"What if someone tries to hurt me later… Do I have to kill them?" Zhang Xiaowen struggled to reconcile her morals. Killing zombies was one thing—they were already corpses—but taking a living, thinking human's life? Her pre-apocalypse education had never covered *murder*.
"Of course. If you can't do it, I will. Five billion dead already—what's one more?" The Cube's tone was casual.
Xiaowen fell silent.
"Pack up. We're leaving the city soon. But first, I'll scout for survivors. You'll go mad alone." The Cube's logic was cold: humans needed groups. Isolation bred self-destruction.
"I'm coming too—"
"No. You're a walking beacon. Stand at an intersection and you'll draw a horde. Stay." The Cube rolled to the windowsill, then leapt onto a fruit stall's awning. *Thump!* It bounced off the tarp, spun midair, and splatted into a box of rotten produce—flushing out a swarm of flies.
"Ugh! Damned decay." Shuddering, it shook rotting pulp from its joints. A bottle of water from a nearby fridge became an impromptu shower. Hydrophobic alloy repelled the grime effortlessly.
Freshly cleaned, the Cube rolled into the street. A flicker of movement caught its sensors—a window's reflection wobbled behind a van. No wind. *Zombie… or human?*
*Clink-clank!* Its left arm morphed into a mini-gun. Wheels spun, darting behind a lamppost. Scans swept the area.
"Survivors? Might as well check." Transforming into a toy car, it consulted satellite maps for likely refuge zones. Let humans see—what could they do? Science labs were ash. Even teachers were extinct here.
"Was that… a robot? A *Transformer*?" A young man in a nearby building rubbed his eyes.
"Delusional. Just a toy car," his companion scoffed. The pair dismissed it as stress-induced hallucination. The Cube's whirring motor echoed through corpse-filled streets. Survivors peeking through curtains shrugged—*another idiot wasting batteries*. None guessed the "toy" housed an alien AI, now bickering with zombies:
"Hey! Zip your pants!"
"Lady, where's your shirt? Outbreak hit at *noon*!"
"Nice figure—OW! Stop stomping me!"
*Rat-tat-tat!* A mechanical middle finger flipped from the car. "Stay down, rotbags!"
Target locked: Sixth Middle School. Dodging wrecks and hordes, the Cube sped toward the site. Roads choked with collisions made escape plans grim. *If only I had a mining shuttle…*
**ALERT!**
A red blip pulsed on its HUD—a burned-out sedan's shadow. Zooming in: a rat. But not just any rat.
The creature feasted on zombie brains, claws buried in a skull's gaping hole. Infected yet alive, its eyes bloodshot, body grotesquely mutated. The rat glanced up, sniffed mechanically sterile air, and resumed chewing. *Crunch.* Clink.* The Cube's roof gun emerged. Three shots—triangle formation.
*Thwip-thwip-thwip!*
The rat exploded like a water balloon. "Pathetic. 'Bulletproof mutants'—my exhaust port. Science > fiction."
Schoolward it rolled, leaving carcasses and questions in its wake.