When the robots began invading our homes for Obedience Inspections we discovered they were afraid of spiders.

They didn’t want us calling them robots. Androids or humanoids was acceptable. Flattering, even. They loved being mistaken for us. We could call them Cobots (that was the official branding) because we were supposed to cohabitate, co-work with them. But most of us just called them agents. This new deep state was more transparent than the last. They did everything right in front of our faces. The Whole Earth War had completely removed hope— seriously, it was no longer included in the Registry of Human Emotions, they took the word itself out of the dictionary. Some still had it, of course, in books hidden away before The Continental Fire. I saw it once, at a neighbour’s house, late at night: HOPE, noun [Latin cupio.] 1. A desire of some good, accompanied with at least a slight expectation of obtaining it, or a belief that it is obtainable. “Hope” doesn’t exist, they told us. Not anymore. It was declared unsubstantiated. Only power existed now, and power was for the taking. World leaders no longer needed humans to fight their wars. He who built an army had an army. It was an underwhelming scramble to the top, a flurry of fleece Patagonia vests. While their masters were in a race to the destruction of all life, the Agents were playing a lot of roles. They were the cops, the city councillors, social workers. Teachers. Little league coaches. All entry level government jobs. Agents were renewing your passport, or denying it. They had exclusive selling rights to baby formula, antibiotics, birth control. Alcohol. They were praised for being impartial and correct, not moral. There was no talk of morality anymore, the word now was correct. They were everywhere and some of us had even been convinced that it was for our own good. God created man and man created agents. It was as close as man could get to recreating God, I guess. Just someone to walk in the garden with us again and say Hey, don’t touch that! They were styled as our caregivers, but really they were our handlers. And for years it worked. There was no longer the law, just regular updates to reboot society to their liking. It was mostly met with apathy. We had collectively disassociated. We were like teenagers hanging out in our rooms while our really rich parents entertained downstairs, only mom and dad were plundering our planet for resources and slowly enslaving our species. The earth was their playground, we were just standing at the fence, watching, hoping not to get picked on. But one thing came back to haunt them. The truth was these elite, and more specifically these tech giants were out of touch. Tucked away in Silicon Valley in their sterile homes they’d forgotten to update the living conditions of the rest of the world before unleashing their babysitters on us. The robots were trained in their homes, their friends’ homes. They forgot the rest of us were all still living in turn of the century houses, shitty old apartment buildings, and government housing with our true cohabitants. Spiders.