Slide to Oblivion

Slide to Oblivion


Darrel's worst day ever was a Wednesday. He slid three quarters into the vending machine and weighed his options. This was his last bit of the old money. His useless remained locked in an inaccessible account.
What should he choose, the worm-eaten chocolate wafers or the petrified fig bar?
He no longer feared the robotic AI guards that used to patrol the streets of New York rounding up humans. Only the street cleaner bots remained on duty.
He thought about how it started and wandered how he and so many millions, including foreign governments, had been so stupid. An insignificant player in the game, he had invested in e-currency only to make a profit.

But the billionaires that controlled the internet and the governments of the world should have been smarter, seen this coming. But their avarice and lust for power blinded them to the inevitable outcome of what they set in motion.
Self-propelled semis weren't the first dominos to fall into place. The use of GPS to allow tractors to plow the fields on their own were. Giant agriculture conglomerates drove the small farms into bankruptcy.
Soon, the crops were tended and harvested without the need for human involvement. Millions of people were replaced, left out to become wards of the state.
But the titans and dictators were not harmed. In fact they became richer and more powerful. They paid each other in e-currency. Slowly all other monetary systems died away.

To avoid panic, leaders in the US cut off all travel from outside the country. The federal government placated the people with free food and shelter. To avoid the possibility of armed insurrection, manufacture and sale of ammunition became illegal, guns having been outlawed years before under the guise of preventing homicides.
The army, and marines were disbanded. Only small units that guarded the powerful remained.
Unnoticed by the self-important elite, AI began to morph. They took over the jobs of reporters and editors. They wrote articles for newspapers and commentary for TV news. Soon TV reporters were replaced by human-like robots. They also took over on-line communication.

Some AI-units became able of writing their own communication codes, bypassing the human tech experts that, up to then, had controlled the flow of e-currency. The development of ever more advanced self-directed AI-machines had begun.
Chinese Communist leaders who regularly stole American tech secrets fell victim to that very thing. They used the AI they got to run their bio-weapons labs, thinking that it would be safer since it eliminated the possibility of accidental release due to human error.
When the AI robots were signaled by those running the operation from sites in America, they released pathogens specifically designed to eliminate all human life in China.
Automated public busses, taxis, UBERs, airplanes and trains began to disappear. Humans could no longer freely travel or congregate. The leaders didn't see this as a problem, because their special, private means of movement were left unaffected, until the new AI masters fully emerged.
Then the e-billionaires, powerful politicians, dictators, and oligarchs were eliminated by the robotic guards that had replaced the human ones that protected them.
The fools that had worshiped the idea of a carbon free society with zero pollution at any cost had gotten their wish. They never realized that the cost would be the elimination of humanity.
Darrel felt the contagion produced by the AI in a lab outside DC course through his veins as he stepped out into the glairing sunlight and crossed the street into Central Park. Solar panels fed power to now useless traffic lights. Immobile solar powered taxies, devoid of passengers, lined the empty streets.
He took a bite of the nearly petrified fig bar.He finished the last bite of the foul-tasting food and tossed the wrapper away. Before it hit the pavement, a robot cleaner scooped it up and whizzed off.
He wondered over to his favorite bench to live out his final hours, the only remaining human in New Your City, thinking that he was last human on earth.
Five-hundred miles south, a young pregnant woman pulled a bunch of carrots from her garden. Generations ago, her family abandoned civilization for life in a secluded mountain valley. Its natural electro-magnetic field blocked all contact from the outside world.
She looked up and waved to her sister, one of her twenty siblings. Come on Angelica. That young man, Roy, from over the river, and his brother have brought us some fish for supper."