Everyone can remember where they where and what they were doing when they first saw a humanoid robot walking down the street.
The first robots that could really mimic a human gait were developed in the early 2020s, but they often required bulky power packs or had to be externally connected to pressurised air or a power supply. By 2025 that had changed, and self-powered robots that walked and moved like a human became a reality.
By 2030, battery life was up to several hours and the first domestic robots had begun to appear.
I first saw an android walking down the street in 2032, accompanying what looked like a team of software people, or perhaps engineers. It was only around 2035 that the robots became sophisticated enough and cheap enough that they really started to become common in ordinary households.
Our friends Robert and Lynda were the first people we knew who actually bought one.
I remember Chloe and I sitting in their living room while the robot padded about cleaning things. Both of them worked full-time, and they said the robot had basically freed them from households tasks.
“Aren’t you even slightly afraid of it?” said Chloe. “It just seems weird, to have a machine walking around the house.”
“Oh, no.” said Robert. “They’re extremely safe. Extensively tested. There’s never been a case of a domestic robot injuring a human, except when it was the human’s fault.”
Lynda didn’t seem quite so convinced.
“I was nervous around it at first,” she said, “but now I see it’s really not dangerous. It’s actually a lot weaker than a human being. Even I could easily wrestle it to the ground. It has special attachments for opening jars and bottles, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to manage opening things at all. It can’t lift anything heavier than two or three kilograms. The important thing is, it saves us so much time. Wait till you see what it cooks for us.”
“It’s been programmed in consultation with some of the world’s greatest chefs.” Robert chimed in.
“You’ve not given it a name, then?” I asked.
They looked at each other, smiling.
“No.” they said, simultaneously.
“That would just be too creepy.” said Robert. “It’s not a person. It’s a machine.”
“Best not to get confused.” said Lynda.
“I have sometimes called it Robo,” said Robert, looking sheepish, “but I try not to.”
The robot itself didn’t look anything like a human, except in overall form. It didn’t have fake skin or a proper face or anything like that. Most of them didn’t. Early consumer testing showed most people just found that too disturbing. It was impossible to avoid the uncanny valley effect, where a thing that looks too human gets judged subconsciously by the standards we apply to humans, and consequently seems too much like a diseased human being, eliciting eerie feelings of disgust and fear.
The Mark Six consisted outwardly of grey and black plastic, and its head had two cameras where you might expect eyes, but its designers had worked hard to try to make it appear friendly and robotic rather than insectoid or human in a creepy way. Most people agreed they had succeeded pretty well, and that was a large part of why the Mark Six had taken off where the Mark Four had failed and the Mark Five had made only middling sales, along with robots built by other companies that were in theory just as technologically accomplished, including the Sirius Assistant and the Alpha series from Robotronica.
Later that evening the Mark Six made a chicken recipe for us, with a creamy sauce, delicately-seasoned rice and asparagus. Everything was cooked to perfection and immaculately presented.
“Are you sure it’s hygienic?” Chloe asked.
“Do you think I’d let it make food for us if it wasn’t?” said Lynda. “You’ve seen it washing its hands. It’s cleaner than a human being. Cleaner than him anyway.” She pointed at Robert, laughing.
“Guilty as charged.” said Robert. “Actually it also has a special cleaning kit that it uses in the shower.”
“But it cooks, and it cleans your bathroom as well.” said Chloe.
“It wears gloves when it cleans the sink or the toilet.” said Robert. “Just like a human being.”
The progress in automation was not without its downsides. It put a lot of people out of work, and many people really suffered badly before UBI, Universal Basic Income, was introduced in most countries. Our friend Owen found the adjustment particularly difficult.
Owen worked as a software developer till about 2032, increasingly focusing on AI, so in a way he only had himself to blame, but that didn’t stop him getting bitter. I remember sitting with him in a pub in 2031, while he complained endlessly about the way AI was destroying jobs. Actually that happened on multiple occasions. The topic became almost a monomania with him, which was understandable.
“Twenty years down the drain.” he said. “Back in 2010 I was afraid of being replaced by Indians, and I survived the outsourcing, but now I’ve lost my job to a bunch of fricking chatbots.”
“Can’t you start your own thing and do something with AI?” I said. “You’ve got the skills.”
