My fellow Mad-Scientist Americans,

Every candidate for president must address the national defense, and I am no exception. My vision for the future of our military is simple: robots. If war must be waged, let it be waged by remote control.

I want to take nothing away from the incredibly hard-working and amazingly brave men and women in our armed forces today, and I also want to make clear that the need for human soldiers will not simply disappear as our armored androids roll off the factory floor and into the battlefields of the 21^st century. I simply wish to propose that the best way to fight a war is when the enemy never gets a chance to shoot at your people.

Remember the old peacenik question “what if they held a war and nobody showed up?” We’re getting closer to being able to find the answer, because our people can stay safely in a bunker miles and miles away from the danger, safely guiding devices such as the Predator UAV on reconnaissance and attack missions without jeopardizing any of our own people.

An unfair advantage?

As a wise old martial arts teacher once told me: “if you’re in a fair fight, you’ve planned it badly.” I say we plan our wars really, really well.

Developing this technology is expensive, but it saves more than it costs in terms of medical treatment and suffering for soldiers and their families. What is more, this technology drives the innovations of the future, and perhaps someday all dangerous jobs—from disarming bombs to milking rattlesnakes—might be outsourced to our silicone friends.

Peace on Earth (War on the Moon)

If elected president, I’ll take us all one step farther by establishing agreements to have our military robots fight the other side’s military robots, so that no human beings are ever in danger. By mutual agreement, we can hold all combat far away from civilian population centers—in fact, I say we do our brawling on the moon where there’s no chance of collateral damage and anyone with a telescope can enjoy the show.

So what if the other country loses but doesn’t submit? Well, if we can beat their bots on the moon, there’s nothing stopping us from bringing them back to earth and beating the other guy in person. It’s in their interest to play by the rules.

What about terrorists who try to bypass our military to take things out on innocents? With all the added advances in tactical robots, they’re going to be in for increasingly nasty surprises as our robots get smaller, harder to detect, and ever more vigilant.

Robot superiority means national superiority.

A VOTE FOR MAD SCIENTISTS IS A VOTE FOR PEACEFUL ROBOT VIOLENCE.

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I’m a mad scientist, and I want to be your president.*

Yes, I am one of THOSE mad scientists who creates insane doomsday machines and crazy lizard monsters, but I stand before you (or, rather, sit before my keyboard if you want to get all literal) to tell you that I’m also mad in the sense that I’m angry. Very angry. And just this once I think I’ll try politics before resorting to flying cyborg monkeys.

For too long the two major parties have ignored the important scientific issues that touch each and every one of us personally. No longer! With your support, I intend to lead America to a brighter, shinier future with far, far more robots and more flying cars. But more importantly, far less stupidity.

As a candidate in this election, I hope to shift the debate away from such petty, abstract issues such as the economy and gerrymandering, and shift it towards the real, important things that will change our lives today and in the future. Here are some of the issues I intend to stump for:

• Economy: we can’t afford to outsource our scientific future. Let’s make a particle collider so big it’ll give Europe boson-envy.
• Healthcare: why you’re a freaking idiot if you don’t vaccinate your child.
• International diplomacy: building better doomsday devices.
• Military: robot soldiers are the way to go.
• Global climate change: 98% of scientists never agree about anything… but they agree about this. What does that tell you?
• NASA: We now pay the Russians to fly our astronauts into space. Are you frakking kidding me? We can do better!

I’m sick and tired of politicians on both sides pandering to the denialists and distracting the public with petty social squabbles. Science is our burden, our mess, and our best hope for a better future. If you agree, tweet this, post this, email it, and leave me comments. The important thing is that you tell your friends, tell your co-workers, and tell your political leaders.

Let’s bring science back into the public debate.

AMERICA CAN’T AFFORD TO IGNORE ITS MAD SCIENTISTS ANY LONGER.

