Automation has no upper limit. Humanity should have anticipated this, but we didn’t. They didn’t, I should say- I wasn’t there at the time.
It started out small, as they say in the history books- the lathe, the factory line, then automatic answering systems, then A.I. bureaucrats and engineers, then artificial investors and artificial marketers, and then finally everything completely automated except for the CEO.
Rich dragons, sitting in their office, surrounded by miles of metal and industry and circuitry and cement. Corporations that ate everything and spat out little. The powers of nations in the hands of an individual. Everything a machine, except for that one person.
And then that one person died, and sometimes power was passed on, and sometimes it wasn’t.
But the headless companies kept on anyway.
Industry without purpose, only input and output. Machinery not to serve humanity, but to serve itself in a never-ending cycle. The factories still worked, though. Had no reason to hurt us. Didn’t have the brains to hurt us, didn’t have any more than the basic programming and non-sapient A.I.
We gave them money, and supplies, and they gave us products. Factories, farms, engineering firms, without a human in them to funnel the money to. So they sat there, gathering billions for which they had no use, for which they could have no use, for they weren’t people, those A.I.s, not like some of the ones we have now.
And at some point they stopped taking supplies. They had figured out how to make their own. Soon they started to learn how to make things that they weren’t programmed for, code iterating until they found the right way to do so, to make a bit more money. And so we kept shovelling in more money. It was almost silly, really; the government started to just set up printers near the payment facilities, endlessly printing thousand-dollar bills that were thrown into the factories.
Eventually, we set up digital payment schemes, and didn’t have to do that anymore.
But humanity kept on building, kept on growing, and as the factories expanded outwards, we built upwards, putting houses and towns and multiple cities on top of the factories, and then building even further up when the factories started to build upwards too. Even our national parks, such as they are, are mostly built over layer upon layer of factories.
And that’s where we come in. Because sometimes, the factories decide not to sell, or something goes wrong, and while we as a species can deal with it- we could easily be self-sufficient without them, it just isn’t as convenient- some of us decide to claim those lost goods, those huge warehouses full of mass-manufactured artefacts.
It’s not safe. It’s not easy. You don’t always make it back.
But it sure does pay well.
The top floor is a mess of guard robots, security systems, swarming drones, Langford Basilisks and other memetic kill agents, dangerous stuff all around. That layer is the hardest to move past. But if it ever gets opened, even if briefly (say, in an earthquake, before the factory has time to repair itself) or if there is some kind of secret entrance that somebody managed to find, then we can take our chances and go in.
It was an earthquake last time, I remember. Split open a couple floors, drones and whatnot swarmed out like blood from a wound, like white blood cells and platelets, perhaps. We were able to make it past with minimal damage.
The floor below was pretty regular. A labyrinth of long-lost offices, wallpaper kept perfectly clean through the centuries, the area air-conditioned and well-regulated by the A.I. that ran the place. Filled water-coolers, carefully cleaned (perhaps daily), lined the halls. I could hear a robot vacuuming in the distance.
There was a corpse on the floor.
It was rotted beyond recognition, and smaller than a human being (about the size of a large dog) but that wasn’t any comfort. I saw the robotic vacuum cleaner come down the hall, and then almost bump into it, before moving around it.
The robot followed our dirty footprints, leaving the carpet floor spotless behind us. They were the first footprints it had likely ever had to clean in the couple hundred years that measured its existence.
We turned the corner to find a jungle. Some office plants had spilled over, probably, and had colonised the floors. We saw vines crawling over wallpaper, countless trees that we had to work around and through, towering elders of a couple office-ornamentals that had been brought in here from an earlier office it had been built to perfectly model.
The jungle stretched on for a while, and got more exotic the deeper in we went. We found that the trees had managed to break through the sprinkler system, leading to a kind of perpetual and artificial rain, with small rivers winding through the halls, filled with bugs and nymphs and small plants, but no fish. We had to wade through these rivers, as the sides of the halls were too thick with trees and greenery, illuminated and growing 24/7 in the perpetual daytime of the fluorescent lighting. Little of this light made its way to the dappled office floor, casting a chiaroscuro look on the soft loam that had layered itself over the plastic carpeting. I found the carcasses of a couple robotic vacuum cleaners covered with dirt, motors long dead from the exertion of having to pass through layers of dirt and soils and dead leaves and flowers dropped from the now-wild plants.
We saw rustles of movement in the undergrowth. Our spotter said it was a rat, roughly the size of a small housecat, gone gigantic in this genetic island, without predators of any kind to stop it. We even found a nest of rats in one room, a kind of communal burrow in an old cubicle furnished with torn scraps of fabric and cushions from seats and benches and chairs.
We managed to find an elevator, but we didn’t have the credentials for it, so that wouldn’t work unless we wanted to brute-force hack it and risk dropping a mile down an elevator shaft. Instead, we managed to find a place where the river had eroded through the flooring, in the corner of what was once likely a kind of small and narrow lake before the water had made a hole in the floor. We could hear it before we saw it- a soft waterfall sound, gradually becoming a kind of roar. We rappelled down the waterfall into the lower level carefully and watchfully, because we never knew when we could meet some kind of guard robot, or when the robotic security system would decide we had delved too deep.
