Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,1

I said.

“Thanks, Pounce.”

“I found my old box up there. Would you like me to break it down for recycling?”

“Oh, there’s no need to do that.”

“It’s no trouble.”

She laughed. “No, we just don’t know when we might need it again.” Then, for a moment, she froze, as if she were a robot herself, skipping over her programming, caught in some irreparable logic loop. She hadn’t meant to say that. Not like that. Not in such a casual way. Her eyes stayed on the apple, the knife halfway through a slice.

She cut a piece off the apple and ate it right off the knife, still not making eye contact, trying to find the right words.

“Ezra isn’t going to be little forever,” she blurted out, finally looking me in the eye. “It’s hard to think about, I know. I want my little boy to stay a little boy for as long as possible. Forever if he could. But time doesn’t work that way. Nothing works that way. He’s growing up fast, and soon he’s going to be a teenager and he just won’t need a nanny anymore.”

“I understand,” I said. I didn’t.

“Besides,” she said, smiling big and broad, as if she were about to spill that happiest truth. “Don’t you want to continue being a nanny and have another little boy or girl to raise?”

“Yes, ma’am. That would be nice. But I’m excited to raise Ezra first.”

I was lying.

I didn’t lie often. It wasn’t really in my nature. Just the usual white lies or sugarcoated truths to protect Ezra from the harder things in the world. Telling him about dogs going to live with a family on a farm upstate, or how grown-ups make noise in their bedrooms when they’re playing grown-up games, things like that. But my feelings, when I had them, usually weren’t worth concealing. I loved Ezra. I loved the Reinharts. There was no reason to hide that.

But I didn’t want to raise another child. I hadn’t even thought about it. I was Ezra’s. He was mine. I always assumed I’d be repurposed as he grew up: run errands, do housework, split the chores with Ariadne, the family’s domestic. I never thought I’d be shut down. Boxed up. Shipped off to serve another family. That just . . . hadn’t crossed my mind. It didn’t seem like a feasible option.

But I was a fashionable. Having a stuffed tiger run around with your eight-year-old wouldn’t cause someone to bat an eye, but being the domestic of a twentysomething off on his first life adventures might. Why hadn’t I thought about this? Why did it take seeing my box to even entertain the possibility?

I stood with the gang outside of Ocasio-Cortez Elementary, the sky a pale blue, the sun blazing down, not a cloud anywhere in sight. We were a coffee clique of nannies, all different brands, makes, and models. There was Ferdinand, another Blue Star Zoo Model like me, a lavender-furred lion with a pink mane and belly; Jenny, an old-school Apple iBot, sleek white plastic and rose chrome, all dinged up and scuffed from two generations of family; Stark, a repurposed domestic, all his edges rounded and his parts a sleek black as is always fashionable; Maggie, a Blue Star Basic model, some thirty years old, plain white and mostly plastic; and Beau, short for Beauregard, the oldest of us, a hand-me-down nanny-droid pushing sixty—an old Gen Three, back when they were still making robots look more human than machine.

“What did you think was going to happen?” asked Ferdinand. “You were going to follow him off to college?”

I shook my head. “I really don’t know. I hadn’t thought much about the future at all.”

“You’re not supposed to,” said Jenny. “You aren’t wired to look forward to anything. You’re wired to be in the now. The only future that matters is Ezra’s. That’s how they want you. That’s how they want us all.”

Ferdinand shook his head. “Yeah, but it should have at least crossed his mind.”

“Maybe they could, I mean, you know, let him go. On his own,” Maggie began.

“They’re not going to do that,” interrupted Stark. “No one is going to do that. Not anyone in this zip code.”

Jenny nodded, pointing to Stark. “It’s a pipe dream. It’s crazy to think they would.”

“It’s crazy to think anyone would, but they have,” said Maggie.

“Cut the kid some slack,” said Beau. “This is a tough day. We’ve all faced it.”

Everyone else nodded.

“You remember what it’s like, Ferdinand. The first time you really