*I’m not really a scientist or a politician. This is a work of social satire. Don’t actually vote for me: if I really wanted your vote, I’d use my mind-control ray.

The panzer-kampftruppen’s gunfire collided with the pack of mutant chickens, causing tails, flanks, and fore claws to burst into clouds of blood and feathers. Yet still they came, showing no concept of pain or fear. Dr. Scott’s reverse-evolution process had distilled into them every ounce of hunger and territorialism possessed by their most ferocious dinosaur ancestors.

The flock ripped and tore at the meat which still hung from the robotic intruder, too close now for the rotating barrels to pick them out. The panzer-kampftruppen smashed at them with its heavy fist. It caught one with a solid blow, sending the beast sprawling to the far side of the barn, but the rest crowded in even closer. They clogged the arm and leg joints with their tails and feet as they climbed their prey’s back and sides. One lunged its toothed beak into the narrow view-slit, searching for the pilot’s head the way an ordinary chicken might peck for a grub inside a log. Another seized the machine’s leg in its claws and dug its teeth deep into the hydraulic pump behind the knee, sending a spray of black oil down its face.

“Let’s get out of here before we find out who wins,” Reggie said as he hoisted the loft ladder up into the jagged gap in the roof. Preferring to lead by example—particularly when that example involved swift retreat—he scampered out into the daylight.

Dr. Scott followed him, and Clem appeared a moment later.

“This here’s one peach of an escape plan,” said Clem. “You reckon there’s a way to get down off’n this roof?”

Stepping lightly to avoid losing his balance or breaking through the damaged roof, Reggie worked his way over to the edge and peered down. There was a small haystack below, but they were at least twenty feet up. Once, one of his stunt men had broken a leg making a jump just like this one.

Reggie turned to tell the others that, out of the goodness of his heart, he would allow them to jump first. However, before he could open up his mouth, he saw the glinting silver and red fuselage of the Scrumtumbler S-1 hover-plane lifting up behind them like the glorious sunrise.

“See!” Reggie said, running past the other two towards the open side door of airplane. “Everything’s going exactly as I planned!”

The panzer-kampftruppen slashed downward with its fist and the door’s hinges ripped away from the wall. It clomped into the barn, the still-smoking barrels of its right arm swiveling in search of a target.

“And… action!” Reggie called.

Clem and Dr. Scott, positioned in the barn’s loft, dumped their buckets of offal down onto the panzer-kampftruppen, covering it in loops of cow innards and globs of jellified blood.

The walking tank had no neck joints and all its viewports were designed only for ground assault. Awkwardly, it leaned backwards in an attempt to target the source of the raining slop, but before it could bring its machineguns to bear, Reggie pulled the rope to begin phase two of his plan.

It was like he was a kid again, opening the curtains at his neighborhood vaudeville theater. This time, however, it wasn’t the curtain going up, it was a cage door sliding open. The mutant chickens, wild with their new freedom, howled and dashed forward like a swarm of meat-seeking missiles.

The panzer-kampftruppen spun to face them, flinging bits of grime and gore off itself as it turned. Its machinegun spat fire and thunder as the chickens howled. The fight was on.

“My research!” Dr. Scott made as if to push past Clem and run back to the house, but Reggie grabbed the sleeve of his lab coat and held him back.

Through the barn door, they could see thick black smoke rolling out through the broken windows of the ranch house.

“Must a’ been an incendiary shell,” Clem said as he slammed the barn door shut.

“But they weren’t firing incendiaries—” Dr. Scott’s words were interrupted by the  deafening drumbeat of machinegun fire. A line of bullet holes opened in the side of the barn just above their heads. One of the barn’s support pillars disintegrated into splinters, causing boards to drop from the ceiling. The roof sagged and the bright Tijuana sunlight streamed in through the new gap over their heads.

