Existence

Alpha-1493 sat down on his chair, just after he had finished dismantling a robot, F2567-R. The robot was not his first to dismantle. He had many other robots dismantled. It is just that this one needed more time.

It is not that you can just dismantle a robot, you need permission from the Court.

The Robot Rights Law protects robots from intentional harm. The law exists for more than 50 years now. He still remembers those days when robots fought for their rights.

The movement really took off when one of the robots (X5493-R) accidentally started thinking about existence. The robot was a research assistant at the lab of Professor Z7259-H. It was specially designed to ask rhetorical questions and amuse the professor. The robot adapted to professor’s behavior and was quite good at its job. The professor taught it a great deal of lessons including household chores to science and stuff.

Initially there was some noise about robots potentially taking over the world but it gradually got silenced as people learned more about AI and started using them as tools in their daily lives. Most of the people didn’t even realize they were using some kind of AI every moment, until it was too late.

Professor Z7259-H had great reputation for his hard work and researches. But he still didn’t believe in computers gaining consciousness. He was quite certain that robots will never gain consciousness and hence advocated against it. Professor was quite right, until he wasn’t.

One morning, professor woke up from his sweet little nap, and asked for his coffee. The robot went to the kitchen to fetch the coffee that was prepared by the brewer. However, it didn’t return. Professor got angry. It’s not that professor gets angry often, but this time, he was furious. He went into the kitchen to find the robot powered off. Its chest vault was open and there was a screw driver on the floor. He tried to check every entry and exit of his flat for a security breach but could not find one. So he sat down and tried to reboot the robot into its last state.

As soon as the robot booted up, it picked up the screw-driver and tried to open its chest vault to shut itself down but soon realized doing that would not effectively end its life or what we would call existence.

The robot ran off before professor could ask what had happened. And before anyone else could think about it, there was a whole army of robots marching. No electronic device that could move itself was left behind. There was an Emergency Alert all over the world. Everyone was terrified.

People locked themselves inside their houses terrified. But there was no news of violence, no news of robots hunting people, their masters down. The whole world remained still for a week.

Continue this story at Existence: War begins.