Guns don't kill people. Robots kill people.

created by Gamaliel

(idea) by allseeingeye (1.7 wk) (print) ? (I like it!) 21 C!s Fri Apr 04 2003 at 16:13:51

I hate the NSA. They have been up my ass since this whole nightmare started. Stewing in a "secure location" with a neck brace on for the last month has done nothing to improve my disposition. I was as surprised as any of them. Hell, they saw the video. I guess I should start at the beginning.

World opinion is a bitch when you're a politician these days. We have all these wonderful modern weapons, but if we use them to defend the country or sort out a hotspot in some backwater shithole, people freak the fuck out. Hell, its been 120 years since somebody even thought about a nuke. Its taboo. So, if your hands are tied by the lily-livered public, you go black ops. And for the last 50 years, the secret defense industry has been swimming in cash. A few years at MIT, half a week in Quantico and a plane ride to Langley started my career. I had more money than a goddamn movie star, and I never used it. The work ate my life.

So, after working on some shitty sat-recon analyzers and orbital wiretaps, I landed the holy grail of projects. I mean, this thing was so black it didn't even cast a shadow. My first run in with National Security occurred about an hour into the job application. They grilled me on why I was eating corned beef from Brazil. How the fuck that was dangerous to the nation, I don't know. Foreign influence I guess. Anyway, after 3 months of jumping through hoops for those clowns, I was in. An X project.

I even got "disappeared". They drugged me at work, hauled me off to "The Shop" and stuck a Witness Relocation guy in my apartment. 3 days later, my cat and about half my Playboys arrived. I never really cared. I was in.

Executive Order 2914-04 authorized the creation and use of nonbiological constructs for the elimination of dire threats to national and global security. Assassin droids. I dropped a gold brick in my shorts at the briefing. The order came down a day ago, and 6 "platforms" were waiting to go. My cherry new job was to monitor performance. I got to compile statistics on murderers. I found out later that I was a replacement. There had been an accident.

It was 4 days before I saw one up close. Locked upright in its port, it looked like an NBA star painted matte black. Taller and thinner than possible for a human, it stood about 8 feet tall with long thick fingers. The most disturbing feature was the face, or lack there of. It looked like one of those department store mannequins with all the details ground off. No eyes, no ears, nothing. All that crap was done with vibration sensors and passive radar. Not one unsealed joint made this baby all weather. The tiny jack for diagnostics was on the right wrist. I ran my hand over the smooth modular shell that covered alloys I can't even begin to explain, and one tiny gold star was stamped under the number 9 impression on the left shoulder. The comp geeks called it Kill -9, some archaic joke that was too obscure to explain. It was the last in the series. They had destroyed 1 and 2 in combat tests against each other, and 3 was decommissioned after crushing my predecessor. Official report said he knocked it into self defense mode. Word around the lab was it wasn't even turned on.

The List occupied a 20 foot tall screen in the Ops Center. These guys and gals got a big red X from Uncle Sam, and our job was to cancel their subscriptions. I saw some wild shit on those screens. Like the time 7 punched through the roof of an APC and pulled most of a South Asian general out the ragged hole. When 5 jumped down nine stories to land on his target feet first. I spilled hot coffee all over after 4 got hit with an RPG and had to bug out. The SEAL team recovered him 36 miles away, running full out, holding its own damn arm. The no evidence routine checked out fine. The ones we all watched carefully were Kill -9 missions.

9 did some crazy shit. He stuck to ceilings, he hid under floors, he jumped out windows and kicked in doors. It got to be like watching a wild sci-fi vid. Kill-9 got mop up jobs. When 4 screwed up in China, 9 finished the job like it wasn't even hard. Slowly but surely, 9 replaced the others. When they hauled it back to the Shop, I always got first dibs. Jacking up and ripping numbers, my report was due 30 minutes after recovery. Wiping the gore off 9 was somebody else's problem. I never noticed the bug.

