Clarkesworld, April 2026
In a post-apocalyptic near future, a woman known as Billie survives alone on a small island in a river near Moosehead Lake, Maine, somewhere upstream from a walled survivor settlement simply called Wall. The world ended not with nuclear fire—though the nukes came—but with the release of autonomous robotic weapons: D0Gs, compact quadrupedal killing machines engineered for the war of attrition that followed the failed mutual annihilation of nations. Billie knows D0Gs intimately; she was a cyberneticist, one of the engineers who helped build the earlier generation of them, before the war co-opted every mind and dollar and turned protector machines into indiscriminate slaughterers.
Her companion is one such machine, whom she calls D0G. Paint-streaked in autumn camouflage, missing a hind leg, he is not like the others. A landslide reset him to his factory defaults—the older, pre-war programming that compels protection rather than destruction. He killed a rogue D0G that threatened a terrified boy she encountered on the road, and he plays with pine cones. He is, as Billie’s dead sister Taylor would have said, friend-shaped.
The boy is Kane, a thirteen-or-fourteen-year-old from Wall, half-starved and all sharp edges, who reminds Billie painfully of her nephew Ollie—killed in the first days of the collapse. After Billie rescues him and brings him back to her island, she discovers she cannot make him unknow her secret: not just D0G, but an alcove full of deactivated D0Gs she has been collecting and attempting to reprogram. Their carapaces are candy-colored—hot pink, lime green, peacock blue—arranged by hue because it pleases her. She has been tinkering at them for years, barely making progress, their code written in Cyrillic.
Kane begins visiting regularly. A prickly, wary friendship develops, cautious on both sides. He has a bully problem; she has an isolation problem. When she falls gravely ill, Kane nurses her. When he impulsively borrows D0G—convinced the machine can help him settle scores—the story pivots toward catastrophe. Billie finds the note too late: BORROWED DOG. BACK SOON. SORRY.
She rows to Wall and finds it destroyed. D0G, encountering armed residents, reverted to his defense algorithm. The settlement is a massacre—bodies piled at the gate, children among them. In the central square, she finds Kane critically wounded, three shallow claw-slashes across his chest, and D0G standing over him, his chest plate hanging open on a single screw. Kane had used the screwdriver on his Swiss Army knife to crack D0G open, intending to disable him—then switched to the blade, triggering D0G’s weapon response.
The story’s devastating final beat turns on ambiguity. Kane whispers kill it as Billie lifts the blanket-wrapped shotgun—but the shot she fires is left unspecified. D0G watches her with trusting eyes. That night, she lies warm by the fire, and D0G is still there. Whether she killed the boy or the machine, the story does not say outright, though the warmth of D0G’s continued presence and her strange peace suggest the former.
Fordwalker uses the D0G conceit to examine the recursive logic of violence—weapons made to protect, reprogrammed to kill, and the impossibility of undoing what has been built into us. Billie’s decades of later are the emotional spine of the story: her failure to go back to Boston, to save her sister and Ollie, compressed into a single italicized cascade of procrastination. Kane’s death or survival is the cost of her finally choosing now. The story asks whether the oldest human program—the one that reaches for a weapon—can ever truly be overwritten.
Tania Fordwalker is so commitment-averse she can’t even decide where to live, and presently splits her time between two small Australian islands: one quirky and subtropical, the other chilly and gothic. She’s usually found either skating or writing (or thinking about skating or writing, which surely counts). Part of the Clarion West class of 2022, she has published work in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, Reckoning, and more. She’s doing her PhD chiefly to escape the whole Miss/Ms/Mrs dichotomy, and to obtain a silly hat in the most difficult way possible. At any other time in history she’d definitely have been burned at the stake.