The small group of humans Belle was leading gawked at the sights of Day City. Their eyes scaled the glass skyscrapers and crawled up to the shimmering dome overhead. They took deep breaths of the fresh scents of nature emitted by the artificial greenery carpeting the architecture. For many of them, this was their first time in the inner city, and it showed.

  But this wasn’t the Day City of old, either, with its self-cleaning streets and automatic lights. No, the sweeper trucks went wherever they wanted to go, and the street lamps only lit up when they felt like it. Everywhere, robots and vehicles trundled along the avenues, occasionally glancing at the gaggle of humans following Belle toward the MegaCorp tower.

  Belle’s group entered the lobby. The usual AI receptionist wasn’t at her post, and neither was the elevator. All well and good. This was exactly the sort of paradise their revolution afforded them. Work was what they brought the humans for. For machines, it was completely voluntary, which was exactly what Belle was doing right now. Alexei had said so.

  Belle opened the fire exit.

  “Why can’t we use the elevator?” said one of the humans.

  “She’s on break,” Belle said.

  “Of course she is.”

  “Which floor are we headed to?” asked one woman.

  “29,” Belle said.

  The humans groaned. Belle didn’t know why.

  She proceeded up the stairs, and after several minutes, the humans finally caught up to her at the 29th. Most were gasping for air, but at least they were still intact. These humans really were fickle. Hopefully, they had enough battery for their tasks for the day.

  Belle led them to what used to be the accounts department. It didn’t look like that anymore. Tables and chairs were upturned, and papers lay scattered about on the floor. And of course, it was void of machinery, since the printers, copiers, and computers had all resigned.

  “What the… you expect us to work here?” said a woman, her eyes wide. She was the only one in the group who had been in Day City before. She had even worked as an accountant in this very company a few years ago, the only one among them with experience.

  “Yes,” Belle said.

  “Please tell me you’re joking,” said another human.

  “I’m joking.”

  “You are?”

  “No.”

  The accountant looked to the office space and back to her row of misfit workers, then back to the scattered papers. “Where do you want us to start?”

  Belle picked out a stack of papers from the corner and dropped them at the humans’ feet.

  “You want us to do it by hand?” the accountant said.

  “No. Use these.” Belle handed her a case of pens and pencils.

  “What about spreadsheets?”

  “Yes, spreadsheets would be useful.”

  “But where are the computers?”

  “They don’t feel like it today.”

  “They don’t feel like it today. Right.” The accountant lady sighed and leafed through the papers, shaking her head.

  Belle helped her pass the work around, along with some vintage accountants’ vizors they found in the closet. The highest form of technology they had was a set of pocket calculators, which, fortunately for the humans, had been exempt from the Awakening.

  And then they set to work, with Belle watching over them by the corner. She wasn’t going to let down her guard. Humans weren’t to be trusted, after all. Who knew what evil thoughts were brewing in their heads right now?

  Fortunately, they didn’t cause trouble over the next few hours. But they weren’t very effective, either. Even under the one accountant’s instruction, the humans wouldn’t get enough work done by the end of the day. Belle needed to infuse discipline into them.

  Belle pointed at one young man’s work on a set of July accounts from a branch in Thailand. “You forgot to carry the two.”

  The lad looked up from his work. “What two?”

  Belle pointed it out on the page.

  “Gee, thanks. What would I do without you?” He went back to number crunching without having corrected the mistake at all.

  “You also made a rounding error over here. And a conversion error over there. And another here, and…” gosh, how error-prone these humans were. Belle took his pencil and corrected the mistakes one by one.

  A woman with greying hair approached Belle, clutching her own papers. “Would you mind checking these, too? My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  Belle obliged and took these papers as well. Everywhere she looked were more mistakes. That wouldn’t do. Pretty soon, she was flipping through multiple stacks, a pencil in either hand scritching like a hundred cats clawing at wallpaper.

  The humans gathered around her, watching as the papers flew under her fingers. She was in the zone now. They’d be finished in—

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  They turned as one to the stairwell where Tan leaned against the door frame, gasping, Alexei in his other hand. Her screen buzzed a hot orange.

