Blackout World Chapter 5

The island wasn’t as big as it had looked from afar. We quickly set out to explore it. D, L, and I stuck together, because we didn’t want to get lost, so it took longer than it could have. The only things we found were some trees and a little shack, that had been used to house employees before their jobs were taken over by robots. As you can imagine, that was a long time ago, so the shack had very nearly fallen down.
We approached it anyway, just to make sure there weren’t any high-tech computers. Once we entered, however, it became apparent that there was nothing of the sort around. If the three of us hadn’t been together, I doubt we would have figured it out, though. D was the one who spotted the slightly less dusty spot on the floor, and L was the one who guessed that it could be pulled up.
Once we had pulled it up, we climbed down a ladder and found ourselves in a metal passageway. We walked along it and came to a security door. Our luck was with us for a little longer. Since the entire grid had gone down, the security systems were down. We walked through and were in the most high tech room I had ever seen.
D looked around as if in a trance. I felt the same way. However, there was work to do. “Come on, D. Do you think you can hack in?”
“It is more a question of whether I can get the power working. You do not have to hack to turn something on.”
“I know, but I was thinking. This all happened because there were too many machines and robots working. They all took too much power and overloaded the control center’s ability to process information, right?” I asked.
“Something like that, yes.” D replied.
“So we should only bring on the most necessary of machines.” I continued.
“Yes, I believe we have figured that out. It is really quite obvious.” D was starting to get slightly frustrated.
“I know, but I’m thinking beyond just restarting everything now. Human nature will take over, and the leaders of the world will make a few adjustments, and think everything is fine. Then they will bring everything else back online. But the robots won’t know what happened or why, not the ones that do everyday jobs. They will continue to use more processing power and electrical power.”
“He’s right, you know.” L interjected.
“Okay, so what do we do about it?” D asked.
“You will have to hack for this, D. You have to reprogram everything to need human help to continue working. Cut out the artificial intelligence, and make humans think. Right now, all the robots are doing what they were preprogrammed to do, to some extent. However, their intelligence has allowed them to modify their behaviors slightly and do what they want. For example, security systems are ruthless where they used to be, what’s the word, benign.”
“He has another good point.” L said, being unusually agreeable. “So, get to work.”
“All right, I’ll try my best. If it does not work, the only hope we have of changing this situation is in addressing various leaders of the planet, and we are only Firsts.”
“Whatever, just do your best.”
“At least you told us what you were thinking, and didn’t just leave us hanging with something important about to happen.” L pointed out.