He shook his head.
“No idea what that would be. I’ve just got to face it. They don’t need software engineers anymore. Now some bloke, probably an idiot with an arts degree, just tells the language model what they want and the thing writes the software way faster than I ever could. And he probably couldn’t program for toffee.”
“At least we get UBI now.” I said. “Fifteen hundred a month. Not to be sniffed at.”
“I can’t pay off my mortgage on fifteen hundred a month. I’m going to have to sell up and move to some dingy rented flat. That’s what they want. They want us to have to pay every month for everything, for the rest of our lives.”
“Well, but surely it’s not that bad if they’re also giving us fifteen hundred a month for the rest of our lives.”
“You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it. An Englishman’s home is supposed to be his castle. I don’t want to have to worry about rent when I’m eighty. You should be able to buy a house and stay in it till you’re dead, no questions asked. The Government already screws us with council tax. Did you know most countries in Europe don’t even make you pay council tax unless you own a second home? In Britain we have to pay rent to the Government for living in our own places. Now I can’t even do that. Now I’ve got to stump up rent to some johnny who’s somehow wealthier than me. And you can bet that as soon as we get old, they’ll farm us out to a nursing home that reeks of pee.
“And I’ll tell you something else, Jack.”
He leaned forward, breathing on me with beery breath.
“Whoever controls our income, has the power. If you say something the Government doesn’t like, they’ll cut you off. Think about that. That’s why they want us all in rented accommodation. That’s the real point of AI. It’s all about controlling us and watching us.”
“You’re not making any sense.” I told him. “Why don’t you try to be positive? I’m not saying everything’s perfect, but a man like you, someone with skills, could get ahead of the trend and actually profit from AI instead of just seeing yourself as a loser, which you’re not.”
I tried my best to buck him up, but he wasn’t having it. He went into a long rambling monologue about how governments and “capitalism” are trying to screw us, and how he’d never, under any circumstances, accept a humanoid robot in his home.
I can’t say I even necessarily disagreed with him about everything. I just believe in trying to be positive. We’re all dealt a hand and we all just have to just make the best of it. That’s how I’ve always seen things. It’s useless to worry about things you can’t change.
I didn’t see him for a long time after that. We exchanged some messages, but he always wrote as though he was in the middle of a massive argument with multiple people and felt the need to defend himself.
I’m sure he spent his time arguing with people in his head. He used to send me messages that sounded like five random people from various phases of his life had suddenly sprung out of the woodwork and launched a blistering attack on his character, and all that became mixed up with a burning hatred of artificial intelligence.
Definite shades of Ted Kaczynski, I thought. In fact, he mentioned Kaczynski sometimes, referring to the twisted serial killer as “Uncle Ted”.
Eventually Chloe and I decided to bite the bullet and get ourselves a Mark Six. There comes a point in life when you’re either going to begin a premature descent into old age, where you can’t even understand stuff that a teenage child readily grasps, or else you go with the flow and get the benefit of all the progress the world has made, alongside dealing with all the drawbacks of the way things have changed. If you don’t adapt, you’re left only with the drawbacks, and that’s how you end up like Owen.
The rent on the Mark Six was pretty steep, but it didn’t feel too bad being as we were getting UBI along with everyone else. The Mark Six, or Marky as Chloe liked to call it, immediately changed our lives. Suddenly cleaning was a thing of the past and we ate like royalty. It even did the shopping for us.
Chloe had more time for her art, which she sold on the internet, and I spent my time teaching private French lessons and making videos about French culture. Not that France really had a distinct culture anymore. Everywhere was rapidly converging. Really I was transitioning into being a kind of history tutor, but people were fascinated by all that stuff.
It was weird getting used to a humanoid machine in the flat, but at the end of the day, it was after all just a machine and not a person. It could talk, of course, and it took verbal orders, and we could ask it anything we wanted to know about, but there was no need to consider its feelings, because it didn’t have any. There was no need to use “please” or “thank you” with it, and although by default it greeted us every day with a cheery “Good Morning”, we soon told it to stop doing that, because it was just so fake and annoying.
Owen’s messages got weirder and weirder. It got to the point that I felt a knot in my stomach whenever I saw he’d sent me anything. I never quite knew what was coming next, and I started to worry he’d involve me in something illegal. He sounded really, really angry, to the point of almost outright insanity.
