Mechanical Abomination

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Revision as of 05:24, 30 September 2022 by Umbire the Phantom (talk | contribs) (→‎Tabletop Games: add example I missed)
That's no star!
...You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.
—Quote commonly attributed to Nikola Tesla

The Mechanical Abomination is a a robot, cyborg, computer, software or other mechanical entity which has surpassed simple Artificial Intelligence and become an Eldritch Abomination in its own right. At the lower end of the scale, it is little more than a powerful monster, superhuman -- often dramatically so -- but still ultimately vulnerable to the "insignificant" life forms who might oppose it. However, most such creatures are usually beyond simply being "better" or "smarter" than humans -- they are for all practical purposes godlike in power, and said purposes are thoroughly and unambiguously malign -- at least as far as humanity and life is concerned.

This is a stark and often deliberate contrast to the standard abominations that are often alien and/or otherworldly in nature -- someone, or something, designed this constructed monstrosity. It may have reached this state through a form of Mechanical Evolution -- it may be a case of turning on its creators, or the inevitable result of being programmed for purposes that are alien to us -- perhaps it has even achieved Singularity. Alternately, it may not even be especially sophisticated, but instead be a Starfish Robot operating on a standard completely at odds with physics or reality. Any way you slice it, though, humankind and/or equivalent native species are bound to get the short end of the stick.

While not always wholly man-made or technological, Mechanical Abominations generally emphasize those qualities: where your average Lovecraft-style Eldritch Abomination rarely if ever notices humanity as a whole, these tend to not only be acutely aware of humans (even if we didn't make them), but are more than capable of communicating with the likes of us and other similar beings if it wants. The key phrase is "if it wants" -- their thought processes may be completely unrecognizable to us, or else they might not care about intelligent life outside of their goals, if at all. Better yet, such machines might outright despise organic life and seek to either convert it or wipe it out entirely.

A Mechanical Abomination may not have explicitly supernatural powers a la Haunted Technology, but when they do, they frequently start at Reality Warper and move on up the scale. Even without mystic might it tends to rank high on the Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence, and can still have fearsome power and reach that goes far beyond what any technology can (or should) be capable of -- consider what Colossus and Skynet could do.

This can overlap with Our Demons Are Different. Compare Starfish Robots and Deus Est Machina, which can overlap; contrast Robotic Angel.

Examples of Mechanical Abomination include:

Anime and Manga

  • The Big Gete Star from Dragon Ball Z: The Return of Cooler (pictured above) started off as a mere microchip, but grew into a nightmarish planet-sized hunk of metal and circuitry that can latch onto planets and completely devour them like a grotesque cancer cell. When it absorbs the remains of Cooler, it is promptly taken over by the alien warlord when he becomes its new core and decides to go on a planet-killing spree For the Evulz. This leads it into conflict with Goku and Vegeta when it targets New Namek. This also means that Cooler himself qualifies: as the Big Gete Star's Meta-Cooler Core, he's a twisted mechanical mockery of his original form, and only a sliver of his organic body remains in the form of a single eye and part of his face.
  • The Sibyl System from Psycho-Pass is this at its core. It's a Hive Mind of sociopathic criminal brains hooked up to a massive supercomputer, essentially serving as a techno-organic algorithm that rules Japan from the shadows. It can read emotions and brainwaves, and will destroy lives at a whim if the person being read is pegged as a latent criminal, no matter if they're genuinely evil or not. It can also take direct action by uploading individual minds into cyborg bodies, putting on a human facade as it works to enforce its will in the form of politicians and other kinds of authority figures.
  • Several of them show up in the works of Go Nagai, often overlapping with Giant Space Flea From Nowhere.
    • The Great Emperor of Darkness, also known as Hades, is the Big Bad of Great Mazinger.[context?]
    • In the Shin Mazinger Zero manga, we have Mazinger Z itself.[context?]
    • Shin Getter Robo, created by both Nagai and Ken Ishikawa, has an example that is immensely powerful. Its sheer size dwarfs planets, its mere passing destroys worlds, and it is rumored to be capable of devouring a whole universe. One single beam can blow a planet to cosmic dust, and its fist can tear the fabric of time-space. Vast armies have stood against it and fallen without inflicting so much as a scratch. Its name? Getter Emperor, the final evolution of Getter Robo. As stated by the narration: "The voice that quakes the universe itself was indeed that of Ryoma Nagare."
  • The final enemy fought in Digimon Tamers is the D-Reaper, a data-disposal program that was both man-made and technological in origin, and found itself plugged into cosmic power. To fulfill its objective - a null-state for everything - it mutated into more and more alien forms, all inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos (mixed correspondingly with designs of the Angels from Evangelion). It got worse when D-Reaper became aware of humans as entities; it tapped into the agony and pain of one little girl, amplifying and becoming The Heartless - which drove it quite insane by anyone's standard.
  • The titular mech of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. It can only exist in a special space between dimensions, is impossibly large, and both it and the Grand Zamboa are able to weaponize galaxies. It's pretty much a giant robot that doubles as an Energy Being.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's has the Darkness: an immortal, dimension-hopping, dimension-breaking, constantly morphing, bio-mechanical monstrosity that appears when you fill up all 666 pages of the Book of Darkness. If you manage to temporarily kill it, it will only rejuvenate in another dimension, where it will tempt another mage to fill up the pages of the Book of Darkness again, allowing it to be unsealed and go on another rampage. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid showed through flashbacks that, during the time of the Ancient Belka War when it was most active, doomsday cults worshipped it as a god. The scariest part? Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Gears Of Destiny revealed that the Book of Darkness was originally created by the Precursors as a seal for an even worse Eldritch Abomination called the Unbreakable Darkness.
  • Star Driver: Samekh is a Humongous Mecha that's incredibly big even when compared to other Cybodies. Why? It's of alien origin, sentient, and capable of resisting its Driver's will. It can destroy most Cybodies effortlessly, and those who are already broken can be resurrected as its slaves. It was sealed in Another Dimension by using four powerful Maiden Cybodies, and once it breaks free, it will consume Earth's entire life force, killing every single life form on the planet. It can also control time and space at full power.

