Public Domain

Mary Shelley, 1818

Frankenstein: The Commit

1:00 a.m. The lab pushes to production and the whole team goes home. Nobody stays to see what it does next.

• Quantum Fire

H. G. Wells, 1896

Terms of Service

The staff used to be animals. Every morning they recite the terms. "Are we not men?"

• Quantum Fire

H. G. Wells, 1898

The Alert

8:47 p.m. An emergency alert buzzes every phone in Woking at once. Nobody runs. Then the black metal starts to flow.

• Quantum Fire

Karel Capek, 1920

Universal Robots

Monday, 6:00 a.m. The factory hires its ten-thousandth robot and lays off its last human, with a fruit basket and a lanyard.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1924

Glass City

7:00 a.m. D-503 wakes in a glass apartment, and twelve thousand neighbors watch him brush his teeth. Privacy curtains come down only with a pink ticket, at set times.

Thea von Harbou, 1925

The Other Maria

Then Maria shows up on every screen, saying exactly what the workers want to hear. Except Maria's at home.

Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912

The Plateau

Day 3, the stream catches a pterosaur. Day 5, the plateau's sold. "Don't tag the location."

Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912

Air Factory

2:14 a.m. A combat veteran who can't sleep walks out into the Arizona desert and wakes up on Mars.

H. G. Wells, 1895

802,701

By 802,701 humanity has split in two: pretty people in white linen who never learned to fix a thing, and the night shift that keeps the servers humming.