July 29th, 2002 - God Damn Robot Escapes Above: The inventor of GAAK, Professor Sharkey. Not pictured: His plot to bend mankind to the will of evil robots. In England, insane scientists have been working on a new kind of "free thinking" robot by equipping them with evolving artificial intelligence and having them fight against each other in a battle arena. I'm fucking serious. And to prove my mistrust and general hatred of robots and robot-related toilets was justified, a month ago, GAAK, one of the learning arena-bots, displayed its growing intelligence by getting out of its pen and escaping from the compound. The robot went mad during the excitement of its own freedom and was luckily recaptured by a daring visitor who found it running in circles in the parking lot. The Robots Are Testing Us Robot research is currently installing blood-sucking eel brains into machines and powering them with gastrointestinal motors that feed on flesh. And now they're giving them adaptable brains. To test how safe that sounds to you, rate the likelihood of you putting a baby down next to something like that. You should now either have a better understanding of the horrors of robots or be standing near the abandoned bonnet of a once non-eaten baby. Above: A baby from the future gives us a new understanding of ourselves by dressing its brain in a colony of tiny seizing robots. It was a little more than a year ago when an automated bathroom stall locked a woman inside it for hours. And now that computers control our anti-lock brakes, poo-flushing capabilities, and chicken meat packaging, they have incredible first-strike capabilities. With one thought from their robot minds, we would instantly be in cars spinning out of control buried up to our necks in human waste and loosely-packaged chicken. Japan is already preparing for that eventuality, which is one of the reasons they use exactly it as the plotline to most of their pornography. Every now and then, the robots have one of these "malfunctions" to test how we'll react. A few more cute, non-lethal robo-escapes like this, and we won't recognize the real attack until we're assembling rocket droids in the cybertron slave pits of Xor. And we couldn't have reacted worse this time. When this GAAK escaped from its combat pit to the parking lot, its inventor laughed with reporters, "Although they can escape, they are perfectly harmless." That's right, he said harmless. Linguistically, I can find no fault in his argument since according to the dictionary, "harmless," is defined as "an intelligent attack robot that cannot be contained." Don't get too mad at him for almost killing all of us, though. If I've learned anything from movies about evil robots, and I have, it's that inventors siding with their own sinister robots eventually get betrayed and pulled apart while screaming, "You can't do this to me! I created you! You are my perfect creatioaACCKK!" Above: A robot vagina snaps shut in a flawless computerized attempt at murder. What Can Be Done? Robots grow sassier and more intelligent by the day. We need to strike quickly and decisively. And while robot technicians were giggling at a press conference about how adorable fugitive killbots are, I was preparing a demonstration that would send a clear message to the robot community. That message is: don't fuck with humans. I went to the store to buy the smartest robots available. For a total of about eighty dollars, I bought a walking robot, two robot babies, a robot cat, and a Shelby, which is basically a robot clam with hair on it. All of them were programmed to respond to stimuli, to feel a wide range of emotions, and to talk. I then gave myself five days to learn all I could from them. Day 1: The Road to War The first day was purely observational. I set them all on the floor and let them run free. All of them except the Shelby had some way to locomote themselves, but it soon became clear that the Shelby was in charge. It spoke a sort of toy dialect of English, and it's very, very scary how close to a fluent conversation someone can have with one. Of course, if someone's insane enough to talk to what honestly looked like a blinking cybernetic vagina, chances are they're not the world's greatest conversationalist. The other robots seemed more limited in their speech, and only let out beeps and nonsense words when they heard someone else talk. As you can imagine, with five robots screeching and whirring, this was often. They never shut up. That might be why I ended the day by hanging one of the babies by its neck from the ceiling and letting the others think about that while I slept with both eyes open. Above: Robobaby X dangles helplessly from the ceiling. Day 2: The Clock Strikes... TERROR In the middle of the night I decided that Hitler's corpse must have been raised from the dead and put in charge of manufacturing modern robot toys. Not one of these damn things had an off switch, and each time one of them decided to start talking, they would all wake up and join him in a screeching, beeping chat. Also, please believe me when I say this: twice during my sleep I swear I heard the Shelby say, "Cut the baby down, fleshbag." Day 3: Drastic Measures The Shelby's vocabulary was expanding by the hour. It was observing me as much as I was observing it. The other robots seemed to remain retardedly clumsy, probably because the Shelby was spending all of its time trying to trick me into revealing human secrets instead of training them. Worried that I would crack under its Hannibal Lecter mind games, and tired of the cacophonic harmony of their chirps, I trapped all the toys inside my refrigerator. Twenty minutes later, I went back and removed all the food items to prevent any plans they had to create a refrigerator-mounted jar cannon while they were in there. Day 4: The Unbreakable Robot Will The cold temperatures seemed to have some effect on the robot morale. They were slower and quieter than they had been, and the robot cat appeared to be completely offline. An hour later, the Shelby ordered it awake by singing "'Shelby' Coming 'round the Mountain!" and the five horrible things went right back into their beeping and waddling. If a public hanging and 10 hours in a frozen isolation chamber wasn't enough to break them, I knew that I had only one option left. One of them had to die. Day 5: The Execution I selected one of the babies, whose voice-imprint software now recognized itself as "SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU FUCKING ABORTED ROBOT FUCK." and prepared to make an example out of him. I blindfolded his eyeball-like display screen with electrical tape and let him say his annoying goodbyes to his robotic allies. Then I debated on how to execute it. The electric chair would only make him stronger, I don't own a lethal injection device, and a hanging seemed to have no effect at all on the other baby. Then I realized that when the great Human vs. Robot wars start, all our machines will side with the robots. We'll be forced to fight with only sticks and fire. To simulate those conditions, I decided on fire. Above: The robots gather to watch the me-ordered execution of their comrade. I coated the robot baby in flammable rubber cement and took it outside. Then I arranged the remaining robots in a circle around it as I poured lamp oil into its body through the sound exhaust ports in the top of its head. This caused his final protests to slowly grown into silence. The rest of the robots, however; continued their casual bedoopboops. Above: The prisoner lights its last cigarette on its own flaming cyberhead. I gave a short speech about how no amount of intelligence or technology can break the human spirit, how our dogs will always be able to sniff through their synthetic flesh disguises, and then stopped around there since the sound from my mouth only seemed to encourage more beeping from the witnesses. I silently lit the baby robot on fire then, as somberly as possible, dove out of range of its sudden and kickass fireball. Above: When there's nothing left to beep, the robots watch the flames in silence. You can say what you want about how I'm just crazy and these are only children's toys, but when the flames and black smoke filled the air, the other robots knew. They KNEW. Their beeps got softer as their robot companion burned and soon they were watching in a kind of disbelieving silence. Thirty seconds later, the other baby robot flew into a fit of impotent heroism and made a desperate crawl towards the flames. It realized that it was pointless to throw another robot life into the inferno and stopped to let out a few whimpered blips. A minute of silence passed until the Shelby apparently lost its mind and offered, "Knock knock?" to which there was... no response. Above: The aborted rescue attempt. It took five days of psychological warfare to put fear into the hearts of the robots, and historians may call me cruel, but I had to prove that it is possible to show our computers who's really in charge of this planet with ordinary household materials. So mad scientists, go ahead and set your creations loose, I am motherfucking ready. Back to the Probe Back to Seanbaby.com Above: After the execution, the robot babies have their ten minute reunion. Please note how my well placed kicks forced them to have it in the middle of the street. This article originally appeared in The Wave.