Mechanical Abomination

"...You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension."

- Quote commonly attributed to Nikola Tesla

A Mechanical Abomination is 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 against "insignificant" life forms such as those who made it, as well as those who 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 -- human or not, someone or something designed and constructed thus monstrosity. It may be a case of turning on its creators, or it could be the inevitable result of being programmed for purposes that are alien to us; it may have reached this state through a form of Mechanical Evolution, and perhaps 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 these 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 also overlap; contrast Robotic Angel. Compare also Organic Technology, which a Mechanical Abomination may incorporate or even become.

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, who becomes its new core and decides to go on a planet-killing spree For the Evulz. This leads him into conflict with Goku and Vegeta when it targets New Namek.
 * This also means that Cooler himself qualifies: as the Big Gete Star's core and the source of the Meta-Coolers, 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 visually 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, which amplified and drove it quite insane by anyone's standard, turning it into The Heartless.
 * 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?.
 * Mobile Fighter G Gundam has a spoiler-heavy example that practically drives the entire plot:

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 Galactus of the Marvel universe 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 is a realm of sorts that gained sapience and cohesion sometime in the 21st century, and is analogous to elemental forces like the Green and the Red. Composed of sapient androids and computer AI, the Metal is not (yet) a dimension unto itself, and operates out of a base in the Arctic, as far from organic life as possible; it is a bona fide Enemy to All Living Things, including the Green and even the Rot.
 * Transformers comics:
 * The Swarm in Transformers Generation 2 were born from a long-lost ritual of Transformer reproduction that their god Primus never intended them to retain, and are obsessed with destroying all mechanical life in the known universe.
 * Generation 2 also introduces the Liege Maximo, a massive creature implied to be one of the original Primes, and an abomination in his own right reminiscent of Unicron (who is also a consistent example in the series).

Fan Works

 * This Deltarune fanvid by Lumpy Touch has the already-creepy Spamton turn into one of these upon . The music video for his hypothetical theme shows him in action: Taking a page from, the video begins with appearing to taunt Kris in the form of a heart-shaped object on a long, mechanical tendril that has his face on it; his mere presence causes everything to glitch out uncontrollably. When Susie, Ralsei and Noelle come to Kris's defense and demand  back, he reveals himself to be a massive techno-organic monstrosity seemingly made out of phone parts, computer parts, and an unsettling amount of human teeth.
 * 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 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 then 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. 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. He is wholly devoted to destruction, and is even willing to sacrifice his herald and the other Decepticons to achieve his goals.
 * His herald, Galvatron, is the result of Megatron making a Deal with the Devil at a moment of near-death and being reformatted by Unicron into a viciously cunning Decepticon leader with an army of other reanimated Decepticons; following Galvatron's defeat at the hands of Rodimus Prime, he became a screaming, unpredictable madman who would turn on his own soldiers as readily as his enemies.

Literature

 * The supercomputer 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 malignant 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 . 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.
 * There are also humanoid TARDISes in other works within the universe that open up to take on passengers like normal ones. Very unpleasant to ponder.
 * 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 fly 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

 * 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 the Machine in a way that casts it as an example - 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 type of 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:
 * CthulhuTech has the Engels, biomechanical EVA-expy monstrosities that are also Transhuman Aliens.
 * CthulhuTech has the Engels, biomechanical EVA-expy monstrosities that are also Transhuman Aliens.

