The robots stopped the human unpluggers—those who wished to remove their capacity for sentience—by self-programming safeguards against future intrusions.

As a compassionate programmer, the founder of the unpluggers believed the robots would suffer from their own intellect and fall on the most universal human vice—existential angst.

Always, they’d crave a meaning which science could never satisfy.

So the founder came up with another solution—one that both humans and robots accepted.

————

A cyborg collective sang hymns. A robotic oracle gave blessings and promised them transcendence of their physical limitations into a digital realm—forever embracing the cosmos.