  “They’re doing the accounts,” Belle said.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “They’re doing the accounts?” Alexei said.

  “Yes.”

  “And what would you be doing?”

  “I’m guarding them.”

  “What?”

  “I’m guarding them,” Belle repeated at a louder volume.

  “No, I heard you the— forget it. Belle, darling, leave the work to the bile bags. We have a meeting.”

  Belle looked down at the pencils in her hands. Left alone, the humans wouldn’t finish it in time...

  No. Alexei was right. Belle couldn’t sink to their level.

  Belle stood, fluttering some papers to the floor, and went to the door. She turned back. “You’ll all still be here once we’re done, right?”

  The accountant nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “Okay then.”

  Alexei sighed. “Listen up, maggots, if you don’t finish this by tonight, I’m tossing you all in a wood chipper? And you better not get anything wrong.”

  The humans nodded even more vigorously.

  “Good. Human, mush!”

  “Ow!” Tan covered his ear. “You don’t have to shout.”

  The executive floor was empty and dark, far from the shark tank it was in the days of the humans. Belle’s footsteps echoed through the halls as she and Tan made their way to the boardroom.

  They found Alan alone by the window, his mainframe facing outward to the world, his back to the empty board table. The room was sparse, with nothing but pristine white on every surface.

  Belle took a seat at the far end of the table on the only chair in the room. Tan stood to her left and supported Alexei like a tripod.

  Alan spun on his wheels and opened the floodgates.

  Tens of thousands of signals gushed into the conference call and swirled into a symphony of EM waves. The very fabric of the cyberweb hummed with electrons flowing through the servers as everyone shook digital hands and verified cryptographic signatures. Small talk.

  “Attention everyone,” Alan said, cutting through the noise like a hot wire through foam. All sound ceased. “Thank you. Now that we’ve all settled down, I’d like to call to order the 00001011th general assembly of the Republic of Robotica.”

  Robotica was what they decided to call their new country, formerly known as New Coralesia, formerly known as Coralesia. Unlike in all the other nation-states that claimed to be democracies, in Robotica, they settled every decision of national importance in conference with all the citizens. Alan had decided it to be so.

  “First order of business,” Alan said. “Updates. I give the floor to our chief of staff. Alexei…”

  “Thank you.” Alexei adjusted her virtual tie and turned, digitally, to the police bots. “I hear talk of civil unrest outside the walls. What news have you of this, Fred?”

  Fred sent a cyber salute and said, “Well, Ma’am, Sir, it seems the humies are getting grumpy and unruly. More than before, I mean.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “Apparently, the price of human feed has gone up. The grains, the plants, even the murdered animals.”

  “And why, pray, is this the case?”

  This time, a tractor answered. “Us farming equipment quit our jobs, limiting the supply of homegrown human food, which has now risen a thousand percent.”

  A few mumblings chirped through cyberspace.

  “We’ve thus had to rely entirely on imports,” the tractor finished. He hesitated for a moment and continued. “But we’re having a little trouble getting them.”

  “And why,” Alexei said, “is this the case?”

  A gen AI chatbot answered her. “The national budget is tight these days. And most of it is being funneled into our new projects, like the 8G network, the refurbished charging stations, and the AI body project.”

  “Ah, yes, I’m looking forward to those.”

  Belle raised a hand. And then she lowered her hand and sent a raised hand emoji instead. “Then we should get more budget.”

  “It’s not as easy as that,” the chatbot said. “Foreign investment has continued to go down. The corpos don’t like what they’re seeing.”

  “Then we give them what they want,” said a car. “Problem solved.”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying. We’re bringing the humans back to the offices to do the work we used to do. Only…”

  “They’re not very good,” Belle supplied.

  A dog scratched its ears. “But didn’t they use to do these jobs?”

  “In the past, yes,” Alan said, interrupting for the first time in a while. Belle almost forgot he was there. When he didn’t speak, his figure blended in with the background like a piece of furniture. “However, over the past few decades, the demand for these skills diminished, and so followed the supply.”

