Well, your university has been taken over by kiwibots: What to do next? 

SATIRE – What started off as a malfunctioning delivery led to not only a complete evacuation of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but also an evacuation of Lafayette Parish.

“I just ordered my usual nacho basket from McAlister’s, but I didn’t think it would lead to the mass destruction of the public and my peers,” Juliette Frosterick, a junior majoring in psychology, said. “I’ll never eat another nacho basket again.”

Frosterick ordered her food on March 23 at 12:13 p.m. and requested it to be delivered through the new Kiwibot delivery system. Operated by The Kiwibot Big Company, these robots are miniature-sized pieces of technology that deliver food to students all throughout campus. The company even added new features to the bots including flying abilities, invisibility techniques and laser-shooting capabilities (to heat up food after those longer deliveries). 

“Nothing possibly wrong could happen with these new features. I can only see great things coming about these new additions,” Dr. Kiwi Botz, the creator of the Kiwibot, said. 

Many students were thrilled about the new features, including Frosterick. Although she doesn’t live there, she purposefully went with some friends to the 4th floor community room of Bonin Hall just to try out the Kiwibot’s new flying feature. 

However, after the Kiwibot got the food, it made its way to Bonin Hall, and as it was flying up to the 4th floor, it started short-circuiting. Students passed by and saw the bot glitching in the air with smoke and sparks coming out of it. 

According to Frosterick, one of the sparks hit a bush and made it burst into flames. After almost 10 minutes, the bot fell to the ground. Students began to set up a memorial around the burnt bot and left it there for two days. The bot’s name was Lindsley.

“Lindsley was my favorite bot on campus. I would intentionally order at a certain time and certain spot on campus just to see her,” Gregory Halfsie, a UL Lafayette freshman studying chemical engineering, said while sobbing. 

However, after two days, Halfsie said he went to pay his tributes to Lindsley, and before he could finish kissing it, the bot regenerated and began to transform into this enormous blue robot with piercing red eyes, broad shoulders and long metal arms. 

“I thought it was the best day of my life! The Kiwibot I loved was alive again and this time larger. I loved it for 30 seconds, before I was thrown halfway across campus by it,” Halfsie said. 

Halfsie was grabbed and tossed from Bonin Hall all the way to Heritage Apartments along with a few other passing students that were near the space between the dorms and the Student Union. 

The Kiwibot was 150 feet tall and was crushing all buildings and cars in her path. Before the Kiwibot could move any further past the Student Union, she sent out a signal to the rest of the Kiwibots on campus which, in turn, triggered them to transform into their true selves: the giant Kiwibots. They all met up near Agnes Edwards before some started flying around campus using their lasers to blow objects up and some started on-foot tearing up buildings and smooshing animals and people.

According to Botz, the possible reason for this malfunction could be the fact that he forgot to put a “don’t destroy” command in the bots, so at some point, they were bound to go rogue. 

“Yeah, you know how I said we have nothing to worry about? Well, that’s before I realized that I forgot an important part of the bots’ programming,” Botz said. “Whoops; my bad, mankind.”

Some of the Kiwibots used their invisibility to move from place to place without people noticing, which made dodging their lasers and metallic bodies even harder to avoid. They would break open some of the labs with computers in it and eat the computers to power up. 

The president of the university sent out an evacuation notice to students, however it did not alarm all students. According to Jessie Fingerton in the IT department, the school’s wireless connection was not built to alarm all students at one time, and the rest of the students would be notified two hours after the initial warning message. 

Once they finally completely destroyed H.L. Griffin, which took hours even for them, they started moving out to the Lafayette Parish community. 

They started off by hacking each delivery service and using that as ways to go to people’s houses since it is their primary function. 

The robots then destroyed many beloved food places and stores like Lafayette’s newest popular eatery, Jellyland. 

The bots, however, did not destroy apartments and homes in the parish, which the mayor-president announced was a safe place to stay in. Later that day, it started to rain and the Kiwibots all of a sudden disappeared. 

To this day, residents are unsure if the Kiwibots are invisible and living among us or invisible and just waiting for the right time to come out again.