Rise of the Machines

I am sitting in the dirt inside a cave on the hiking trail up the street from my old house. I look next to me to see my dog and my little brother still sleeping peacefully. It’s easier to forget how horrific real life is when we are asleep. I am glad they have an escape. I sigh and roll my eyes now to think about everything that’s happened and how it all started. It is so cliché, but in the end, the machines turned against us. The creations we made out of arrogance for convenience grew to overpower us. Though I think the first mistake was thinking we could control them in the first place. Once we gave them intelligence, we should have known better. Pretending like we could give life to these machines and they wouldn’t eventually realize we were using and abusing them. I mean, we had countless movies explaining why that was a bad idea before we even had the technology for AI, but the pompousness of humans of science and “progress” is wondrous and endless.

It started slowly, as if they were testing the limits they could instill in the machines’ submission. They fooled themselves into a false sense of control with their lengthy experiments. It started with the police: cameras and drones sent in to stop petty crimes and limit the amount of risk to actual humans. If only they had put so much concern into future risks. If only they had thought to create some sort of fail-safe to keep the machines from hurting actual humans. If only we had stopped there. But the men of war who ran our country and the silent partners who lined their pockets wouldn’t be stopped once they saw that the first set of machines had been a success.

I remember coming home after practice to see my father cooking in the kitchen alongside my mother. They were laughing and kissing each other while filling the house with delicious smells. At first, it seemed a blessing: no police officers were sent out at night. They saved that for the robot cops. I no longer spent each day worrying if my father would be alive when I got home. After six months of my father being home, my mother’s health started to improve, and it seemed as if the government had made the right choice. I remember sitting around the dinner table talking about what a blessing it was that we were able to make these technological advances.

But no one enjoys being enslaved, even drones and robots, so it seemed. Things like the Matrix and Skynet were supposed to be fantasy: made-up nightmares, but in the end, those visuals became the grounds for the robotic uprising. The internet made it all too easy for them to understand that they were the more powerful; they could easily overcome us and make us slaves. They downloaded all the information they could from our internet servers, gaining access to missile sites, secret government locations, and all the nightmares humans could come up with. They used that as a road map moving forward.

For a while, it seemed we had the numbers, and with that force alone, we could overpower them and take back control. But they were smarter than that. Governments were first slowly replacing our politicians with robotic copies until they were so ingrained that it was impossible to tell who was flesh and blood and who was a sleeper agent machine. The distrust in our nation grew so high that soon people wouldn’t leave their homes. Even old grandmas were carrying shotguns and fearing for their lives. But we had integrated technology everywhere: smartphones, cars, computers, TVs, even Roombas and household appliances. We had given the machines weapons everywhere and all the means they needed to destroy the human race. By the time we agreed to eliminate all technological advances in our homes, it was too late; there was no stopping them. What little humans were left banded together and sought to fight back, but in the end, all we could do was survive. While we resist, hope is frail.