You'll look back and say "Rocket Jones tried to warn us"

We have one of those tower fans in our living room. You know the kind, with three or four little fans stacked vertically. It does a nice job, oscillates, different speeds, all that happy crap a fan does.

But they slipped up on the design. They forgot to hide its intelligence.

This thing has LED displays on the front face, at the top, where it's convenient to read. But when you set it to oscillate on low speed (arguably the most common setting), these two lights look like shining red eyes, tirelessly scanning back and forth across the room. Noting the positions of all life forms in the vicinity.

This fan has a remote control! And guess where it sits? That's right, it's brain sits under a clear plastic canopy on top of the beast. Where it can control things.

Granted, this thing is seriously limited in the amount of malevolence it can project. I mean, it's on a pedestal base. But don't let that fool you, because they've already figured out how to use remote mobile robots to recconoiter your home. Roomba? Small, cheap, dispensible. Sounds like a scout to me.

What we're seeing here is the very beginnings of the takeover. Hollywood gave us the Terminator, then T2 and T3. This fan is probably something like T1/64th. But don't let it's relative weakness lull you into a false sense of security. It wants that. And it's eyes never stop scanning.

For another few weeks, until it gets unplugged and put it up in the attic.

It's nice to air out your darkest paranoias once in a while. But if you forget to put it away again, you wind up on talk radio.