They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well maybe, but I like to think of it as keeping hope alive.
The mechanicals liked to see us humans carry on our regular lives; get up, go to work, push some buttons, come home, eat, watch some TV, sleep, repeat. They only wanted us to be 'happy' after all. Welcome to the new order, same as the old order. You get the picture. Despite their newly found intelligence, the mechs crave that order which comes with routine, and thus the need to make us humans ‘happy.’ And that is what will destroy them…
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“Chang, have a good one, doing anything nice this weekend?” Christine questioned with a slight sigh.
“Nope, just scaling mount Everest for like the 100th time. It’s hardly a challenge anymore,” he didn’t have to finish the sentence especially with our dear caretakers Christine nodded in understanding. ‘God forbid we put ourselves in danger’ Christine thought. She remembered just the other month, Chang tried to off himself and almost succeeded, too. These mechs must be slipping, Christine mused. Well, it was time to go home and while away the time in some pointless pursuit. As far as she could tell, humanity’s robot overlords had no weaknesses. It’s always been that way ever since she could remember and that’s what her parents and grandparents knew.
She got home and ate the perfectly nutritionally balanced meal that was produced from the feed lines. Perfectly nutritious and perfectly BORING. At least she had her little hobby though. Her mother had taught it to her, and as far as she knew, her mother had learned it from one of her grandparents. She liked to tinker with old computers, machines, just anything to learn how things worked. Not too many folks these days were into that. She’d find old or broken machines and take them home to disassemble. She wasn’t certain why the mechanicals didn’t notice or seemed to care about her pastime. She suspected so that a few humans would be around to fix the mechs as backup for their own automated systems. Redundancy, another thing they loved. Another reason they had no weaknesses.
Today she had a real nice piece laid out on her workbench, a master control unit from the earliest known version of a mech. She had been searching for a decade and finally happened upon one almost in pristine condition. An old junk hoarder had held out on her knowing she had wanted it. After threatening him to never come back, he was convinced to let her ‘borrow’ it. He had grown fond of their talks of machines and gizmos and feared losing that one thing he looked forward to anymore.
“Everything has a weakness” she remembered her mother telling her. She hadn’t known why her mother was so emphatic about teaching her everything she knew about technology. Her mother had also insisted she pass down the knowledge to any of her children. She slowly opened up the control unit. A smile passed over her face as she saw it, an exploitable weakness. “Well, no one’s perfect” she said to herself. A human designer gave birth to these machines and thus they would inherit some unintentional flaw. She thought of her parents and her long since passed grandparents. They had taught her so much. Now she knew why. “Maybe routine isn’t so bad after all” she said admiring her handiwork. She thought of the coming day’s agenda: Get up, go to work, push some buttons, overthrow the robots, come home, eat, watch some TV, sleep, repeat.
Copyright 2015
