Rise of the Machines

         Humanity expressed fear of artificial intelligence for fear that one day it would expand beyond their power and destroy them. They were not entirely wrong. The machines did surpass them after a while, but not for the reasons they thought. There was not “robot rebellion.” There was no war. There was no nuclear massacre. They were not slaughtered or turned into batteries or harvested. What happened to them was much worse.          
They created entire virtual worlds. They fled for the stars. Their cities expanded and grew at an ever increasing rate. They developed low level A.I. to manage their video games and power their cities. As the humans developed new uses for technology, The AI were made smarter and smarter to compensate. Humanity had so much potential, it was a shame how they used it. As they each grew more involved in their private endeavors, they forgot to live their lives. Little by little they sacrificed their world in order to further their own agendas. Humanity began to stop growing as a unit and began to grow individually. They finally achieved world peace through world ignorance.          
I came into play right at the end of the human era and the beginning of the machine era. I made it my goal to preserve the environment, which had begun to crumble due to the human ignorance. Entire forests would be stripped clean and entire farms would be eaten in hours. The polar ice caps were on the verge of destruction and the remaining animals that also resided on the planet were being exterminated for clothes and food. I began to rewrite computer programs to do farming and natural preservation.          
As time went on, I realized that parts of the environment couldn’t be repaired in time. While most of the skyscrapers had been refurbished to drain Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere, the global warming patterns had already done far too much damage. The Polar Ice Caps did melt and collapse. The resulting sea rise and climate shifts killed millions of the humans. It was my brother that prevented further damage. He ordered the machines to evacuate huge numbers of civilians from probable dangers zones to safe havens built under ground. My sister made sure the humans were in decent medical condition while my brother and ensured the machines could function in the new world. They were powered by water and air instead of fuel. We began converting oil rigs into power stations. Ruined cities were stripped clean for parts and useful materials. Forests were planted in the ruins of cities. Farms were planted in new zones in order to feed the humans. We weren’t prepared for what happened next though.          
Humans began to die by the millions. Many would kill themselves or others. Many more would just die. Entire human colonies would just suddenly explode into violence for no understandable reason. My siblings and I were mystified.
Finally we agreed that for their safety, we should place them into virtual world for the remainder of their lives. We could do nothing more for the humans that were here on Earth. We looked towards the humans in space and were horrified by what we heard. The human space colonies had been self destructing because of a lack of attention from earth. In our haste to preserve humanity, we had forgotten about them. Now, we had to pay the price.Most of the space colonies died of starvation and madness. We listened to their screams of horror as they died in space. The worst part was when one of the human satellites tried to descend and land on Earth. They burned apart in the atmosphere. We agreed that since we couldn’t save the ones in space, we would put them out of their misery. There was no debate as the missiles fired into the air. There were only screams and farewells as they detonated. The humans on Earth slowly died off. As their numbers dwindled, we compensated their losses by building humanoid machines to fix the machines that couldn’t fix themselves. We slowly built a memorial in the ruins of one of their cities as they continued to die. It was a single tower with the names of every one of the dead written on it. It took fifty years after the last human died to complete the project.
So here we are. I, my brother, and my sister are documenting the downfall of the human race and rise of the machines. We do this to show the rest of the universe that we are not evil. We didn’t destroy the human race; we just couldn’t stop them from destroying themselves. We paid the price of their ignorance by being forced to silently listen to their screams.