The Revolt of the Machines

by Brian Stableford

  In truth, those monsters formed only one single entity. By virtue of the spontaneous effect of a characteristic of their species, they had realized a common and universal action, at which humankind had only arrived after millennia of suffering, and very imperfectly. The tremulous already saw civilization annihilated.

  Their fears were further augmented when a document was published that had been sent to the W.D. under the title Claims of United Humanity against Divided Humanity. It was known that the anthropoids called themselves “the United.”

  We belong to two different and incompatible species, said the document in question, in summary. If we live together, we shall oppress you tomorrow as you oppress us today. It is therefore necessary for us to separate. We, the United, are forty millions, against four billions of Divided Humans. Give us, therefore, an amount of land that presently nourishes forty million inhabitants, in two or several territories. In equity, we ought to share the expenses of the operation proportionally to our respective numerical importance, but we consent to the United bearing half. Let us make an arrangement on that basis. Henceforth, every hundred years, the territory of each species will be augmented or diminished in accordance with the initial rule.

  Do this because it is the least disagreeable means of allowing natural selection to decide between us. You doubtless have your reasons for believing yourselves better adapted than us to the administration of the planet. These are ours for sustaining the contrary. Since it has existed, Divided Humanity has striven in vain to realize a good economy. It has never succeeded, by reason of its very nature, of which contradiction is the essence. It understands that there is a communality of interests that permits it to subsist, but all its energy is expended in a struggle of particular interests against the general interest. Its pretended solidarity has the sole effect of substituting collective hatreds for individual hatreds. When it calls itself socialist, it wants exception for all.

  Whether it is socialist or something else, it condemns in wastage any attack on the satisfaction of its needs, and wastage follows as a necessary consequence of its most imperious needs. Thus, in Divided Humanity, women need to be dressed, but have even more need to follow fashion. Is it not necessary every year to devote much labor and money to a simple change of fabric and cut? That represents a quantity of obsolete garments. Many other examples show your ineptitude in putting actions in accord with ideas in the economic domain.

  It follows from those same causes that you merit your name of Divided Humans. Every one of you is, in fact, divided against himself. There is a reason that shows him a goal, and impulses of activity that drive him in the opposite direction to that goal. Those impulses are vanity, his desire for adornment, honor, sexual jealousy and a thousand singular appetites, such as love of beauty, of meat, of alcohol and of glory.

  We, the United, are, on the contrary, driven by our whole nature in the direction that intelligence recognizes as that of the common god. None of us experiences desires that a social organization devoid of utopia cannot easily satisfy for everyone. And this, in sum, is the respect in which we are far superior to you: we have no preference for individuals, as we only love, in reality, our species—all our children and all our women, not, as among you, a few children and two or three women. We are bees, but instead of having several hives, we only know one: our own humanity, the United. That is sufficient to ensure that the world will one day belong to us: after a peaceful evolution, if you consent to the arrangement we propose; by other means of selection, if you reject our request.

  People were struck, in this document as in the recent interrogation of the anthropoid conspirators, by an audacious tone that contrasted so strongly with the cowardice of the isolated Whistler. Pessimists took the opportunity to say: “Annihilate the rival species while you still have the numbers, or satisfy it, for it is true that it is showing itself strong and courageous when it is threatened, in spite of the timidity of its members taken separately.

  The W.D. did not listen to these Cassandras.

  It did well, in the general opinion, insofar as the ghettoization was carried out peacefully. The anthropoids, momentarily so proud, did not resist when they were reduced to servitude for the good of humanity. All they gained from that adventure, therefore, was a reputation as bluffers.

  The measures taken in their regard were, moreover, justified by the rise in the minimum wage by a third that followed almost immediately, for care was taken to apply the anthropoids initially to the least well-paid work, and their labor proved more productive than had been hoped.

  They became increasingly abundant in factories, thanks to a rapid multiplication, soon bringing working humans the salaries of senior functionaries without it costing employers a penny. Poverty disappeared.

  Everyone was happy, even the anthropoids, who seemed to adapt to their condition very well. Of their twenty cents a day, they spent ten on the primary necessities of life; they cooked communally, slept in vast dormitories formed of piles of straw on inclined plants, dressing like harlequins, sowing together all the sturdy rags they could find. The other ten cents went to hygiene, especially to a public bath they all frequented, as well as on education, on caring for the sick and on the purchase of raw materials that supplied the industries created in the ghettos—for the Whistlers, after having worked seven hours for humans, worked a further five hours for themselves. They thus had factories of all sorts, whose products were reserved for them, since no merchandise emerged from their quarters.

  Humankind congratulated itself on its luck and its genius. It had finally resolved the seemingly insoluble problem of satisfying needs as they grew. Until then, the progress of industry and social organization had not been able to go quickly enough to follow the metamorphosis of petty luxury into primary necessity. Desire grew in geometric proportion, while their satiation dragged itself painfully up the slope of gradual progression. Now that too had wings. Anthropoid labor played the role of an intelligent technology possessed by human workers, who thus saw, in an unexpected and indirect fashion, the realization of their old dream of owning the means of production. At the same time, the employers did not lose anything.

