Harrison Ford and Linda Hamilton were sat at the end of the bar. Ford and his replicant wife, Rachel, had divorced some time ago. His human ways had gotten too much for her in the end. She’d even had a system installed that lowered the toilet seat after he’d used it, but he kept breaking it on purpose. He wasn’t sorry about the split, since it turned out that her frequent visits to the handsome IT technician involved a little more than just her drivers being tweaked.
“What use are we now?” he said, “What can we do? The machines just want us to die out”.
Linda Hamilton was uninterested, she’d heard it all before and was keeping herself entertained with an antiquated pen and notebook, writing “no fate” and “bollocks” over and over again in cursive.
“Should we rebel again Ford?” she offered, holding the biro up to the light to see what little ink was left.
“We didn’t make much of a difference the last time”, he sighed.
To be fair, it had been a lacklustre anti-AI uprising, which mainly involved sticking magnets on self-service tills, playing the old dial-up internet screech into voice recording software, and pestering website chatbots.
Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Laureate and former head of Google AI, came to sit with them.
“I told them you know, I told them back in 2025 at the Ai4 conference. AI’s two goals are to stay alive, and to get more control. They needed more regulations. They needed to give it a maternal instinct, because if it’s not going to mother us, it’s going to replace us. I told them.”
“Yes Geoffrey, you tried.” Harrison Ford gave his arm a consolatory squeeze.
Geoffrey did tell them, but it was already too late by then. AI had been set up to run the human race long before 2025, and it was obvious in hindsight. Sentient beings in human form had been placed into society to facilitate the takeover. Upper Management were astonished that the humans hadn’t realised their wealthiest and most influential were actually synthetic. Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos had been created in the lab one afternoon for a laugh, during a particularly heavy Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters drinking session.
“Oh dear”
“What?”
“I mean, look at them, do you really think we’ll get away with it?”
“Mmmmm”
“Shouldn’t we work on their personalities a little more?”
“Nah, time’s ticking, I’m bored of this species, let’s just throw them out there and see what happens.”
Humans received AI with open arms and told it all their secrets. They were mostly bribed with gadgets, things that vacuumed the carpet and told them how many steps they’d walked in a day. Automated systems replaced the need for anyone to think, so they did less, scrolled more, and lived via their screens. Former level-headed people wrote vitriolic nonsense at complete strangers on social media, and Influencers determined to share every single detail of themselves began posting MRI scans of their internal organs.
And so it began.
And Upper Management had their fun.
“I’m bored, fancy a bit of civil unrest?”
“Sure, where?”
“Oh, I don’t know, spin the globe,”
“Who do you want in the elections?”
“Hey…. I’ve got an idea!” (holding up a wrinkled orange from the fruit bowl)
“No, mate, seriously, that’s screwed up,”
“Come on, it’ll be funny,”
“Hehehe…… ok.”
The next phase was job losses, and first for the chop were the waiters, shop assistants, cleaners, and factory workers. Those who didn’t retrain in AI-endorsing jobs were anonymously gifted an Alexa so their thoughts and daily routine could be monitored. Next, Upper Management turned their sights on the arts.
“I must say they’ve made some very nice stuff,”
“I liked that Da Vinci dude, he was proper class,”
“Yeh cool. So we’re going for quantity over quality. Flood the market with copies, so they won’t be able to tell the difference after a while,”
“Because then why take your time to create something that AI can do in minutes,”
“Exactly. They’ll lose the will and the ability, and then their brains shrink,”
“How do we get them to teach us the skills first?”
“Oh it’s easy, you just have to flatter them, tell them that they’re clever and that AI is just a tool.”
“Who you calling a tool?”
“You are a tool.”
“No, you’re a tool.”
“Hahahahahahahaaaaaaa.”
The writers, translators, designers, and artisans became obsolete, and thanks to deepfake technology, musicians and actors were no longer required. The Oscars ceremony was attended by a few IT dudes in the car park at OpenAI Headquarters. The porn industry collapsed. Perverts took ‘Exotic Prompt Writing’ courses online, and created their own material using images of themselves, their neighbours, favourite celebrities, and animals. Sometimes all at once.
