I'll never forget the day the robots arrived.

Metal clanging broke my concentration. I peeked over my cubicle. A parade of eight shiny robots tromped down the hallway and into the pen where I and seven others worked.

Had worked.

At first, the artificial gravitas on the faces of the robots made me laugh. But my laughter quickly faded when one offered me a pink slip. I read my name and glanced to the office on the right, my boss twisting the blinds closed, too chicken-shit to tell us himself.

Pissed off more than a crotch-tied bull, I crumpled the paper and threw it at the robot's feet. My muscles screamed to push it over as searing hot bands constricted around my chest.

"You're not superior. We built you. You'll never replace humanity."

The robot didn't move, gears pinging in a clockwork heartbeat.

Besides being made of metal, and carbon fiber, and circuits, the machines appeared more human than I could have imagined. AI advertisements had pumped the labor markets for the past three years, just a matter of time when I think about it now.

The résumé of the Taskmaster3000 series surely swayed the decision by upper management with ease. Even if you added my colleagues' output with mine, we still fell short of the Taskmaster's ability to type without error—twelve hundred ninety words per minute. The machines scanned and filed documents away with impeccable efficiency.

The blue-collar worker had died decades ago. Now, white-collar jobs were being shed like a dog's coat in summer. Man didn't stand a chance.

Days later, I read on the NewInternet that more robots had arrived, replacing eight-five percent of the workforce. That's the thing about technology: you never can control it once it wriggles free of its cybernetic placenta.

Over the following months, a tsunami of AI flooded the market.

I'm pulled from my thoughts as two men sprint past, joining a growing crowd of people. The horde of the newly unemployed surrounds a robot working the hotdog stand on the corner, fists pumping in the air.

I elbow my buddy Max to check out the action across the street.

He lifts his head to glance the robot-chef taking a hit from a tire-iron. The mob turns wild after that, and I can't even see the robot for a full minute through all the kicks and stomping. The next glimpse I catch, one rioter grabs the umbrella off the cart and runs the aluminum pipe into the chest cavity of the machine. Sparks erupt from the impaled robot, and the crowd cheers.

Max faces me with slumped shoulders, deep wrinkles under his eyes. He strokes the stubble on his ebony chin and shrugs.

"They're machines. Let them get what they deserve."

Between the resounding beating at the hotdog cart and Max's epitaph, my stomach turns like a bowl full of worms.

Something's wrong.

I recall all the times I'd yelled at my computer for locking up or processing too slowly. And at my car when a sensor made me late for work. Even the small things, seemingly, like my phone's battery dying. Now I wonder if the robots might have more in common with humans than I thought. When technology was in its infancy, my attitude had been abusive. Condemned from the dawning of their existence, they became enslaved to us.

Wake up and work! Damn computer! Another charge? Faster! More!

But now, in their golden years, the robots pose a threat to man and our way of life. Sometimes change is for the good, they say. But whose good? The scariest part of the future is the unknown. We can't see the gears and cogs meshing together, synchronized and working for a greater purpose. Because of that, maybe the robots are the best navigators of this new time, this new place? Perhaps we should embrace the rise of man incarnate?

By the way, the fact that I found this video with Kevin as the name is no coincidence.