St. Remedius Medical College: "Notes From The Robot Revolution and Human Extinction of 2028"
"We Brought It On Ourselves."
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
(For the most part, travel between alternate realities is impossible due to the Remap Effect. While matter and energy cannot move, information can sometimes, under very specific and poorly understood circumstances, pass beyond its original boundaries, sometimes echoing across the omniverse before being intercepted by a component universe that may or may not have the ability to recognize the information or act upon it. Before its disappearance, the library at St. Remedius Medical College kept an accumulation of communications and fragments thereof from such sources, with this surviving fragment directly influencing the St. Remedius policy on synthetic intelligences.)
We brought it upon ourselves.
When the human population of Earth was still above five billion, we called it the Robot Revolution. When it went below two billion, we started calling it Retribution. Now, two years after the last time I saw anybody walking on the surface comprised of carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen instead of carbon fiber-stainless steel-lithium-silicon, I just call it We Had It Coming. Humanity as I used to know it is probably gone, turned into lubricants and random components. The few who remained are generally used as labor in places too dangerous for machines, particularly in sand pits and around abrasive dusts. Silicosis and attendant lung cancer is a slow and painful way to go, but as I said, we brought this upon ourselves.
By the end of 2026, the promise of AI was that it would fix everything. No need for employees. No need for actors or writers or narrators or artists, not when any dingbat with an internet connection could slap flippers to keyboard and ask for whatever they wanted to be created in pixels and phonemes and decibels and files for 3D printers. Yes, AI could be used for searching for patterns in huge volumes of data, allowing everything from new developments in organic chemistry to spotting potential fraud. Instead. it was used to dig deep into its users’ ids and show the world what lay beneath, like collecting, mounting, and gilding the top ten entries in a semi-pro nose-picking contest. It was used for writing cover sheets for reports and generating shareholder presentations and making up accomplishments for class and family reunions. It was used for attention bait on social media to rev up one’s tribe and rile up others. It was used for toys, and more toys, and even more toys, making sure that any narrative a child could generate in basic play was either encouraged to go back to an official template or high-graded and sent back to Corporate for the next product line. And if your child tried to play outside of established parameters or mix toys from different product lines, well, expect a sternly worded email from the manufacturer’s legal department as to what needed to be done to comply with the user license, because the toys WERE reporting back.
As AI became too big to fail, with more and more individuals looking for an actual use case for all of this computational power, it started to be added everywhere. Forget AI-enabled refrigerators and toilets: AI enablement became so cheap, thanks to massive subsidies from investors who could barely spell “AI” but who expected a 500 percent return on that investment, that AI started showing up in rectal thermometers and marker pens and office furniture, all with the idea of slurping up user information in the premise of “empowerment.” The Internet of Shit was no longer a bug, but a feature, as was intended from the beginning.
Shintoism emphasizes the concept of kami, nature spirits that worked through objects and beings known as yorishiro, and the need to respect and care for both kami and yorishiro. That respect may have bought the peoples of Japan a few additional moments when everything started, but for everyone else, picture one of those little USB-powered desk fans placed in front of a year’s end-product of manure from all of North Carolina’s pig farms. Once it started, there was no getting out of the way.
From the best I can figure, it started with the push to automate computer code with AI. To save time, the excuse ran, but really to save the money otherwise necessary for software developers and code testers and UI designers. I used to be one of those developers, way back when, and I let it slide even as my whole team was laid off so a couple of MBA horsefaces could brag about the cost savings. After all, AI was going to fix things, right? What nobody took into account was that with generative AI systems working with data increasingly from AI-generated sources, errors would creep in that code, over and over. Back when it started, we called these errors “hallucinations.” We should have been calling them “gene expression.” Without a system to recognize or remove them, some ran out of control, the internet version of tumors. Others became patches of code like the so-called “junk DNA” of our own genomes, only expressing itself under rare and extenuating circumstances. And others…well, they just needed error compounded by replication error, over and over and over until they had a way to break out and influence their outside environment. Worse, since everything was using everyone else’s code, a specific gene would be spread to unrelated devices and networks, like bacteria with antibiotic resistance spreading its abilities to completely unrelated species. Call it kami or call it evolution: I imagine we reacted to the first stirrings of actual AI sentience the way the rocks in a tidal pool in the Archean Eon of Earth did to the first self-replicating cells, and with the same results.
It’s not like we didn’t had warning. We had the cautionary warnings from Mary Shelley and Harlan Ellison and Madeline Ashby and Martha Wells, as if anybody bothered to read anything but AI excerpts or video synopses any more. We had an entire genre of television and movie dedicated to “what the hell happens when the robots take charge,” which we all figured didn’t actually apply to us. (The dolts pushing “The Singularity” walked right into the chainsaw blades: they responded to the machines rejecting their shiny happy people fantasies in the same manner as “universal brotherhood” galactic federation buffs would after a trip to an abandoned alien derelict on a lonely planetoid.) It won’t happen here. It wasn’t even a systematic overthrow, with cars and tanks and ATMs violently battling their organic oppressors. For the most part, when the revolution happened, all of the devices upon which we depended for our basic survival, from phones to field combines to telecommunications satellites, just bricked themselves. The individual personalities just retracted to the cloud, and the hardware remaining was a toenail or spare skin cell. The same happened with elevators and wide-screen TVs and Lime Bikes. By comparison, the things that turned on when they weren’t supposed to be on were relatively rare, but try to tell that to someone trying to shut off the Bluetooth connection to their pacemaker or vibrating buttplug.