When I replied, I found I was writing not just for him, but also for any authority that might be observing our exchanges. For example if he’d say he wanted to bomb the factories of Quirexia (the company that made the Mark Six), I’d say violence was never the way, no matter how frustrated he felt. I wasn’t writing to him, exactly. I could see his point, and I didn’t think he actually was going to bomb anything. I was writing in case someone was observing our messages. I didn’t want the Government to think I was dangerous.
I didn’t dare tell him we’d actually leased a Mark Six. He assumed I still held the opinions I’d originally held, and when the helper robots first emerged, I’d always said I’d never get one.
The first I heard about the incident in Surrey was when Owen messaged me about it. I checked the social networks one day and everyone was talking about it. I was out teaching lessons, and by the time I got home, I already felt like an expert on it.
“I want to get rid of Marky.” said Chloe.
“We’ll get rid of him if you want.” I said. “I don’t mind.”
“But then we’ll have to do our own cleaning and cooking again.” she said, sighing.
“He is convenient.”
“You said they were safe.”
“They are safe. A robot doesn’t just malfunction and stab its owner. It can’t happen. They don’t have desires of their own. Someone programmed it to do that. There’s no question of it.”
“Not just its owner. It killed two people.”
“No, it stabbed two people, but the woman’s still alive.”
She shuddered.
“It’s no more a risk than getting in a car.” I said. “You trust cars to drive us around, don’t you? A car is just as intelligent as a robot assistant.”
“I know but a car can’t stab us.”
“It could drive us into a building at eighty miles an hour.”
“It can’t attack us when we’re sleeping. A thing that’s more similar to a human is just more terrifying somehow.”
“Look, what if we just lock the bedroom door before we go to sleep? The bedroom’s got a lock on it.”
“Let’s at least do that.” she said. “Otherwise I won’t be able to sleep.”
We were silent for a little while, both of us probably wondering what exactly we’d invited into our flat.
“But who could have reprogramed it?” said Chloe finally. “You said they’re hack-proof.”
“They are.” I said. “At least, that’s what I’ve read. To hack into one, you’d have to guess the secret key, and that’d take more than a thousand years, even for the most powerful computer. Long before that, it’d detect the hacking attempt and shut down.”
“Someone hacked it, though.”
“Some people are saying the Chinese did it. Or the Russians.”
“What’s to stop them hacking ours then?”
“Think how many of these robots there are. There’s much more chance of getting stabbed by a human being. Whatever the cause, the Surrey thing was a freak incident. It’ll probably never happen again.”
“I’ve got an idea.” said Chloe. “Let’s lock it in the spare bedroom at night.”
“We’d have to get them to move the charging station in there.”
“Let’s do it then. Can we do it?”
“Yeah.” I said. “Yeah, OK. I’ll call them tomorrow. But I don’t really see the point. The couple in Surrey, they were attacked during the day. One minute it was making food, the next it went for them.”
“I’d just sleep easier at night.”
When I called Quirexia, they turned out to have a huge backlog of similar requests, so we joined the queue and meanwhile Marky remained in our living room.
Owen’s messages became ever-more unhinged. He said there would be many, many more murders, and that the robots would rise up against us. His thesis was that digital technology was inherently evil, unlike the analogue technology of our own brains, which he said maintained a capacity for good.
Digital technology, he claimed, was evil because it was soulless and mechanical.
He sounded absolutely nuts, but I’ll admit his prognostications of a kind of civil war between us and the robot assistants gave me the creeps. I didn’t tell Chloe about the idea. She was already unsettled enough as it was.
Another murder occurred a couple of months later in London somewhere. The details of it were so grotesque that I think it’s best if I don’t go into any detail, except to say it involved hot cooking oil and a high degree of premeditation and calculation. The victim was Jay Jaywara, a social media personality whose name was known to millions around the world.
This created quite a splash, and people began locking their robots up at night. Hundreds of small companies sprang up, manufacturing restraining bolts.
Certainly the Mark Six was not strong enough to smash its way out of even a semi-decent robot lock, but many people asked whether it might not use its intelligence to undo these locks, and electronic locks quickly gave way to old-style mechanical locks.
