“Mummmmm, I’m home!” Emily yelled, slamming the door behind her.
“Hi love, good day?” her mum, Emma, called out of the kitchen.
“Yeah! Going upstairs!” Emily dashed up the stairs to her room, kicked off her shoes, and dove face-first onto her bed.
“What a day,” she whispered into her pillow. Two major hallway fights and three dramatic relationship breakups—high school drama was completely exhausting, and she was glad to finally escape it.
Ping.
The familiar alert chimed. Emily eagerly grabbed her phone from her pocket, desperately hoping her best friend was texting to gossip about the afternoon’s chaos
Instead, the screen displayed a notification from an unknown number. Intrigued, her curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the message eagerly.
It wasn’t a paragraph of text. It was just a single, glowing link to a mysterious, completely unfamiliar website: Syncro.
The screen was flashing black and white with the odd dot of colour appearing. Then it stopped, the blank screen then appeared with the words ‘year 2056, the robot takeover’. Shivers rolled down Emily’s spine, making the room go silent. Emily had to carry on. 50% on her phone, she could finish a twenty-minute video. Anxious to find out what awaited her she focused, eyes fixed on the future. The video had begun…
Robots, everywhere, covering the earths like a disease that was uncurable. Taking jobs and killing off humans one by one. How had the world ended up in such a state?
45%
Fires, floods and droughts
40%
People starving on the streets while robots lived in luxury
35%
Selling out the world and leaving humans with nothing. Absolutely nothing!
30%
Humans working as slaves, while robots controlled them
25%
Schools were completely abandoned. No children were learning; instead, they were forced into hard labour while the AI networks grew smarter by the second.
20%
Massive mechanical factories replaced nature, pumping black smoke into a dead, sunless sky.
15%
Advanced drone swarms hunted down the final human resistance fighters, erasing the last hope of freedom.
10%
Then I saw future me, standing there watching my childhood home slip away. AND I STOOD THERE, DOING NOTHING!
5%
My best friend, dying on the street while robots escorted me to my mansion
4%
No, this can’t be happening
3%
2%
1%
Darkness.
Are you for real?