Mechanical Abomination

"...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. However, 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.

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 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.
 * Several of them show up in the works of Go Nagai, often overlapping with Giant Space Flea From Nowhere.
 * The Great Emperor of Darkness,, is the Big Bad of Great Mazinger.
 * In the Shin Mazinger Zero manga, we have.
 * 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?
 * 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: is a Humongous Mecha that's incredibly big even when compared to other Cybodies. Why?.

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.

Fan Works

 * This Deltarune fanvid has the already-creepy turn into one of these upon taking Kris' SOUL. Taking a page from  book,  is a massive techno-organic abomination seemingly made out of phone parts, computer parts, and an unsettling amount of human teeth, and his mere presence causes everything to glitch out uncontrollably. The music video for his hypothetical theme shows him in action:
 * SHIVA from the 1990s-vintage Mega Crossover fic The Dance of Shiva. It started out as an AI computer, created as an assistant by a Mad Scientist easily equal to Washuu from Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki -- but after its creator was executed for arranging two simultaneous Class 4/5 Planetary annihilations of inhabited worlds (just so he could compare their results and relative effectiveness), SHIVA merged with a genuine Eldritch Abomination and became something close to a mad, evil god.

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.
 * 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.

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.

Live-Action TV

 * Adam from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is this as a result of the experimentation to combine cybernetics and the supernatural.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

 * The urban legend of Mariana's Web involves one - some people seem to think the Internet itself has an Eldritch Location where you'll find Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

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.

Video Games

 * Okami gives us the Final Boss of the game:.
 * 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, including the Final Boss:
 * The subsequent phases of the boss fight reveal why. The post-game side mode Meta Knightmare Returns and The True Arena reveal more about this mysterious entity:
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * In Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity,
 * Undertale:
 * The CORE may be this, given the role it played in the backstory of, its creator. In practice it's meant to be a gargantuan underground power plant, but . If a power plant accident can essentially , then what in the world is this thing?!
 * Then there's one of the Final Bosses:
 * Deltarune has the Bonus Boss of Chapter 2 . 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.
 * 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..
 * 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: 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.
 * HEPHAESTUS from the Frozen Wilds DLC hits a lot of the same beats as HADES. It's another rogue AI 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 . It's treated less like a machine and more like a demon by the Banuk and, 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:
 * Even by the standards of the Chariot line, the Metal Devils are in a class of their own. 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.
 * Introduced in Five Nights at Freddy's 3, Springtrap has since become an example of this.
 * Five Nights at Freddy's 4 introduces the Nightmare animatronics, several of which qualify for this.
 * Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location introduces yet another near the end.
 * Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach reveals two examples in one of the many endings: 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.
 * 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...

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.
 * 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, . 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.

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.