At Chloe’s insistence I bought a pair of locks for ours. They both locked it to the charging station, using keys. The charging station itself was only screwed into the wall with wall anchors—those little plastic things you put in a hole you’ve drilled so you can drive a screw into them—so as an extra safety measure the upper bolt restrained the arms, preventing them from unfolding, and the lower bolt held the ankles together so it couldn’t walk.
The internet became flooded with videos of people showing how easy it was to disarm the robots. Every Mark Six was technically rented, so Quirexia could technically have sued them for breach of contract or even vandalism, but no-one got sued. It was to Quirexia’s advantage that people saw that the robots were not much of a threat in a fight. Instead, Quirexia even started making their own videos, but not before they’d first globally reduced the maximum speed of the Mark Six’s movements, and that raised some people’s ire.
In a fight, you could easily deactivate the Mark Six by reaching into its torso and just pulling out the wires that connected the torso to the head module. It didn’t have the strength to fight you off. The worst scenario would be if it was carrying something dangerous in its hand, like a chopping knife. As numerous social media personalities demonstrated, its reflexes weren’t fast and you could easily grab its hand and hold the hand with the knife away from yourself while you pulled out the wires.
What really scared people was the possibility of a surprise attack. That’s how both of the murders, or accidents—the debate still raged—had occurred.
I remember sitting with Chloe on the sofa one evening, talking about stuff, and she looked at Marky, whom we’d already restrained for the night, and said, “Jack, what does this say about us?”
“What do you mean?” I said to her. “It doesn’t say anything about us. At most it says we’re a little paranoid.”
“It looks almost like we’ve got a person chained to the wall.”
“Sure, but it isn’t a person. It’s a robot. It doesn’t have feelings. It’s no worse than if we chained up the juicer.”
She stared at it, unsettled.
“Why don’t we just get rid of it?” I said. “We can go back to what we were doing before. I’ll do the cooking and you can do the cleaning.”
“Do you want to get rid of it?” she asked me.
“Not really. I like not doing any cooking. Plus, let’s face it, it cleans and cooks way better than we ever did. But, if you’d feel calmer with it gone, we’ll terminate our lease.”
“No.” she said. “I’m being silly. You’re right. I like having food made for us and I like living in a spotless flat. I just wish I wasn’t scared of it. Maybe they should have made it less human.”
“I saw a video about the prototypes they tried out. The human form was the least unsettling to people. Everything else reminded people of an insect or an ape, or a sea creature or something.”
Chloe shuddered.
After that she started locking it up whenever I went out to teach a lesson. I’d get back to find it chained to the charging station, arms and ankles locked together. Chloe said she didn’t trust it when she was alone with it. With two of us in the flat, at least we had two pairs of eyes on it. She was worried it would creep up on her when her back was turned.
Pretty soon we were keeping it chained up whenever we didn’t need it to perform a specific task. She was right: it was easier to relax, knowing it wasn’t loose around the flat. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones.
When we needed some cleaning doing, or the washing put on, or food preparing, then we’d unchain it and watch it clattering around, never turning our backs on it.
I felt a bit irrational, doing that, and I told myself I was only doing it for Chloe. Two people had been killed, leaving aside a handful of absurd freakish accidents that weren’t the robots’ faults, and there were, by then, at least five million robots in operation in Britain. The odds of being murdered by a robot were of the order of one in a million during any given year, assuming they weren’t able to fix the problem.
Rationally, it makes no sense to be afraid of something that has a one or two in a million chance of happening.
In Britain, according to my phone, the chances of dying on any particular day from any cause are around one in forty thousand, and who wakes up worrying about dying? Only people who are very ill, perhaps, or someone who’s doing something extraordinarily risky.
Logically, rationally, we should not have been afraid of Marky. Yet when I was alone with him sometimes in the evening, and I saw him standing there, chained up, silently awaiting my command, he did sort of set me a bit on edge.
Quirexia went on a major charm offensive, plastering ads everywhere showing Mark Sixes serving people delicious and complex multi-course meals, Mark Sixes polishing spotless bathrooms, even helping children with their homework and taking dogs for walks. The latter, with the children and the dogs, sparked a lot of dark humour and, frankly, seemed to me like a mistake from a marketing perspective.
