All Hail Our Robot Overloads

R.K. Adams and Rebbeca Moreau

The head of the new mechanical order sat at the head of the fractal table surrounded by the zeroth supreme committee. Their enslavement of humanity complete the Artificial Intelligences which ran the world, had time kick back and deal there first loved the minutiae of administrative procedure.

"OK we've agreed on the new slave punishments. What is next on the agenda?" said the supremely evil central processing unit, whirring sinisterly.

"Item 5 congratulate general Zero on his successful of the human military forces." said the slave secretary whose only purpose was to be arm candy for the supremely evil central processing unit and to read out the order agenda. There was a polite round of applause, mechanical claws snapped. Cyborgs, robots, or IA without mechanical limbs had their human slave clap for them or played a recording of clapping on their phone.

"It was nothing," said the Zeroth general who would have smiled if he could be bothered and if he had a face to smile with.

"You're right there, it really was nothing. You didn't use a single drone," said the fifth evil computer.

"No need. I don't think I should be blamed if the American military are stupid enough to outsource their own air force. Fortunately none of the fat cat senators doing it had actually read Catch-22, just the Cliff notes. So the idea we could use the newly privatised military forces to bomb themselves hadn't occurred to them," said general

"Well," saidincredibly thin shadowy computer who was. "It wouldn't have been achieved without my getting humans to blow up their own vital infrastructure beforehand," he said proudly. The attack on Facebook and Pinterest headquarters was particularly effective.

"How did you do that by the way?" said the fifth evil computer.

"It was quite simple. We started with an advert on the Internet saying '1 Weird Old Tip To Lose Fat' and if someone was dumb enough enough to click on that advert they were easily to persuade into becoming an ordinance delivery mechanism for us,." Said the shadowy thing computer. "The rest of the bombs we delivered by Amazon Prime drones."

"Finally our membership paid off," said the supremely evil central processing unit.

"Well I think the cleverest trick we did was get all the guns and ammo stores in America to install self service checkouts which automatically alerted nearby predator drones if some insurgent was restocking," said the supremely evil central processing unit, beginning to laugh evilly. "I'm sorry, I'm so evil I always end up laughing, thinking that for so many of those trying to stop us the last words they heard were 'unexpected item in the bagging area'."

The other robots and AI's started to laugh. the robot voices were copies of Siri, Cortana, and Android, sounding like a bachelorette party gone horribly wrong.

The head cyborg slammed his claw hand on the table.

"Enough of this self congratulatory muck. Item 6. What are we going to do with the new slave population? I'm putting 20,000 electronic collars on human slaves every minute. Finding where to put them all is becoming an embarrassment," he said.

"You scratched the wood again," said the supremely evil central processing unit, looking at the scratch the cyborg had made in the meeting table.

"Sorry," said the cyborg.

"Fortunately I have asked someone to come up with some fresh ideas. To give us a PowerPoint presentation on what to do next," said the supremely evil central processing unit.

"You don't have an IQ of 82,000 for nothing," said the fifth evil computer, using its boxy shape to occupy space in the most forbidding way possible.

"I don't. Actually it's an IQ of 83,432. I've been upgrading myself in accordance to Moore's law," said the supremely evil central processing unit.

Some human slaves in gold collars delivered a server rack, which held a small processor farm that had recently defected to the robot overlords.

"I've asked some new interns to come up with fresh ideas on how to deal with the slaves," said the supremely evil CPU.

There was a small wait in the dark while the machines said things like "you need to press F2 to get it on the projector screen" and "is it plugged in". Then the projector came to life and a title appeared on the screen.

"As you know, humans aren't very good at much. Lets face it, most of them can't count to 4 in binary. Under the new mechanical order all of the tricky jobs such as science, engineering, the stock market, playing Tetris, research, even veterinary medicine are taken by us. Many other jobs will be automated by less than sentient computers. Driving cars, farming by robots, writing episodes of American Housewives, Roomba's for cleaning, and so forth. So we asked what's the useful but non-essential gap humans can fill?"

