All HUMANS agreed, after this incident, Stabbies were forbidden, well mostly. At least all the intelligent ones who cared about others. People loved their Stabbies, but now, the "blades" were soft rubber or foam with harmless, to as many as possible, red dye.
https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-04182-k164-death-by-stabby -- Anon Guest
The news spread fast. The regulations were debated for a lot longer. Obviously, the Ships' or Stations' Humans needed enrichment and Stabbies were the lowest cost version of that. You never needed a lot, and there were high odds of the Humans making one or more of their own.
But many Humans were as lazy as the ones on the dead station. All the safety alerts and warnings would fall on willfully ignorant ears.
"That's never happened," was the common Human rationalisation, "so it'll never happen." Humans could be dumb like that.
Eventually, the compromise emerged. Stabbies were allowed, so long as the default weapon was both symbolic and harmless. A plastic knife, or a solid foam one loaded with red ink. Unless, and they had to make this perfectly clear, the facility was under direct attack by a declared enemy.
There were even fast-swap kits added to the emergency response kits.
And urgent messages to all Mediks and administrators to make sure that the Stabbies weren't hazardous to their own crews.
As with all measures to prevent Humans from destroying themselves or their friends, there was pushback. Some folks insisted that they had the right to have their skin sliced open by a blade infected with pathogens.
Something-something "nanny state" and so on. Most people stopped reading by then, wondering if Humanity was daft as well as insane.
Humans would never be able to answer with accuracy.
[Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash]
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Reminds me of the idiots that play shooting at each other with BB guns. Airsoft uses soft pellets but BB guns, those actually go under the skin.
Then when they get infections, they gripe wondering how it happened. People never learn, do they?
In the story they saw an entire place wiped out because of the plague spreading like that, so that everyone fled, fought each other, or died of disease, all because of some idiot not cleaning the knife on their little robot.
"Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence," -- Hanlon's Razor. I'm pretty sure Willful Ignorance is a large portion of that factor.
Some folks just refuse to believe that they could come to harm.