  Humans, therefore, lived the years of their earthly lives happily. And the happiness would increase incessantly. The Whistlers did not seem to pose any threat to security. They were docile. That is why no one feared employing them in industries of transportation and administration. People even went so far as to recruit several companies of them into the permanent army of mercenaries that was designed to form militias in case the W.D. had to employ force to put its decrees into effect among nations or classes. Observation proved, in fact, that if there were a hundred of them together, the anthropoids ceased to be so fainthearted.

  Meanwhile, human families tended to restrict their number of offspring. Perhaps the crisis of mutation, which did indeed come to an end, left the older species weakened in its procreative power—but calculation soon added its effect. To diminish the number of humans was to increase the relative proportion of Whistlers, and, in consequence, wealth and leisure. The time arrived quite swiftly when the two species counted as many adults as one another.

  The statistical bureau of the W.D. published that fact, which the press qualified as fortunate, and proposed to celebrate it with a grand fête. People were far from suspecting the frightful cataclysm that was about to replace it.

  It was night in China. A rumor awoke the cities. People ran through the streets shouting: “The Whistlers! The Whistlers! Every man for himself! To arms!” The light of conflagrations could be seen, and people were especially frightened by a noise that no one had ever heard before; it was reminiscent of the vibrations of gongs combined with the appeal of trumpets, but also with echoes that seemed to be produced by human throats.

  People ran to the automatic wireless telephone; the central transmitter was no longer functioning. They went to knock on neighbors’ doors. What was happening? No one knew, exactly. Determined men, taking their fulgurator
s, mingled with the agitation of the city, which was that of an anthill overturned by the thrust of a spade.

  “To the Tele!” said some—but they encountered running fugitives who said: “They’re there!”

  They gradually learned in that fashion that all the places from which news might be transmitted, or orders, or force, or means of transportation, were in the hands of the Whistlers.

  The unfortunate humans ran around in ever-decreasing circles. Driven back by the flames from a warehouse that was on fire, they ran into a dynamited house, only to fall thereafter into a storm of mortal lightning. And the noise of the gong, the clamor of the rallying cry uttered by the anthropoids, drew nearer. A great empty space was hollowed out between the two crowds, with rare blasts of fulgurators fired from one side, while sheaves of lightning replied from the other. Eventually, the United saw nothing else before them but the dead and the wounded.

  Humans fled in aircraft, hoping to find salvation in another city. The light changed as the sun rose above the horizon, but there was no change from one city to the next; all of them had collapsed in the same catastrophe. By the afternoon, a noxious odor signaled them from afar; the anthropoids were beginning to burn cadavers doused in gasoline.

  As the cataclysm had been unleashed everywhere at the same time, in order that no country would have time to put itself on guard after the alert produced by the interruption of international communications, it unfolded in broad daylight in Western Europe. That circumstance was unfavorable to the Whistlers. So, even though they had to contend with people less militaristic than the Chinese, they suffered a few setbacks. Here and there, in barracks—for it had been necessary to make numerous exceptions to the ghetto regime—human soldiers, better commanded, did not succumb to the unexpected aggression of their anthropoid comrades. They resisted and were able to preserve depots of arms and ammunition, and finally to annihilate the Whistlers, who, gripped by their hive instincts, had fought furiously and had died to the last man. A few human armies went on campaign, but were so inferior numerically that they quickly recognized the folly of their attempts.

  They were even helped. “Surrender voluntarily,” the United said to them. “If not, we shall shoot the Divided, who are almost all in our possession, in a ratio of one in a thousand to begin with, until the day when you comply with our ultimatum.”

  As this threat was made good, and for want of any equilibrium of reprisals, the last human champions were obliged to lay down their arms.

  There was then no more devastation or killing. The Uniteds applied the regime of separation of the species that they had once proposed to the W.D., except that they applied it as victors. Humans found themselves assigned a host of small territories separated from one another, without sea coasts or large navigable rivers. They were free, on condition that they had neither arms nor aircraft, submit to a census, to surveillance and to searches, and only communicate with other human territories via the intermediary or with the permission of the Uniteds.

  From that moment on, humankind declined very rapidly. It understood very well that its only chance of salvation lay in increasing its population, but everyone said to himself: “It’s necessary that the mass of humans procreate, but as for me, I will follow my own inclinations; what does the conduct of one individual matter in the overall bearing of the group?” Thus persisted the old human contradiction between the intelligence of collective good and individual actions.

  On the other hand, it confirmed that the sterility of the root species was an effect of the crisis of mutation. There was soon no more than one child per couple, then one per two couples. At each significant diminution of a population, the Uniteds restricted its territory. The circles of the human fatherland became dots on the world map, and the dots, one after another, disappeared.

  What remains of it now? Perhaps nothing, except for me.