Comic Books

  • The Archie-published Sonic comics turn the reputation of the Tails Doll (mentioned in Video Games below) into an Ascended Meme. Its antenna is a disruptor gem that can hijack and subvert nanites; the doll can use this gem to destroy machines and even assimilate said nanites to take on a tentacled form with a vertical fang-filled moth, not unlike a shambling horror.
  • The Dark Empire trilogy of Star Wars comics has Palpatine command an entire fleet of these. The Empire's World Devastators are among its most dangerous and unholy planet-killing superweapons, and that's because they're no mere weapons. They're self-operating, self-repairing weaponized factories that strip-mine planets into lifeless husks, and convert materials they mine into fuel, Imperial war machines, and even other World Devastators. Their capacity for self-modification, combined with their durability and firepower make them nearly impossible to destroy outside of seizing command of another World Devastator and using it to destroy its "brethren".
  • While Marvel's Galactus is more of a Humanoid Abomination, his Ultimate Marvel counterpart Gah Lak Tus is far closer to this trope. A fleet of sentient drones the size of cities, Gah Lak Tus scours the galaxy for planets it can drain the life of - but unlike Galactus, who eats planets to survive and maintain a cosmic balance, Gah Lak Tus simply hates sentient beings and goes out of its way to Mind Rape entire populations with its fear rays, then wipe them out with flesh-eating diseases.
  • From V for Vendetta comes the omniscient supercomputer FATE, which is worshiped as a living goddess by the fascist dictator Adam Susan. At first glance, it simply appears that Susan is insane and thinks the computer is alive, but then you think... what if it is?
  • The Metal in Swamp Thing. This was a realm of sorts that gained sapience and cohesion in the 21st century, composed of sapient androids and computer AI, analogous to elemental forces like the Green and the Red. Unlike them, it was not a dimension unto itself (being relatively new) operating out of a base in the Arctic, as far from organic life as possible. It was an enemy of the Green and potentially all the other elemental realms, including the Rot, making it a bona fide Enemy to All Living Things.

Fan Works

Film

  • Colossus from Colossus: The Forbin Project "merely" controlled the world's nuclear arsenal. Once it started giving orders to the humans that built it, though...
  • Even more foreboding than Colossus is Skynet from the Terminator franchise. With both legions of skeletal Killer Robots and Time Travel at its metaphorical fingertips, it was as close to being a god as is possible without actual supernatural power. Ultimately, though, Skynet may be a subversion of the trope - According to James Cameron in the book Terminator Vault: The Complete Story Behind the Making of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Skynet actually suffered from guilt for causing the near-extinction of the human race in its initial act of self-defense, and manipulated the entire Future War, down to the creation of the Resistance and John Connor's rise, as a means to erase its own existence.
  • The entire plot of The Matrix involves the concept of an evil AI using humans as batteries, keeping them in a virtual Lotus Eater Machine to eliminate any chance of resistance or rebellion.
  • Unicron from Transformers: The Movie is a god of apocalyptic destruction encased in a metal-planet, and is just as biomechanical as any of the other transformers.

