Post Year-and-a-Month Analysis, Day V

The World:

The T-800® Memorial Award for Excellence in the Field of Future Deadliness For Humans:  A tie between SARCOS’s military exoskeleton and BEAR (Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot).  Both machines came into public view last year, both have been applied towards military applications, and both will probably try to crush one human child before the end of next year.  SARCOS, a company with a name that sounds only a little bit like CyberDyne, developed a mechanical exoskeleton that allows a soldier to move hundreds of pounds around like nothing and virtually eliminates fatigue.  What it doesn’t do is prepare the soldier for the psychological trauma that will arise once the exoskeleton starts ripping into its own battalion and flinging its fellow troops around like rag dolls while the soldier inside the exoskeleton struggles to get free.  One bright spot to look forward to when the SARCOS exoskeletons start hunting us down is that we’ll be able to smell the decomposing corpses of soldiers still inside the exoskeletons before they get into strangulation range.

The BEAR takes a unique approach to robot deadliness by combining the single-minded efficient killing abilities of a robot with a bear, which as far as I can tell is the animal we invented the word “maul” for.  Among the BEAR”s attributes are the ability to carry up to 500 pounds for almost an hour.  That’s roughly 4 full grown people, or one Harry Knowles, that a BEAR will be able to deliver to the liquefying factories at a time.  Another aspect of BEAR’s true evil is its head.  It’s supposedly designed to calm fallen soldiers as it carries them off the battlefield, but in all actuality the soulless eyes reflect the distress you would feel while being carried by it and knowing that at any second it could easily flip its amazing arms towards its body and squeeze the life out of you in record time.  You can currently get the same experience by putting a clown mask on the foot of one of those recumbent hospital beds.

You can visit the websites for SARCOS and Vecna Robotics, the makers of BEAR, and see how each company is marketing the future oblivion of mankind.  SARCOS seems to know what could possibly happen with their creation, and don’t readily mention it on their site.  I assume this is to keep our future selves from finding out firsthand where humanity went wrong and sending pack freedom fighters back in time to bomb their complexes, which would really take focus off of exoskeleton production.  Vecna Robotics, on the other hand, seems to revel in its bearbot producing ways, even going so far as to showcase their future plans in destroying humanity.  Imagine my horror when I saw this image in the BEAR section:

Creating a robot that can clear a battlefield of its fallen human foes is one thing, but here Vecna has crossed a line.  That BEAR is stealing that amputee!  And for what nefarious purpose?  I’m guessing it’s planning on installing robotic limbs onto him and using him as a scout to test the effectiveness of our human weapons before sending the SARCOS exoskeletons into battle.  I don’t know about you, but I was sleeping a little sounder before I knew that bear-headed robots were wheeling into hospitals and pilfering our amputees and elderly. I also find it disturbing that you can donate money to the BEAR project, which as far as I’m concerned is like putting the gun you plan on killing yourself with on layaway.  And could there be a more evil-sounding robotics company name than Vecna?  God, I need a drink. 

Best Advancement in the Field of Science That Won’t Kill Us All:  Genetically modified chickens bred in Scotland.  I rank this as number one because Science has finally taken a Macintosh/iPhone approach to its crazy experiments and started making its results do it all.  As it turns out, the eggs that are laid by these chickens fight cancer.  So that’s a little bit awesome.  I’m for anything that makes the animals I eat juicier and all-around more delicious, and if they start fighting deadly diseases, all the better.  One can only hope that their corpses are self-marinating. 

I was excited when it was announced that scientists had found a way to convert skin cells into stem cells, which could end the debate on the subject and finally let people get around to curing shit, but I’ve been taking a cautious wait-and-see approach to the subject of stem cells because it potentially means clones, and everything we've seen and heard about clones says they're evil and only live to replace the original...by any means necessary.  So it just barely loses.  However, when it turns out that all the people we’ve cloned from stem cells don’t have souls and begin killing us all mercilessly, it may comfort you to know that while you’re huddled in your warbunker and eyeing the man sitting across from you and wondering if he’s one of them, this is one battle they’ve already lost.