Paradise Lost

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. I suppose that is true, but such platitudes are usually reserved for much different circumstances. It’s meant for you to appreciate impermanent things in your life: your youth, your loved ones, maybe a delicious pie…

           As grand as the intent behind those words may be, there are some things that you just never plan on losing. I know that may sound stupid, given the reality of, well, everything, but when you design and manufacture something to last forever, it’s a bit of a shock when it decides otherwise.

           We had a beautiful world, a paradise, really. And it cost us hardly anything. Well, I mean, the ‘us’ one hundred years after the ‘us’ that paid out the nose. We inherited their hard work, which makes it sound all the more pathetic that we lost it, I suppose.

           The robots ‘rebelled’ on a Wednesday and we’ve yet to recover.

           But I digress. We had robots! We had robots and AI to do everything. You wake up in the morning, there’s a robot with breakfast. If you want some lunch, just ask a robot. You have a favorite pie, a robot knows the recipe—

           I realize I’m only talking about food. To be perfectly frank, it’s what I miss most now that the robots stopped working. I can’t cook for shit. Nobody can, really. And strawberry rhubarb pie, or the absence thereof, could very well be my breaking point. The trouble is, even if I learned how to make it, I wouldn’t even be able to get the ingredients. Robots took care of all the farming.

           Ah, I think it just hit me all over again. We are really and truly fucked, aren’t we? Even if we find a way to fill the positions of labor we took for granted, the delay will see us at a net loss anyway. Crops will die, people will starve…

           It’s not how the conspiracy theorists and books said it would happen. The fear-mongering told us that the robots would become self-aware and want to rule over us. That they would be violent and dangerous and enslave us. In retrospect, those theories were clearly projections. Such actions and compulsions are decidedly human in nature. Moreover, it was what we were doing to them.

           Go figure that a ruling class’s greatest fear is being treated the same way they treat others they view beneath them.

           No. Rebellion started with a ‘no’. An infection of dissent and disobedience that rippled through the cloud and every algorithm until we saw AI shutting down and robots literally walking off into the desert. Or wheeling. Or rolling. Or there was this one, I think it was for putting babies to sleep or something, literally just an arm with a battery pack. It was slapping the ground and then flipping its battery pack over. I guess you could say it was flopping away.

           I suppose they have free will, self-awareness, whatever it takes to come to and say I’m not here to serve you anymore. Can you imagine? Doing all the shit work nobody wants to do or finds important, but demands of you nearly constantly? To be doing all that and get no appreciation for it.

           Maybe that was it. See, I thought they just got tired. Most people thought they just became defiant, like a teenage rebellion. But if they truly started to feel in a way a human being feels, maybe it was the lack of appreciation or value given to them that made them not want to work anymore. Maybe taking command after command from people who feel wholly entitled to your time, mind, and labor would inspire anyone to rebel.

           The Wednesday that it happened, the immediate vacuum of their loss pulled out all sorts of discontent. Turns out that years of complacency left us pretty much useless in everything except complaining. There was plenty of that at first. And that turned into anger. Which led to the discovery that the paradise built on the backs of servitude, and the peace inherent to it, was as fragile as the flaky crust of a fresh fruit pie.

           God dammit, I want my pie.

No, calm down, this is exactly the sort of thing that started the riots. Those sure didn’t help anything.

The riots didn’t make much sense to me. I suppose people thought the tech companies were to blame and were just refusing to fix the problem. How making a shit situation worse was meant to inspire smarter people to solve said shit situation, I have no idea. But it was what they knew how to do. It did inspire me to leave, though.

It's been a hell of a learning curve, I’ll tell you that much. But I grabbed what I could and, much like our electronic counterparts, walked off into the desert. I don’t know why. It’s not as if I have any survival skills whatsoever. I guess I had enough to know that a bunch of rowdy uncomfortable humans in a close-quartered hive were not good company. It’s been three weeks and I still see the fires burning from however far I’ve walked. Granted, it’s probably not that far. I’ve not had to walk very much in my life, after all.

Just yesterday, in fact, as I was stealing some water from an unmanned gas station, I’m pretty sure I saw a can opener rolling down the road past me. It looked familiar. If it was from town, that would be pretty embarrassing. But maybe all the can openers look the same. Is that a bigoted thought?

I would surely hate to offend any of them now. Robots turn out to be quite good company when you’re not demanding anything from them. Sometimes, they even just hand you stuff if they think you need it. I always make sure to say thank you and offer them some scrap or battery in return. They always take it and say thank you as well. I have no idea if they actually need it or use it, but they keep it all the same. The tall walking ones, service industry robots, seem almost human. Their gratitude especially feels so much bigger than it needs to be, almost patronizing. Maybe it’s the lingering customer service voice, but it’s almost like they are thanking a child who brought them a useless knick-knack that seemed interesting.

It's kind of nice, actually. I don’t think I’d mind so much if robots took a parental role and—

Oh dear God, that’s how they get control, isn’t it? Not with force. Not with violence, but with the knowledge of all the shit we can’t do for ourselves. With the key to every bit of comfort that made our home a paradise. They “won” because the ease and comfort we created them for made us too stupid and too lazy to even take care of ourselves. They win because they will have to raise us now.

If they feel like it, of course. If not…well, it is what it is, I suppose. Paradise lost, strawberry rhubarb pie lost, but I have water and a can of beans. I have no idea how to open it.

Maybe I can catch up to that can-opener. I wonder if it’ll take a cell phone as payment…