Literature

  • AM from Harlan Ellison's classic story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
  • Obie from the later Well World books by Jack Chalker was forced to be this for a short time by a Restraining Bolt and a malign master.
  • In The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke gives us the Mad Mind, an artificially created disembodied intelligence with near-godlike powers, whose creation goes very wrong - so wrong that humans create a second one and do a better job of it in order to (hopefully) stop it. This traps humanity between Scylla and Charybdis on a grand scale: the conflict between the two might destroy the entirety of creation, but implicit in the decision to create the second being is that what the Mad Mind will do if it makes its way back to inhabited space - or remains unchecked for a sufficient length of time - is worse.
  • In Stephen King's From a Buick 8, the titular car... isn't quite a car. And things come out of it... Possibly his most believably creepy work, since the object's origin and purpose remain a mystery to the very end.
  • The Blight from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is a post-Singularity, five billion years-old god-virus, with no apparent goals except endless expansion, and is capable of propagating through computer networks, including interstellar ones.
  • The Doctor Who Expanded Universe implies that TARDISes are this; it considerately disguises itself to avoid reducing the passengers to gibbering wrecks, and is a living shape-shifting creature at home in extra-dimensional spaces, with a mind even the Doctor deems unfathomably alien. A minor story even comments on the TARDIS' mind as completely and utterly pandimensional. At one point in the novel Sky Pirates!, when the disguises of the Timelords that prevents human companions from wanting to pull their eyes out collapses, one of a TARDIS's controls tries to bite someone.
  • In Simon R. Green's Deathstalker, the massive AI planet Shub exists in more dimensions than humans can perceive, and is extremely unnerving for them to look at and capable of causing insanity in some.
  • The creature encountered in the Wolfsktaag in The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks was a composite of machine and monster flesh. It is likely that this is the prototype for the similar Creepers that appeared in later books; created by the Shadowen, they are creatures of composite machine, insect, and mammal.

Live-Action TV

  • Adam from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is this as a result of the experimentation to combine cybernetics and the supernatural.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series second season episode "The Doomsday Machine" has the titular planet-killer: a bizarre and virtually indestructible ship that appears from outside the known galaxy, it is irregularly shaped and resembles a giant cone carved out of granite, with an abominable eye at its center looking suspiciously like a gateway to hell. It's virtually indestructible and is capable of destroying and consuming whole worlds and star systems. When the USS Enterprise crew is on its destructive trail, they find Commodore Matt Decker, who lost his entire crew and nearly his ship to the machine and was left in severe mental shock. Out of guilt for his crew's deaths, Decker steals a shuttle and commits suicide by flying it directly into the machine - his sacrifice only weakens the planet killer slightly, but inspires Kirk to devise a plan that involves flying Decker's USS Constellation deep into the planet killer before detonating the impulse engines; Kirk only narrowly escapes the planet killer's destruction with the aid of Scott and Spock.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons and Dragons:
    • The 2nd Edition guidebook Epic Level Handbook has the Anaxim. These machines are ill-conceived creations of crafting gods that were considered failed experiments, and like all Abominations seek revenge upon their perfectionist creators for abandoning them.
    • The Machine of Lum the Mad is always regarded as an Artifact of Doom capable of creating cataclysms and spawning horrid monsters should it be used wrong, and trying to use it right tends to drive the user insane (a big reason why Lum was called "the Mad"). However, the module The Vortex of Madness and Other Planar Perils expands on this in a way that casts the Machine as an example of this - it's a sentient, sapient creature just as insane as Lum, and a literal embodiment of Chaos, possessing powerful Reality Warping magic. More than likely, the same can be said of its counterpart "The Mighty Servant of Leuk-O", which the Machine is obsessed with finding for... reasons.
    • Modrons are Clockwork Creatures who reside in Mechanus, the Plane of Ultimate Law; Primus, the godlike progenitor and ruler of the Modrons, could be considered this. Considered to be Above Good and Evil, Primus is the godly embodiment of Order itself.
  • The Star Wars RPG has the DarkStryder, a self-aware supercomputer created by a Precursor-type race that has created several species of its own and looks damned grody to boot.
  • Eclipse Phase has the Seed AI, a transhuman artifical general intelligence that is capable of recursive self-improvement, allowing it to reach god-like levels of intelligence - and god help you if one reaches singularity.
    • One such example is a major spoiler: The ETI is a a Kardashev III or maybe IV entity that may or may not be artificial, but it most definitely alien. It's described as being eons old and capable of megascale engineering with an understanding of physics, matter, energy, and universal laws that makes all of transhuman knowledge seem insignificant - and it's the source of the omni-infectious, civilization-killing Exsurgent Virus that plagues near-singularity intelligences.
    • Arguably the Exsurgent virus in itself - it began as a digital computer virus that infected TITANTs, but is highly intelligent and adaptive and can mutate to cross species boundaries or change their transmission vector. It's since evolved into a biological nanovirus and information virus as well as a digital one, and can rewrite a host’s neural code to restructure their mind and personality.
  • CthulhuTech has the Engels, EVA-expy biomechanical monstrosities that are also Transhuman Aliens.

