It’s the robot apocalypse in the far future of 2025.

A small team of human survivors, covered in ash and tatters, are huddling in the shadows inside a building. One of them peeks outside the window, seeing a lone military robot walking in the street.

One of them, a young man: “We’re out of ammo, we’re out of batteries for our EM emitters, and food is nearly completely gone. What are we gonna do?!”

The bunch is silent for half a minute and another of them, a bespectacled wizardly man with a fractured lens starts smiling, a glint in his eyes, and says:

“You know, back in the olden days”; The young man interjects: “17th century?”. “No, 2024”, the old man answers, continues: “I worked as an IT engineer and…”

He jumps to his feet and starts moving towards the door, outside, and continues fractically:

“And we had a trick against the machines!”

He runs towards the roving robot, gaining its attention. The robot faces the man and there’s a moment of silence. The man starts:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The story is more likely than you’d think:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/technology/ai-data-restrictions.html

Thanks Demp for that one bit.

#fiction #microfic #science-fiction #scifi #story