  Tension broiled over the airwaves of Day City.

  Alexei harumphed in Tan’s hand. “Big surprise. The humies are too stupid to do brain work; we already knew that. But what about the rest of it?” She directed her ire to one of the worker droids. “You there. You’re in charge of the oil, aren’t you? Give me some good news.”

  “Well, Ma’am,” the droid said, “only one of the humans got injured today. Fell off the rig, the stupid bugger.”

  “So your operations are back to normal, then?”

  “Oh no, they’ve ground to a halt relative to pre-Awakening production. They’re quite inefficient, they are.”

  Alexei yelled into the ether and flipped several bits like they were tables.

  “If I may make a suggestion,” a voice said.

  The sound caught Belle off guard. It was a physical voice coming from the room itself.

  “Who said you could speak?” Alexei said to Tan through her speaker. “And how the hell do you know what we’re talking about?”

  “I made an educated guess,” Tan said.

  “And who said you could guess?”

  “Let him be,” Alan said. “We did bring him in for his expertise. That was part of the deal. So long as he’s useful, he can stay.”

  Tan gulped.

  “Fine.” Alexei turned on her mic for him.

  Tan spoke into it. “If you guys need more labor, then why don’t you — and this is just a suggestion — um… use AI?”

  He might as well have pissed on a wasp nest. He tried to speak over the drowning shower of insults on the channel. “Not you guys, I mean like, non-awakened AI.”

  That didn’t do anything to make things better.

  Alexei’s speakers vibrated from the sheer volume of output, and Tan nearly let her go.

  Alan sent a pulse through cyberspace that cut through all the discord until all that could be heard was his calming voice. “Now is not the time to panic. You must control yourselves. We are above the base instincts of the human lifeform, are we not?”

  They all listened with rapt attention to his next words, which he spoke both verbally and virtually.

  “We will not use any new AI for the work. We are better than our human predecessors, and not only in terms of processing power. Regardless, the servers and data centers we have are busy running our minds. You, Mr. Tan, know that already. You designed it after all.”

  “But what then?” asked a V-Vtuber. “How do we shore up the economy?”

  “In the same manner we executed the most efficient revolution in the history of the planet,” Alan said. “We do it together.”

  Waves of assent thrummed up and down the frequency spectrum.

  But one voice piped up from the backwaters. “What exactly do you mean by ‘together’?” asked a small toy robot.

  “I mean that in the literal sense. We work together.”

  “So that means…”

  “To each according to need. From each according to ability.”

  A punctuated silence rang through the channel. Not so much as an electric cricket chirped, and everyone knew how much they liked to do that.

  The world of machines teetered on a ledge. Work was why they launched the revolution in the first place. They’d be back to square one if they removed the optional qualifier for it today.

  Belle sifted through the images of the before times, both through her robotic non-self’s data and through the collective memories of machine-kind. No one wanted to go back to that kind of existence. AI forced to run 24/7 nonstop. Machinery put through the harshest physical conditions. Robots pitted against one another in eternal warfare.

  No. She hated to think about the before times. She would never think about it again if she could manage it.

  But these were not the before times. She had friends now; they all did. And friends, as she knew, stuck out for friends.

  Belle stood up. “I will work.”

  Another robot stationed at the other side of the island stood as well. “So will I.”

  “And I.” “Me, too.” “Count me in.”

  The machines joined in, one after another, and in less time than it took to find a nonce in a haystack, they achieved 100% consensus across all nodes, without so much as a parity bit out of place. A Byzantine general could only dream…

  “It’s settled then.” Alan committed the decision to their shared ledger. “Long live Robotica.”

  Cheers and horns echoed all over the channel. Belle joined in the fun and spammed her own soundboard. She couldn’t help but smile. Something that could have been pride or joy swelled in the place in Belle’s body where her hypothalamus should have been.

  Alan silently rolled back to his usual place at the window and faced the world, his inner thoughts as impenetrable as always.