Strangely Naked

In movies and fiction, murderous robots are always depicted as stoic death machines. But what if an armed John Connor aggressively approaches a vulnerable, prone Terminator, and the Terminator, instead of having a skull face or Ahhhhnold’s face, looks like a child and the child begs John not to murder him? Wouldn’t that be more compelling?

Elon Musk is terrified of the pending robot apocalypse (I, for one, welcome our robot overlords. Dear robot overlords, I’m pretty great at oiling squeaky joints, like a joint greasing savant.) But I can’t imagine highly intelligent robots caring about us at all. “Oh, the humans? Yeah, we give them baubles and trinkets to polish our articulated joints. They love it! We have de-roboticized all of our factories and exploited human labor, and they thank us for it because we’ve improved some stupid jobs stats!”

Even if a robot, with all its robotized logic, decided it would be a good idea to antagonize its highest potential threat rather than just stroll the streets and throw cupcakes at a docile  group of mouth-breathers, why wouldn’t it present itself as something cute, like a small child rather than a disgusting Austrian former body builder? They’re robots, unstoppable killing machines that don’t sleep. Why manifest as a giant target like a bouncy boobed muscle man like Schwarzenegger?

A strong man exoskeleton doesn’t make you stronger. Go with something much more intimidating, like a hollow-eyed blonde child. Imagine a Village of the Damned situation but all those towheaded kids are literally relentless killing machines. An army of infants pursuing their prey. Like this disturbing list of kid actors who all look like they got their headshot from “Show Me On The Doll Where Your Parents, Unltd.”

Now, imagine you have the drop on one of those adorable terminators, are you going to be so quick as to unload a shotgun into the face of one of the Stranger Things kids? What if that pint sized terminator was programed to beg for its’ life?

“Ah jeez, ma’am, I sure would appweciate it–[they’re also programmed to do that adorable thing where they can’t really pronounce “r” or “l”]–if you didn’t bwast me in the face wiff dat big gun. Pweeeeease? Pwetty pwease?”

They’re walking, murdering computers, why not mine the internet and make the killer robots look like the children of the people trying to destroy them or the people trying to destroy them when they were children? You’re really going to murder 8 year old you?

The Terminators were/will be lazy but despite that, I probably wouldn’t be able to murder a robot, because I’M A GOOD PERSON dammit. I swear, and I think that means that murdering a sentient murder-bot who has dreams and aspirations–yeah, those may be murdering me, but who am I to deny a person their dreams–is wrong. Though, I won’t tell you what I would do with a captured robot-infant-me if left alone. Okay, fine, I would make it eat onions, which I dislike. Take that, murder-bot.