The demon robot that comes with instructions on how to kill it
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Credit: Dangerous Minds / Satyress Robotics
Pop Culture
The bizarre safety robot that comes with instructions on how to kill it
Will Howard<br>Tue 11 August 2026 23:00, UK
Picture the scene. When driving through the woods, you slip on a patch of black ice and end up wedged in between a tight-knit thicket of trees. You’re fine, but you need fairly urgent help to get you out of the car, so you call for help and they say, ‘Sure thing, we’ll send out new robot‘. You wait a few hours, then, in the halflight cast from your dying headlights, you see something briefly, something completely inhuman.<br>Your headlights begin to flicker and every time they come back on, whatever beast it is gets closer. It’s seven feet tall. It’s jet black. It’s carrying a chainsaw. It steps over a downed tree and reveals that it has the torso of a man and the bottom half of a horse. As it finally gets within touching distance of your car, you see this creature has the head of a bull. Horns spiralling out into the dark. It regards you with dead, white eyes as you desperately plead with it not to send you to the hell from whence it came as it raises its chainsaw.
Then it starts cutting down the trees beside you as its operator waves at you, having recorded you begging for your life for social media.<br>Congratulations, you’ve had your live saved by Threehalves, the newest creation from Satyress Robotics.
We’ll level with you, dear reader, I have no idea whether I’m falling for something here. This cannot be real, I mean… Look at it?! Not only does it look like it stands guard at a BDSM dungeon exclusively for Terminators, this design is meant to be ‘practical’. That little short story I wrote at the start isn’t a parable for the worst possible way you could possibly encounter this lovechild of all four horsemen of the apocalypse and their horses; it’s the way that Satyress wants to deploy it, too.
Credit: Satyress RoboticsWhen talking to The Debrief about their goals for the robot, a spokesperson from Satyress was asked about whether these monstrosities will operate on their own judgment. Satyress seemed to delay the robot uprising for at least a couple of months by saying, “Our goal is to have experienced trade experts in control of the bots at all times. Forestry, for instance, is the deadliest job in the US – our goal is to save lives first and foremost.”<br>Even the things that look like they were put in simply for aesthetics, like the horns, are apparently there for practical reasons. They are supposedly there to make sure that the robot can’t enter doorways and remains something used for outdoor work. In the same interview with The Debrief, the spokesperson said they were “another way to make it clear this isn’t a toy, [a] security guard, etc, it’s built for one reason, for a teleoperator to do dangerous work or heavy lifting from a safe, in line of sight distance. We are not looking at any use cases in commercial buildings, and certainly not residential.”
However, for all their talk about how the Threehalves will always have operators that they can only function in self-defence without, Satyress did also build some fail-safes into the machine. There’s a button at the centre of its midsection that can be pressed to shut it down; however, if that’s unavailable for one reason or another, there’s an alternative. The operating manual helpfully illustrates that if you shoot or stab the robot’s torso or back, then it will immediately immobilise.<br>Again, this might all be an elaborate hoax. Satyress’ social media presence appears thin on the ground for a company that can build hundreds of robots like this with the right contract. Not to mention how no amount of strategy talk about the horns will ever convince me that they’re there for anything other than aesthetics. Perhaps this is all satirical, a comment on how terrifying and dystopian a robot-enforced society will be when it comes.<br>Perhaps it’s something worse, though, and a sign that it’s coming sooner than we think.
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