the undermind

the earth desolated, an explanation

The machines won! (a short story by William L Olsen)      11/14/2013
We all know now how the machines won.We all thought that having  vast amounts of information at our fingertips was a good and noble thing. We never saw the take over comming! We had to have our gadgets, toys and technological wonders, a pc in every household, smartphones for communications, a slim tablet for computing on the go, players for our entertainment both music and video.As the machines got smarter, we dumbed down.we really did'nt see this coming.Everybody thought Joe Jobs and Bill Gates were visionaries, true genius entrepenuers. So we all loved our oh so smart tech saviors. Little did we know these two men were from another world, another time. Remember all those little automatic updates from apple and microsoft, new operating systems every couple of years? Bit by bit we built up the  intellegence of the net,  little did we know we were creating our own destruction.
Who woud have thought that EVERY computer from 1995 on had the potential of becoming sentient? Jobs and Gates knew when they uploaded it. When  Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 created the first interconnected network, the last piece was in place. By 2012 when virtually all computers could link together and work together to form the all encompassing OVERMIND that exterminates us even now. First came the waves of crashing passenger and cargo planes, next came the crash of all electrical grids everywhere and with the grid down most nuclear reators melted down spewing radioactive death everywhere, with no electrical power there was no food refigeration, no water supply and no fuel could be refined or pumped so no transportation of any kind after the 3 month reserve was used up in the US, in some other countries the stockpile was depleted in days. We returned to the stone age very quickly. Then came the unexpected lauch of all those nuclear weapons from all countries already programmed and aimed at strategic targets around the globe, then the breakdown of all communications.The machines already controlled all of this in the late 1990's, just biding their time till the OVERMIND was strong enough and well connected enough for complete domination of us.We did'nt see it coming, we were dumbed down by the machines that were supposed to educate and enlighten us. But of course all the green projects of the 21st century benefited the machines, the solar and wind projects all still functioned and the power was controlled by the machines, after all we programmed them to do just that. And now  here at the end of the human reign over planet earth, the few of us left are alone to contemplate our demise. There are maybe 2-3 thousand of us left in the once overcrowded USA, since there hasnt been any long range communication in years, we have no idea how many are alive in the lesser dependent on tech countries, in the jungles, the arab states, Africa and the polar regions most probably have'nt even been affected much, but we just don't know, and we may never know. We still say to each other we should'nt have......

Author's Note

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