AMAZING!!!!!!!
/spoilers
this is such a creative and gripping take on the robot takeover genre as well as storytelling with the internet as the subject for that matter. it works so so well and you take what's honestly a really hostile source material for tense and solemn writing and somehow manage to nail it anyways. i'm sure you're very aware of that though, like this story's full of that sense of interpersonal disconnection, loneliness, and that oh so uncomfortable mingling of serious and desperate and crass and comedic which if there was a point to explore the internet in literature that would be it and its done SO WELL here!! i also like how when the thesbots turn rogue there's actually not much explicitly seen or said about them, and we entirely stop hearing from the bots themselves, which leaves them as this sort of faceless silent probably enormous horde stalking the streets which knows where you live and all of your family's names which is so creepy in such a good way. my favourite is jessie green's death announcement and the 'we think she was followed' line like even know we don't know what they're thinking at all we just know they DO think and they premeditate like URGGG foaming at the mouth rn. and there's so much good done with the timeline itself like the trends and jokes and bickering and ads and trades post killer robots and again its that internet bathos and it doesnt make you go 'oh this story doesnt want to be taken seriously :/' it just makes you go 'oh my god....' and throughout the story there's already this kind of looming thought of 'hmm how many of these people are real and not just bots trying to sneak survivor information' especially after the let's player's death + automated video upload and that tension was born for a purpose and by god does it achieve it because the final korvo announcements of 'twitter might be compromised' to 'vulnerable meetup details at this place and (im assuming 'typo' to throw off bots?) time' to 'TWITTER IS COMPROMISED' is SOOO GGUOOD like this is LITERALLY ernest hemingway iceberg theory like this is high art. UGHK and the OPENING/ENDING TWIST like its such a good setup because you see these kind of dated cheesy internet jokes with inexplicit dates and youre like oh this is an old ass phone and omgg the creeping horror and tension of seeing people give way to ads and then the ads give way to people again and hold on those messages look familiar and !HOLY MOLY!!! ik ive said it sm atp but its SO GOOD and creepy like now the faceles silent enormous horde is just taking up the faces of all these dead people and parroting their cheesy early internet era phrases like AGAIN its the 'this should be lame and corny' but its TENSE AND CREEPY like the ability to do that and take an unorthodox and absurd and typically trite subject + medium and turning it into this tense eerie grimly comedic thriller is just nothing short of amazing and a real testament to your skill and creativity as a writer. it's such a short story but such an efficient one and truly gives the sense of a whole other world full of real people and their anguish, grief, and hopeless humour. anyways i'm almost done feverishly fanboying but i dont really know how else to summarise this other than that your writing is incredible, and that this story is just so endearingly, stabbingly, and distressingly human. (even more so, that it doesn't end with them!!)