As Vicious as Roman Rule
You had asked for something significant to change, and leaving the robot in charge was certainly not bringing an outcome you have seen before down here.
Or at least not outright this blatant. Disappearances for disagreement. Demand of worship. One mind, one mantra.
Humanity had a words for these things. Dystopia. Cults. Ever since They came back, you have been thinking of a book you read, that you once had no frame of reference for understandings. It had been a book long abandoned in the dump, and your friend had avoided it, but you, eager to know what the human world was like, had tried to read it. But you didn't really understand, even as They tried to explain it.
Now you have a very real example playing out in front of you.
"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull."
For all there was a statue of the scientist, she was nowhere to be seen. You have some ideas of where you might find her. Did she choose it for herself, or was it the first disappearance? It does not particularly matter, as all of this is temporary, though it may mean something for a future variation.
But they will never know. Ignorance is Strength here, because it means they can still try. They think they can put their head down, and stay quiet, and continue to eat, sleep, work, and function. And that's what they will keep doing, regardless of who leads them, or what future they face into. A continuation of life underground, of never seeing the sun, to be born and die in stagnation.
"The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed."
Monsters have been kept, sealed, below for so long, that they are but myths to humans now. They can grow cruel or kind individually, but together they are a mob. And while monsters fall down from despair down here, humans grow in millions by the day.
There isn't a way out, there isn't hope, and more and more Monsters fall down in despair as that realization creeps through their bones, never to get up again. What would be the point?
Long ago, in a variation that has no longer happened, you realised there wasn't one.
I'd felt this one was particularly 1984, though another quote from that book showed up in the previous chapter