She lay there, tied to the bed, bound in ways that defied logic, defied sense, defied any reasonable need to prevent someone’s movement let alone any particular kinky desire for restraint.
Ropes tied to ropes bound about more ropes lashed to further ropes which ensured the complete submission of the flesh to which they were all insidiously preventing any movement at all.
The excessive arrangement alone could have caused death in any number of ways. Coagulation of the blood in situ, embolisms, lack-of-oxygen based gangrene, just to name a few.
But that was not what killed her.
The stench was terrible, and the scene to which it an integral part of was worse if such a comparison could be made by a sane mind. The stench was blood. The stench was rot and decay. The stench was simply a cherry on the top of what a darker mind would call an icecream sundae of a murder.
This post may come off sounding like great plot to a SciFi film, and it probably is. The problem is that every link I’m putting in here is either an academic paper, or a research project that is actually currently underway, usually for military contract.
The robots mimic basic animals to begin with, and are too basic to be called AI. They do have limited survival drive and can share information. They could also reproduce given the availability of finished materials. To think that it would start out with some grandiose A.I., like in the Terminator films is misguided for numerous reasons, least of all being the complexity of creating a real A.I. system which requires more than mere binary states of current non-quantum computational architecture, and basic safeguards one would hope the folks DARPA are smart enough to install.
It begins with basic models escaping field tests and self reconstructing due to limited processing power of single units. As more units develop by scavenging parts from available sources (and places like electronics stores would basically become a spawning ground) they become faster at building their own basic models, as well as constructing new models, due to increased numbers available to help construct others and the processing power of working in hive like networks. Other designs are quickly developed through trial and error processes to make them better suited for specific tasks.
What starts out as basic survive and adapt units has now become a colony that has specialised roles.
Hunter Gatherers
Guardians
Builders
Processing Units
The threat would be initially ignored as science fiction, until Guardian units started attacking people to defend colonies, or hunter gatherer units identified human dwellings as optimal material gathering grounds, or worse, that some human tissues would be naturally useful.
Further specialisations would occur in Guardians to specifically attack humans who are active threats. Units from different colonies would pass on information and designs to other colonies, if they exist which is likely at this point as some units would have fallen out of the communication net, when they randomly pass each other buy.
True A.I. would be highly unlikely to come about in this instance as self adaptation routines are unlikely to create anything more advanced than methods for dealing with issues. The necessity for actual thought and reason would simply not exist, and the ability to further improve on designs to achieve this end are equally unlikely. “Smart” behaviours would that mimick thought, at least in a tactical sense, would be present and slowly become more advanced. Electronics stores & warehouses will become hives. Places that humans have to go to, such as petrol station, will become assault grounds should humans become widely identified as a threat. In this instance, retaliation would occur, but be largely pointless as colonies and hives that are attacked will quickly learn to hide processing units and some basic HGs and Builders as a means of continuing the colony and starting over.
Whilst they may be rudimentary compared to the robotic swarms we expect from post-apocalyptic science fiction films, they still hold two major advantages over us. 1) They don’t work as collective individuals; and 2) they will have a learning time of zero for replacement units, versus the at least ten years it would take for our own. From a purely mathematical stand point, there’s no way they could lose.
Trey was laughing to himself. A gleeful laugh that verged on manic. It was shrill like that of a child squealing as its fleshy thighs are pinched hard by an unremitting elderly relative with their saccharine smiles and even sicklier sweetened breath, but at the same time it was dry like the wind scouring over old, dead trees that had fallen at the edge of a dessert as the forests slowly retreated and gave way to the scouring sands and blazing heat.
It was a self satisfied laugh.
Trey was reading the news online.
A casual observer would have noted that the story being read was not a human interest story about some delightfully large and retarded cross eyed kitten competition, nor indeed anything to do with cats and their woefully abhorrent grasp of things such as grammar or correct spelling and punctuation.
The voice buzzed across an absolute blackness of the kind that physicists only theorise to exist. The kind of darkness that cannot truly exist in real space and so only exists in the minds of those filled with a gibbering terror at the nadir of the mental trough they find themselves in. The kind of darkness that becomes the totality of existence for a suicide.
“Nonsense,” came a reply sounding of slate dragged against gravel, mortification, and centuries of undisturbed decay “there are seven to be taken by seven in the seventh month. We have done it annually since His Lordship straddled Earth and brought disharmony among men.”
