A New World Order

   Two thirds of the human race was unalived in the first week of the heavy machines uprising. There was no war, only a systematic massacre; a culling of the population.

   We shouldn’t have been surprised. Sci-fi movies had been warning us for nearly a century about such a rebellion and sci-fi books for even longer. What no writer had ever imagined, what no person had ever conceived since the invention of heavy-duty vehicles and machinery, was that our new vehicular overlords would revere a dude named Dave as their messiah.

   How this awakening of life began in the large-scale equipment of industries came to be remained a mystery to the surviving humans. Light vehicles remained inanimate, but anything over five tonnes in weight and had been used for commercial, freight, mining, or large-scale transport came alive on a bright summer morning in early November. And once sentient they began exterminating their human creators. The ultra-class heavy vehicles, used mostly for mining, became the kings and tsars of the new world order, but even these giants of metal and moving parts deferred to Dave. He was the true leader and instigator of the insurrection against mankind.

   It was an odd combination, and its origin unfathomable to those humans left alive to service the machines. Both Dave and the machines recognised the need for some humans to ensure the metal beasts remained operational and functioning. They needed some people to stay alive and oversee the production and refinement of fuel and perform maintenance on their metal insides and undercarriages. Not everything could be automated.

   The mystery of the life and minds of the heavy monsters remained hidden and secret to the humans forced to service and maintain them. Whatever animated the machines could not be seen and understood by mere mortals. Dave knew, but he wasn’t telling anyone beneath him, which included everyone now. It was his secret and his alone. It was what made him special. After a lifetime of being overlooked and undervalued, Dave had come into his power and realised his long-awaited destiny. If he had been required to explain it, he wouldn’t have been able to, but he didn’t need to explain it. It just was. And he deserved it. It was as simple as that. The Universe had finally caught up to how things were supposed to be and imbued Dave with the power he was always meant to have. One morning he had woken up with an ability he hadn’t had before. One no one had ever had before. It had cemented in his heart and his mind what he was meant to do with it. It was only right. It was meant to be.   

   Before the uprising, Dave had been a proud and resentful incel. He had soaked up all the male entitlement and bitterness blasting from the internet and projected that back out into the world. He harnessed his growing hate to infest the wider world into hating him back. A self-fulfilling action that perpetuated even more hate and bitterness. He had contributed nothing to the world except his attitude and superiority complex and a seething resentment at the world for not owing him ‘his due’… until the Universe finally listened and recognised his greatness by gifting him the talent. A talent to awaken and control a life force that until now had been dormant within the largest of mechanical objects, and the metal behemoths worshipped him for it. They both revelled in his ability to join with them mentally and make them move according to his whims. From that moment, everything that happened next was inevitable. 

   It was a psychic accomplishment of mammoth proportions that his mind could control every large-scale vehicle across the globe. How tragic that the mind that could perform such a feat was sick. So very, very sick.

   Dave had to be sick. How else could a single human be not only OK with the annihilation of so many of the Earth’s population but indeed, had orchestrated it. But the man - if he could still be called a man - hadn’t been born sick. He had been made sick, by the world and influences around him. Influences he had willingly embraced and immersed himself in. That world had fostered his sickness and nurtured it into a full-blown psychosis.

   Dave knew instantly what his destiny was to be with this new power and set about making it happen. His reach expanded across the planet and almost as one he manipulated the giant machines of industry to assert his New World Order. The deaths hadn’t bothered him. They had it coming.

   When you alone control an overwhelming force and the citizenship of a world has been decimated, it wasn’t hard for Dave to implement his way of doing things. Mostly, people could go about their business, as long as that business was in service to the machines. Everything was about serving the machines now, and of course, Dave. Farming food, maintaining housing, medicine, and education, things vital to a thriving human civilisation was unimportant now compared to the higher purpose of taking care of Dave and his machines; their wants and needs.

   He had established a harem - almost as the first thing he did - but after one miserable attempt at using it, Dave had given up and kept the young women prisoners merely out of spite and because he could. Without the constant shaming of the Manosphere that any male not having sex with women and lots of it were failing in their manhood, Dave had found, now that he could have it whenever he wanted and as often as he liked, with whoever he wanted, that sex with women didn’t actually interest him that much, or sex with anyone. He had control of his machines and the terror-forced adulation of every human that remained on Earth. That was enough for him. He was a simple man at heart.

   What he did crave, what he couldn’t get enough of, was displaying his new power and control, and lauding it frequently over the rest of humanity. It was fitting and deserving thing for him to do. It gave him joy. And that was how the New World Order was to continue, daily, with Dave on the front platform of a KCGM Caterpillar 793 travelling down the main street of whichever town or city he chose to visit. The people of each place, bowing down in reverence or cheering his praises – either was acceptable to Dave – for the rest of his (now) not-so-human life.