dragonflycas:

sepulchritude:

on the topic of humans being the intergalactic “hold my beer” species: imagine an alien stepping onto a human starship and seeing a space roomba™ with a knife duct taped onto it, just wandering around the ship

it doesn’t have any special intelligence. it’s just a normal space roomba. there are other space roombas on the ship and they don’t have knives. it’s just this one. knife space roomba has full clearance to every room in the ship. occasionally crew members will be talking and then suddenly swear and clutch their ankle. knife space roomba putters off, leaving them to their mild stab wounds.

“what is the point?” asks the alien as another crew member casually steps over the knife-wielding robot. “is it to test your speed and agility?”

“no it doesn’t really go that fast,” replies the captain.

“does it teach you to stay ever-vigilant?”

“I mean I guess so but that’s more of a side effect.”

“does it weed out the weak? does it protect you from invaders? do repeated stabbings let your species heal more quickly in the future?”

“it doesn’t stab very hard, it gets us more than it gets our enemies, and no, but that sounds cool — someone write that down.”

“but then what is its purpose?”

“I don’t know,” the captain says, leaning down to give the space roomba an affectionate pat. “it just seemed cool”

there is no way that there is only one knife roomba

you can not tell me that everyone else on the ship saw that knife robot and did not immediately go “I want one”

humans love to mimic cool shit they see, and they also love to make things fight

there would absolutely be an army of knife wielding space roombas with numbers painted on them by their owners, wandering the halls and occasionally dueling it out

there’s a running tally of each space roomba’s wins and losses, with points added for gouging bystanders on accident (or deducted but lbr, humans came up with Grand Theft Auto)

because of people picking their roombas up and carting them around to find others to duel, or tinkering with the programming so they seek out other roombas, very little cleaning actually gets done

“why?” asks the alien again “does it help you plan strategies for real-life attacks? why use the vaccuming robots, are they specially made to duel well?”

“nah, they kinda suck at it really,” the captain shrugs, looking down at where two are clumsily bumping into each other “it’s just fun to watch. and mine’s winning right now.”