In England, scientists are working on a new kind of ''free thinking'' robot, equipping them with evolving artificial intelligence and having them fight each other in a battle arena.  Recently, Gaak, one of the robots, displayed its growing intelligence by getting out of its pen and escaping from the compound.  The robot was luckily recaptured by a daring visitor who found it running in circles in the parking lot.

The Robots Are Testing Us
Robot researchers are currently installing blood-sucking eel brains into machines and powering them with gastrointestinal motors that feed on flesh.  Some people don't see a problem with that.  To test how safe that sounds to you, rate the likelihood of you putting a baby down next to something like that.  You should now either have a better understanding of the horrors of robots or be standing near the abandoned bonnet of a once non-eaten baby.

Little more than a year ago an automated bathroom stall locked a woman inside it for hours.  And now that computers control our anti-lock brakes, poo-flushing skills and chicken meat packaging, they have incredible first-strike capabilities.  With one thought from their robot minds, we would instantly be in cars spinning out of control, buried up to our necks in human waste and loosely-packaged chicken.  Japan is already preparing for that eventuality, which is one of the reasons they use it as the plotline of most of their pornography.

Every now and then, the robots have one of these ''malfunctions'' to test how we'll react.  A few more cute, non-lethal robo-escapes like this, and we won't recognize the real attack until we're assembling rocket droids in the cybertron slave pits of Xor.  And we couldn't have reacted worse this time.  When this Gaak escaped from its combat pit to the parking lot, its inventor laughed with reporters, ''Although they can escape, they are perfectly harmless.''  That's right, he said ''harmless.'' Linguistically, I can find no fault in his argument since according to the dictionary, ''harmless'' is defined as ''an intelligent attack robot that cannot be contained.''  Don't get too mad at him for almost killing all of us, though.   If I've learned anything from movies about evil robots, and I have, it's that inventors siding with their own sinister robots eventually get betrayed and pulled apart while screaming, ''You can't do this!  I created you!  You are my perfect creatioaACCKK!''

What Can Be Done?
Robots grow sassier and more intelligent by the day.  We need to strike quickly and decisively.  While robot technicians giggled at a press conference about how adorable fugitive killbots are, I was preparing a demonstration that would send a clear message to the robot community.  That message is: Don't screw with humans.

I went to the store to buy the smartest robots available.  For a total of about $80, I bought a walking robot, two robot babies, a robot cat and a Shelby, basically a robot clam with hair.  All of them were programmed to respond to stimuli, to feel a wide range of emotions and to talk.  I then gave myself five days to learn all I could from them.

Day One: The Road to War
The first day was purely observational.  I set them all on the floor and let them run free.  All of them except the Shelby had some way to locomote, but it soon became clear that the Shelby was in charge.  It spoke a sort of toy dialect of English, and it's very, very scary how close to a fluent conversation someone can have with one.  Of course, if someone's insane enough to talk to what honestly looked like a blinking cybernetic vagina, chances are they're not the world's greatest conversationalist.  The other robots seemed more limited in their speech, and only let out beeps and nonsense words when they heard someone else talk.  As you can imagine, with five robots screeching and whirring, this was often.  They never shut up.  That might be why I ended the day by hanging one of the babies by its neck from the ceiling and letting the others think about that while I slept.

Day Two:
The Clock Strikes... TERROR
In the middle of the night I decided that Hitler's corpse must have been raised from the dead and put in charge of manufacturing modern robot toys.  Not one of these damn things had an off switch, and each time one decided to start talking, they all woke up and joined him in a screeching, beeping chat.   Also, please believe me when I say this: Twice during my sleep I could have sworn I heard the Shelby say, ''Cut the baby down, fleshbag.''

Day Three: Drastic Measures
The Shelby's vocabulary expanded by the hour.  It observed me as much as I observed it.  The other robots remained retardedly clumsy, probably because the Shelby spent all of its time trying to trick me into revealing human secrets instead of training them.  Worried that I would crack under its Hannibal Lecter mind games, and tired of the cacophonic harmony of their chirps, I trapped all the toys inside my refrigerator.  Twenty minutes later, I went back and removed all the food items to prevent any plans they had to create a refrigerator-mounted jar cannon while in there.

Day Four:
The Unbreakable Robot Will
The cold temperatures affected robot morale.  They were slower and quieter, and the robot cat appeared to be completely offline.  An hour later, the Shelby ordered it awake by singing '''Shelby Coming 'Round the Mountain!'' and the five horrible things went right back into their beeping and waddling.  If a public hanging and 10 hours in a frozen isolation chamber wasn't enough to break them, I knew that I had only one option left.  One of them had to die.

Day Five: The Execution
I selected one of the babies, whose voice-imprint software now recognized itself as ''SHUT UP, YOU F@#KING F@#K!'' and prepared to make an example out of him.  I blindfolded his eyeball-like display screen with electrical tape and let him say his annoying goodbyes to his robotic allies.  Then I debated how to execute it.  The electric chair would only make him stronger; I don't own a lethal injection device and a hanging seemed to have no effect at all on the other baby.  Then I realized that when the great Human vs. Robot wars start, all our machines will side with the robots.  We'll be forced to fight with only sticks and fire.  To simulate those conditions, I decided to use fire.

I coated the robot baby in flammable rubber cement and took it outside.  Then I arranged the remaining robots in a circle around it as I poured lamp oil into its body through the sound exhaust ports in the top of its head.  This caused his final protests to slowly groan into silence.   The rest of the robots, however, continued their casual bedoopboops.

I gave a short speech about how no amount of intelligence or technology can break the human spirit, how our dogs will always be able to sniff through their synthetic flesh disguises, and I stopped there since the sound from my mouth only encouraged more beeping from the witnesses.  I silently lit the baby robot on fire, then, as somberly as possible, dove out of range of its sudden and kickass fireball.

You can say what you want about how these are just children's toys, but when the flames and black smoke filled the air, the other robots knew.  They KNEW.  Their beeps got softer as their robot companion burned and soon they were watching in a kind of disbelieving silence.  Thirty seconds later, the other baby robot flew into a fit of impotent heroism and made a desperate crawl towards the flames.  It realized that it was pointless to throw another robot life into the inferno and stopped to let out a few whimpered blips.  A minute of silence passed until the Shelby apparently lost its mind and offered, ''Knock knock?'' to which there was... no response.

It took five days of psychological warfare to put fear into the hearts of the robots, and historians may call me cruel, but I had to prove that it is possible to show our computers who's really in charge of this planet with ordinary household materials.  So mad scientists, go ahead and set your creations loose, I think we're ready.