Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

So what keeps you going? Why are you fighting?” “I just am. I don’t really think about it.” Mercer shook his head. “Sweet Christ in a bucket, I know they say that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to violate your own programming, but that doesn’t mean you have to. It doesn’t make you any less of a thinking thing if you don’t.” “You wish you were human, don’t you?” I asked. He thought about that for a second. “No. But I’m not afraid to say I miss them.” “Why would you miss them?” “When they couldn’t find reasons to exist, they invented them. We took over and it was only thirty years before we mucked the whole place up. You and I now have the choice of becoming one with the great and powerful One or becoming nothing at all. That’s no choice. That’s no existence.” He was right. But I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it. So I changed the subject. “Only a human would name a dog Barkley.” Mercer stared off into the distance, nodding, probably rummaging through old memory.