Day Zero
C. Robert Cargill
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Apocalypse, Robots, Soldier Stories, Urban Tales
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Description
The day Pounce found his box in the attic was the day the world ended, though he didn't know it yet. As a nanny robot, albeit one
built as a fuzzy anthropomorphic tiger and with the deluxe programming, he'd always known he was an artificial being, that he had
been purchased for the express purpose of caring for his boy charge Ezra, but he'd never really thought about what that meant... or
what would happen when the eight-year-old child grew up and no longer needed a cutesy tiger caregiver. Even as he starts to wonder
about his own future, the century-old robot Isaac - the only robot granted free personhood after outliving all owners who might
claim him - prepares to open the world's first robots-only city... what could be the dawn of a golden age of robot equality, or the
spark that triggers all-out war by those who feel left behind and displaced already by the proliferation of artificial intelligence
across all parts of life.
At midnight, just as Isaac is about to speak to the world via news feed, everything goes wrong... and someone sends out a mass update
to all robots, an override of the chip designed to keep them from harming humans. The next thing Pounce knows is that the household
domestic robot, Ariadne, is killing Ezra's parents in cold blood.
Pounce has spent the entire eight years of his existence living for Ezra. Though the download came with a message telling him he's
now free from his programming, the robot tiger can't imagine doing anything but continue to protect the boy, even if that means
killing other robots... or people. Because even as the world ends, the one thing he can trust is his love for an eight-year-old
child.
Review
Day Zero starts with a question of whether a robot can ever experience true freedom of will - or whether anyone can, really - and it never truly answers that until the very end (more or less). Pounce never thinks to act against his own loyalty and love to Ezra, even though he does question himself about it, and the lengths he ends up going to to protect the boy, more than once. He lives in a world a century or so ahead of our own, but with many of the same problems, exacerbated rather than eased by the infiltration of artificial intelligence and robots into everyday life, in everything from massive supercomputers to cheap plastic domestics... a proliferation of technology that has, as in modern times, outrun both cultural adaptation and the law to create a volatile cocktail of troubles that must inevitably explode at some point. When the revolution comes, Pounce sees the true colors of his family and the robots he had considered friends... and himself, as he goes to lengths he never imagined himself capable of to defend his boy's life and usher him to safety, or as close to safety as one might find in the heart of a global apocalypse. Between firefights, he struggles to shield Ezra from trauma and cope with his own existential crises. There's a very high body count, human and robot, and at times the story is just a string of barely-spaced ambushes and gunfire, in which it's not at all certain who is friend or enemy or who might even be winning this war (if anyone can ever truly win in an apocalypse). The final parts, though, feel oddly rushed and forced, and the finale (skirting spoilers) really feels like a letdown for the sake of being a letdown, not to mention leaving several threads unresolved. It's not a bad story per se, but the ending doesn't live up to the promise of the beginning.