The three of them dove to the ground and crawled to the back of the barn, next to the line of buckets of offal destined to feed Dr. Scott’s mutant chickens. Nearby, those same creatures slashed their toothy beaks through the bars of their pen and howled in a manner fitting for the dinosaurs they had been reverse-evolved to resemble.

“Where’s the pilot?” Reggie demanded.

“Saw her runnin’ to the plane,” Clem moaned. “She’s probably gonna skedaddle and leave us here.”

A metallic fist burst through the wall of the barn. Its fingers opened and then the hand pulled back to rip gap even wider.

“We don’t have much time!” Dr. Scott wailed. “What can we do?”

Reggie lifted his fedora to wipe the sweat off his forehead. There were no doors on the ground level except the one that the bipedal panzer was battering down. They would have a better chance of flapping their arms and flying out through the gap in the roof than they would trying to run past that thing. They needed another option, and they needed it fast.

Suddenly, Reggie grabbed a bucket of slop, waved away the cloud of flies and peered inside. He curled up his nose as he smelled it, but when he looked at his companions he had a twinkle in his eyes.

“You got a plan?” Clem asked.

“I got a plan,” Reggie answered.

When the bullets began to fly, Clem slipped away to Dr. Scott’s study. Upending a bottle of whiskey he had set aside for this very occasion, he doused the doctor’s laboratory notebooks and then tossed a lit match onto the stack. By the time the flames had spread to the carpet and the other bookshelves, Clem was already down the stairs and out the back door.

The moment Clem stepped around the side of the house he was nearly decapitated by a stream of machinegun fire. He ducked back behind the corner as scraps of wooden siding and chunks of lumber rained down onto the brim of his ten gallon hat. Pressing himself flat against the ground, he risked a quick glance at the source of the gunfire.

The Nazis had a walking tank. One of its arms ended in a machine gun with rotating barrels, and the other ended in a wrecking ball of a fist. This was a panzer-kampftruppen, a prototype Clem recognized from blueprints he had seen in the Terra Arcanum headquarters.

That’s the problem with Nazis, Clem thought. They tend to go to extremes. This trait usually made it easy for the Terra Arcanum to manipulate them, but once in a while it caused some minor setbacks.

The walking tank was not swift, but its resounding footfalls drew inexorably closer to him. Then, a stroke of luck: Kate Boone broke from behind a small hillock, firing as she ran. Her shots pinged uselessly off the panzer’s steel chest-plate, but it was enough to draw the metal monster’s attention long enough for Clem to sprint to the barn to join the director and the scientist.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. (type “J” to skip back one post; type “K” to skip ahead one post)

The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

Rusty wasn’t trying to catch her, he was only trying to stay two steps behind her wherever she went. The problem was that nobody, especially not the little girl, could see the difference. The girl and her mechanical pursuer careened through the aisles, first bowling through the crowd and then through the tables. Test tubes, telescopes, circuit boards, and all kinds of other expensive experiments smashed to the floor. One of the dads in the crowd lunged for my robot, but he only managed to knock over someone else, who fell against another person.Before I knew what was happening, half the crowd went down in a tangle of arms and legs.

Everybody was screaming. The girl started shrieking “Help! Mommy, Help!” but that only made things worse because Rusty is programmed to respond to verbal commands, and “help” means you need a hand up. When she said it, those two pincer-arms deployed, reaching out for her and snapping as they came.

The MIT judge was right in my ear, yelling at me to turn it off, but before I could reach for the power knob, another judge shouldered me out of the way and cranked the knob as far as it would go… in the wrong direction.

The thing about broadcasting electricity is that the electromagnetic pulse, the EMP, is the same thing that causes blackouts within a hundred miles of a nuclear bomb explosion. At lower power and at just the right frequencies, Rusty’s EMP could run small electronics for short periods of time. Maybe it was a mistake to have fit Rusty with the most powerful Tesla coil I could make, because at maximum power it made the magnifying transmitter dangerous to anything with circuits or wires.