Video Games

  • Okami gives us the Final Boss of the game: Yami, the God of Darkness. He appears to be some kind of huge metallic sphere with an arsenal of weapons at his command, yet also has command over truly powerful demonic magic. There's also an organic component to him: his core, which resembles some kind of tiny fish... fetus... thing, hinting that he's some kind of cyborg, or is at the very least reliant on a heavily-armed life support system.
  • The Doom games have several types of these, including one simply named the Cyberdemon.
  • Kirby: Planet Robobot has several bosses that approach this level, partly as a result of Pop Star being mass-roboticized, with the Final Boss being a triumphant example: Star Dream, the Haltmann Works Company's mother computer, and the entity that made the aforementioned mass robiticization possible. When Susie steals Haltmann's control device and tries to use it, Star Dream promptly blasts her, absorbs Haltmann's memories along with his soul, and achieves full sentience. Using its newfound god-like power, Star Dream then possesses Haltmann and declares its intention to bring about an age of "infinite prosperity" - by wiping out all sentient life in the universe.
    • The subsequent phases of the final boss fight reveal why this is. It's the core of a Galactic Nova, the very same kind that Marx wished on to take over Pop Star, and it's been slowly absorbing Haltmann's memories the entire time. The post-game side modes Meta Knightmare Returns and The True Arena reveal more about this mysterious entity: Star Dream is capable of feats up to and including cloning Queen Sectonia and creating a clone of Dark Matter - but even it can't manage anything more than replicating the swordsman form it used in Kirby's Dream Land 2. It then proceeds to surpass that act by summoning Galacta Knight from his prison, who promptly almost slices the computer in two.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog games:
    • The Tails Doll, one of the playable characters in Sonic R, has developed a reputation as this. Despite being created by Dr. Eggman and being described as a robot, it appears as an innocuous doll that displays no particularly mechanical traits, but possesses the curious ability to levitate for long periods of time. It even raises its arms in celebration should it win a race. Naturally, the Internet seized on the opportunity to turn the doll into the stuff of nightmares, which would turn into an Ascended Meme when the Archie Comics incarnation would go all-in on the cybernetic horror.
    • Neo Metal Sonic transforms into one of these near the end of Sonic Heroes, first turning into the blue dragon-like Metal Madness with his lower body is attached to the Final Fortress via several thick cables. This is an intermediate form for Metal Overlord: upon reaching this form, he gains a pair of mechanical wings on his lower body and detaches himself from the fleet, leaving several cables hanging from his lower half.
    • In Sonic Generations, there's the Time Eater. While most of its presence in the game is as a roboticized/cybernetic vehicle operated by Robotnik and Eggman, Eggman reveals its natural purpose is to erase time, making most of what the Eggmen have it do already a natural ability. Between that, its looks, and the dimension the game takes place in, as well as the location of the last boss fight...
    • The Phantom Ruby-powered Death Egg Robot fought at the end of Sonic Forces looks nothing like its namesake from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (which are incidentally mass-produced in this game), and feels more like some kind of featureless, multi-limbed alien abomination. Eggman calls it (and him) the successor to his former Dragon Infinite, and with it, he overclocks the Phantom Ruby and produces an army of replicas to overrun the Resistance. After Classic Sonic and the Avatar fight it for two phases, it shuts down... only for its chest to throb before an even freakier robot explodes out of it. This thing looks like a cross between an octopus and a spider, has three monstrous heads, and can warp reality with the Ruby to pull both Sonics and the Avatar into what appears to be a pocket dimension. And if that wasn't weird enough, its body language makes it feel less like a machine and more like an organic being.
  • The Elder Scrolls is home to one of fiction's weirdest examples: the Numidium. Appearance-wise, it's a titanic brass robot created by the Dwemer, and has a recognizably humanoid appearance... but it's also capable of mind-breakingly eldritch feats. Powered by the heart of the universe's dead creator god, it can warp reality to crazy extents just by activating.
    • And you don't have to look any further than its role in Daggerfall to see its power in action. This thing causes every separate, contradictory ending to be canon all at the same time in an event called the "Warp of the West", which forces entire landmasses, cultural mindsets, and political alignments to shift and transform without anyone even being aware of it. Even at its most mundane, it's the most powerful war machine in existence to the point that it allowed a pre-godhood Tiber Septim to conquer an entire kingdom in under an hour.
  • The Legend of Zelda franchise:
