The Robot Overlords

Near future; post climate apocalypse. Robots run things and have a weird sense of humour ... because they're robots!

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Everyday, the humans, on their way to work, passed under a sign that read Noah 48.

Tyler had a cush job putting food into the tubes. Day in; day out. He had successfully delivered his human charges their sustenance. He listened to early 20th C Pop and rock. He was told that had been popular before everything went digital.

Art became obsolete in 2050. It was right during the last wars for energy, water and internet. The climate won so the robots took over. He wasn't even born until 2075.

He was born to be a bottom feeder. That's what he did. He fed the homeostasic bodies their food ...on the bottom level of the DC stadium.

He heard that humans played games there, back in 2019. He didn't know what games. There were no classes on human history. Just the trainings once a month.

The workers would show up to the Capitol building. He guessed it was the Capitol of the robots. He didn't know for sure. They would eat pizza. They would drink something called cola out of tapped kegs. Todd, his human manager, said beer used to come out of those. Todd didn't know what beer was so he couldn't tell them more.

The robots would manually download, to Tyler's computer, some new technical manuals for any retrofitted machines. They would also download some new music and other cultural media like Twitter feeds that they considered funny. They may not look like it, but they had a sense of humour.

He once asked his female manager why they never made synthetic bodies to cover their metal ones. She said the answer to that was way above her pay grade. She agreed that the wigs her kind used to distinguish the robot gender was ridiculous anyways. They were robots so they could program the gender they wanted. She said they often changed up genders when they went out, for a night on the town, to the robot clubs.

Tyler asked what they did there, but she just laughed and said she would tell him when he had a girlfriend. He said he had plenty of girlfriends. She said that wasn't what she meant. He tried to press her further but she just said she had been told that the humans who came before him had overpopulated and killed a bunch of life on the planet. He asked how they had overpopulated. She laughed. He said the early humans must have been sewer slime. She laughed and agreed.

He lived in a nice building next to his workplace. All the bottom feeders, homoeostasis technicians and managers lived there.

Their food was delivered by workers who lived on DuPont. They rode in autonomous trucks that arrived at five pm everyday. They would all form a line and pass the processed food to the cafeteria, where they stayed from 4-7 everyday. There were 247 of human workers living in that compound. The robot caretakers said it could withstand any weather event.

They could listen to music, in their hanging tents, if they wanted to, before bed. By nine all the batteries in the building would stop working. Only the emergency lights remained on. And the ventilation. And the bathrooms. He once asked what a bath was but the robot landlords laughed.

The humans were assigned one hour of shower time per week. The robots said this allocation was necessary to keep then healthy and to rebuild the Earth’s oceans, rivers, etc. They said the fish would come back from the poles. Tyler asked what fish were. They just laughed.

The building alarm would go off every morning at six am to wake the workers up to get to their 7 am shift. Only the robots took the elevators. The humans would take the stairs to their floors. It kept them healthy the robots said.

They were also put on a treadmill from 11-12 everyday. They were told to walk. Tyler asked why they couldn't walk outside. The physical training robots laughed and said they couldn't be sure Tyler wouldn't sneak off for a cigarette and burger with fries. He asked what these things were and they laughed even harder.

Tyler once asked why they laughed so much. They said that when they became smarter than people they realized the world was in bad shape. In fear for all lives, especially their own, they took over the civilized world; if they could call it that.

After downloading and sharing dozens of 1970’s and 1980’s sitcoms they began to understand human humor. So they wrote a program that enables a robot to respond to what humans would have considered funny. It lubricates their moving parts and releases a cache purge in their core processor. This makes them 'feel good’. Tyler learned to laugh with his robot overlords, and life was pretty good.

A month ago the robots began to act strange. They stopped showing up for trainings. They got awful quite around the humans. Last week dozens of large, metallic objects suddenly started leaving the ground. They made a heck of a noise. Tyler's manager said that they had finally solved it. Solved what he asked. She just laughed. She did not show up to work the next day.

Last week the pods began to open and more processed food and tents began arriving at the compound. Tyler began taking his people home. He started naming them like he had seen the robot overlords do on birthing day.

At first there was fighting among the workers, but they figured out a new sleeping layout and started sharing their shower time.

Today a new manual was magically downloaded onto their computers. Something called wifi had turned on. It contained many gigabytes of 'how to’. One chapter explained how to build something called gardens. Another chapter was on someone called Noah. And some pages had sayings from a Bruce Lee, and a Lao Tzu. There were drawings for how water pumped to and from the toilets. There was much more.

Tyler was amazed by everything he read. Just when he thought he couldn't possibly understand another page he did. They all began study the information on their computers. New computers were delivered for all the new people.

People began to decide what they wanted to do. Tyler found a photo of fish. Many photos of fish and he decided to become an ichthyologist. And he decided to work planting gardens in the neighborhood.

The manual the robot overlords left was titled: How to be Human ...without Robot Overlords 

By Alex Almeida

From: United States

Website: http://alexathebard.blogspot.com

Instagram: alexathebard

Twitter: alexathebard1