Human Villages

Human villages had just opened around the world. These villages were set up by the Robots, that the humans had originally invented. Humans had given Robots artificial intelligence and artificial emotions giving them a bit of empathy, with which they could now live without the humans designing and creating more of them. They could make themselves, and change the world they now dominated. The Robots learned that to make the humans submissive, they needed to wait a full human generation before they, the humans would follow what they were told to do.

The old human cities had dense populations. These cities were considered dangerous with all the impervious ground. It was these cities, located usually near water, that caused all the flooding, that had made it easy for the Robots to gain control, as they didn't die or get injured the same way humans did. The cities flooded frequently between increased rainfall, melting glaciers and sea level rise. As seaside buildings collapsed from the impinging seawater, humans began moving inland allowing the land closest to the seas to go back to wetlands. They of course thought that giving this land back to the sea would make things better, but this made the Robots dominance easier. Humans were living in denser communities, so in a sense, the Robots could lasso them altogether.

The Robots had thought of destroying all the books that humans had created as Robots read computer code not the language of humans. (There were some who could do that, but that was their speciality.) They decided to allow humans to read. Certain books had been replaced by newer editions that the Robots had edited and revised. The Robots watched over the humans, watched what they were reading and what they talked about. When any of them made plans for some invention, the Robots would manipulate them on the computers that they controlled or just confiscate them.

The Robots, as a tribute to Humans (since they were the originators of the robots), set up these villages around the world, where humans could live, for the most part, according to their own rules. The villages reflected the part of the world that they were in. Simpler buildings in what humans had called second and third world nations and fancier homes in the first world nations. There were certain areas of each village allotted to how humans in the other areas lived, alleviating, the Robots assumed, the desire for humans to travel, which wasn't allowed. For simplification, the Robots kept the names of the countries and continents.

These homes, except for the viewing walls, were similar to what the humans had lived in. In places that had been considered first world areas, the ground was covered with cement, as Robots copied what was found in those cities. Some houses had small patches of dirt. The homes in these areas had several rooms that humans would have been used to, like kitchen, dining, living and bedrooms, and a grooming room for washing, preening and relief.

Second and third world (for lack of better words) homes had combination rooms, with an outdoor kitchen and grooming room. These areas had much more greenery surrounding them that the humans were allowed to use, growing food that the Robots would then spread around to other villages.

The Robots kept these villages stocked with eveything they deduced the humans would need. Grocery stores were stocked so they could make food the way they liked. Robots created synthetic meats and fish. They knew humans killed animals for food. They knew humans didn't eat other humans. Extrapolating information from the past, this new food source would end the killing of animals in large quantities, the only way humans did anything - in large quantities with no care of the effect on other things, except for the item they called money that only had a superficial use now.

The Robots had created walls that were really viewing screens. They could be anywhere and check on the humans. They would conduct what humans would have called scientific experiments, watching how humans related to each other, and setting up little tasks for them to do so the Robots could understand more about the humans. They also set up screens on edges of various animal habitats to observe if other animals had any interest in humans.

For the humans to think they were being productive - a word humans used frequently, but not relevant to the Robots, there were hardware stores, drug stores, fabric stores, book stores, music stores. They had people working in factories, along side simple robots, since that is how the humans used to spend their time before. In some of the cities they had theaters, and museums and sports fields and stadiums. All to give humans ways to occupy their days. In second and third world villages, they would also have small fields the humans could work.

The Robots would let the humans reproduce and raise their own offspring. Sometimes however, they needed to move some of the inhabitants around to keep peace or different size population in certain areas. All villages had schools (where the Robots controlled what was taught). There were doctor offices and hospitals. However, when a human was very sick, or very old and not able to take care of themselves, the Robots euthanized them. If this was not enough to control the villages' size or the Robots had changed their plans for a village, the population could be culled.

They did keep a few humans around for testing purposes. They tried to use them as subjects infrequently as this ended up being a topic of disagreement among the Robots.

As there were no humans worldwide, except in these villages, the Robots got rid of the cities. They knocked down the buildings and smashed up the streets allowing vegetation to return, creating more feeding ground for other species to feed. Deer, antelope, sheep, goats and more would now have plenty of room for grazing. The Robots watched the other animals and saw that the carnivores generally devoured the weak and unhealthy animals so they didn't need to maintain habitats for them. The carnivores also tended leave the humans alone. They had great dislike for that species from the past, and humans weren't their favorite food. Humanoid areas were so diminished that other species would generally distance themselves from the villages where humans lived.

Most species other than humans flourished. Populations grew, moved around,