SCP-160: Predator Drone

SCP-160: Predator Drone SCP-160 takes the idea of a predator drone pretty literally. From a distance, it looks like a small unmanned aircraft. Get close enough to watch it feed, and the machine starts behaving like something that belongs in a food chain. It hunts small animals, dives onto them, and uses a metal feeding tube to inject a corrosive substance into their bodies. Once the internal organs have broken down, it draws the material back out. The Foundation first found it after pets began disappearing and turning up dead. Its appearance gives you a familiar piece of technology. Its behavior gives you an animal nobody knows how to classify. There isn't an identified person controlling it. It keeps operating, and the usual way of sedating an animal doesn't work because its visible construction is mechanical. The Foundation has considered disabling it with an electromagnetic pulse, but hasn't approved that because of the damage it might cause. For now, feeding is automated, and anyone entering its enclosure needs armor. That leaves a pretty uncomfortable problem for the people studying it. Getting a better look means interfering with something that can defend itself, while leaving it running means never getting a proper look inside. The story also leaves its origin open. Marks on the exterior suggest identifying labels may have been removed, but that doesn't tell us who removed them or why. There's room for several explanations without the entry pretending to have settled on one. From a writing perspective, the useful part here is how little needs to change before something familiar becomes unsettling. Give an ordinary machine an appetite, let it develop a place in the environment, and suddenly the questions change. You're thinking about what it eats, what it avoids, and what might happen if it encounters something it hasn't hunted before. It doesn't need to chase everyone it sees to be dangerous. Most of the time, it's simply going about its business. Unfortunately, that business involves feeding on living things. https://t.co/qycL0MPND8