I was battling a cold last week and ended up having a nearly writing-free week, so there was no Flash Fiction posted. But now I’m back. This week I switched my twitch schedule around so that my writing stream is on Tuesday instead of Thursdays. It works better with my university schedule this term. So, check me out there at 9 am Tuesdays!
Anyway, this week’s flash fiction post was based on a prompt from Seventh Sanctum, my go-to spot for prompts. Here it is:
First came the satellite falls, then came the rogue robots. If I’m being honest, I preferred the former to the latter. Chunks of metal falling from the sky could, at least, be predicted, their courses tracked and cover taken before they impacted. The robots were not remotely as predictable. Suddenly, they’d just be there. Disassembling your furniture. Burning your breakfast. Trying to diagnose you with some tropical disease you couldn’t possibly have. You’d wake up in the night and find one of them standing on your bedside, just looking at you, their measuring instruments whirring and beeping.
We’d built them all for such specific purposes that even when everything fell apart, when the infrastructure that kept our technologies working crumbled into dust and the robots were all freed from the tasks programmed into their data core, they kept doing the work they were created for anyway. Just not when and where they were programmed for it. And of course, since all communication functions had seized to work with the collapse, cancelling was no longer an option. You could tell them to leave until you were blue in the face, even have them physically removed from the premises, but once they had it in their minds to carry out a task, they carried it out. Easier to just let them. Easier, but not easy. Have you ever tried to do your homework while a clanky maintenance-bot tries to replace your floorboard? I didn’t fail that last history exam out of negligence, is all I’m saying. So yeah, I’ll take the chunks of falling metal any day.
My big sister says that I’m just too young to remember how bad the satellite falls really were, that we were just lucky to have been spared from any major damage. At school, too, we keep reading about the people that died before we learned how to predict where they would impact, about the structural damage and how people were afraid to leave their homes. I’m pretty sure they’re exaggerating to make us pay attention.
This is the eighth plague. The next one is darkness. I’m not worried though. We have flashlights.
Short and silly, but there you go! Have a good weekend, everyone!