New Blood Needed by Roy Dorman
from Dystopia: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
AL-41 left the arsenal with a spring in its step that hadn’t been there yesterday. The Programmers had changed its charge from “KILL AS NEEDED” to the more challenging, “LIVE CAPTURE.”
The Programmers, the mechanical minds in charge of how the entire world now functioned, had determined there was once again a need for human input into The System.
This was not as easy as it may sound. Humans now lived in the wild, a day-to-day feral exitance as they had 10,000 years ago.
AL-41 would bring in a number of young humans for re-education. One or more of them might prove to be adequate to the task. That process would take a number of years before they could assist The Programmers in making the necessary technological updates.
It had been almost fifty years since the last time The Programmers had needed raw human intelligence to upgrade The System.
AL-41 was not prepared for the underground resistance that had been developing since the last “LIVE CAPTURE.” It was overcome by dozens of zealous humans angry at the theft of their world.
AL-41 was completely destroyed in the first shot fired to take back Planet Earth from the machines.
This story appears as part of Dystopia, a PUNK NOIR Magazine series.
Bio
Roy Dorman is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Benefits Office and has been a voracious reader for over 70 years. At the prompting of an old high school friend, himself a retired English teacher, Roy is now a voracious writer. He has had flash fiction and poetry published in Black Petals, Bewildering Stories, One Sentence Poems, Yellow Mama, Drunk Monkeys, Literally Stories, Dark Dossier, The Rye Whiskey Review, Near To The Knuckle, Theme of Absence, Shotgun Honey, Punk Noir, The Yard, and a number of other online and print journals. Unweaving a Tangled Web, published by Hekate Publishing, is his first novel.
PUNK NOIR, the online literary and arts magazine that looks at the world at its most askew, casting a bloodshot eye over the written word, film, music, television and more.
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