The island was small, away from the mainland, secure, private and not talked about.
Well, within government circles it may get discussed by a very few. No governments like to advertise the sort of research that went on there. The development of robots for military purposes isn’t very nice at the best of times, but at this facility it was all about the delivery of highly toxic chemical agents designed to wipe out a great number of combatants quickly and with minimal human involvement. Robots were being built and programmed to do this very thing, and the relatively small group of scientists that lived and worked on the island needed a peaceful environment in which to design and construct their machines of death.
The island consisted of a large laboratory complex where thirty odd specialist scientists worked, and a small residential area where they were housed along with a small administration and maintenance staff. A population of around fifty that had very little contact with the outside world and were only visited once a year by a supply ship. As working groups go, their provisions were plentiful, their needs were met, and they lived in an environment of relative luxury. This would have stayed this way had it not been for two things. The first, being a frivolous decision and the second a failure in the matter of storage.
At a committee meeting it was decided that the contentious issue within the maintenance staff regarding who should be responsible for putting all of the dustbins out and bringing them in again should be resolved once and for all. Considering how many highly advanced test robots they had in storage, it would be easy to programme a group of these machines to operate on a daily schedule of keeping the entire complex free of rubbish, thereby resolving the issue. Within a few days these were programmed and put to work. All went well. The robots took out the bins, and the regular driverless trucks collected the rubbish and took it to the landfill site at the far end of the island. No human intervention was required. Whether all this came about as a welcome distraction from their more serious duties will never be known.
The second, and more important issue, was the storage of several large canisters of the project’s deadly poison that were held in a warehouse built for the purpose. The building was spacious enough to use as an assembly point for the robots that dealt with the rubbish. It was never considered that the weekly mass movement of robots coming and going on a weekly basis could vibrate and weaken the racks that held the canisters. However, it was on the third week of all this busy coming and going that one of the main legs of the rack system gave way, distorting the framework sufficiently to topple all canisters to the ground. Only three of the ten containers broke open, but this was enough; more than enough.
There was little wind that day, allowing the heavy, invisible and odourless gas to slowly but surely cover the entire island in an ankle-deep layer of deadly vapour that would be stirred by the early morning movements of the inhabitants; those that were still alive. By mid-morning there was not a living soul on the island. As a result of the extremely virulent nature of this particular chemical agent all tissue and bone matter was reduced to dust inside of a week. Only piles of clothing remained.
The authorities on the mainland knew nothing of this for several weeks. When a complete lack of communication became a concern, a small patrol boat arrived and a party of security officers landed to make enquiries. The small team was quite safe, owing to the natural elements having dispersed the toxic agent within the first few days of the spill, but they were shocked by the devastating scene that confronted them. Not to mention the fact that a dedicated team of robots were observed to be diligently carrying out empty bins, that were tipped into an empty driverless truck, to be taken to the dump where it tipped its empty load onto an undisturbed rubbish site.