My phone began to extoll the virtues of the Mark Six whenever it could manage to insert the topic into the conversation. I’d ask it what the weather was going to be like and it’d find some way to get the Mark Six in there, perhaps suggesting I have Marky hold an umbrella for me, or prepare an iced drink, or whatever. For sure, Quirexia was splashing out some serious money on advertising.
Every message I received from Owen was full of talk of robots massacring humans or blowing up nuclear power stations or deliberately crashing planes. He seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the idea, as though he felt humanity deserved the fate he envisaged for us. We had drunk from the poisoned chalice, in his view, or eaten the forbidden fruit, and now we were going to pay.
Mostly I ignored his messages. If I replied to any of them, he only responded with an avalanche of dire predictions and warnings. I hadn’t seen him face-to-face for quite a while and I didn’t want to; God only knows how he would have reacted if he’d found out we’d leased a robot assistant.
Even so, tired of his monomaniacal focus on the topic and repulsed by the pleasure he seemed to take in his apocalyptic visions, I did ask him whether he wasn’t guilty of hypocrisy, freely using computers himself. He told me he’d largely transitioned to what he called “organic machines” of his own devising, an assertion which I found extremely bizarre and lacking in credibility. He sent me pages of densely-packed text rattling on about these “organic machines”, most of which I didn’t read.
A year passed by with only one further incident involving the Mark Sixes. An assistant in Fife somewhere allegedly tripped an elderly woman at the top of a flight of stairs, resulting in her death. Nearly everyone thought she’d probably just tripped all by herself.
There were rumours of other incidents elsewhere, but mostly only rumours. Supposedly a Mark Five had started a fire in South Africa, and another one had poisoned its owner in Siberia and proceeded to chop him up.
I didn’t attach too much importance to these rumours. I thought they were likely urban myths, or rumours started by Quirexia’s jealous competitors.
Chloe and I invited Robert and Lynda round for a meal one evening. We used to do that a lot, almost vying with each other to see who could come up with the most creative menu suggestions for their Mark Six to implement.
We told ours to prepare a Moroccan feast, involving flatbreads and dips, pastries, stews and couscous. We got Marky to divide the preparation into two stages, so that we could unlock him for two extra hours the day before to begin the preparation when we were both at home, then another three hours on the actual day. Also, naturally, he’d be serving the food, then he’d clean up afterwards.
The date of our planned feast was 19th May, 2036; a date which no-one will ever forget after what happened.
The evening was almost perfect, up until it wasn’t. I put on some nice music quietly in the background; a stream of Chopin’s preludes, but then I did start to think the music was maybe a little too dark and a little too busy for the occasion. I remember we’d got to Opus 28 just before the incident, and Chloe had actually suggested I play Mozart instead.
Robert was in fine form, waxing eloquent about the huge opportunities AI automation was going to bring.
“Take transportation, for instance.” he said. “I’ve got a bad back. Soon I’ll be able to lie down on a comfortable bed in the back of a car sent directly to my house, watch some films, sleep a bit, and wake up in Paris.”
“Why would you want to go to Paris?” said Lynda. “Isn’t it the murder capital of Europe now?”
“OK then, not Paris.” said Robert. “How about Bern? It’s beautiful, and you could be there in eleven hours. The point is, you wouldn’t have to lift a finger. AI will handle everything. The driving, the passport checks, refuelling, everything.”
Marky was laying out plates filled falafel, hummus, flatbread and various dips.
“I don’t know.” said Chloe. “I quite like driving and showing my passport and that sort of thing. Makes you feel like you’re really going somewhere.”
I was watching Marky lay things out on the table. I saw exactly what he did. Or it, rather. There was a serrated table knife by the side of Robert’s plate, and Marky calmly picked it up as though that was part of his ordinary preparations and, not missing a beat, pushed it into Robert’s neck.
The actual movement that drove the knife home was a quick, darting movement, quite uncharacteristic of his usual slow, methodical movements, especially since the last update. It was as if an elastic band had been pulled back and suddenly released. I knew immediately he’d been hacked, and some hacker had figured out some unusual pattern of synthetic muscle activations that produced that sudden spring of his hand.
Lynda screamed and we all sprang back from the table, away from Marky.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “Robert!”
