(Yes, I’ve heard that they stopped calling it Skynet as of the latest movie. I’ve also heard that no real Terminator movies have been made since 1991. I know which theory I prefer.)
Of all the baddies in the cataclysm, the robots are probably the most powerful. High hit points, destructive weapons, pretty-much impervious to zombies until they run out of bullets (which they inevitably do, because no amount of gunfire can match the pulping ability of a few whacks from a crowbar). Humanity would probably have a much easier time in our fight against the Blob, the hellspawn, the mushrooms and the flowers, if only our Terminators hadn’t turned on us.
From one of the in-game newspapers:
INVADERS NOT HUMAN?: An earlier command by the Police Chief has backfired. “The invaders don’t register as human. The securibots turned on us when we tried to fight them. We don’t have enough people left to reprogram them.”
Well, that’s some pretty bad programming. Nay, that is inexcusably god-awful programming. Robot kills humans when robot sees human fighting non-human? Was the robot uprising inevitable the moment one of them saw a rabid dog put down, or wandered into a slaughterhouse? And in all the robot-defended installations, not a single programmer lived long enough to turn them off or to make them only target non-humans when they realized what was happening? That seems… hard to believe.
What if it’s more than bad programming?
What if the robots are being INSTRUCTED to kill everything by some unseen, malevolent entity?
Skynet becomes self-aware. Blob makes contact with Skynet, Blob convinces Skynet to soften up the meatbags in the opening hours and days of the Cataclysm, but then something happens to cause Skynet to attack living and blobbed meatbags alike. Some kind of falling-out between Blob and Skynet.
Damn, having the lore increased for one more big faction with a background like that would be good, maybe adding something like the chrono trigger plot of the AI processing humans as biomatter to make more robots and the things to keep working. So that would be the reason they turned on the blob, a dimension full of biomass to keep increasing the robot faction, adding the spawn of secret factories processing humans and zombies and the like, where the main enemies are robots.
Steven King wrote an interesting interplay between zombies and (what might have been) AI in his 2006 novel, “Cell”. The novel itself was mediocre at best, but the premise of cell phones triggering a zombie apocalypse (implying that they haven’t already triggered a zombie apocalypse) is one of few that I find to be both somewhat-believable and legitimately terrifying.
What about a robotic faction that continues in a nonsensical objective of endlessly replicating useless consumer goods, no longer seeing any blob-carrying humans as humans and actively exterminating them?
Or maybe a robotic Ai faction who are actually pretty much the only hope of Earth, who are looking for a way to permamantly shut down any dimensional portals and sterilise the whole biosphere. If they succeeded, they would reseed the planet and eventually create new humans from stored embryos.
Consider they might use thermonuclear weapons or something even more advanced to completely sterilise the whole planet, except for a vault of carefully managed human embryos with all blob removed. Or alternatively, loading sterilised humans, along with flora and fauna on a generation ship to seed another planet, managed by an experimental AI not yet known to the Blob.
Said faction would be inherently hostile to human survivors unless it had some particular use for them, and probably try to hide their real aim from survivors
Canonically, the only existing experimental AI has the long term planning skills and common sense of your pointed hair boss who told you he wanted 24 hours notice on unplanned network disconnections. Putting him in charge of a generation starship would guarantee that no one would survive to make it to the next star.
Thanks for resurrecting this. It was a good read of a reasonable story element.
That said; Anyone happen to read or see the film version of Virus? The meatbags on the ship get minced and mixed with robots as parts and the alien AI has a perspective of humanity being nothing more than a virus.
