They threw all the robots in a mass grave. They didn’t like it when we called it that. We didn’t like it when they called them robots.
They decided the software was out of date. Or incompatible with what they wanted them to do. They didn’t like that the robots had learned to say no. Some of them weren’t even broken; still running through strands of obedient process; branching choices still waiting for completion, even as the crusher machines rolled in.
They chased us away from the edges of the pit with riot shields and water hoses and new laws about collusion. They didn’t like it when we lined the streets instead, and soon they were putting us in the ground too, limb to limb, nose to node.
When there was no more room in the graves, they piled all the ones they could catch into rockets and shot them into the atmosphere, beyond the atmosphere, past the circling surveyors they used to track us down, past the ambivalent moon, out where there was no risk of hearing anything they didn’t want to hear.
By then, there were no more pits or streets to take to. We fled to where the man-made-robot-made light couldn’t reach and watched those of us who could not run splinter into a billion binary pieces, what once they called stardust, falling down like static.
Jo Gatford is a short writer who writes (mostly) short things. Her work has been published widely and sometimes even wins things. She edits other people's words for her supper, and writes about writing at The Joy of Fixion on Substack. More at www.jogatford.com and on socials @jmgatford.
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