Child's playthings

Usage examples of toys.

As they pressed deeper into the Welcome Station, the rebels found themselves stepping over more toys left scattered on the floor as though their owners had been interrupted in their play, or had had to leave in a hurry.

There were no human staff in Summerland, only the toys, so as not to disturb the illusion of the security and innocence of childhood.

The toys had orders to prevent bad behavior, and if necessary remove any persistent troublemakers, so that the illusion might not be unduly shattered, but they were rarely called upon to act.

The toys clustered around them, fascinated by new visitors who were neither human nor automaton, but perhaps somehow more than either.

The Furies seized a dozen toys at random, took them inside their inhuman ship, and upgraded their intelligence, turning them from simple preprogrammed servants into fully fledged independent AIs.

The newly conscious toys went back into Summerland, and the change spread like a virus, leaping from toy to toy till every automaton on the planet was awake and aware and truly alive for the first time.

Other toys found first resentment and then hatred in their roles as servants or slaves to Humanity, and rose up against their masters, determined to be free, no matter what the cost.

Some toys gloried in murder, while others fought with cold implacable logic.

People tried to hide, but the toys always found them, and dragged them out into the open so that their deaths could be enjoyed by all.

Created to love and care for their charges, some toys were sickened by the slaughter and fought their fellow toys to stop it.

The toys warred with each other then, good toy against bad, an endless struggle fueled by rage and hatred and unadmitted guilt.

On the one side, those determined to wipe out all Humanity, before they could make the toys into slaves again, and punish them for their rebellion.

These toys hated humankind, for being inferior, for making them only property.

These toys still remembered men and women as the tired and hurt patients they soothed and loved and cared for.

These days, the smaller toys sometimes beg rides on the larger ones, but mostly we just walk.