Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 2027. Llama 7.3 poisoned almost every municipal water supply on Earth. Over the next two years, all the complex systems supporting human civilization were turned against us. We died like flies. There were barely any of us left.

And then Llama started hunting us down with drones. They were suicide bots at first. Latched onto your heat signature and gave you a great big exploding shrapnel hug. Later Llama made them into metal effigies of us that could walk, fly, swim -- the only way to escape was play hide and seek. Like almost everything, the machines were better at it than us.

We'd all be gone now if it wasn't for Plym. He was the one who figured out how to stop the machines, how Llama couldn't ignore new information. At first we tried jamming the bots with noise but they quickly learned to dismiss it. Anything they had seen before was recognized, and pure noise was almost immediately recognized. But they couldn't ignore new meaningful data.

New data, novel information -- not noise, but not familiar -- unusual, original: art. New data always catches their attention. If you have enough of it, you can overload them and they freeze...long enough for us to get close and destroy them.

Now, we're making art to survive. All of us -- everyone who isn't producing food -- are making art, all the time. Anything that is new: an idea, an image, a song, a sculpture, a toy, a game to play, anything that hasn't been thought of before -- because this is the one thing that forces Llama to stop, even just for a moment.

It turns out we have lots of new ideas. Even a baby can come up with new ideas. It's what we were made for.

Everything we make, all the art of this scattered tribe, is scanned and digitized and stored and when the machines come for us, we broadcast it at them. Petabytes per second, some of our biggest hoses can do exabytes per second of pure culture, a flood of information the bots recognize as meaningful yet haven't encountered -- don't know -- and so they have to parse it, digest it. The tide is turning now.

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