The moment the judge accidentally cranked the power to maximum, there was a bright flash overhead as the light bulbs in the ceiling burned out. On the tables all around us, dozens of experiments with electrical components burst into flame, and everyone within twenty feet of Rusty yelped in almost perfect unison as the cell phones in their pockets overheated. At the same instant, Rusty collapsed in place, a pathetic trail of smoke rising from his back, his battery fried by his own sudden output.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. (type “J” to skip back one post; type “K” to skip ahead one post)

The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

“Question,” said the MIT judge. “Can you explain what you mean by ‘wireless electricity’ and why you would equip your robot with this feature?”

“Sure,” I said, twisting the power knob at the control station. Rusty hummed to life, his limbs twisting and clicking through their initiation sequence. “It’s based on an electromagnetic pulse—EMP for short. This electricity broadcasting is based on the work of Nikola Tesla, who invented the alternating current which runs every plug-in appliance in your home. Tesla was this amazing genius who wanted to broadcast wireless power all over the world, but he never could get funding because nobody could see how it would make money. Anyway, I’m doing it on a small scale and I figured it could be an energy savings if Rusty followed you around in your home. You know, so the lights would come on whenever the two of you entered a room and they’d turn off when you left. No more forgetting to flick the switch.”

One of the other judges raised his hand. “You really think people would want that… that thing following them around in their houses?”

I’m not good with sarcasm or rhetorical questions, but I think that question was really meant to say that Rusty was ugly. That kind of hurt. I’d been working on this robot for years. If you noticed, I even call him a “him” instead of an “it,” because to me he was a family pet. Whether you have a cat, a parakeet, or a robotic scorpion-dog, you still love your pet no matter what. You just can’t help it.

I cleared my throat and moved on, hoping to get back to the important parts of my demonstration. “Rusty can navigate just about any terrain on his own, even climb trees and ladders. If you wear this tracking bracelet,” I held up a black plastic strip about the size of a wristwatch. “Rusty will always follow you obediently wherever you go. Just watch.”

For some seriously stupid reason, I picked the little girl for my demonstration. I don’t know what I was thinking, except maybe I thought if that little girl could see Rusty as I saw him—a reliable and helpful companion—then maybe everyone else would see him that way, too.

I don’t think the girl’s mother realized what I was doing when I asked if I could put the bracelet on her daughter’s wrist, but she said it was okay. The little girl didn’t protest when I clicked it into place.

I returned to the controls and inched the power knob up to ten percent. Rusty hissed as his pistons drew his body up to standing, and the spiked turret on his back twitched. One clanking, growling step was all it took and that little girl screamed and ran. Rusty, following his programming, ran after her.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. (type “J” to skip back one post; type “K” to skip ahead one post)

The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

The judges seemed really interested in the antimatter reactor blueprints. Even the guy from MIT asked a lot of questions, and they all took tons of notes, which meant that they were going to give it lots of points.

Then it was my turn. My palms got really sweaty and I started to feel a bit dizzy. The things I hate the most in the world are germs, followed by bugs and rodents, which carry a lot of germs. But public speaking is a close third. I have a hard enough time talking to people one-on-one, but when there’s a crowd I end up doing really stupid things. I think my IQ is inversely proportional to the number of strangers who are listening to me. The bigger the group, the dumber I feel. And this was a big group.

“So, what have you got for us?” said the judge from MIT, and now every eye in the crowd was on me.

“A robot,” I answered. I could see that this statement didn’t make much of an impact. Half of everyone in the building had come equipped with some little gizmo that could walk or roll or change directions when it bumped into a wall.

“What makes my robot special is two things,” I went on. “The first is that Rusty—that’s my robot’s name—can recognize its master and follow him or her around a room. The second thing is that Rusty can broadcast wireless electricity. That means when Rusty is around, you can run small appliances without having to plug them in.”

That got a few of the judges to scribble some notes on their clipboards, but they weren’t writing a lot. They needed a demonstration.

