Illustration Friday: "Seeds"

From the SEEDS of DESTRUCTION sprung the DOOM BRINGER ULTRA ULTRA.

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At its original inception, Project X-18999 was designed to be a domestic household robot -- a construction of limited artificial intelligence specifically engineered to help old people get around.

Marketed as "The Friendly-Bot" to an aging "Baby Boomer" generation, X-18999, was intended to replace the Personal Emergency Response Services provided by Life Alert Emergency Response, Inc. Unofficially, it was designed to render obsolete "those little necklace things with the button."

Focus groups reported to feel, with regards to X-18999, "like it was my best friend. " -- Sandy Evans, Ohio.

"I like it better than my children!" raved Andrea Burkowski, Indiana.

AARP declared X-18999 to be "the best thing since lobbying for Medicare!"

However, an unfortunate aesthetic design flaw, specifically with the addition of the shoulder mounted cannons (which were arguably unnecessary in the first place as X-18999 was designed for finding medicines dropped in the kitchen) X-18999 scrambled simple commands and interpreted "cross the street" and "buy a bagel" with "UNLEASH THE WAR-HAMMER OF THE APOCALYPSE. THE TRAVELER HAS COME. CHOOSE AND PERISH." -- Much to the dismay of the understandably confused early adopters.

The resulting lawsuits crippled the parent company who had up to that point worked feverishly on a patch for x-18999 (dubbed "the kitten patch") intended to address certain "admitted instabilities" in the speech recognition region of X-18999's CPU.

Unfortunately, the parent company went bankrupt and the kitten patch was never put into production. Thankfully, most robots were hunted down and destroyed by the U.S. Military.

The lesson we are all left with is frustratingly simple: Do not design your robots to even look like that could blow up a city. It will give them ideas. It is that simple.