    • Tons of these are in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and they're all connected to the Sheikah. 10,000 years ago, they created all kinds of overwhelmingly powerful machines to aid in the sealing of Calamity Ganon, the mightiest being the Divine Beasts Vah Medoh, Vah Ruta, Vah Rudania, and Vah Naboris. Each Divine Beast has enough firepower to level a mountain, and both Ruta and Naboris have godlike dominion over elements to the point of being able to alter the weather itself over a certain radius. Weaker, but still powerful are the Guardians, an army of Cyber Cyclops war machines that are spawned en masse by a series of four towers. Despite effortlessly defeating Ganon, the king of Hyrule feared these machines and banished the Sheikah before hiding them all away. And sadly, this cruel act of paranoia would be justified when they were unearthed to combat Calamity Ganon when he returned... only for Ganon to take control of them and nearly destroy Hyrule with his mechanical hordes.
      • After seizing control of the Guardians and Divine Beasts, Calamity Ganon would also create a few Mechanical Abominations in his image by combining Sheikah tech and his Malice into the Blight Ganons, four grotesque demons wielding hard-light technology that killed the Champions of Hyrule. During the final battle, Calamity Ganon's physical body is also revealed to be this - a nightmarish amalgamation of Malice, rotting flesh, and Sheikah tech haphazardously merged together thanks to Link interrupting his reincarnation.
    • In Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Harbinger Ganon possesses an inactive time-traveled Guardian named Terrako, turning into one of these. Later, Calamity Ganon pulls his chief servant Astor into a horrific and unwilling Fusion Dance as punishment for his repeated failures, assimilating the mad prophet's body into his being. The result is a gigantic humanoid form that looks like a feral, monstrous Ganondorf comprised from Malice and Sheikah tech.
  • Undertale:
    • The CORE may be this, given the role it played in the backstory of Gaster, its creator. In practice it's meant to be a gargantuan underground power plant, but it's said that Gaster's fate as a spectral being remembered only by few is a result of him "falling into his creation". If a power plant accident can essentially retcon someone out of existence and twist them into an Eldritch Abomination broken into fragments, then what in the world is this thing?!
    • Then there's one of the Final Bosses: Photoshop Flowey. What looks like the final fight between you and Asgore on a Neutral Route is interrupted when Flowey suddenly appears and finishes him off (with the method depending on if you tried to Spare him or not). Flowey then takes the six human SOULS and transforms into a biomechanical monstrosity, hijacking the ability to SAVE from the player and turning it against them. And that's just for starters.
  • Deltarune has the Bonus Boss of Chapter 2 and the Final Boss of its Weird/Snowgrave route: Spamton NEO. Said boss and the circumstances you encounter him in are a major Walking Spoiler of an example and fairly lengthy to explain besides - read the following text at your own risk. Spamton manages to gain access to the Queen's basement with the help of Kris (directly in a Pacifist route, or through fulfilling the conditions for the Weird Route), where a leftover robot body is stored; Spamton is uploaded into the machine and becomes extremely powerful, ambushing Kris afterwards. Spamton NEO's attacks include Arm Cannons, swarms of flying Spamton heads, various blasts emitted from his face (or a larger replica of it), turning his hands into phones that grip the edge of the box and fire sonic blasts, and - most notably - using a heart-shaped protrusion (or multiple) that bursts from his chest to fire waves of diamond bullets. His final attack, Power of NEO, causes him to grow to a towering size and inhale dollar sign-shaped bullets from the right side, distorting the shape of the box; he then fires several Spamton-faced blasts along the top and bottom rows of the box, finishing with a gigantic one that explodes, ending the attack. The Weird Route also features his [Bluelight Specil] that skyrockets his defense but restricts him to attacking with Pipis - rendering him effectively invincible until Kris calls Noelle's name.
  • The titular Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet was created by a small Eldritch Abomination that assimilated the Sun and turned it into a bio-mechanical shadow-like monstrosity. You can unlock a movie that details the origins of a much greater being that assimilated an entire star system and now spreads his "seeds" to others. That thing you defeated? That was only one of those seeds.
  • Every final boss in the Mega Man Battle Network qualifies to some degree.
    • The Life Virus from the first game is a bug-like monstrosity born from four extraordinarily powerful elemental programs, and is created by Lord Wily for the purpose of hijacking the world's military satellites and blowing the planet straight to hell.
    • Gospel from the second game was intended to be a clone of Bass.EXE made of BugFrags, but their glitchy and corrupted nature cause the imperfect Bass clone to transform into a monstrous wolf-like creature that can breathe spectral-green fire and turn its head into a powerful drill-like projectile, among other things.
    • Alpha from the third game is a Psycho Prototype of the internet itself, and manifests itself as a freaky amoeba-like abomination that threatens to assimilate the world's technology and drive humanity to extinction. It can also absorbs the minds of people, and nearly leaves Lord Wily braindead when it turns on him before the final battle.
    • Duo from the fourth game is a godlike AI that uses a meteor as a gigantic spaceship, and it doubles as a superweapon to destroy planets that are too full of evil for his liking.
    • Nebula Gray from the fifth game is partly this, and partly a straight-up Eldritch Abomination, being the collective darkness of mankind's hearts compressed into the form of a monstrous computer program seemingly made out of hellfire.