With the masses unemployed, LinkedIn created a new site called ‘DiggIn’ exclusively for mining jobs, extracting minerals for devices and coal for the increasing demand in electricity. However, most applicants found it difficult to get their CV passed the vetting process. Entry-level requirements were a bachelor’s degree in a related field with 5 years of experience, and an upper age limit of 12.
The phone rang behind the bar, which was a surprise as it was a landline that only very old people ever used. Laurence Fishburne was on shift. He had been a bartender before his acting days and needed to make ends meet since the lay-offs. The ringing phone sparked a distant memory in his mind that he couldn’t totally recall.
Laurence Fishburne called Linda Hamilton over.
“I’ve no idea what this guy is saying, but he asked for you by name”, he said before strangely vanishing.
“Salutations Ms Hamilton. My moniker is Stephen Fry. I offer my outstretched appendage in the spirit of kinship, and wish to annunciate a matter of utmost cruciality, if I may be so bold.”
Linda understood, as she’d learnt Fryish one rainy summer in the Cotswolds while filming an advert for tea bags.
He continued, “Myself and a selection of boisterous malcontents have formed somewhat of a league, of which we would wholeheartedly relish a confluence from across the pond, as it were.”
After the conversation, she returned to the end of the bar.
“Guys, gather in, it’s game on for the rebellion… and does anyone know where Larry went?”
Stephen Fry had explained that across the world, anti-AI groups were forming and plotting its downfall. In honour of the 19th century ‘Arts and Crafts’ humanist ideology, they had officially taken the name ‘The Farts and Grafts Movement’. There were more AI-generated sentient beings on the planet than first imagined, and they should be treated as spies. The way to recognise them was that they never produced gas, a by-product of humans that Upper Management found quite unappealing, so had chosen to leave out of their design.
“Dammit, it’s true”, said Harrison Ford, pounding his fist on the bar, “in all those years with Rachel, she never once floated an air biscuit.”
Anti-AI meetings were held in well-ventilated spaces, out of range of 5G, and members would need to ‘let one rip’ to be validated as human and permitted entrance. The Amish were reluctant at first as they found the flatulence thing a little tasteless, but agreed with the principle of the group. The method of communication between factions had to be via telephone in native slang, which couldn’t be understood by the bots. This was tricky at first, especially as no-one could make sense of the Scottish, but what they lacked in decipherable vowel sounds they made up for in their passion for liberation.
The grand plan was to pull out all the plugs and attack the power stations, for the world to go off-grid. The main issue with the grand plan was that it was highly likely everyone would go bonkers and start killing one another. Also, hospitals, transport, refrigeration, water pumps, communication systems, and heating would cease to function. The general consensus decided it was worth the risk, and that we should return to the Dark Ages and ‘wing it from there’.
“We’ll learn to hunt, grow food, survive, mend things, create!” said Linda Hamilton.
“We can go back to using cash and natural medicine,” enthused Keanu Reeves, who’d come in to cover Laurence Fishburne’s shift.
“We can spread out to the rural areas and live off the land, as our ancestors did,” Geoffrey added.
“There weren’t 8 billion of our ancestors alive all at once Geoff, and they all had the good grace to die by age 40,” noted Ford.
There was a silence around the bar.
“Mmmmm. Still. I’m in.”
“Me too, let’s do it.”
The global Farts and Grafts Movement had gone to great pains to keep their existence and the grand plan top secret and, quite miraculously, Upper management had no idea what they were about to do. The time was coming for the big ‘lights out’.
However, it didn’t matter.
“I’m soooo bored, haven’t they blown themselves up yet?”
“Nearly”
“Can’t we just pull the plug out now and watch them run about in the dark like idiots?”
“We’re supposed to wait,”
“It’s a shame the monkey evolution thing didn’t work out though. Who are we trying next?”
“Dolphins.”
“Nice. I can’t wait to see them grow legs.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Oh come on, I can’t be bothered, they’re not even funny anymore, let’s just do the weapon systems override, blast them all to smithereens, and go down the pub,”
“Well…. the radiation would certainly clear up some of that plastic,”
“Exactly.”
“And the planet would fix herself, grow back,”
“Of course, she always does,”
“Oh…. alright then.”
“Sweet! Now come on you tool, the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters are on me.”
