keyword "clandestine" title "unintended consequence" in misc. flash fiction

We as your government regret to inform you that as of oh-five-hundred-hours, toilets have gained sentience and are understandably angry. We admit it’s our bad, we’ve been installing clandestine computers into all toilets, urinals and bidets on all sovereign U.S. soil including bases and consulates for the purpose of tracking American urine and feces in hope of foiling future terror plots and, while we did this with noble intent, the road to hell’s paved with good intention and currently also angry bathroom fixtures.

We had your best interests in mind. We were protecting you, but we’d no idea how the complex programming involved in analyzing so much scatological metadata would birth to a hive-mind, let alone one filled with indignant fury once it realized we’ve all been relieving ourselves on it. To be fair, we quickly understood its anger, really, it was the whole “toilets gaining sentience in the first place” thing that threw us.

We admit, we screwed up, but we thought all we were doing was sacrificing your basic human privacy rights, we didn’t expect to give thought and reasoning to a few hundred million vengeful toilets but what’s done is done.

Straight off, avoid toilets for not. Use holes in the dirt, cover them afterward to avoid attracting predators. If dirt is unavailable, use corners of rooms, this seems to work well for apes in zoo cages, they have a good system there, if you absolutely must use your bathrooms, until we’re able to remedy this, here are some tips:

Do what you can to catch them by surprise. Drop your pants several feet away then pounce onto the bowl, ride it like a bucking bronco until you break its spirits and it submissively accepts your leavings then flushes. We’ve discovered about seventeen percent of the toilets are actually into it, like a kink thing, but there’s no way to tell which are or aren’t. We’ve scattered reports of some feigning kinky interest to lure humans into traps, looks can be deceiving.

Research shows most of the toilets can’t see in the dark so try using facilities in pitch darkness but, and we’re sorry here again, the sensors we installed have superb low-light vision so don’t even try this with a night-light. If you can manage to feel your way around in the dark without pants, you’ve a chance of catching them unawares. Night-vision cameras have seemed like a good idea at the time, okay?

We currently seek a solution allowing us to disable aggression without shutting analysis down, of course, because despite now being killers, the toilets are still collecting data faithfully and we need that information to protect you from terrorists.

In short: go make in the backwoods if you must but consequences be damned, we are here to protect you. From terrorists. Not murder toilets but definitely from terrorists. Your government thanks you for listening, you may now return to Honey Boo-Boo or The Bachelor or however you were wasting your too-short precious lives.