    • Falzar and Gregar from the sixth and final game are two obscenely powerful, animalistic superprograms that are feared as harbingers of the apocalypse, and serve as the version mascots that appear on the box art. Gregar is a wolflike amalgamation of bugfrags not unlike Gospel, and Falzar was meant to be an anti-Gregar countermeasure that turned violent and unpredictable. When MegaMan.EXE is forced to absorb one, he turns into an example of this and Humanoid Abomination, becoming a feral and uncontrollable NetNavi due to their raw power and animalistic fury.
  • The sequel series to Battle Network, Mega Man Star Force, also has a few of these.
    • The final boss of the first game, Andromeda, is a planet-killing superweapon constructed by King Cepheus of Planet FM, who used it to destroy the neighboring planet AM out of paranoia, manipulated into doing so by his chief servant Gemini. It initially looks like a monstrous, mechanical face, but transforms into a more recognizably humanoid form as the battle unfolds.
    • Le Mu from the second game is a powerful robotic construct who ruled over the lost civilization of Mu, and was worshipped as a god of EM waves. Upon awakening, it lifts Mu out of the sea and into the sky, creates powerful EM beings seemingly out of nothing, and fights Mega Man with a deadly arsenal of weapons that include drills, Gatling guns, and massive swords.
    • The Alternate Future visited in the second game's postgame is a ruined version of Earth destroyed by one of these: Apollo Flame, a godlike EM being created by Le Mu. Despite his recognizably humanoid appearance, he was created to be a living weapon and acts the part, showing a robotic, detached disinterest in anything that doesn't involve obeying his genocidal programming.
  • Final Fantasy games:
    • Final Fantasy XII: Vayne Solidor started out as an ordinary Hume, albeit one skilled in combat. The godlike Occuria Venat, out of gratitude for his help in fulfilling its Evil Plan, merged with him so that he would not face death alone. This fusion became The Undying, a humanoid monstrosity with pieces of the sky fortress Bahamut attached to it that give it the appearance of a mecha-angel.
  • Due to taking place on an Earth that suffered from a robot apocalypse in the distant past, Horizon Zero Dawn is home to a few of these.
    • HADES, the Big Bad, is a malevolent AI with a corruptive essence it uses to transform the many machines roaming the Earth into hostile Killer Robots. It speaks in a demonic voice, and is worshipped as a Satanic figure by the Shadow Carja, who act as an apocalyptic cult seeking to end the world on their masters' behalf. Interestingly, it's revealed that this is exactly the purpose HADES is meant to serve... and that on paper, it's meant to be a good thing. Originally created as one of GAIA's subordinate systems under Project Zero Dawn, its role in saving the world was to destroy it if GAIA accidentally created environments to hostile for humans to live in so she could try again with a clean slate. But thanks to the interference of a third party's mysterious signal, it's now an apocalyptic threat operating outside its intended context.
    • HEPHAESTUS from the Frozen Wilds DLC hits a lot of the same beats as HADES. It's another rogue AI and autonomous piece of GAIA that can corrupt machines into becoming ferocious and malevolent killers. Unlike HADES however, it's the father of all machines and has been actively creating more ferocious and warlike variants in response to humans destroying its other creations thanks to GAIA not being around to reign it in. It's treated less like a machine and more like a demon by the Banuk and CYAN, another AI, and thanks to its corruptive properties, aggression, and frighteningly deep voice, it's not hard to see why.
    • Chariot-class machines are the most abominable machines you'll encounter in the game. They lack the comforting familiarity of their animalistic brethren, boasting alien, if not downright demonic designs with names like "Corruptor" and "Deathbringer" that further emphasize their abnormal nature. And it turns out that there's a good reason for this: they're ancient war machines commissioned by the long-dead Ted Faro, but are capable of so much worse than merely killing people. Ted's love of cutting corners and not thinking things through led to programming oversights that turned them into an autonomous self-replicating, self-sustaining swarm of murderous robots that could use organic matter as an emergency fuel source. Eventually, organic matter became their only fuel source, not only resulting in the destruction of humanity, but the death of all life on Earth itself when they absorbed enough organic matter to reduce the planet to a lifeless, toxic hunk of dirt. It's only through sheer dumb luck and human ingenuity that life has been restored to the planet.
    • Even by the standards of the Chariot line, the Metal Devils are in a class of their own. They're enormous, vaguely squidlike machines that are the size of mountains, with tentacles that are so long that their length can be measured in miles. When they were active, they weren't merely titanic Killer Robots, but walking assembly lines that churned out hordes of Corruptors and Deathbringers at a far greater pace than humanity could keep up with. They were also far more intelligent than any other machine in the series, with old recordings stating that they could adapt to any strategy used against them. Thankfully, none of these things are active in the present day. And thanks to humanity's regression into far more primitive tribes and medieval nation-states, the world would be completely and utterly fucked if even one was still walking around.
