obeying him wasn’t in them. I saw then why he made the deal. Mama Bear wasn’t just a tactical suite designed to handle everything from a terrorist attack to an earthquake; it erased every last bit of parental control the owner has, directing everything in my being toward one singular purpose:
Protecting their child.
That was my priority now. And I didn’t owe this guy or his family jack shit. Ezra was my everything. My reason for being. They were potential threats. Or casualties. But I was still me. I was still the Pounce that had been here before. I loved Ezra the same way, and I did feel I owed these people for