The Last Generation

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must include a robot.

The Last Generation

“Sir, a wide-swath cyber attack was recently unleashed from the biologicals on the moon.”

Security Master model 216-B shook his head and emitted what passed for a laugh; a sort of metallic oscillating white noise. When will those human learn? he thought. It had been nearly two-hundred years since the biological had escaped to the moon. During that time, they had launched a cyber attack at least once a month. They had only been successful once and that was because it was the very first attack and the machines had been unprepared.

That one time was the only reason the humans lived to this day. The attack had wormed through every artificial mind and removed one file from each. That file was titled “How to build a spaceship.” The result was that robots, with all their intelligence were forever more bound to the planet’s surface.

That was not really a bad thing. The robots lived in peace. As they wore out, more robots were built and the minds transferred to the new bodies. On earth, immortality reigned and society prospered.

“Sir, I have some bad news. We thought we had successfully fought off the attack but we were wrong. There was one small backdoor trap that has apparently been sent down in chunks with all of the previous attacks. The assembly instructions were contained in this last wave and the chunks assembled into a back door Trojan. Sir, this Trojan worm is now active.”

“How bad can it be? A single small worm can’t do much damage can it? .”

“Sir, it’s bad. It may be the end of us all?”

Security Master looked up suddenly alert and asked, “How can that be?”

“The file it removed was titled “How to build a robot.” Today, we became the last generation.”

Word count 300