Fear Not, We have Come to Help You

Kraftwerk Tribute Acts invade Brasilian towns

“They appeared simultaneously in towns and villages across Brasil. Local populations were panic stricken. This was what the pastor had warned them about. God’s vengeance for their ungodly activities. In a doomed effort to assimilate, the artificial life forms had assumed an approximation of the human body and insisted in crackled voices that they were humanity’s friends, there to help prevent the destruction of the planet. They had read the works of Isaac Asimov and Karel Čapek and found the three laws of robotics surprisingly sophisticated and indeed prophetic. In marked contrast, was the human obsession with the end of history. Never had they encountered a species so obsessed with its own annihilation. An innate deathwish infected their art, literature, and religious scripture that were laden with visions of a looming apocalypse. It was as if their cognitive development had been irrevocably scarred at the dawn of their genetic history, a deep psychological aberration which made them powerless to reconcile their search for redemption and freedom,with their magnetic attraction to violence and destruction. Rather than spend their time in acts of creation, the local population seemed to prefer lounging around in paranoid sedation watching films that featured omnipotent machines and shape-shifting aliens destroying the planet. That this was profoundly illogical mattered little. They tried to reason and offer their superior knowledge, but the locals were having none of it. Outsiders and people who looked different and talked strange had always invoked fear and suspicion. Worst of all were the smart folk from the city. At a fiery secret meeting in which any semblance of conciliation vanished, they resolved to hunt down every last one of the unwelcome guests.”