“Autofac” is episode eight of season one of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams and is based on the short story of the same name.
It opens with a woman driving in a car past a sign saying Autofac, which makes her smile. The news on the radio mentions the rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia. The woman tries to change the channel on the radio but is struggling to get a channel when she sees a large missile flying low overhead. The woman pulls over the car and sees the missile hit a city in the distance, destroying it in a nuclear explosion. As the air blast hits another woman, who looks similar but much grubbier, is woken up by a man.
She, Emily, and two men head out in a salvaged vehicle with a weapon hanging from a hoist on the back. The city is destroyed and they are hunting a delivery drone. It seems that, after the world was destroyed, the automated factories kept churning out goods for now-dead consumers.
The drone is shot down with the vehicle-mounted weapon, which looks like some sort of air cannon. It’s been 20 years since the war ended and Emily and the others want to contact the Autofac AI and get it to speak to them. The survivors want the Autofac to shut down, because it is churning out goods that are not needed and turning the land into a polluted wasteland as a result. The Autofac kills to defend itself and is perfectly willing to send out suicide drones to deal with attackers. It is also protecting its supply lines so that it can continue manufacturing goods.
Emily manages to submit a customer service request and the Autofac states that a representative will be sent out to deal with them. The representative arrives in a much, much bigger drone is a humanoid robot – a simulacrum designed to interact with humans – called Alice. The survivors say that they don’t need the Autofac, and Alice says that perhaps it would be better if humans depended on the Autofac.
The Autofac does not seem to be hugely willing to cooperate. Nor is it unaware that no-one is taking its goods, or that the world has ended. According to Emily, who has some serious coding skills, Alice’s program is ridiculously complicated, far more than it needs to be. It almost seems as if the Autofac has been evolving without humans around. If the Autofac won’t shut itself down, the survivors will need to shut it down themselves. Permanently and with extreme prejudice. But things are not what they seem.