“Who’s there?”
“Chuck the survival protocols. We leave at dawn.”
The parrot’s eyes flickered—not with the dull glass of a toy, but with a swirling, liquid iridescence. The left eye calibrated first, zooming and focusing on Elias’s stubbled jaw. The right eye followed a second later, cross-referencing his face against a database that had died with the old world.
The parrot tilted its head. Its feathers were not feathers at all but millions of microscopic solar scales, each one a photovoltaic whisperer. Chuck 3.0 hopped onto the edge of the workbench and surveyed the bunker: the rusted shelves, the dwindled water jugs, the map on the wall dotted with red X’s where salvage teams had died.
“Chuck.”