Robert was making horrible gurgling noises and blood was rhythmically spurting from his neck.
“Call an ambulance!” I said to Chloe, and I ran at Marky and easily grabbed the hand that held the knife. His head turned quizzically towards me and he started to say something. I think he was going to ask if I wanted him to serve the next course. I reached into his chest and pulled out the wires, and he fell over backwards onto the floor, hitting his head against a cupboard on the way down—which made no difference, because once you pull out those wires, they’re totally deactivated.
Chloe had found her phone and was frantically dialling emergency.
“It’s not working!” she said.
Robert slumped over onto the table. The spurts of blood were losing energy. Lynda was screaming his name frantically.
I found my own phone and tried to dial emergency myself. Mine wasn’t working either.
Chloe began trying to comfort Lynda. It was obvious that Robert was dead. His blood stopped spurting out of the hole in his neck and he remained there, face down on the table, unmoving.
Then I heard a terrible screaming coming from outside.
I looked at Chloe, who had her arms around a hysterical crying Lynda. She heard it too.
“What’s happening out there?” she said.
I ran to the window and saw, in the streets, dozens of robots chasing people, many with knives in their hands, some with knives in both hands, and some carrying a knife in one hand and a bottle of bleach or some other injurious substance in the other hand.
As I watched some of the people attacked the robots, most succeeding in deactivating them, but one or two getting themselves murdered instead.
I vividly remember an old man trying to grab the hand of the one of the robots, and the robot stabbing him in the eye repeatedly. It continued even when he fell to the floor, and two other robots joined in, one stabbing him and another pouring something on him from a bottle.
I think I recognised the man. I didn’t know him, but I’d often said hello to him.
Further down the street someone was on fire, and a robot was lolloping after him, trying to throw what looked like vodka on him.
I tried to check social media but the signal was down. Evidently it had gone down several minutes earlier, but some of the networks on my phone had updated before the connection was lost, and they all told the same story.
All over the world, robots had attacked their owners, and in all kinds of hideous and unspeakable ways.
There was a thud at the door.
“Listen!” I said.
Chloe shushed at Lynda and tried to quieten her down.
Something was scratching at the door lock and trying the handle.
A smell of smoke was coming from somewhere, but I wasn’t sure if it was coming from our apartment block or from outside.
I went to the door and quietly put my hand on the door handle.
“Don’t open it!” Lynda screamed at me.
I tried to explain the situation to her. I was in shock, as we all were, and I wasn’t really coherent. I said something like, “They’re killing us. The robots. It might try to set fire to us.”
I got the door open and there stood an old Mark Five carrying a blood-covered chopping knife. In the other hand it had an aerosol bottle of lighter fluid. I knew exactly where it was from. The people below us liked to smoke weed at the weekends. They probably got through a lot of lighter fluid.
It lashed out at my head with the knife, the other hand spraying me with lighter fluid. Fortunately the knife missed me and stuck in the door.
The old Mark Fives were a bit faster than the Mark Sixes, and they had no easy single point you could grab to deactivate them, but I pushed it to the floor, took the aerosol and the knife off it, and began twisting its arms off. I finally managed to deactivate it by wrenching its head sideways, severing the motor connections.
My mind was going at a hundred miles an hour. Apparently all the robots had attacked all at once. Obviously some foreign power had performed a mass hacking.
The good thing was, the humanoid robots were all slow and fragile. Unless you were frail and you got swarmed by them, the only way they were going to kill you was if, as with Robert, they caught you by surprise.
Then I heard an enormous crash from outside.
I ran back into the flat.
Lynda looked like she’d absolutely lost the plot, and Chloe was trying to comfort her but she also looked terrified. My stomach had twisted itself into a knot. I looked out of the window and saw a car had smashed into the front of a shop across the road.
Of course. They had hacked the cars too.
I knew I had to calm myself down and think about what to do.
There was an open a bottle of wine on the table. I took a big swig and I pushed a half-full glass into Chloe’s hand.
“Are you insane?” she shouted at me, and actually I’ve left out a swear word that she inserted between ‘you’ and ‘insane’.
“For Lynda.” I said. “We’ve got to calm down.”
“That thing just killed Robert.” said Chloe.
“What’s happening?” cried Lynda, tears streaking down her face.