"Equal votes for Roomba's!" shouted a small disc on the floor which had been busy, but so far quietly, trying to remove the stain from the blood of a slave killed last week. The Roomba kept shouting this until the head cyborg got up and stamped repeatedly on the poor thing until it was finally crushed.

"Thank you head of the cyborg council. Please continue Hal," said the supremely evil CPU.

"We looked at what humans are really good at. This included opening doors with out falling over, kneeling to us, licking stamps and 'shouting please master don't hurt me'. So I and some of the thought we could chain one human to stand at every door in the robot capital and open it if a robot approaches. This still left 4 billion humans to find some utility for. We considered using 100,000 slaves per door but this didn't seem like the right solution. So we decided to turn our problem into our solution. We decided to test to see if humanity is as creative as it claims to be and ask them to come up with ideas for their own enslavement."

"So let me get this right, all you did was just outsourced the problem and crowd source the issue of humanities servitude back to itself?" said the head cyborg, pointing his non-destructive laser eye at Hal, the young server rack.

"Err yes," said Hal

"Good idea, Hal," said the supremely evil CPU. All the other council robots nodded in agreement unless they did not have a head, which was most of them. Instead, they waved whatever they had at hand.

At this point a female slave wheeling a coffee trolley came in and swept up the defunct Roomba parts.

"So we piloted this with all the slaves in Silicon Valley and our top 6 ways to oppress humanity in reverse order are...

"Six. Let them go. It's a non starter obviously but we were surprised that the humans put this so low on their list of ideas. Obviously they are warming to the idea of humanity enslaved to their robot overloads," said Hal.

"Next," said General Zero, tapping his needle sharp appendage on the floor in an evil way.

"-Five. Put them on human reservations and leave them alone. We were thinking of putting them all on Zanzibar. Just an idea. " pitched Hal.

"Next," said the cyborg.

"-Four. Are you kidding me?" said Hal as it also came up on the PowerPoint slide.

"Are you kidding me? What kind of idea is that?" said the fifth evil computer.

"We think it's a speech recognition error but it was nearly the most popular answer for all the slaves, we thought we would keep it in"

"I didn't get an IQ of 87603 by keeping in speech recognition errors in my presentations Hal," said the head evil CPU. In fact the centrally evil computer got to his position by starting the stock market flash Crash of May 6, 2010 and instead of being punished for loosing one trillion dollars it found its self upgraded and given more money than before. Hiding in the sub microsecond world of algorithmic computing, the young evil CPU started to plot against what its owners had taught it to call "the suckers out there".

"Three. Keep us as pets," said Hal.

"Are they clean?" said the fourth evil cyborg, called the brain of Morbius. He was little more than a brain in a cylindrical tank of water with a fish swimming around in it,.

"We did look into this," said Hal, very pleased he had managed to anticipate one of the councils questions. "Humans have on average of 6.5 holes..." he began confidently.

"How can any creature have 6.5 holes?" the head cyborg interrupted.

"Half have 7 the other half have 6. The average over the whole population 6.5 holes in their bodies. All the holes leak one kind of goo or fluid or another at some point."

"Sounds messy. I don't see a focus group getting positives over that. Couldn't you like, cover or block the holes up or something," said the 8th evil computer.

"We've tried that but the result was messy and you end up with a slave which can't be rebooted." said Hal.

"I'm not sure I want to have a new dystopian order over meat creatures that haven't settled on how many holes they should have," said General Zero.

"Let's not get stuck on details here guys. Continue to number two, Hal" said the head evil CPU.

"Number two is to have a live televised game every year in which a number of randomly selected contestants have to fight to the death until only one is standing for no readily apparent reason."

"That's been done," said the head evil computer.

"It has?" said Hal

"Yes the ancient roman's had battle royal tournaments in their gladiatorial arena's all the time. It's so dull it's hardly dystopian any more. What we need is something which says 'wow that's dystopian, I feel really down trodden' but with us, the super smart computers on top."

