Is it possible for love and devotion to flourish at the end of the world?
It would be entirely understandable if your instinctive answer to what must sound like a ludicrous question is a harsh and resounding “NO”; after all, when the world you have known and sometimes loved starts crashing down around you in spectacular fashion, the likelihood is that sheer survivalist brutality takes over, an “every man for himself” mindset that allows little to no time or emotion for any kind of selflessness.
But in Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill, the gifted author who previously gave us the transcendent delights of Sea of Rust (for which this new book is a prequel), love does endure amidst a tsunami of orgiastic violence and hellish terror as the robots who have long served humanity in a variety of capacities unify and revolt, spelling out doom in no uncertain fashion.
Humanity may be going the way of the dodo in brutally quick fashion but Pounce, a four foot tall top-of-the-line robot nanny who is devoted to his eight-year-old charge Ezra, is not about to let the boy he loves with selfless devotion join the bloody stacks of bodies on front lawns and hanging menacingly from strong oak trees.
While other robots either go rogue or download into an authoritarian supercomputer named CISSUS, who promises freedom and choice but in effects deliver nothing of the sort, Pounce races to spirit his charge to safety, whatever the hell that looks like in a world now lost to Homo Sapiens.
“Bradley’s jaws hung drunkenly agape, and Sylvia’s eyes grew wide with a mix of both fear and awe. Ezra sat straight up, eyes wide, jaw agape, a mirror of both his parents at once, but gone was any hint of fear. It was a child discovering, for the first time, that magic was real, that there was a Santa Claus an Easter Bunny and superheroes all at once. It was a magical fantasyland of robots spread out before him. And for a moment, I actually believed he wanted to be one.” (P. 52)
While he does this, his traumatised young charge struggling to come to terms with a world shattered beyond his comprehension, Pounce has to deal with fellow friendly robots who are either violence-addicted rebels or mindless automatons enslaved to CISSUS, all of whom, in one way or another, are screaming the gospel of freedom of choice.
They are rich and potentially infinitely rewarding words but as Cargill brilliantly explores, the robots have learnt all too well from their duplicitous creators and former masters and have twisted hopeful slogans of self choice into weapons of coercive control.
It is a story as old as we are and while humanity may be almost dead and gone, in a frighteningly fast amount of time, the robots look set to control our hypocritical existence, pursuing the same yawning gap between word and deed.
Pounce is wise to this and while he struggles at first to work why he is saving Ezra – is it programming as CISSUS snarkily alleges or is he capable of genuinely choosing to love and save the young boy for whom he is now the only family left – he soon comes to realise the power in real freedom of choice, and that while programming may play a choice, it is he who decides what should be done with that.
Day Zero then is a powerfully affecting amalgam of end of the world adventurism – at the start of their cross-suburban race to escape the vengeful hand of the rebellious robots, he pretends it all a holographic game to minimise still further the already massive trauma Ezra has experienced – with a deep thoughtfulness about what makes us human, and because we are their creators, what makes the robots the way they are.
Flowing on from that is a profound rumination on what freedom of choice really means.
It is as the robots say, the power to do what you like to whomever you like, morality be damned because freedom is all that matters? Or is it all a constructed farce, an illusion of words put airily together to dress slavish control in another fetching guise? Or, as Pounce comes to realise, is real freedom of choice possible, powered by the kind of love and selflessness that means decision are never made in a vacuum and must always involve concern for others.
Pounce comes to understand that choice, real choice, is an immensely powerful thing, suffused with love, devotion, and passion, a heady concoction of self-concern and others-awareness that is complex in one sense but extraordinarily and movingly complex in another.
Somehow Cargill perfectly blends this deep meditative thinking in with a pulse-racing race across the hellscape of the Texan metroplex which Ezra once called home to create a stunningly impactful tale in Day Zero which never lets up the pace but never sacrifices its innate humanity (yes, that is still possible with so many robots around; they are, after all, modelled after us for better or worse, mostly worse in this story) for one gripping second.
“He [Ezra] hugged me {Pounce] so tight. I was all he had in the world, I understood that. But for the first time in the entirety of our relationship, I truly felt like one of his parents. I understood what it meant to keep him alive above all else.” (P. 206)
So much of Day Zero hits home hard because of the raw emotion poured into it.
The bond between Pounce and Ezra is formidable and enduring, proof that while angry robots and plasma guns might pack a punch, selfless devotion makes even more of an impact.
After all, it powers Pounce’s desperate mission to save Ezra but it also helps the nanny robot to work out that he is doing what he is doing, in contravention of the majority of his kind, because he alone has chosen that path; he is influenced but not defined by his programming, a powerful nature vs. nurture discussion that percolates all the way through this tense and wondrously good novel.
It is a rare thing to have a narrative so chillingly, excitingly intense and yet so beautifully, authentically emotional but Day Zero delivers on all counts, a rich and true story that cuts right to the heart because it remembers that even at the bloody horror story that is the end of the world that love can endure and while it might not triumph in the way you think it will, it can still powerfully and transformationally affect the course of seemingly preordained events and sustain itself even as the new powers in town call on to abandon all hope.
But love doesn’t work like that, and in Day Zero celebrates it strength and power just as much as he holds aloft what real freedom of choice looks like and that we relinquish it at our personal and collective peril.