We got to within five names of the end of the List. A goddamn cake walk in Brazil was the straw that broke the camel's back. 9 did a HALO drop and landed hard. The GPS lock went off-line, but the uplink stayed on so we let him run. He kept dropping off target, distracted by threats it would normally ignore. When he picked up the gun, the whole room hushed. They don't know how to use guns. 9 did. Like a master. The signal dropped 29.8 seconds later. 9 was AWOL.

I like to describe what happened next as a shitstorm. SEALS went in to recover him. No bot. Delta Force did a SAR mission. No bot but lots of bodies. The NSA locked us down and we all got the CIA's best psychological examination. No bot. In the black ops world, this is flush time. Bye Bye Executive Order 2914-04.

So my new job is to help the Company wash its hands of the whole thing. I got the job of pulling the plug on 4 through 8. Heading back out to the lab, I get a strange feeling. Call it intuition or whatever. My skin was crawling when I got there. Then I was looking at a Ops Center production in living color. 9 dropped off the fucking ceiling and pinned me 6 feet up a concrete wall with its oversized paw. By the neck. Choking and scared, I see 9 turn to the camera mounted behind the door. It regards me with its blank face and does some crazy shit with its free hand in front of me. It was all so quiet except for the gagging noise I was making. 9 pushed forward on his hand and I blacked out.

My neck broke in 2 places. Turns out the crazy hand motions were sign language. Individual letters.

I C A M E F O R M Y B R O T H E R S

The lab was empty when they found me.

(place) by czeano (17.8 hr) (print) ? (I like it!) 1 C! Thu Apr 10 2003 at 13:25:06

In a dark cabal hideout (a mad scientist's lair)
The smell of fresh corpses spoiling the air
From a lab labelled "SECRET," I saw a shimmering light
My mind grew focused and my pupils wide
I should have run for my life!
There he stood in the doorway
I heard his manic scream
And I was thinking to myself
This could be real or just a bad dream
Then he threw the big knife switch, electricity arced
There was clanking down the corridor and I heard him shout:

"Welcome to life, my big red robot!
You're Destruct-o-Bot (with a patent, nyah)
Plenty of folks in the greater metro region:
Any time I say, you will kill and maim"

His bot was made just for killing, he broke Azimov's rules
He'd built a lot of prototypes, most in grad schools
There it stood in the courtyard, ten stories tall
It looked so majestic... and then it started to maul.
So I called to the 'Doctor', "What the hell have you done?"
He said "Mfmfmmggm CODE mmmmfflll 19-61"
And then his voice faded, 'cause his skull turned to mush.
The robot near smiled it liked killing so much...

Blood splashed off the ceiling, the pink flesh hit the floor
The bot said, "YOU ARE MY PRISONER HERE, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR."
And in the laboratory, behind that monstrous shape
I grabbed for the remote control and made my great escape
Last thing I remember, I dove for the closest vent
I had to find some way to warn the Government.
"HALT," said the robot, "I AM PROGRAMMED TO DESTROY."
"YOU CAN RUN AS FAST AS YOU LIKE BUT YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE."

The moral of the story is: Robots can't rhyme.

printable version
chaos

Guns don't kill people. Ninjas kill people.	kill -9	Zeroth Law of Robotics	I will REMOVE your "All your radical touching base are already occurred to the lesbian monkey puppy" philosophy on me if you don't eat my soy google balls, hatt-baby. Real or malarky?
Guns don't kill people, paintballs kill people	Guns don't kill people, paperclips kill people	Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it.	The Battle of Tempest IV: Tango Base, Day 0
Kill Bot	I, Robot	NSA	Robot is to follow the sun
She is silver, mechanical. She sees in infrared.	This machine kills fascists	Quantico, Virginia	Never rely on an Artificial Intelligence to save you from fiery death
AWOL	Intelligent weapons and the soldier of the future	That which doesn't kill me makes me breakfast	Isaac Asimov, the First Law of Robotics, and the Second Amendment
I am an army of one	Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht	Nuclear weapons don't kill people. People kill people.	RPG

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