Disaster 5: Carnivorous Robots

Robots that eat for fuel are dubbed “gastrobots” and are becoming a trend in the field…because apparently a good number of robotics engineers have the same bizarre fetish of being chewed and digested in the cold steel guts of metal beasts. There are a slew of Gastrobots existing in the world right now: The Chew-Chew is a robot resembling a toy train that runs on sugar cubes. A robot being developed at the University of the West of England that eats slugs is another. That’s not too bad, right? As long as it stops somewhere short of government contracts being penned for flesh-eating robots, I suppose humanity will end up all right.
 
Oh, surely you didn’t think it was going to stop at that mild-to-moderate level of terror, did you? That’s adorable!
 
No, science is not just “teaching toy trains to eat sugar.” If the world was that innocent, we’d all be riding unicorns to our jobs at the kitten factory where the only “emissions” would be rainbows and kitten sighs. Sadly, ours is a world of far more terrible consequences: The US Government has commissioned a third party developer to build and refine Gastrobots for use on the battlefield. That’s right: We’re currently building warbots that power themselves on corpses. The robot digestive tracts are being developed by a corporation called Cyclone Power, who prefers to call them “beta biomass engine systems.”

Yeah, sure. I like to tell the police that I’m practicing “body freedom,” but in the end I still get arrested for indecent exposure; you fuckers built a carnivorous robot. Just own up already, and admit that what you’ve dubbed the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot is really a–Wait…oh God. Did you get that?

Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot: EATR.

OK, never mind: Nobody is trying to disguise the fear factor of this technology. It’s plain to see they’re not exactly trying to placate the masses with comforting marketing jargon when something called “Cyclone Power” unveils their “EATR War Bots.” An announcement that straight-up threatening would make Cobra Commander anxiety-puke into his face mask. These are out-and-out super-villains hell-bent on world destruction, and you know what? There’s actually something downright refreshing about that kind of honesty in a corporation these days.

Robert Brockway is the author of Everything is Going to Kill Everybody and an editor and columnist for Cracked.com and runs the successful humor site IFightRobots.com. He lives in Portland, Oregon.