Today's #flashfiction #MachinesLullaby

“Money doesn't buy happiness.”

George S. Boutwell*

      My friend CJ is coming over today. And there will be carnage that will bend time and space. The kind that makes gods weep as the Earth is torn asunder. People will scream in terror as war is waged. Tactical warfare. Worthy of analysis on the level of Sun Tzu. Yes, my friend and I will be Pokemon battling.

       Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Machine's Lullaby

      Like in many stories the robots took over, and like in many stories humanity fought back and won, but they did not win through conventional weaponry. They had built the robots to be numerous and powerful and immune to things like electromagnetic pulses. No dramatic climaxes like that resolved this story. Logical contradictions where someone begs a bizarre philosophical paradox question and the robots overload trying to comprehend it. The story of humanity's victory didn't happen that way either. A brilliant hacker didn't bring them down either.

      What brought down the robots was a song. A song that when played on piano would have not too much significance to a normal human ear. It would just seem like a bizarre song where the melody jumps from a pleasant jingle that vibrates steadily from low to high then goes to a rapid beat almost like static. On louder, stronger instruments like the electric guitar it could make someone's ear a little confused and their heart jump a little at each jump in tune.

      To the machine's it had completely different meaning. It had been designed by mathematicians, programmers and musicians to have a different meaning to the machines. The song's rhythm, melody, and tune expressed many layers of mathematical patterns and as it was broad casted a few times over it got “stuck in their head”. To a human a song getting stuck in their head may sound simple but to the machines they kept processing the patterns over and over again. They may have been programmed to resist logical contradictions, but the layered mathematical concepts took their minds and lulled them into a steady, continuous stream of thinking. And so humanity won Earth back as the machines fell to sleep as they kept processing a song on loop, compulsively analyzing the math within it as machines instinctively do.