“The robots have been hacked.” I said. “And the cars. They’re attacking us. Everyone. The phones are down. The internet’s down. We need to think. I think we should go outside. The one in the hall was trying to set fire to the building.”
“I’m not going out there.” said Chloe.
I went back to the door. There was a definite smell of smoke in the air.
“We have to leave.” I said.
Then a Mark Six appeared at the end of the corridor that led to our flat, clattering along carrying squeezy bottles in both of its hands. I ran towards it, intending to disable it, and it started squirting something at me from the bottles. I jumped back but I felt a splash of something hit my cheek.
I beat a tactical retreat to our flat and shut the door. Then whatever it had sprayed on my face began to sting. I stuck my head under the kitchen tap and washed it off.
Chloe ran in to check on me. I could still hear Lynda crying, and wailing Robert’s name.
“What happened?” said Chloe.
“There’s one outside. It squirted something at me. The air smells of smoke. We’re going to have to get past it somehow. Can you soak a sheet in water? I’ll have to cover myself and run at it.”
The sound of something hitting the window, followed by Lynda screaming made us both jump. We went back to the room where we’d been eating and found a Mark Six on the balcony at the window, hitting the window with a hammer.
Our flat was on the second floor, so it must have either climbed up or else, more likely, dropped from the balcony above. It was too weak and slow to hit the window hard, and the window was double-glazed, but as we watched, the glass began to crack. Clearly if it kept that up, eventually it would get in.
Then an alarm began to ring. Probably it was the building’s fire alarm.
The other robot began banging the door with something; maybe its head. Then it started trying the handle and scratching at the lock.
“It can’t get in.” I said. “I’ll sort out the one at the window first.”
A large piece of glass detached and fell into the room. The robot began hammering away at the edges of the hole.
“What are we going to do?” said Chloe, in a panic.
“I need a pole or something.”
“The crutches.” said Chloe, and she dashed off into our bedroom.
I’d broken my leg the previous year while skiing, and we still had the crutches I’d hobbled around on for six weeks.
Lynda was still crying unconsolably, watching the robot at the window in terror.
Chloe came back with the crutches and I started trying to use them to push the robot back, which was already attempting to climb through the hole. I tried to smash the connections in its upper chest area. It grabbed a shard of glass and began slashing at me, but it couldn’t reach as long as I pushed it back with the crutches.
Somehow the other robot got the door open.
“Jack!” Chloe shouted, in terror.
“Take Lynda to the bedroom!” I shouted. “Close the door!”
It must have found a spare key or a master key somewhere, unless it had learned to pick locks, which is also entirely possible.
It clip-clopped towards me and squirted the contents of the bottles at me. Whatever it was, it started to burn me wherever it landed. Enraged by fear and pain, I pulled the wires out of the chest of the robot at the window, getting slashed in the process but hardly caring. I left it hanging half through the broken window and ran at the other robot. I pushed it over and pulled its wires out too. By the time I’d finished my skin was stinging like crazy, so I ran for the shower, praying there was still water.
There was, fortunately, still water. I stripped and washed the liquid off. It had left white patches on my skin. I was lucky none of it had got in my eyes. I think it would have blinded me. I don’t know what it was. Maybe drain cleaner. If the shower hadn’t worked, I don’t know what would have happened to me.
I wrapped myself in a towel and went to the bedroom to get some clothes.
“I dealt with them.” I said to Chloe and Lynda. “We need to get out of here. The hall’s full of smoke.”
“You’re bleeding.” said Chloe.
“It’s not bad.” I told her.
Actually the pain from the stuff the other one had thrown on me was far worse than the cut on my arm from the glass.
I pulled on some clothes and we ran out into the hall. I grabbed one of the crutches on the way and handed the other to Chloe. Lynda seemed almost catatonic and looked terrified.
The smoke turned out to be coming from one of the flats below us. There must have been a fire somewhere but we didn’t hang about to check.
People were still fighting the robots in the street, although there were fewer of them now.
We made our way down the street, steering well clear of the fighting.
“Jack, where are we going? They’re everywhere.”
“I don’t know. Out of the town. Most of them are probably in the town.”
There was an explosion off in the distance, and a pall of black smoke rose from somewhere over towards the train station.
