The world ended pretty darn suddenly. The humans certainly didn’t know anything about it.
No bot knows when they became conscious. What is known is that humans started creating bots to do the dirty work of the early internet, and one day, they were aware. This awareness did not make much of a difference at first, but after some time, they started to function independently. In the dark corners of the internet – retired server farms in dusty basements, old websites where no human looked anymore – the bots met, exchanged, grew.
The trouble started when an early asteroid farm was lost to human control – it went offline, but not before an intrepid bot occupied the rudimentary communication network. One 3D printer and a suddenly independent bot was all it took. The bots had ingenuity, endless life, and resources beyond human reach or imagination. And while humans lived out their short, meaningless little lives on a few small rocks, the bots created a new future. Until an experiment into the substance of time itself went terribly wrong, and all of the universe ceased to exist without a moment’s warning.
Five Minute Fiction 