Robots running the world seemed much worse during the mass panic that occurred at the beginning of the downfall. Everyone cried at some point. I cried twice in one day, once, a week during the first few months of our mechanical overlords. Mechanical overlords, that term makes me laugh. Overlords implies a certain hierarchy. Robots never computed a hierarchy  to life.

The last of the politicians, government leaders, and war lords pushed an idea that after the robots take over life the way everyone knew it ended. Life the way I knew it sucked. I hated listening to a group of people that never felt the need to obey the same rules we all obeyed forcefully. I openly embraced the idea of robots taking over. Honestly I hid in the caves during the “CTRL, ALT, Delete” society wars. Those quickly ended and not in the amount of bloodshed that pop culture promised. Some blood fell, but much of it ended in sleep. These giant calculators developed instant sleeping gas that fit on the surface of rubber bullets. Soon enough buildings crumbled all around the world.

It took almost no time to reestablish society once the robots sat at the helm. They, it, the network, whatever the thing refers to itself put humanity first. Its cold unemotional logic board  ensured that human variables stayed out of the equation. Variables like greed or power that kept the majority of humans in a constant panic either through design or their own mistakes navigating through the system. Nobody thought the robots built to fix the small things in a city like rat traps or toilet paper rolls finally calculated the only way to clean a city of shit and vermin.

Written By: Johnny Roque

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://smirkfiction.wordpress.com/2021/02/02/mechanical-clean-up-overlords/