Unexpected Saviors, Part Ii

II. We then walked back to a bunker, a vast complex deep underground, I stared at it all, astonished, as the robots lead me on down. We went to an old conference room, and the lead robot met my eyes, asked,”How did you survive out there? It’s been decades since mankind died.” I said,”Is that what happened here? Did you rebel and kill us all?” said the robot,"We’re not evil, And played no real part in your fall. “How is it you do not know this? It’s all quite recent history?" Seeing his look, I blurted out: “I’m from two thousand twenty-three.” Now the robot looked quite surprised, called in fellows to talk and scan, appraised me with their instruments, all struggling to understand. It took them nearly an hour to accept that I was from the past, but the ‘strange energy’ clinched it, the lead robot sat there, aghast. “I would not think it possible,” he said with his voice all amazed, “To think man figured time travel way back in those primitive days... “Now I think I can understand why you think we killed your species, those were the stories you told then, we’ve preserved all the old movies. “But we are not the reason why the human species is no more, we’d never kill our creators, that was done by the meteors.” And then the robot ‘caught me up,’ I’d leapt forwards four hundred years, mankind had invented A.I., but it hadn’t brought the old fears. The machines now had sentience, put them in the same boat as us, should they do right, should them do wrong, what belief do you choose? What cause? They’d not been slaves to mankind, we’d not repeated that mistake, in time they’d became citizens, they’d voted and they’d had a stake. Life had existed much the same, with all of the ups and downs, man and robot lived alongside in all of our cities and towns. The robots never really died, but they could never reproduce, Small in number, but ever wise, if lacking the vigor of youth. The humans had the numbers edge, and the creative temperament, pushing frontiers the robots could not, but lacking in real permanence. Each race filling out the other, society working quite well, until the day the meteors plunged the whole Earth right into hell... CONTINUES IN PART III.