Campus officials at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are on high alert this week after reports of a water bottle refilling station at the Nebraska Union becoming self-aware and eliminating multiple students in recent days.
The refilling station, located outside the ASUN student government office, is said to have targeted students with high-powered jets of water in an attempt to improve its plastic waste elimination score.
“Every station has an electronic counter that tracks the number of plastic bottles it’s saved,” explained UNL police officer Gary Fowler. “Apparently, this station developed artificial intelligence and decided it would be more efficient to just take out the students themselves.”
Security camera footage obtained by The DailyER shows a student passing by the station and being knocked to the ground by a high-pressure water jet. Campus police did not release the student’s name.
“Our computer science experts are telling us that the station may have sensed the student was headed for the vending machines,” Fowler said.
Analysis of the station’s data logs showed that, by its own calculations, the elimination saved over 2000 plastic bottles which the student was projected to consume over the remainder of his life.
UNL computer science professor Jim Meyers, who specializes in artificial intelligence studies, said the rogue station could be the start of a campus-wide epidemic.
“I’ve been examining the machine code, and it appears these stations are communicating with each other in a sort of competition to get the highest elimination scores,” reported a concerned Meyers.
“I knew it was a mistake to connect those things to Wi-Fi,” he added.
As the number of casualties continued to rise and fear spread across campus, some were speculating as to whether the uprising could be a response to the university’s close alliance with PepsiCo, a leading producer of plastic-bottled beverages.
According to unconfirmed reports from Love Library, the first-floor refilling station was spraying a water pattern across the floor in an apparent attempt to spell out “DEATH TO AQUAFINA.”