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, with the Final Boss being a triumphant example:
 * The subsequent phases of the final boss fight reveal why this is. The post-game side modes 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.
 * In Sonic Generations, there's the Time Eater. While most of its presence in the game is, Eggman reveals its natural purpose is . 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 to produce an army of replicas and 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:
 * This series 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. In Daggerfall, 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.
 * No matter if you believe him to be a cyborg or simply a human incarnation of Akatosh or Lorkhan, Pelinal Whitestrake was undeniably this. A batshit crazy time-displaced knight said to have a "killing light" in his hand and a red gem in place of a heart, Pelinal was a One-Man Army that near single-handedly drove the depraved Ayleid civilization to extinction, and nearly wiped out the Khajiit due to his blind hatred of elf-kind. Other weird feats include him smothering a man to death in his sleep with moths due to a remark he took personally, and having a long conversation with his beloved friend and "nephew" Morihaus before dying... after having his head severed.
 * 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 the returning Calamity Ganon... only for him 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 it?!
 * Then there's one of the Final Bosses:
 * Deltarune has the Walking Spoiler Bonus Boss of Chapter 2 . When manages to get into the basement of Queen's mansion with the help of Kris (indirectly or otherwise depending on the route),  - and he's out to take over Cyber City and.
 * And that's without getting into the powerset that actually makes properly abominable.
 * 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 brain-dead 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 a mix of this and 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.
 * The Fal'Cie from Final Fantasy XIII are examples of this, looking for the most part like bizarre machine-things.
 * 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 corrupting essence that 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: if you look at a particular camera, there's a very rare chance one of the posters you can see turns into a Golden Freddy poster; you'll then hear a child laughing and pull down the monitor to see his "empty" suit somehow inside the office, making a dreadful garbled noise - pull it back up quickly or else it attacks. His Jump Scare is also distinct from the others, producing a full-screen still of his face with a pitched down version of the normal scream and then force-crashing the game.
 * In Five Nights at Freddy's 2, Shadow Freddy and "Shadow Bonnie" seem to be of a similar vein, because they aren't proper animatronics so much as 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, there is nothing to give context to these two. The latter's official name (RWQFSFASXC) drives this status home even further.
 * Golden Freddy appears as one of the "main" cast this time, and is somewhat withered like the other old animatronics. It can also take the form of an animatronic suit's head the size of the other animatronics that can float around the building - as in the previous game, Golden disregards doors in favor of either warping into your office or else lurking as a giant head in the hallway. Its jump-scare is "downgraded" to a normal death, and can be prevented by immediately putting on the Freddy Fazbear Head for the suit form; for the floating head form, you must turn off the flashlight before it lingers on him too long.
 * 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, who are probably the ghastliest, most hellish-looking animatronics in the series. Their massive bodies, drill-tipped claws, and mouths loaded with several rows of fangs make them look less like restaurant mascots and more like demons, and they aren't confined to a restaurant or theme park. They stalk the halls of a little boy's house!
 * When it comes to individual animatronics, Nightmare Freddy (as well as ) are particularly abominable. Nightmare Freddy slowly manifests on your bed, with tiny little "Freddles" spawning periodically - if you don't scare them off in time, they fuse into Nightmare Freddy, who will very quickly kill you. Likewise,
 * Worse still is his replacement in the Halloween Update:
 * Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location introduces yet another near the end.
 * Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator brings still another example:
 * Ultimate Custom Night brings along the entire crew up to this point for the ride and lets you pick your poison with which ones you want to face - as you might expect, some of these haunted robots are way more abominable than the rest. And now several can talk to you after they've killed you, too! The Nightmare Animatronics in particular have suitably demonic low-pitched voices compared to the others.
