The Oedipal Robot

Tom was a very intelligent man, quite brilliant in fact. He was also extremely lazy, extraordinarily vain and incredibly conceited. He would constantly moan to his friends about how it was impossible for IT graduates like him to get jobs. Secretly they thought that if he actually applied for a job, he might have more luck. But trying was something Tom did not do unless it was for one of his 'projects'. These were little ideas that he had, which quickly morphed into full blown obsessions. He would spend days working on them, so focussed that he would forget to eat and sleep. At the end of the vigil, he would emerge from his room, often looking close to death, and present his creation to anyone and everyone who was in the vicinity. The results were inevitably so outlandish that one had to marvel at both the madness and ingenuity of the person who created them.

One day Tom decided that he was well and truly sick of being a nobody. He wanted fame, riches, and herds of women. These things were certainly within his grasp, for he was so brilliant that if he applied himself to a career, he would quickly rise up the ranks and be rewarded with all that he was looking for. But Tom was much too lazy to put in the hard work that this required. Instead, he built a robot. His plan was simple: he would sit at home watching daytime television, while his robot would be out there working hard, building networks and setting up dates. 'Foolproof' he labelled it, and set to work at once.

First things first, he had to get some money, because most robot components weren't available at the $2 shop. He set up an internet scam, begging people to donate money to African children suffering from AIDS and pocketing the proceeds (he was also completely lacking in any moral framework). This done, he began to build the robot from scratch. It had to look and sound exactly like him - even his mother would have to be deceived. Days passed in hectic abandon. He only remembered to eat, when his hands began to shake so badly that he could no longer hold the tools in his hand. He allowed himself 5 hours sleep and gorged himself on passionfruit (his projects always illicited a strong craving for passionfruit in him) then got back to work.

After two weeks the outer shell was done. It was the most perfect Doppelgänger the world had ever seen - even the scar on his ring finger, where his brother had inadvertantly cut him with scissors was there. The final step was programming the robot so it would do exactly what he wanted. His deft fingers tapped away on the keyboard, creating routines and subroutines, which were all very complicated, and gave the robot a personality with equal parts greed, ambition, and flirtatiousness.

Eventually he was done. He reached down the robot's throat to turn on the power switch (the most convenient place to locate it) and... gave a snarl of disappointment as nothing at all happened. Eyes flashing in frustration, he turned back to the computer screen and discovered the cause of the culprit. The ambition chip was playing up. He disassembled everything and began to reprogram it, cranking up the ambition setting to unimaginable levels. Confident that everything was now in working order, he again reached down the robot's throat, pressed the switch and gave a whoop of pure elation as the robot sat up and began looking around at its surroundings.
"Who are you?" it asked, in a perfect imitation of his voice.
"I am Tom, your father and master"

Before he could finish the sentence, the robot flicked out its inbuilt Swiss Army Knife and stabbed him in the throat. Pausing only to take a shower to wash off the blood, the robot stepped outside into the bright and beautiful world, which it would soon destroy in a cataclysmic attempt to unite the world through a third world war.