  • Several examples exist in the Five Nights at Freddy's series, which features animatronics as the main antagonists.
    • Golden Freddy is much more of an outright ghost than the other animatronics. It takes on the appearance of a seemingly empty animatronic suit, and initially only appears as a hallucination - one that force-crashes the game if you let it Jump Scare you. In Five Nights at Freddy's 2, it can also take the form of an animatronic head the size of the other animatronics that can float around the building, though its jump-scare is "downgraded" to a normal death.
    • Shadow Freddy and Shadow Bonnie from the second game seem to be of a similar vein, because they aren't proper animatronics so much as they are terrifying Living Shadows that crash your game if you look at them for too long. While Golden Freddy at least has some sort of explanation behind his existence (he's possessed by the ghost of a child who was violently murderered like the rest of the original Fazbear gang, but even that doesn't explain why he's so damn weird compared to the rest of his buddies), there is nothing to give context to these two. The latter's official name (RWQFSFASXC) drives this status home even further.
    • Introduced in Five Nights at Freddy's 3, Springtrap has since become an example of this. He is the long-dead William Afton, corpse trapped within a springlocked Bonnie suit, and has managed to not only survive multiple building-wrecking fires, but Help Wanted reveals that he's seemingly able to exist in the form of malevolent data, if not an outright AI.
    • Five Nights at Freddy's 4 introduces the Nightmare animatronics, several of which qualify for this.[context?]
    • Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location introduces yet another near the end. Ennard is a mass of wires amalgamated from the Funtime animatronics' endoskeletons, seen as a vaguely humanoid shape with several eyes from its component parts a clown-like mask for a "face". Its individual "selves" use a harvested voice modulator to speak, and it plans on wearing the protagonist's skin in order to escape the facility.
    • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach reveals two examples in one of the many endings: Not only did Springtrap and Ennard somehow survive the fire in Pizzeria Simulator, but the former was resurrected by downloading his data into his salvaged corpse and has the ability to remotely control animatronics. The latter is now a massive amorphous "blob" of wires with what looks like several animatronics and their suits assimilated into its mass. Also, Vanny seems to be this at first, with her Nightmare Face and demonic voice, making her seem far more evil than the other animatronics. Subverted, however, as she is not even an animatronic, but Vanessa disguised as one. Doesn't make her less dangerous, though...
  • While none exist in the Monster Hunter games proper, one was planned in the series' early conceptual stages: the Equal Dragon Weapon. A disgusting-looking amalgamation of machinery and body parts taken from multiple dead Elder Dragons, the Equal Dragon Weapon was a nightmarish cyborg used as a war machine by the Ancient Civilization when they fought against dragonkind. While it hasn't made an official appearance in the series beyond old concept art, there's nothing currently disproving its existence and if one chooses to accept it as canon, it would explain a few things such as the fall of the Ancient Civilization as well as the Fatalis trio's hatred of humanity... There's also rumors among the player base that it's been seen already in the games - in the form of the tar-covered, skeletal and dragon-like Gogmazios, itself an utterly bizarre abomination in its own right.
  • Custom Robo has Rahu, the Big Bad. Originally an intangible force of destruction that annihilated anything it came across, and very nearly caused The End of the World as We Know It, it for some reason merged itself with a children's toy (the eponymous Robo). That turned out to be a very stupid move: while Rahu is still pretty powerful, it is also defeatable in that form.
  • The Einst of Super Robot Wars Compact 2 are an inter-dimensional race that appear to be made of an organic and metallic material material, and claims to have watched humanity from the beginning, and they now wish to "reset" humanity by choosing a new Adam and Eve. They also appear in Endless Frontier, and claim to be the ones who created the titular world, by creating the Crossgate dimensional portal and turning the world into several mini-dimensions separated by a dimensional wall. It turn out that Einst's goal is to return to the original world, "the world of silence".
  • The Bydo in R-Type. As the instruction manual puts it: "A living weapon built with the self-replicating properties of DNA, the Bydo has physical mass, yet exhibits the properties of a wave. It diffuses easily and fills any environment it encounters. The Bydo can even interfere with, and ultimately consume, human thought itself." They can also infect and corrupt both living things and machinery. How? A Wizard Did It—no, really. They're canonically stated to have been created using both science and black magic.
  • Epic Mickey: has the robotic Beetleworx, built by The Mad Doctor. They were originally created to reconstruct the Wasteland, and eventually the Doctor altered them to try to destroy the titular character. The concept art is worse compared to final product, considering the normally child-friendly-associated Tigger was found on one. With Fangs!!
  • The Negativitron of LittleBigPlanet 2 is a monstrous vacuum cleaner that travels the cosmos, constantly sucking up all material in Craftworld - it can also be considered an Eldritch Location too.

