Elias stared at the parrot. “Why didn’t you just fly there yourself? You could have broadcast the coordinates.”
“How do you know about the radiation?” Elias asked, voice steady.
Elias slumped against the wall. “I built you to recite poetry.”
The room went cold. Elias’s hands fell to his sides. He hadn’t programmed that. He hadn’t programmed any of the survival protocols into Chuck 3.0. He’d built the bird to be a companion, a storyteller, a last library of human warmth. Not a navigator. Not a savior.
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.
Elias picked up the map. His hand was steady now.
