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The VICE Guide to Right Now

Oh Good, Drones Have Flamethrowers Now

Just when you thought this hellscape couldn't get any worse.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Screengrab via Jon Levine / Twitter 

Pretty dark timeline we're on, huh? Hawaii is a fiery vision of hell, the US-Mexico border is a shit show, and—wait, what's that? Up there, in the sky! A bird? A plane? A glimmer of ho—oh. Oh no. That, fellow inmates in this miserable prison of a world, is a drone with a flamethrower on it.

As you can see, it's spewing jets of fire at a power line, systematically disintegrating what appears to be some kind of gauzy net of debris. The contraption might seem like the work of real-life Bond villain Elon Musk, or the latest invention from Boston Dynamics destined to revolt on its masters and wage war on humankind. It's tough to say for sure—there's no word on where this one was filmed, or what kind of psychopath made it—but the machine could have been inflicted upon this Earth by, innocently enough, a Chinese power company.

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According to Gizmodo, the electric company deploys the flame-throwing drones to clean shit off power lines that a construction guy would have a hard time reaching. But that's not what really matters here. What matters is that there are tiny, remote-controlled robot dragons just zipping around out there, and it's only a matter of time before they turn their deadly, precise fire cannons on the humans who brought them into this world. Sure, it's kind of cool to see what they can do to a dangly black thing on a power line. But behold the terror of what they can do to flesh:

So that's it, then. That's how it all ends. Giant robot men chase us down, their headless cyborg dogs fight us into submission, and we all go up in a column of drone flame. At this point—in a world this brutal—maybe just bring on the robot apocalypse already.

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