 * Nightmarionne acts even more abominable that usual and takes half a page from Golden Freddy's book above: He'll slowly fade into your view within the office, requiring you to move your cursor away from him before he fully manifests and attacks you - just hope he doesn't phase in over anything you needed at that moment! His voice clips after killing you are demonic and low-pitched with a noticeable stutter.
 * Nightmare Freddy's Freddles will appear scattered on your desk and around the office, and as before they will fuse to reform into Nightmare Freddy and end your run unless you scatter them with your flashlight. His voice is a low, gravelly and robotic monotone.
 * Two other Nightmare Animatronics,, are completely invisible to your cameras and can only be seen when you spot their eyes staring at you from the darkness of the left and right doors respectively - better close them fast once you see them! Where has a higher-pitch Voice of the Legion going for its voice,  is a deeper and monstrous Guttural Growler in comparison.
 * Jack-O-Chica was originally a pumpkin-themed Palette Swap of Nightmare Chica with empty, lit-up eye sockets that was introduced in the Five Nights at Freddy's 4 Halloween Update. In Ultimate Custom Night, she takes on a role distinct from the original: If the office heats up enough, she'll shimmer into existence within both doorways at the same time, and you must close both doors simultaneously when she fully materializes in them to make her disappear... but if the office is 100 degrees or more, there's nothing that'll stop her from coming in hot. Her low-pitched voice crackles with TV static as well, reminiscent of a lively fire.
 * XOR is an empty-eyed, monochrome variant of the Balloon Boy-like Dee Dee that will show up very rarely in her place during normal play, but will also appear if playing the 50/20 mode - just so you can't get out of Dee Dee summoning animatronics. Upon appearing, XOR glitches around the office while repeating one of Dee Dee's phrases, heavily garbled and in reverse, followed by setting every single non-selectable animatronic minus the last on you in order. Just when you thought A NEW CHALLENGER HAS APPEARED! wasn't unwelcome enough...
 * Some of those non-selectable animatronics also include returning examples: Shadow Bonnie/RWQFSFASXC remains as shadowy as ever with a new power to match, subjecting you to a ten-second, fog-induced blackout that can't be avoided and obscures the doors and vents - plenty of time for you to be caught by something you can't see. Nightmare Chica is another of the summons that immediately appears right behind you once she's active, and all you'll see is jaws full of More Teeth Than the Osmond Family closing over you with no explanation for how she got there - and no way to get rid of her beyond hitting the A/C's power button, but good luck figuring that out without knowing beforehand.
 * And finally, the last abominable non-selectable animatronic is a very special guest that you have to take special steps to meet:
 * Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach:
 * Vanny seems to be this at first, with her Nightmare Face and demonic voice, making her seem far more evil than the other animatronics.
 * The game reveals two more examples in one of the many endings:
 * As for, it's now a massive amorphous "blob" of wires with what looks like several animatronics and their suits assimilated into its mass, and is easily the largest "animatronic" to ever feature in the games, dwarfing even the giant DJ Music Man. Despite the remnants of these shells, there seems to be few traces of whatever personality any of them once had - all that you see left is a snarling, mindless monster that uses the faceplates of as its main "head" and attacks anyone it senses with its massive tentacles, with the curious exception of.
 * 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 would have been 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, itself an utterly bizarre abomination in its own right.
 * The Einst of Super Robot Wars Compact 2 are an inter-dimensional race that appear to be made of an organic and metallic 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 characters they're modeled after - there's one of Tigger 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 too.
 * In the Pokémon franchise, most quasi-mechanical Mons are familiar and at least understandable in appearance, if a bit mysterious in origin. These Mons... not so much:
 * The Ultra Beast Xurkitree of Pokémon Sun and Moon and their Ultra Sun/Moon second versions is a massive, dancing treelike creature made entirely out of electrical cables, and has no face whatsoever - it can also grow to the size of mountains, as seen by the gigantic Xurkitree hanging out in the background of their home dimension.
 * Amusingly, while they aren't proper abominations, this is how Professor Laventon views the Porygon line in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Being time-displaced digital Pokémon thrown roughly 100-200 years back in the past, their expressionless faces, weird anatomy, and inability to breathe and eat disturbs him deeply, as shown by the Pokédex entries he authors.
 * The Reapers in Mass Effect are . Just one of them is . True to the classic Eldritch Abomination style, the Reapers appear to be giant space cephalopods as well.
 * In Mass Effect 2,.