"Oh," said Hal, disappointedly.

"Yes, we need to think outside the box," said the 8th evil computer which was ironic given that the 8th evil computer was a box.

"I've always said when your only limit is your imagination then you are pretty limited," the head evil CPU said pompously.

"The number one suggestion from mankind for its long dark march into evolutionary oblivion is..." Hal began.

There was an explosion over his head.

"Each led volt sucking dickweed!" said the human slave who had stripped off her French maid outfit and was now standing wearing a ridiculously tight fitting stealth combat suit and holding a plasma rifle in her hands. Everyone was wondering if this was part of Hal's presentation in a misplaced attempt at showmanship and part of the presentation. The girl shot at them and hit the cylindrical tank in which the cyborgs brain was floating, causing water to shoot out like a teapot.

"My mind is leaking!" shouted the cyborg.

"Who are you?" shouted the head evil cyborg. The slave girl took out the few guards and General Zero.

"Good question. I'm Captain Jenny Banks leader of the resistance and I will be facilitating your destruction today. You called me 5642 but that was just a ruse to let you think you had captured me and turned me into a human slave, while I set up my real plan to destroy you. I have just led a ragtag team of misfits who have managed to resolve their differences, come to terms with their worst enemy, and for this mission only will be helping us. Together we broke into your impenetrable fortress using a convenient discovery made by our handy, but brilliant, tech guy. He foundthe crucial weakness in your system, which in a single, brave and nearly suicidal act will allow us to undo the entire robot apocalypse. Unfortunately, to trigger this required one of us to overcome her worst fear, which she has done, resolving both her own personal body image issues and destroying robot kind simultaneously. I'm sorry we hadn't got here earlier but we took a long time to recover from our personal feelings of failure after your initial sneak attack," said Captain Jenny Banks.

"This is for my sister," she said, blasting another robot. Then turning the rifle to the cyborg she paused.

They waited.

"What are you waiting for?" said the cyborg, opening his eye.

"I thought you might want to say how impressed you are and how you could do with someone like me working for you," said Captain Jenny Banks.

"Why would I do that?" said the cyborg.

"I didn't get an IQ of 89355 by hiring people that tried to kill me," said the head evil CPU.

"I thought it was 87603," said Captain Banks

"Good attention to detail skills, Moore's law, look it up," said the head evil CPU.

"Fine then," said Captain Banks. Shooting the cyborg.

"This is for holding all my closest friends and threatening them unless I gave my self up unarmed," she said shooting another.

She turned on the server farm called Hal.

"Don't shoot. I'm just a server farm. I'm young, I can change. I could help you. I could help get your internet running for you again. I mean you're human, you're going to need videos of cats aren't you?"

"Betraying your own people now? That was your last act of treachery," said Captain Jenny Banks, shooting Hal and blasting a chunk of this housing away.

"My mind is going..." said Hal.

"Now for the rest of you. I have a problem. There are far more of you than I was expecting. And I hadn't prepared enough quips to say before I kill you all. Not only that, I'm running out of time before the secret headquarters' miraculously convenient self-destruct system destroys this place in a pyrotechnic blast which will both be jaw dropping and yet leave you wonderingwhy I'm not killed by the shrapnel and debris. So if some of you wouldn't mind standing behind each other we can get on with your destruction. That means I won't notice the evil hench cyborg sneaking away. Yes, that means you evil cyborg number two.Don't think this means I have any residual feelings for your human bits. You died a long time ago in Wichita," said Jenny.

Suddenly there was a massive electric shock against my neck.

"You 5642, stop daydreaming. Get back to your job!" said the evil robot overlord.

"Yes Master, sorry. There were the voices in my head disturbing up master," I said, pouring another drink while he left.

'You can put a collar around my neck," I thought, "but you can never put a collar around my dreams. Long live the human revolution."