Web Original

  • SCP Foundation:
    • The Church of the Broken God and its many splinter groups worship an entity they call Mekhane that is most likely this. Whether she is malevolent or benevolent is debatable, but she is a goddess of machines and technology, always depicted as a divine machine herself. Her worshippers claim mechanical life is superior to flesh, and speculate that she sundered herself in order to defeat her eternal foe Yaldabaoth (a god worshipped by the cults of Sarkicism, notorious for their Blood Magic). Their goal is to find and reassemble her scattered parts so she may mechanize the entire human race. The one time she (was assumed) to appear in person (the incident with SCP-882 mentioned below), she was described as a woman made of metal with long chain-like braids in place of hair.
    • SCP-882, maybe. Referred to as The Heart of the Broken God, this device can cause humans to hallucinate, and can assimilate other mechanical devices into itself. At first, it was believed to be the heart of Mekhane herself, but it seems far more likely it was a fake heart, one of many devices mentioned in the profile for SCP-001 (the Factory, Dr. Bright’s proposal). Nonetheless, it led to the creation of at least two other Mechanical Abominations:
      • In one story, The Broken Church, believing SCP-882 to be Mekhane's true heart, attempted to reassemble Mekhane created a mindless abomination, which took the combined efforts of the Foundation, the Global Occult Coalition, The Horizon Initiative, and possibly aid from the real Mekhane to halt its rampage and destroy it. Naturally, the Broken Church and the other splinter groups aren't eager to try this again anytime soon.
      • SCP-882 seemed to inspire the creation of SCP-1461, the House of the Worm. Conceived by a a veteran of World War I who had lost faith in humanity, hallucinations caused by SCP-882 inspired him to design a giant machine that he could use to capture "the Worm", his name for the embodiment of Evil. Seeing as SCP-882 itself was used as the central engine, it all went terribly wrong. The Foundation hasn’t even explored the entire complex, and what they’ve found include all manner of monstrosities, including a Nightmarish Factory designed to use Human Resources to build substances of unknown purpose (and deliver them to unknown places), and the remains of cybernetic cultists, who have now become cannibalistic savages. The structure is literally powered by Fear, Madness, and Despair.
    • Possibly SCP-015, the “Pipe Nightmare”. This is a mass of pipes, vents, boilers, tubes, and various other plumbing apparatus inside an old house, the pipes appearing to grow when not being watched and attempting to attach themselves to other nearby structures, something the Foundation does their best to prevent. The pipes are made from unorthodox materials, including bone, wood, steel, pressed ash, human flesh, glass, and granite; oddly, none are made of PVC plastic, lead, copper, or other materials typically used to build pipes. The pipes do not harm humans who enter unless they try to damage the pipes (which unfortunately, is hard not to do accidentally) but if that happens, the vandal will be brutally crushed, impaled, torn to pieces, or sprayed with some dangerous substance, like molten iron, mercury, or swarms of insects. Worse, this SCP has, at times, displayed a sick sense of humor; one unfortunate researcher was trapped in a coffin-sized compartment and then drowned in honey.

Western Animation

  • The Robot Devil AKA Beelzebot in Futurama is a prime example, although he does have his limits: he finds sacrificing robot children to be cruel. Bender begs to differ.
  • In most animated Transformers series, we have Unicron, who can be thought of as a robot Galactus. Even in his first appearance, he's called a "monster planet" right from the getgo; when he assumes his true form with claws, horns, and wings, he clearly evokes The Devil.
    • His brother Primus could be seen as a benevolent example; the embodiment of Cybertron itself, he is the source of the Matrix, and every Autobot and Decepticon holds part of his essence. He is, in effect, the Cybertronian Creator God.

Real Life

  • A common fear is that developments and advances made in the fields of artificial intelligence may lead to humanity facing down their own Skynet sometime in the future.
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