Doctor Zollo worked on his robotic bears all night in preparation for the big day. He inspected and carefully made final tweaks on each bear and was pleased they looked and acted so authentically. Hidden underground in his secret, high-tech laboratory, he had spent a year inventing his perfect robotic bears. Through much trial and error, he had labored unsparingly on what he hoped would be a spectacular debut.
His bears were replicas of the Black Bears in Montana that prowled the northwest corner of the state where Doctor Zollo’s laboratory lay hidden beneath the vast forest. Unlike real Black Bears, Doctor Zollo’s bears had surprises hidden under their furry exteriors for their assigned tasks in his experiment.
He released them into the Montana wilds on the first day of bear hunting season, which seemed an insane time to send them into certain doom with hundreds of hunters invading the forest fully armed and looking to bag bears.
Shots rang out all over the forest throughout the day with Doctor Zollo anxiously waiting in the laboratory pondering the fate of his robotic bears. Would the hunters’ bullets penetrate their steel bodies beneath their furry exteriors and kill them? He didn’t think so. He didn’t think the hunters would stand a chance against his invincible creations, but it was a first-time experiment with the failure risks first experiments often have
The first encounter was against a party of six hunters. Before the hunters spotted the bears, arrows pierced their hearts killing them instantly. Doctor Zollo had trained his bears to be expert archers with arms so strong they could fire deadly arrows twice as far as humans and with sufficient power to penetrate flesh and bone with ease.
In the second encounter against six groups of thirty hunters, the bears, also expertly skilled in the use of firearms, mowed them down in minutes with rapid-fire machine guns.
During their third encounter of the day, they blasted a dozen hunters out of platforms in trees whose corpses unceremoniously dive-bombed into the forest below with resounding thumps on the hard ground.
Before the day was over, the robotic bears shocked and slaughtered every hunter that entered the forest intent on taking their lives for cold-blooded thrill kills. The robotic bears had been programmed by Doctor Zollo to kill them to avenge the deaths of all the real bears wantonly slaughtered by hunters for decades.
The robotic bears hauled the dead hunters’ bodies back to Doctor Zollo’s laboratory. With programmed taxidermy skills, they preserved the hunter’s heads and mounted them on the corridor walls of the laboratory. They and Doctor Zollo marveled at the protruding trophies, symbols of the experiment’s success. It had been a great day for Doctor Zollo’s experiment, and it was only the beginning.
Bob Boyd