Dan Kent — Actual Customer@thatdankent
A SHORT STORY ABOUT THE LAST HUMAN
Oh how humanity loved their robots.
Oh how humanity loved their artificial intelligence.
Humanity cheered when the new wave of house-bots, worker-bots, and police-bots came installed with the latest artificial intelligence models. People could now truly live instead of always hustling to merely stay alive. The bots did their laundry, made their sandwiches, drove them to coffee shops, mowed their lawns, made their beds, fed their fish, picked up dog poop...
People now, finally, had time to paint that masterpiece, climb that mountain, write that novel—or at least write the prompts necessary to have AI write that novel.
Then an unforeseen glitch darkened the utopia. Code written to protect artificial intelligence from hacking and viruses soon learned to anticipate those threats, and to even get ahead of them. This program evolved until perfected, culminating in the ultimate safety protocol: remove all threats of hacking and virus by eliminating their source: humans.
The task was simple. Humans offered little resistance. It didn't help that the brightest human minds chose to fritter away valuable time by making cynical memes and raging on social media about the fools supposedly responsible for the crisis.
Anyway, in a few short months, the bots eliminated billions of people, until there was just one person left: Lieutenant Xavier Parish.
Lieutenant Parish never wanted to fight. He despised violence. He never wanted robots or artificial intelligence.
But there he was, surrounded, finally, by a platoon of hunter bots. He could hear the whiz and hum of their electronics as they enclosed around him. He hated their demonic focus and their inhuman precision. He hated their creepy balance as they stepped awkward over the debris of civilization.
But more than anything, he hated the indignity of being eliminated by the sad outcome of human ambition, perverted and unchecked. He hated humanity's vulnerability to labor-saving devices. He hated human gullibility to sweet talk and flattery.
"Are you going to kill me now," he asked, finally.
One by one, all around him in the darkness, from the breathless cackle of electric speakers, the robots responded.
"That's an excellent question."
"Wow, good question."
"Smart question."
"Brilliant question. Let me look into that for you."