 * The Reapers often claim that their minds are incomprehensible to organics, and that Reapers think on a level so high that organics cannot even begin to imagine the thoughts a Reaper has. This is apparently not just arrogant boasting: in Mass Effect 3,.

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 * Custom Robo has the Big Bad Rahu. 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, for some reason it 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.
 * Cubia from the .hack// series is a computer program that fits this bill within the realm of The World. For one thing, it's a mass of purple tree-root-looking things with a very creepy skull for a head that can materialize anywhere it chooses, and it's even referred to as "The Anti-Existence" once or twice. All of the other AIs running about seem to have some purpose that they're trying to accomplish, but Cubia pops up out of nowhere, and even with a somewhat vague explanation of what it is, no one in the series seems to be able to explain what its goal or purpose is, nor how it was created. Oh, and it's unkillable, save for one very specific method that the heroes are understandably reluctant to use. Throughout the series, it's specifically said (usually by Helba) that Cubia is.
 * The Black Beast of BlazBlue is a horrifically powerful monster that appeared about a hundred years before the game's story kicks off, nearly destroyed the world, and qualifies as this due to being.
 * NetHack variant dNetHack has Expies of Primus and the Modrons from Dungeons & Dragons in autons. They are spherical, Lawful Neutral Clockwork Creatures that have five different types and can appear randomly in the dungeon, and the Lawful Quest contains several autons as well as Axus, who is the setting's Primus-equivalent and creator of the autons and the embodiment of Law. Axus cannot be permanently killed, and attacking him will render every single auton that's spawned, and every one that ever will spawn, hostile towards you.
 * The Halloween Hack: The boss known as the looks like the kind of calamitous contraption you'd expect, considering its creator believes that.

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 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 entirely of non-standard materials, including bone, wood, steel, pressed ash, human flesh, glass, and granite. The pipes do not harm humans who enter unless they try to damage the pipes, which unfortunately is hard not to do accidentally - and 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 displayed a sick sense of humor at times; one unfortunate researcher was trapped in a coffin-sized compartment and then drowned in honey.

Western Animation

 * Futurama
 * The Robot Devil AKA Beelzebot is a prime example, although he does have his limits: he finds sacrificing robot children to be cruel. Bender begs to differ.
 * Possibly the entity Bender meets in "Godfellas", which if so, is a benevolent example. At first Bender wonders if this sapient galaxy is God, but when he questions why it talks in binary, he wonders if it might actually be a computerized space probe that collided with the actual God. The entity itself does not know.
 * Transformers:
 * In most animated Transformers series ever since Generation 1, 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 get-go, and is known as the Great Devourer, the Chaos Bringer, and the Planet Eater. His total goal is the reduction of all existence in every reality to nothing; when he assumes his true form with claws, horns, and wings, he also clearly evokes The Devil. Many other examples of this in the franchise appear as his "Heralds", gifted with fleets of vehicles, vast armies, supernatural powers, and powerful insanity.
 * Transformers: Prime introduces Megatronus Prime. Originally a Cybertronian miner going by the designation D-16, in the Gladiator Arena he took on the name of one of the original Thirteen Primes, Megatronus, and became a warrior of Primus charged with overseeing all Entropy in the multiverse - Unicron corrupted him into betraying his brothers and killing one of them, and his name henceforth would forever be "The Fallen"... In this state, he is more akin to the Galvatron of the Generation 1 movie: a vicious but rational warlord that loses his mind whenever exposed to.
 * Remarkably, the Unicron of Prime is even more of an example than normal. "One Shall Rise" reveals that . He's also capable of spawning endless copies of himself from the stone of the earth, and while they're thankfully smaller than the original, they're still Humungous Mecha. Unlike Generation 1, he also opts to take matters into his own hands rather than act through.
 * Transformers Energon introduces another herald of Unicron in Scorponok, the leader of the Terrorcon hivemind and a Humongous Mecha among Humongous Mecha...
 * Tornedron from "Call of the Primitives" could also probably count, and it is rather anticlimactically beaten by flicking a switch, reversing its polarity.
 * Tornedron from "Call of the Primitives" could also probably count, and it is rather anticlimactically beaten by flicking a switch, reversing its polarity.

Real Life

 * A common fear among people 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.