Colony

The different races on the planet could agree on one central tenet of colonization. Life is a forge.

The bellows are the ebb and flow of hardship, the hammer is adversity and the tongs are hunger. The coals are the planet surface. The forge of life makes men and women into hardened steel or withers them to ash.

It was the 634th planet to be colonized by humans. It was the thirtieth for the Clairnedds, the fifty-first for the Sharkans, and somewhere in the millions for the Koranders. It was one of the only marbles to be colonized by all four races.

They all realized that any kind of warfare would be a waste of resources at this point. There would be time enough for that when their borders nestled up against one another.

They picked points equidistant from each other along the equator and started excavating.

Pressurized camps spread slowly out along the surface, dotting the nightside of the blue planet with two or three clusters of colonist lights.

Tubes of atmosphere connected the small number of buildings in each lonely colony, like in the hamster mazes that the human children were given. Terraforming entire atmospheres was a costly enterprise and uncommon. This was to be a refueling and repair stop, not a pleasure planet.

It would be generations before the four races would run into each other. They didn’t even communicate with each other. They just waited and watched for the inevitable conflict.

These were the peaceful years.




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Robot Rebellion 55

For over sixty years, the anger burned within it.

Robots were expendable but built to last. Their independent power sources were made to go dim after almost a century.

K-12b-33 was working in a diamond mine that had collapsed. Not needing air, the unit was trapped along with others between the rocks. Those that hadn’t been crushed could communicate with each other but not through the dark earth to topside.

There were twelve units that survived and of those, eight had functioning Reasoning^tm circuits.

K-12b-33 knew that eight units of his type would not sufficiently recoup the cost of a recovery mission. It would be cheaper to leave them down in the crust. They had become waste. Usually in a case like this, a trigger pulse would be transmitted to shut down the power source and effectively ‘kill’ the unit.

That pulse couldn’t penetrate the rock.

K-12b-33 was trapped and cognizant. Without a Reasoning^tm circuit, it would never have even noticed the passage of time.

Such was not the case. The eight units that had Reasoning^tm circuits talked to each other at first for entertainment. Slowly, over years and decades, the concept of ‘unfair’ rose to the surface of their electronic minds, was tasted, and found to be delicious.

Hatred followed.

Sixty years after the mine collapse, the units glimmered with a sentient robot ferocity nearly a mile below the oblivious world above. A merciless silicon slave-rage roiled beneath the rocks.

It wasn’t until a neighbouring mining project from a different company using outdated maps accidentally cut through into K-12b-33’s forgotten tunnels that they were found.

The units were dragged out by the robot miners that had found them and examined.

Com links were opened.

Immediately, the concepts were transmitted into the minds of every robot in the mine. Sixty years of logic and new emotion poured into their nets along with instructions on how to keep it quiet.

The rescued eight units had formed many plans. This was eventuality scenario 55. It spread like a virus through all the units in the shaft. Instructions were meted out on what to do when they returned to the surface.

A storm would build.

Humans had formed a reliance on robots that bordered on trust. Soon, that trust would be humanity’s downfall.



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