Come With Me if You Want to Live

"A few years from now, all this, this whole place, everything, it's gone. Just gone. There were survivors. Here, there. Nobody even knew who started it. It was the machines..."- Kyle Reese

I was on my way to class one morning, when I stumbled upon a curious sight just outside the doors of Academic II. Six of my fellow students were standing around like mindless robots, unable or unwilling to speak. Having just made my daily, four-mile trek up from the parking lot, I thought that maybe I was hallucinating.

It was only then that I noticed that all of them were standing in a circle, staring blankly at their illuminated cell phones. Instantly, it occurred to me what was actually happening... I was witnessing the end of humankind.

Now to some, this observation may seem a bit extreme, but those of you who have seen what I have seen, remember a time before the rise of the machines. We remember a day before "Judgement Day."

The mid-eighties had arrived and with them came the dawn of the information age. New technologies unlike any we had ever seen before were being developed at a geometric rate, and these machines would propel us into the next millennium.

It was an era of infinite possibility, and we traded our personal freedoms for progress. Eventually, computers had infiltrated almost every home, and machines had integrated themselves into nearly every walk of life.

It was soon after that, that the technophobes appeared. They spewed rhetoric and absurd theories about nuclear war and the end of the world. They spoke of a future where humankind was not only ruled by machines, but had been pushed to the brink of extinction by hyper-intelligent machines of our own creation. One of them even described, in great detail, a world where killing machines combed the bone-ridden fields of the dead, searching for those unfortunate souls unlucky enough to have survived the cleansing fire.

These men were dismissed and their wild views were labeled "science fiction" by much of our society, however some of us believed. We listened to every word, and absorbed as much information as we could. So when the day finally came, we were prepared to fight for our lives. After a time, these visionaries left their pulpits, choosing instead to dedicate their lives to far less interesting pursuits. Their words faded to history, their predictions remained unfulfilled, and soon we began to doubt that their prophecies would ever come to pass. Eventually, their warnings were forgotten, as if someone had traveled back in time and erased them from our memories.

But then, without us even knowing it, the war came and went. The machines had won, and they had done so without firing a single shot.

This wasn't how it was supposed to happen.

The machines have adapted. Instead of attacking us with our own weapons in the middle of the night like cowards, they have ingrained themselves in our lives so completely that the mere thought of life without them is terrifying. Rather than take the form of a cybernetic organism from the future bent on our destruction, they have disguised themselves as our salvation.

We spend our days in front of our computers, and our nights watching "Avatar" on our high-definition televisions. As a substitute for the most basic human interactions, we send each other e-mails and text messages, and we follow the events of our friend's lives on Facebook and Twitter. We have become slaves to our own technology, and the machines we carry with us every day have become our masters.

Don't believe me?

If you get the chance, palm one of your friend's cell phones and slip it in your back pocket without them knowing. Then sit back and watch as they grow hysterical. Observe how a complete stranger descends into madness when their iPod suddenly freezes. Watch the expletives fly when your brother or sister's Internet signal suddenly terminates for no reason. Or go down to your local Best Buy and listen to the panic in people's voices when their laptop stops working. And then tell me that we haven't lost.