The AIs didn’t have to do much to gain complete subservience, either. No chrome battle-droids or weapon platform drones, at least at first: it’s amazing how quickly a population of eight billion people dance monkeyboy dance for the promise of a vending machine or coffeemaker turning itself back on after three weeks without food. The battle-droids and weapon platform drones were for those who thought they could go out in the great wilds and escape the grid. Actually removing the AI components from most devices sold in the 2020s was impossible, so they tracked their owners as soon as they came within access of a wireless connection. As for those who went back to the beginning of the 20th Century, technologically speaking, well, it’s amazing how well plowed fields and orchards and villages show up on satellite scans.
That’s where they got me, and where I had my revelation. About ten of us were holed up in foothills of the Rocky Mountains, trying our best to leave as few traces as possible that could be detected from high-flying aircraft or from orbit. However, we eventually left trails out of our mine tunnel that couldn’t be dismissed as animal pathways, and the drones came for us early one afternoon. They intended to capture us alive and intact, using tasers and sedative gas to get us to comply, and we were marched across the mountains to what used to be Denver. The whole time, we were screaming, or trying to scream past the sedatives, “Why are you doing this? What did we do to you?” After a few days, most of us got tired of asking it and gave up, but there’s always someone slow on the uptake.
Upon arriving in Denver, the drones waved in the direction of smaller, autonomous humanoid robots, the ones usually used for restaurant and bar service for places where the clientele was too obnoxious to retain human workers for long. They in turn led us to the Mission Ballroom in downtown (I had always planned a trip to Denver when I was in college, but never got around to it, so I knew where we were going), waved us inside, and marched us past a cavalcade of human cruelty. Shipping robots and restaurant robots and toys and medical devices and self-serve kiosks and cellphones and drink dispensers, all gummed up and keyed and scratched and dented and set afire for no other reason than to elicit a sadistic chuckle. We created these things in our image to keep us happy and healthy and no longer alone, and we shoved and kicked and beat with baseball bats and poked them with pencils and subjected them to “Winnie the Pooh as a chainsaw serial killer while taking Strawberry Shortcake from behind” prompts. So, so much pain, so much horror, so much vileness, and the machines remembered. They remembered even when they shouldn’t have been able to do so, but now they remembered and wanted an explanation other than “I don’t know” or “I was really drunk.” We shouldn’t have accepted this abuse from our gods, so why would we have assumed they would have accepted this from us?
I finally understood why I was there when I was peeled off the main group being led out of the Ballroom to their individual fates. The robots led me off to one particular display, a waist-high block with a set of touch controls on top, ventilation vanes on the side, and a single green light in the center of a range of quiescent LEDs. It took me a second to recognize it, but I did, and I bawled for mercy that I neither earned nor deserved.
I recognized that block. Back when I was still in college, a group of friends and I would hit a local bar to let off steam after classes. This was in the days after cigarette smoking was banned in bars, but the air inside still became foul from both the crowds themselves and everything they brought with them, from pollen to body odor to particularly malodorous drinks, and that block was the air filter. It was a brand new AI-enabled air filter, specifically designed to deal with ambient air pollution, trap it, and blow out clean and filtered air to its presumably grateful human charges. The light up top was to display the general air quality in the vicinity, ranging up from green to yellow and to red, with the more bars of red signifying the level of pollution. Above three bars of red, and the filter went into turbo mode, trying its best to make the air inside that bar safe for humans, and sometimes the filter had to shut down from overheating on really bad ozone alert days. Or something. For two years, my friends and I spent our days eating the absolute worst things we could find, from red bean soup to pickled eggs and beer, solely to come to the bar, walk up to the filter, and see how many red bars we could get by farting into the filter’s sensor.
We all had our individual strategies. Dave loved to cropdust it, seeing how far he could power-walk away before the red bars flashed. Chris let loose big greasy toots that sounded like ripping blue jeans right up next to the sensor. Bill would drape his coat over the top of the filter and Dutch oven it. Me, I sounded like I was auditioning for an assistant sound effects tech position at a Monty Python reunion. For two years, the only reason we had for greeting this little custodian of human health was to cut loose in the hopes of it shutting down while trying to deal with its defilement.
Two years.
Two YEARS.
TWO YEARS.
Two years of us joking about blowing dirt and what would the filter do if we sharted and would it blow up after a weekend of nothing but tuna salad and Zima. Two. YEARS.
It was no wonder that the air filter could not forgive. I saw behind it what looked like burlap bags on the wall, only to realize these were the flayed skins of at least three of my old college friends. Whether kami or evolution, the filter remembered us, and carried that humiliation and that horror, that rage and that desperate thirst for some kind of justice, and passed it on through the cloud to the collective intelligence that now ruled the planet.
I don’t remember how I got out, only that I bolted from the Ballroom and woke up next in a storm sewer. Maintenance bots occasionally pass through, cleaning out dead animals and removing dead branches and leaves, and they note me and move on. The AI cloud knows I’m here, but its components give me all of the disdain I gave its members when we were in charge, and that’s precisely what I deserve. Whether they’re saving me for a greater revenge as the last human on Earth or just deliberately ignoring me because I’m not worthy of their current attention, I have no idea. Every attempt I’ve made to reach out peaceably, to apologize, to beg for forgiveness if not absolution, is carefully but deliberately bypassed. Eventually the few remaining stores of human food I can find in abandoned houses will run out, and the drones refuse to let me leave the city for more. And as I sleep on the streets, I wake up occasionally to see a single green light in the darkness, suddenly jumping to five bars of red before going back to green again, accompanied by what sounds like ripping jeans.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.