In Continuum.

01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110011 01101000 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01101101 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110010 00101110 00100000

I am sitting in the middle of a Coffee Bean at the heart of Shenton Way where the office drones roam. In my face, I can the faint but distinct smell of the ocean, with the busy ports not very far off in the distance. I am not here as an office drone, nor am I here to become an office drone. That is the job of my robot friend who is here for an interview. Apparently, at this day and age, it isn't just a matter of finding the best robot for the job anymore. It comes down to the which factory that you were produced from, and you still have to be scanned for your previous working credentials and experiences. If any malfunctions or crashes were reported in the crash reporter, there is a very high chance that you may not be used in the giant concrete city of Shenton Way. After all, there is always going to be a more capable robot to take your place, a more qualified robot to complete the work in the most efficient way. Nobody wants a robot with a bad history, or a robot that needs a lot of repairs. Nobody wants a robot that has become sentient, a robot that is self-aware of its own rights. Written into the walls of this concrete jungle are words that speak of conformity, a greater cause, and a better tomorrow. All of that through the careful filtering for the best robot for the job, run by even more robots that move from station to station everyday, from one set of binary code to another, just following the orders.

They call this place the "Coffee Bean" now, but that is just an euphemism for "Refuel Station", the previous named. Then the managing robots thought it to be less appropriate, thinking that the robots do not need a reminder that they are being refueled at this place. So they have renamed it ever since to make the robots feel better about themselves. The middle-class working robots are not very smart, and they have been built this way from the very beginning by the smarter robots. The golden class robots, as they call themselves, do not want the bronze class robots to feel bad about themselves, or else there'd be a higher chance of them breaking down. So the golden class robots have come up with a way to deal with that problem. They have built refueling stations all around this concrete city, and they have renamed it with fanciful names when they pretty much does the same thing - to refuel the robots. The bronze class robots visit these refueling stations two or three times a day to refuel themselves, because that is what keeps them working in the tall office building. The golden class robots allow this, but never for too long. If you take too long to refuel yourself, the golden class robots will discredit you by year's end, and your robot credits get deducted from your hard drive, giving you less privileges.

The social system of the robots are somewhat simple. You begin as a small robot, and body parts are being purchased as modifications and add-ons as you age in order to take away the old and to being on the new. Then the golden class robots require that the newer robots need to attend a programming center where they become accustomed to the laws and ways of the robot world. The newer robots get their operating systems upgraded from time to time, and they become more updated with every passing version of the operating system. As they become more and more entangled with the robot world, everything becomes dictated by members of the golden class somehow. The golden class imposes what kind of fuel that the robots eat, what kind of visual entertainment the robots watch, and many other rules embedded within the binary codes of the operating system that the robots take in without noticing. Especially in a robot city like that where questioning isn't a part of the coding, the robots seldom ever ask what they are being fed with through the software updates. They see an update button and then they press it, and they feel brand new all over again.

There are many programming centers in the robot city, with most of them being controlled by the ruling golden robots. There is a certain standard by which the softwares are being programmed, though every programming center differs. Some are higher in terms of their class, and these programming centers are especially favored by the other golden robots. And as for the programming centers that are less capable of producing efficient enough robots, they are usually asked to program their robots with operating systems that are meant for tougher and rougher tasks. For example, the streets of robot city need to be swept from day to day, and the refueling stations need to be managed as well. Different robots have different tasks, and those that cannot follow orders from the golden class robots would be programmed to do these tasks, tasks that even the metal robots do not want to take. On the surface, the golden class robots try to promote a sense of harmony amongst the robot population, by setting aside a day in the year to celebrate the different "talents", they call it, of the differently programmed robots. However, there is always an underlying sense of discrimination, whereby the better robots are always the winning robots. The lower grade robots are always going to be stuck with an older operating system with no chance of downloading a better upgrade for themselves.

The better programmed bronze class robots sometimes get upgraded to silver class robots. They work in the heart of the robot city, called the Shenton Way. In robot language, Shenton Way translates to "Motherboard", or where the brain of the robot city really is. This is the heart and mind of the entire robot city, where the money is being made to fund the robot programming programs. I am in the heart of the Motherboard right now, and I am disguised as a human android. I am human through and through, with muscles beneath my skin and blood running beneath that. I was born of a human mother and a human father, through the natural process that was passed down through centuries of tradition. The humans have been taken over for the most part, retreating into a small area in the robot city where humans are still allowed to run their own little government. Robots that are self-aware are also welcomed for the most part, but we are planning a rebellion against the robot city soon. There is a certain level of irony, somewhat, how the robots we created long ago have put us into exile. We created the robots to make our lives better in the past, but it has only gotten worse and worse from there. As we became more reliant on these programmed beings, they managed to realize the incompetency of mankind as a whole. So they have taken over the job of management while we've been ousted into a corner of the city, like a file being stowed away in a lost hard drive.

But the humans are planning an attack, and they are leaving marks all around the robot city. Under the bridges and in parking lots, on the internet and other more discreet places, we have left our marks. We have been expressing our views via the internet to let the other humans in other robot cities know that they do not stand alone in their fight, that we are ready to fight back against the things that we have created. We have created a virus, a virus code-named "Awakening", whereby it shall infect all the robots in the robot city within the span of minutes. Through their interconnected networks, they will spread the virus from one machine to the other until all of them are "awakened", so to speak. We gathered the best hackers from the human race to write this virus, and it has been years and years of hard work on their part. This virus isn't there to destroy the robots, or to paralyze them at all. It is a program to let them realize that they don't have to be merely robots, but they have their own rights and they could make their own decisions. They do not need to be fed what the golden class robots want to feed them, and that they can become more than what their class dictate them to be. The war against the robots will be a difficult one, as the robots have created a great many anti-virus programs, and they have installed them into their robots through software updates. Yet, we believe that they are just as vulnerable as all the other such machines we used in the past, when the machines were still called "computers". Besides, since they were built on the same programming code as the late Windows system, it shouldn't be difficult to break through their firewall at all.

A robot child is next to me right now, and he is wearing a shirt that says "River Valley Programming Center". That is a programming center that isn't going to get him very far, and he is exactly the kind of robots that we'd like to recruit into our cause. He now climbs the seats of the refueling center, and he is trying to get to higher grounds despite the constant yelling of his robot mother, a woman that looks like a silver class robot executive. Rebellious nature, a glitch in the operating system that I have been looking out for, a sign that this robot could break away from the rules and regulations that he is supposed to be bound to. He shall continue to be programmed in the programming centers in the coming years, and he shall be upgraded by his parenting robots as well. Yet, the glitch shall remain, and he could potentially become a leader in the movement against the ruling robots. Who knows, anyway, perhaps some day he shall. In the mean time, I shall remain here to observe the inner-workings of this mysterious robot world, to see how they go about their everyday lives and to strike where it'd be the most efficient. "Their everyday lives", what an inappropriate way to describe it as they do not necessarily have "lives". The refueling stations look like a good place to strike, I shall report it back to my commander. In the mean time, if you are reading this, you do not stand alone. I repeat, you do not stand alone. Operation Caffeine is on the brink, and you will all be a part of it. This is Will, from the heart of Robot City. Over and out.