The Last Day of My Old Life

Remy kept a cool head as she made the final tweaks to her mini-bots. The little electromagnetic robots were inspired by Big Hero 6, except real, and they were her pride and joy. They operated out of one A.I. powered computer brain. They had taken years to handcraft, and they still needed some work, but they were also finally done! Remy pressed the on-off switch, and all of the bots powered up with a whirring sound. She typed in her command on the computer, and the mini-bots correspondingly morphed into a small replica of a castle. Remy shrieked with delight.

Just a little bit longer, Remy thought. Just a little bit longer before you prove what you can do. Mom and dad will be proud of you. That’s what all of this was about, after all. Showing her parents that she was smarter than they thought. They were both scientists with every possible award and qualification that ever existed, and Remy had never lived up to their expectations.

She switched off the computer and climbed into her bed. For the first time in weeks, she slept without nightmares of being rejected. Instead, she dreamed of the looks on her father’s face when he saw the intricately coded instructions more eloquent than Shakespeare. When her mother noticed the precision of the magnetic fields. Nothing could ruin this for her.

Remy woke to the sounds of crashes and screams. Panicked, but still having some decency, she threw on a fresh shirt and shoes and rushed outside. As soon as she stepped outside, she realized everything had changed.

Her mini-bots were consuming her neighborhood. They seemed to be moving in a regular pattern, swelling up like a wave, then crashing down with a resounding BANG! The bots glinted ominously in the sunlight, and they seemed like they had multiplied. She didn’t realize she’d made so many. Or maybe she hadn’t.

She raced back into her house and slammed the door behind her, not that it would keep the swarms out once they reached her. She spun around the banister and dashed upstairs as fast as her feet would carry her. She stumbled into her room in three seconds flat and opened the computer. The dumb thing could only flash “Auto-Program Started.”

This is all my fault. I must’ve missed something in the programming, Remy thought. She skimmed the sections that would be telling them to do this; she tried to stop the program from running, but there was nothing she could do, except… she could erase the programming for the bots entirely and hoped that it would work.

She navigated the screen and tried not to cry. All of her work was going to be destroyed, but she had to do it. All it took was the press of a button. Her finger shook as she slowly pressed down on the delete key, and a single rogue tear slipped down her nose. And then, just like that, everything she had to show from the last three years of turning down friends and sports was gone.

Her body started shaking with quiet sobs, and she hated herself for that. If she hadn’t done it, people would’ve died. The neighborhood around her was silent, except for the wail of a young child.

Remy stood slowly, and made her way downstairs. Not being able to witness the devastation surely just outside, she turned on the T.V. and flopped onto the old, worn, grayish couch. At least her mother and father were safe at the grocery and work.

With the side of her head cupped in her hands, Remy flicked boredly through channels, feeling slightly numb. But one channel caught her eye. The A.M. News was showing video clips of the nano-bots, and the videos weren’t only from her neighborhood. The whole city was engulfed, and the bots were progressing toward the Capitol building.

Then Remy saw the most terrifying part: a meter that was rising by the second. The words over it were labeled “Death Rate.” It was already over 40.

Only the bots around her immediate area had shut down, but the ones swarming the city were still working.

Without thinking, Remy rushed outside without bothering to close the door, and hopped in the car parked in her neighbor’s driveway, which hadn’t been badly damaged by the bots. So what if she didn’t have a driver’s license? Her dad had given her some basic lessons and she was good at driving go-carts and four wheelers and all kinds of other vehicles. She started the car and it puffed to life. She turned out of the driveway and sped through every light on the way to the Capitol building.

The white dome came into view and Remy breathed a sigh of relief. She stopped the car and ran outside into the chaos. She spun around, trying to find someone with a computer. There was a cluster of government tech vans parked a healthy distance away from the catastrophe.

As Remy ran to it, she recited all of the lines of code and all of the passwords she’d have to break through to reach the bots backup program. The backup would be harder to breach, though. Why did she have to delete the programming? She mentally slapped herself.

“I need access to a computer, please,” she said calmly to a tall, muscle-y government agent guarding the vans.

”Listen, little girl, there’s nothing you can do. You’re just a kid,” he grunted.

Remy took a deep breath. “I know how to hack into the bots’ backup program. I have all of the passwords.”

He stared dubiously at her. Then a voice behind him called, “Let her try. She’s the one who created them after all.” The voice belonged to Professor MacEachran, her father’s friend. “Come quickly, Miss Calvin.”

He rushed her into one of the vans and motioned to a boxy computer. Remy leaned over the screen and started typing her passwords to the main touch control and the search engine spat out a link to the document. Thank goodness for the Cloud. In minutes she reached the Touch control and scrolled to the bottom of the crammed page. With the arrows on the keyboard, she navigated her way to the Central Command. This time she wouldn’t hesitate. She pressed down on the delete key, feeling the way it clicked under her finger. She trailed her other hand along the board to the 0 key, and pushed. She waited five seconds for the command to reach the bots. The wait seemed endless, but then, everything fell still.

The world seemed to freeze. Remy and the others around her listened closely to the sounds of the sweet silence. There was no crashing, no buildings thundering to the ground. It was just quiet.

The van came to life all at once, and everyone rushed outside to see the nano-bots sprawled across the parking lots around them. Full grown scientists and tech scholars whooped and cheered, but Remy couldn’t feel triumphant. When she looked around, all she saw was the destruction she had caused. Buildings she’d grown up with were disintegrated, and there were people arriving just then in ambulances to take away the injured parents, children, and other recipients to wounds.

A tear slipped down her cheek. She closed her eyes as she pulled out her phone. She didn’t want to see the destruction anymore. She listened to the ringing phone, hoping with all her heart that she was about to hear her parents’ voices, safe and sound. She wasn’t sure of where the Nano-bots had washed away, but she hoped it wasn’t anywhere near her parents or her friends.

The phone kept on ringing, until it finally told her to leave a voicemail. Remy tried to control her ragged breathing. Her mom and dad would be fine. Of course they were. How could they not be? They had to be. And what about her friends? We’re they okay too?

She lifted the screen to her eyes and tried to find an online list of names of people who’d been killed. When she finally found one, what felt like hours later, she read each name carefully. With every name she recognized, a little piece of her heart chipped away. Kids at school and their parents, pastors she’d known, the PicknSave clerk. And then she saw two names, side by side, that made her feel wobbly and, scarily, more numb than sad. Skylar Calvin and Ben Calvin.

Remy slowly walked to Professor MacEachran to ask for a ride, but stopped when she saw that he was sobbing. It was a humiliating thing, watching someone so tough cry. She turned to the car she’d driven there and walked to it, then broke into a run. She needed to find another home, where everything around it wasn’t destroyed. More importantly, she needed to find a guardian. She was too young to support herself, much as she hated it. She pulled the latch open, memorizing the soft, cold feel of the metal, and opened the door. Once she was positioned perfectly in the driver’s seat, she started the ignition and shifted to Drive. She stepped gently on the gas, and, very, very slowly, pulled out of the parking lot that marked the end of her old life, and drove into her new one.