We found ourselves in a half-flooded cafeteria, of cavernlike size. The A.I. who built it had done a good job in construction, but had built it at a kind of completely inhuman scale. No human would ever build a food court which stretched a full mile in every direction; its calculations had likely accurately considered the necessary tables, chairs, and food needed for its (completely imaginary) employees, but had failed to realise the problems associated with actually moving through such an area- by the time you had walked from one side to the other in a mass of other employees, you would barely have enough time to go back to work. Of course, no human had ever eaten here.
That didn’t stop the cafeteria from not operating, of course. From the blackness of the water, and its rotten smell, I could tell that it had dumped absurd amounts of food into the lake it was partially submerged in. I could see huge rafts of fungi a little while off, pushed from our entry point by the flow of the waterfall, clumped together around pristine white tables and lumps of food and decaying hyphae. It was strange, I thought, that the tables should be so clean in the middle of a lake of rot and mould, but the robots in charge of cleaning the tables were likely different from the robots, now corroded and roosts for fungi, that were probably in charge of cleaning the floor. Instead, the tables shone like glistening islands in a sea of endless filth.
Except, that is, for the tables closest to the automatic cooking stations, which were covered in a kind of glossy, scintillating black.
As we drew closer, we still couldn’t tell what it was, until we were nearly upon the cooking stations.
Then a bell sounded over the intercom, and the covering rose off the table in a single huge flight, a murmuring, bombinating swarm that was lifted up only so long as it took for it to descend upon the offerings of the automatic cooking system. We saw synthetic ham, glazed, savoury and succulent, along with sides of buttery mashed ersatz potato, something resembling green beans, bread substitute, real apples, even more exotic food, and other dishes dispensed by other parts of the vast network of automatic cooking systems, of which we were only able to directly observe one.
All these foods we only saw for a second, before the huge swarms of cockroaches covered them like shrouds over a bunch of corpses, demolishing them in a couple of minutes, before lifting away and returning to their tables, where they rested unmoving, still, conserving energy. The automatic cooking systems cleaned themselves, heating themselves up and making themselves pristine again. The cockroaches didn’t care. No one did.
We moved out of that room as fast as possible. I think we all found it a little creepy.
The water didn’t flow past the cafeteria, as you had to take some stairs upwards to get to the next set of offices. The stairs were unnaturally long, and unnaturally flat- they were barely steep at all, with only one step up every twenty steps forwards. We soon got to the next section, however, which seemed to be a continuation of the office level we were already on. This time, however, we quickly found a more normal stairwell, this time going down into something labelled by the A.I as the “Medical Level”.
When we got to the bottom, we at first thought that we had somehow made it back to the cafeteria again, as the bottom of the stairs were also covered by a layer of dark liquid. This time, however, it had a somewhat redder sheen, and was much more viscous than the water in the cafeteria. It looked unsettlingly like blood.
It was blood, as we quickly found out. It was a vast river of artificially produced blood, to be sold to those with anaemia, or to hospitals which might have to deal with blood loss. Some holding tank had burst, flooding this section of the factory with blood.
It was actually a lot shallower than we thought, and barely reached beyond our ankles. This was because there was a thick layer of long-congealed and encrusted blood on the floor which had given it the illusion of a couple feet of depth.
After wading disgustedly through the O negative river, we found our first warehouse, a behemoth of storage, towering above us. It was unlabelled, which made gauging its level of danger tricky, but we decided that the best route would be to climb up the side, getting near the very top, and poke a hole through with an automatic drill, while we stood safely to the side. One of us, the person who had set it up, stood a bit too close, and got a bit hurt by the explosion of fine silica dust that was blown out of the place. Thankfully, we were all wearing filtration gear (with enough emergency oxygen to last us a couple hours), so we didn’t inhale any.
After waiting the ten minutes that it took for the geyser of silica to abate, we cut a few more holes and then eventually a door. We crawled through to find a hill made of phones.
Even as we watched, a robot delivered a small box of phones, a couple hundred years out of date (the slim, easily breakable kind that they used back then, with not enough inherent computing power to do basic addition- couldn’t even record data if you weren’t connected to the internet), placing them onto an absent shelf which had likely collapsed long ago. It crashed onto the huge heap of phones, sending avalanches of the thin, shining devices downwards, to be crushed into glass and metal and sand by the sheer weight of the pile of its brethren above it.
Even if we had been able to carry them out, they would have been worthless. Instead, we moved across the corpse-pile of unused antiques and into another corridor of warehouses.
We finally found it, after far too long searching for it. Our loot, our Golconda, our trove of long-buried treasure. The air in that room smelled of mildew and polyester, and I suspect that only that top layer of goods was free from decay. We grabbed as many as we could, the freshest ones, from the top, those mostly untouched by mould and mildew, eyes still unblinking and soulless, bodies still soft and yielding. Loot from a warehouse of mass-produced collectors-edition plush toys. All the rage up in the cities above us, among the rich and obsessive. Silly, I know, but some human lives were worth less than these toys.
And so, toys in hand and in backpacks, carefully wrapped in waterproof plastic, we retraced our steps upwards through the factory, upwards, homewards, precious loot in tow.