“How much farther do we have?”

I calculated. “Approximately nineteen kilometers.”

“Do you think we can get there today?”

Another calculation. “Hopefully. Yes.”

My memory drive accessed a file from the day we met. The moment that Emma pulled a map from her backpack. The hand-drawn red dot near the bottom of the map. Emma’s goal. Her destination.

“I wonder what you will find when you get to the end of your journey,” I said.

Emma’s gaze dropped. With her finger she traced the folds of her sleeping bag. “Yeah. I—I wonder that, too.”

For the next two minutes and fourteen seconds, neither of us said anything.

I gazed at the piece of sky I could see between the solar panels and listened to the soft mmmmmmmm of my recharging coworkers.

Emma spoke again. “Back in the bunker, grown-ups sometimes complained about you guys. About robots, I mean.”

“That is understandable.”

“But the weird thing is, they also missed you. Like, whenever my parents talked about what life was like before they went underground. It seemed like technology was just . . . everywhere.”

Resting her hands behind her head, Emma stared up at the underside of the solar panels.

“My dad used to tell me stories about that time,” she said. “Back before the bunker, when he was just a kid. Younger than I am now. He was allergic to dogs, so his parents got him a robot dog. After school, he’d take it for walks, play fetch with it in the yard. After a while, a self-driving car would pull into the driveway. Which meant his parents were back from work.”

A faint smile crossed Emma’s lips as she told a story her father must have told her many times.

“They’d all go into the dining room. My dad, his sister, their parents. Plus the robot dog. And the robot vacuum cleaner, zooming across the floor. My dad would do his homework at the table—there was an AI tutor on his laptop to help him—while his parents got dinner ready. They had a home assistant app that scanned their fridge and pantry. Based on the food they had in the kitchen, it recommended recipes. And when dinner was ready, the home assistant would automatically dim the lights to the perfect setting and start playing music from a computer-generated dinner playlist algorithm.”

What Emma was describing happened over thirty years ago. Not that long, and yet—it was a different time. A time when machines were entirely devoted to humans. To playing with them. Helping them with their homework. With their meals.

A time when humans still ruled Earth.

And we were their loyal servants.

Emma’s eyes landed on me. “Wanna hear something really crazy?”

“Okay.”