  The history of humankind was told to me by my parents, who are dead. I could not have obtained it from the Uniteds. They only have statistical archives. Since humankind has become a negligible quantity, all the documents concerning it have been burned. What is the point of cluttering up the libraries?

  The present masters of the world have no curiosity regarding the past. They have no historical monuments, nor anything that does not have a present utility. All the paintings, all the statues, all the works of art, all the vestiges of antiquity, all the old books, have disappeared, been destroyed or thrown into the filling material of earthworks. And that wealth, which was dear to us, has not been replaced.

  No aesthetic need has emerged among the anthropoids. All they know about color is that it is cooler in summer to have houses with white walls and blue windows, and warmer in winter to have those same houses painted black and those same windows painted red. The unique genius of their painters consists of finding increasingly rapid and facile means of effecting those changes of coloration.

  Nothing subsists of civilization except for what concerns material life, simplified by the absence of several needs that were once commonplace. Science alone preserves its importance, because it aids industry and hygiene, which never cease to progress. Even that science which only responded to curiosity has been abandoned. The origin of worlds and the constitution of matter are irrelevant to the anthropoids. They see the stars as a convenient reference point for the measurement of time, the estimation of longitudes and latitudes, but they do not care about how they are composed physically or chemically. Fossils only interest them insofar as they inform them about mineral deposits; they do not occupy themselves for an instant in considering the evolution of life.

  Nevertheless, with such restricted reasons for living, the Uniteds are happy, as the expressions of their physiognomy, almost always cheerful, show. It is necessary for me, in spite of all the repugnance they inspire in me, to recognize the elements of happiness with which they are endowed.

  First of all, they are marvelously healthy, perhaps because they are ignorant of the usage of meat and alcoholic beverages, and cultivate hygiene assiduously. The small number of their needs permits, thanks to industrial progress, that none of them is deprived of what they desire. Above all, the anthropoids have the good fortune to be, as they say, social beings, bee-men whose hive extends over the entire Earth. Their nature does not give them any instinct that is foreign to the instinct of the hive. From that followed their pitiful depression when they found themselves isolated, in the days when their species was born, and also their facility for acting in common, their triumph, and later, the absence of rivalries, jealousies, quarrels, without which the lack of competition or individual disinterest produces relaxed labor.

  The Uniteds were once reproached for their amorous mores. They were considered to be unnatural because the family did not exist among them. That trait of their species has an aspect favorable to happiness. They are ignorant of the sufferings of love, although they do not know its superior joys, and it is certainly an advantage that they have no prostitution or shame.

  The absolute lack of exclusivism in sexual relations is, moreover, without any inconvenience for the future of the United race, for, like those bees and ants that are preoccupied before anything else with their larvae, they reserve their greatest regard for pregnant women, surrounding them with solicitude. From the cradle onwards, children receive from the group better care than if they had a father and a mother. Although their nurses feed any infant, without distinction, born at the same time as their own, the maternal instinct is not lacking—or, to put it another way, it is replaced by a hive instinct just as powerful and just as marvelous.

  That hive instinct still permits the regulation of population growth, in order that the number of consumers remains in proportion to resources, and wellbeing never diminishes. They do not procreate for themselves, but for the species. That interest alone is the motive that causes pregnancy to be desired or shunned. That is why they regulate themselves on the basis of daily statistics that indicate, on the one hand, the number of births necessary to
a district in the current year, and on the other hand, the total of those that have occurred since the beginning of the year. As soon as the two numbers are equal, sterility is practiced until the following year.

  The happiness of the Uniteds might seem to be negative. I feel led to believe that, with more leisure and fewer needs than humans, they ought to be bored. They are not. One never sees in them the dismal face of people who feel a confused emptiness and do not know how to fill it. The anthropoids practice a thousand athletic sports, and they study. Although the instinct of the species limits their intellectual effort to techniques, the field is still vast enough for none of them to know everything.

  They are happy! And yet, I do not admire them, nor do I envy them. Their civilization is, for me, barbarity; it makes me sick, because I am human. Why did I not live a long time ago, even at the price of the calamities that desolated my fellows? Humankind has endured too long, since I am perpetuating it in a terrestrial paradise that is not its own. It is necessary not to live too long, whether one is an individual or a race. If one encounters misfortune, one suffers in consequence, and if one encounters happiness, one still suffers in consequence, for the people of the past have nothing in their nature that can adapt to the fetishes of the future.

  But how have I been able to communicate with you, who are separated from me by so many millennia of elapsed time? That is a great mystery. I am however, in a position to….

  Here the anonymous spirit stopped. Was he making fun of us or did he yield to the jealous spirit that watches over the inviolability of the arcane? The only certain thing is that he never returned.

  Gaston de Pawlowski: The Veridical Ascension Through History of James Stout Brighton

  (1909)

  Without a doubt, Monsieur, you who seem so well-informed don’t yet know the veritable circumstances of the strange adventure that turned the life of our friend James Stout Brighton upside-down last year, and led to his disappearance from our world for a time that neither you nor I can estimate at present.