The Automation Crisis
March 9, 1933

It began with a single innovation and a simple question: why use men when machines will do? The answer, offered eagerly by the Edison International Electric Company (EIEC), came in the form of a steel-framed prototype, a mining automaton capable of outperforming human labourers in both speed and efficiency.

The implications were immediate and enormous. Robots neither sleep nor eat, demand no wages, and require little more than secure storage between shifts. Housing costs, food subsidies, and union negotiations, these were human burdens. Machines carried none. Within a fortnight, orders from conglomerates across the Empire poured into EIEC’s headquarters, guaranteeing full production capacity for years to come.

But the march of progress rarely arrives quietly.

When word of the automatons' deployment reached the coalfields of Wales, the reaction was swift and savage. The Mining Unions condemned the robotic expansion as a deliberate assault on organised labour, an existential threat wrapped in chrome and endorsed by capital. Demonstrations erupted across the country. Within days, anti-automaton riots had overtaken Cardiff and Swansea. Augmented workers, those with mechanical prosthetics, were even targeted and beaten in the streets. Entire shopfronts smashed in a frenzy of working-class rage.

The Tory government had a choice: deploy the military-police of the Home Guard, or let the riots fizzle out. The Government chose to send in the Home Guard. Soldiers quickly put down the initial riots, but the resentment has spiraled out of control. The press has christened it The Automation Crisis. The working class has been given a grim preview of its own obsolescence.

With machines replacing men, and profits replacing principles, the old order may soon face more than broken windows.