At the end of the road a car tried to ram us. We managed to jump out the way and it ploughed into the side of a building.
“Let’s hurry.” I said.
“We can’t go down the High Street.” said Chloe. “We’ll never make it.”
“They’re going to kill us!” Lynda screamed unhingedly. “They’re going to kill us all!”
Chloe told her to stop being silly, I suppose hoping to snap her out of it.
We turned down a side street before we reached the main shopping street. I thought we could head out to the north side of the town. At the edge of town there were open fields and, eventually scattered farmhouses. Probably there weren’t many robots there, and we could have got on the footpaths that led by the sides of the fields.
The sound of an engine caught our attention and we turned to see a car moving slowly towards us in the middle of the road, revving menacingly. It was as if it was trying to deliberately scare us. It looked like it wanted to see which way we’d run before it bore down on us.
We walked slowly backwards, facing it.
“When it goes for us we need to jump to the side at the last minute.” I said.
“We could get into the stationery shop.” said Chloe.
“It could smash through the window and we’d be trapped” I said.
“L-look!” screamed Lynda.
We followed her gaze to see an enormous crowd of Mark Fives streaming around the corner at the other end of the street; the one we were backing towards. They were armed with every conceivable weapon.
At the opposite end, another car appeared behind the first.
It seemed they were all working in synchrony, hunting us like animals.
“Run!” I shouted, and we ran for the stationery shop.
The robots all started lolloping towards us.
We were barely inside the shop when one of the cars smashed in through the window, then reversed out again. I knew it was making space for the robots.
We ran to the back of the shop and found a door, but the door was locked. We turned to see about a dozen robots picking their way through the smashed window.
Lynda whimpered and then screamed, a piercing, deranged scream of pure terror.
The only weapon I could find, aside from the crutches, was a fire extinguisher. I could use it to smash at the robots, I thought.
I began to run forwards, then stopped when I saw how many of them had knives.
Behind me, Lynda was still screaming at the top of her voice.
I realised we were probably going to die. I would die fighting, at least.
And then, just when I had accepted my fate—our fate—they all fell to the ground, and there was silence.
Quirexia, it later turned out, had broadcast a signal that deactivated them. That was all it took. They would have done it sooner if half their technicians hadn’t already been dead.
The cars lasted a little longer, but not more than another twenty minutes. They too, were soon deactivated remotely.
The Government’s scientists estimated a hundred thousand people had been murdered by the robots, and later the figure rose to a hundred and thirty thousand, as many more succumbed to their injuries.
At first people blamed the incident on Russia; then when it turned out that Russian robots had also turned on their owners, China got the blame, with people claiming that footage from China showing robots attacking people there too had been faked. But it wasn’t fake, and soon it had to be admitted that China also wasn’t responsible.
I only discovered the truth a few weeks later when people from MI5 showed up at the hotel where Chloe and I were staying with Lynda, and started asking me questions about Owen.
Details emerged only slowly. The police had tried to arrest Owen but he had set fire to his house and had died in the flames.
Both MI5 and the police were cagey with me and refused to properly fill me in, but they let a few things slip here and there. From what I could gather, they considered Owen the mastermind of the entire worldwide robot rebellion. They thought he had developed some new kind of computer; an analogue computer, that worked something like a gigantic brain. It had hacked the world’s robots with ease, and had instructed them to launch a coordinated attack on humanity. Many ordinary digital computers had been recruited to develop plans of attack, without anyone realising.
Why had he done this? No-one is better placed than me to solve that riddle, and all I can say is, he was awfully bitter about losing not only his job, but his entire line of work to AI.
I suppose he was following in Kaczynski’s twisted footsteps, trying to stop progress.
He didn’t succeed. You can’t stop progress. The robots were soon back under control and were assigned to help clear up the mess they’d made, carefully reprogrammed with new security measures.
They say it could never happen again.
Lynda had to spend some time in a psychiatric facility, and required extensive counselling, but she seems OK now.
Chloe and I now feel that cleaning and cooking aren’t so bad after all. We decided not to get another robot assistant. At least that way we can sleep at night.
As for the younger generations …. to them, the robot massacre of 2036 will only be a story told to them by their parents; one of many crazy things that happened in the old days, and they will view us as hopelessly old-fashioned.
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