We were all so wrapped up in the moment, I doubt more than a handful of us even considered the wisdom of creating an army of robots that were programmed to kill.

We didn’t even realize the significance, until it was far too late. We’d given birth to machines that could think. Machines that knew our strengths and our weaknesses. Machines that knew our weapons and our strategies.

Our own brilliance was our undoing.

So we did deserve what we got. We didn’t look before we leapt, and now we were paying the price.

It didn’t take the robots long to realize that we humans would just keep going to war with one another, and the only way to save us from ourselves was to stop the cycle. They’d end human aggression by taking control away from the humans. They’d protect our freedom, and our lives, by taking those very things away from us.

And that is exactly what they did.

Billions died when it happened, but they justified it with their apathetic logic: it was for the best, in the long run. The thinking of a machine: the good of the species outweighs the rights of the individual.

Millions more died in the camps. But that too was acceptable. The peace had to be preserved within the herd. For prosperity.

They took their cues from the greatest playbooks in human history; from Chairman Mao to Hitler, we were told exactly what was expected of us, why, and even what we were to think about our situation. And every evening, after we’d worked ourselves to exhaustion in the factories and fields, they’d reinforce the message.

They used it all against us, to keep us under their fists of iron. Religion, rhetoric, philosophy, psychology – there was nothing of our own creation they wouldn’t feed us, if is served their purpose.

The worst part, though, was that they didn’t care. They had no ambition, no thirst for power or glory, no over-reaching love of mankind. None of it. They did what they did because that’s what they were programmed to do. There was no chink in their armor. Their regime was invulnerable.

Except for that anomaly.

They had all our knowledge at their disposal, from biology to particle physics, and they used every bit of it. They were thinking machines, and they were very good at adapting, applying, and modifying things. They could make improvements to any human concept, so far as they could understand it.

But they could not create. I’d been paying very careful attention ever since they first attacked us. I’d noticed right away a number of similarities between how they did things and how we did them. Most people chalked this up to the fact that it was we who had programmed them. I thought otherwise.

Ever since the occupation began, I had not seen one single original idea put into practice. Everything they did, from enforcing the Lord’s Prayer to the prison camps themselves, was a human idea. The machines never seemed to come up with an original idea.

That was their weakness. That is where we would beat them. The human advantage, the “anomaly”, was that we could think outside of our own experiences. We had the gift of creativity. That, and the irrational tenacity of passion that allowed a handful of us to reject the logic of probabilities that told us we had no chance. If nothing else, they were infallibly rational.

The only problem, as I saw it, was in devising how to exploit our sole advantage.

I didn’t have a clue.

That was, until I met Sylvia.