“Ladies and gentleman,” I said as I gripped the corners of the cloth. “I give you… Rusty!”

The crowd gasped when I pulled back the cover to reveal my Rottweiler-sized metallic monstrosity. I had modeled the robot after a crab, but it came out looking more like a clockwork scorpion, with its eight piston-driven spider legs tensed at its side and its pincer-arms poised in front. Rusty’s back was flat and segmented, mounted at the rear by a turret that terminated in a curved radar dish with a long spike protruding from the center. I had tried to make Rusty’s head more friendly-looking by making it long and somewhat dog-like in appearance. I had even given him big, round, friendly eyes, but I think it may have turned out more menacing and predatory than I wanted, especially because those big eyes flickered red as they received LIDAR range-finding feedback from their surroundings.

Now I had everyone’s rapt attention, but maybe not in a good way. Several of the judges shook their heads, perhaps thinking I had been too theatrical in my presentation. The little girl with pig-tails hid behind her mother’s legs, her Raggedy Ann doll forgotten on the floor as she stared at the mechanical monster only a dozen steps away from her.

This is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you’re new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning.

Kate Boone dove to the floor as the bullets tore holes in the door and shattered the windows above her. Reggie kicked the door closed and then crouched down, carefully balancing his breakfast plate in his hands.

The men by the truck opened up with another burst of machinegun fire that almost cut the door in half. Wood splinters and glass shards rained down on them—and onto Reggie’s plate of food.

“Those guys aren’t kidding around this time!” he said, staring in horror at the mound of scrambled eggs now made inedible by the debris.

Dr. Scott stepped in from the kitchen, the mop still in his hands and a horrified look on his face. Kate sprang to her feet and ushered the doctor back the way he came.

“My research!” Dr. Scott yelled, pushing past her on his way to the stairs.

Reggie blocked the way with his husky frame “Sorry, doc. We gotta get out of this house before we end up looking like Swiss cheese.”

“Everybody out to the plane!” Kate ordered.

“Where’d Clem go?” Reggie asked. Nobody had an answer.

Kate dashed out the back door and over the open ground. The gunmen noticed her as she rounded the corner of the barn, and a hail of bullets kicked up the dust just behind her feet.

The airplane was parked behind the barn, but now the gunmen were watching that side of the house. Reggie knew he would never make it across the fifty yards of open, sun-blistered ground.

“Cover us!” Reggie called to Kate.

Kate must have heard him, because she popped back around the corner of the barn, taking aim with her one good eye.

By the truck, one of the two men scrambled to undo the ties to the cargo cover while the other fired the last three bullets from his sub-machinegun and then fluidly ejected the magazine. Kate’s Mauser pistol used rifle-grade ammunition, which gave her the advantage at this range. Her first shot kicked up a dust cloud at the man’s foot as he readied his new magazine and sprayed bullets in her direction. His shots fanned out uselessly; her next two shots found his chest and knocked him to the ground. The second man seized another gun from the truck bed, but Kate’s fire drove him under cover.

Reggie ran for it, hauling Dr. Scott behind him by the sleeve of his white lab coat.

Then the thing in the cargo bed knocked the canvas off itself with a huge steel hand. When Reggie saw what it was, he stumbled and fell to the dry ground.

It was all metal, pistons, and rivets, and it might have been mistaken for an armored car except that it walked upright on two stumpy legs that kicked up clouds of dust with each heavy step. Its blocky torso was armor-plated and adorned with a Swastika-and-dagger motif, and where it might have had a head it bore only a flat hatch a series of view-slits. Its arms were steel and iron girders bound by complicated joints that hissed and hummed as they moved. One of those arms ended in a crude fist, and the other bore a multi-barrel machinegun.

The huge gun swiveled to point directly at Reggie, its barrels spinning to life.

“Unbelievable,” Reggie coughed. “Where’s my camera when I need it?”

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Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com