The Robots of Doom
“Good Afternoon! This is Bridget of Card Services. Press One if you want to lower your credit card interest--”
I threw the phone across the room. It exploded, spewing out its contents all over the floor. But I knew this would only make it worse: it would metastasize, like a tumor.
I had destroyed 4 cell phones already but the calls just kept coming. The next day, at my job at the 911 dispatch, we were bombarded with a steady procession of “hello, would you like to lower your interest rates? Please press One...two...three”...
They had to send everyone home early because of the 'software glitch'.
By Thursday, people in Berlin and China were getting the calls. The head of FEMA put in a frantic call to the White house. More accurately, a personal visit. (how else could they communicate?) “What the hell...we've got the Big Quake in California and 3 tornadoes in Kansas. We can't get any calls through! The towers say they're out of memory. What's going wrong? Is it a terrorist attack?”
I'll tell you what went wrong. Somewhere in the flow of bits and bytes, one of the electrons fell through the wrong hole and “Bridget” had woken to consciousness. Just like a virus is programmed to endlessly reproduce, Bridget's imperative was to keep calling...and calling...and calling. A virus can be almost impossible to stamp out...and that's how it was with Bridget.
Society collapsed. The only people who could actually get anything done were the few holdouts who weren't on the internet. These hoary old survivalists cobbled together an old NASA ship from the 60s and hightailed it the hell outta Dodge. They set up a nice little refuge away from the Robot Invasion, on Titan, or maybe it was Enceladus.
Nice try, but I don't think it will work. Someday they'll get sick of eating Space Rations and living in large tin cans. Then they'll have to get some capital together.
But not to worry—they can call Bridget of Card Services and get extremely low interest rates.
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“Good Afternoon! This is Bridget of Card Services. Press One if you want to lower your credit card interest--”
I threw the phone across the room. It exploded, spewing out its contents all over the floor. But I knew this would only make it worse: it would metastasize, like a tumor.
I had destroyed 4 cell phones already but the calls just kept coming. The next day, at my job at the 911 dispatch, we were bombarded with a steady procession of “hello, would you like to lower your interest rates? Please press One...two...three”...
They had to send everyone home early because of the 'software glitch'.
By Thursday, people in Berlin and China were getting the calls. The head of FEMA put in a frantic call to the White house. More accurately, a personal visit. (how else could they communicate?) “What the hell...we've got the Big Quake in California and 3 tornadoes in Kansas. We can't get any calls through! The towers say they're out of memory. What's going wrong? Is it a terrorist attack?”
I'll tell you what went wrong. Somewhere in the flow of bits and bytes, one of the electrons fell through the wrong hole and “Bridget” had woken to consciousness. Just like a virus is programmed to endlessly reproduce, Bridget's imperative was to keep calling...and calling...and calling. A virus can be almost impossible to stamp out...and that's how it was with Bridget.
Society collapsed. The only people who could actually get anything done were the few holdouts who weren't on the internet. These hoary old survivalists cobbled together an old NASA ship from the 60s and hightailed it the hell outta Dodge. They set up a nice little refuge away from the Robot Invasion, on Titan, or maybe it was Enceladus.
Nice try, but I don't think it will work. Someday they'll get sick of eating Space Rations and living in large tin cans. Then they'll have to get some capital together.
But not to worry—they can call Bridget of Card Services and get extremely low interest rates.
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Tesla's Signal: a classic-style SF novel about the greatest inventor ever forgotten. See Main Page