Tevun-Krus #21 - Comic SF

All Hail Our Robot Overloads - a Short by @The-Scrivener & @RebMoreau

"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.