Day Zero (Sea of Rust, #0)

by C. Robert Cargill

The first day of the end of the world started entirely without incident. The sun came up at precisely 6:34. Scattered clouds, sunny, and 72 degrees. Light traffic—entirely automated—on the 451, so no problems getting to school. No fires or shootings or civil unrest. An average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill last day on Earth.

I mean, I know what I am. There isn’t really a moment that I doubt it, falling into some delusion that I could, at some point, become a real boy. I’m a robot. Artificially intelligent. But I’m also, as the saying goes, a thinking thing. And no thinking thing should have to see the box they were bought and sold in.

They were pining for an era that had died several generations before, both dependent on the social safety net and angry at it for not allowing them to be dirt poor on their own terms.

Bradley was insistent on keeping the settings of any violent games to the least lifelike and most child-friendly. As much as Bradley was fine with filling Ezra’s head with tales of Zeus’s sexual conquests and Saturn’s infanticidal rage, he drew the line at visual depictions of blood, gore, and exploding alien goo.

Normal is just the idea that whatever messed-up or otherwise insane things going on around you are acceptable to maintain whatever comforts you’ve cobbled together for yourself.

For as long as humankind can remember, it has wanted two things: to play God and to breathe life into the objects around them. And for thousands of years, humans created machines to approximate life and magic and all the things men and women could not do. And then a man stood in front of a roomful of people and had a computer say, “Hello.” That’s it. Hello. It didn’t mean it. It didn’t know what it was saying. But it said it. Hello. And within thirty years, humans were having conversations with their phones.

Sylvia looked at me and smiled. “You really are a robot.” Then she turned and went back into the living room. For a moment, I stood there, her words hitting me like a truck. You really are a robot. I really was a robot. But she meant just, didn’t she? She meant just a robot. I hadn’t had time to process how the attack might affect me, but I could say with certainty how that one sentence felt. It didn’t just hurt; it cut deep. Drunk though she was, I knew she meant it.

He was asleep in seconds, the weight of the sandman’s sprinkle too great even for his level of excitement.

“This is one of those moments,” said Bradley. “What moments?” asked Sylvia. “One of those where were you when moments. This . . . this is . . . it’s going to change everything. Tomorrow is going to be a very different day.”

“I’m gonna level with you,” said Bradley. “I’m too drunk to handle this right now. I’m going to need you to be the adult in the room tonight.” “Asshole, I’m drunk too.” “Yeah, but you’re better at it than I am.”

“We have the panic room. It’s stocked. The second we hear a mouse fart outside, we’ll get everyone in it and we’ll wait it out.”

It was quite clear that our neighborhood had been spared the worst of it; from our vantage point, this war had been nothing but a quiet, polite bit of light genocide.