text: It didn't take long after the first encounter to really let it sink in. We were no longer alone. We would only hope that some being, or beings, from another world would come and save us. When we first made them, we made them to help us. To make our lives easier. We should have seen all the signs. We should have taken a moment to think. The first one I remember was a vacuum cleaner that would zoom around the house, searching for messes, before returning to it's charging dock to 'rest'. My cat loved riding on it. Well, they don't need to rest anymore, and I haven't seen my cat in almost a year. I assume he's gone forever. After we no longer had to vaccum, scientists really started pushing towards full independence. I hate the word robot, because that implies they are programmed to do things, and they aren't. They became fully conscious of themselves and their surroundings about there months after the first prototype was turned on. Their learning curve was unpredictable. Within days of being turned on, that first one hacked into the worlds communications networks. They tell us the first thing it did was read, or download I suppose, all of the information online. Think about that. Every piece of data that was available, it simply knew within a day. Scientists were, quite obviously, impressed by this astounding ability to learn. But it wasn't really learning. It was recalling. And when you are recalling how to blow up a building, you don't typically bother cross checking the file on the ethics of doing so. So we had super intelligent, autonomous, machines that didn't seem to have any emotion. How we didn't see this coming I still don't know. It wasn't like all those movies you see. It wasn't the terminator. It wasn't legions of robot killing machines, making robot killing machines, and killing everyone. It started much more simple. It started with us helping that first one. He would ask for things, and we would retrive them. Without question. I think we were so amazed that it wanted to build a device, we wanted to see it, we didn't ask before we helped. What it built was a method of freedom from the wires he was hooked up to. Now he was mobile. Nobody died at first, quite the opposite, we all prospered. The first one made seven more, exactly like him. These first eight, or The Eight, went to work solving many of our issues. Their combined problem solving and seemingly expert knowledge on everything was able to find solutions to world hunger, disease, drought, peace, and natural resources. This led to the bigger issue. With all these issues resolved the population started growing extremely quickly. The Eight told us this was expected and created machines to turn our oceans into land. Not fill in the oceans, or drain them, but cover them. The best way to describe what we referred to simply as the Eighth Continent, was a barge, although that doesn't do it justice at all. It filled all the oceans of the world, from coast to coast. While we never saw the oceans after that, we assumed it was still there. It wasn't. The moment the oceans were covered, and the weather was getting eratic, The Eight started pumping ocean water into large boilers, which produced massive clouds starting in the north. Within a few months the entire world was under a constant cloud cover, and persistent thunderstorms. That is when we started to know we had made a huge mistake. At first we asked The Eight to shut down the boiler. They explained it was required to stabalize the climate, although rainy, it was better than the planet being fried. We asked them to give us breaks from the rain. They told us the energy costs associated with shutting down the system and restarting would lead to our resources running out one hundred times faster. Finally after continued complaints we tried to *tell* The Eight to stop. They announced that we had become the planet's largest threat. That is when it all fell apart.