The Chicken of Tomorrow

Alright, it is the future. Artificial meat is ramping up in production; packets of specially-prepared protein and fat are linked up to electric impulses meant to simulate muscle use, with various calibrations for different kinds of meat. This is, at best, a viable competitor for Spam.

So! You're an aspiring millionaire with more than a bit of cash sunk into such a business. You want to drum up some publicity for the venture, stand out from all the other meatgen corps. Then it strikes you: premium-grade artificial meat! Ah, but how to make it special... Of course! Build a robotic structure around a series of meatgen modules in the shape of a chicken! (It... may not come as easily as that, but whatev.) You can rig the artificial tissue to respond to and even move the robochicken! No cheesy-looking chicken-wing molds for THIS artificial meat! Throw in some cheap chicken-simulation AI and a beak and BOOM! General Tzu's Old-Fashioned Chicken-style genMeat! Everyone'll have to try it and compare it to the real deal, comedians will have a field day with it, PETA will praise it up and down and back around, and robotics scientists will scramble to work for you on the promise that they can improve the AI's behavioral mechanics to make them more chickeny.

Assuming the results from all of this are actually good and delicious, the competition begins picking up similar practices. Commercial interest in real livestock diminishes, to the point that even small farms replace their old chickens for robotic ones. These farms, having to deal with the fast-paced world of genmeats, typically lock the chickens out of their roosts to remove them, as the cost of slaughtering them all would swallow up any money gained from their sale. Most chickens, once left to the wilderness, starve or are easily taken down by predators. Alas, the trend is almost caught too late, and the chicken officially enters the registry for endangered animals. Eventually zoos set up chicken exhibits, and the few that survive in the wild go feral and subsequently disrupt the local ecosystems. A movement begins to redomesticate the animal, leading to the chicken as a top trendy pet of the time.

And that's what I think about when nobody is around.

On a related note, Robot Chicken (the show) is incorrectly named, as it depicts a mad scientist installing equipment into an once-living chicken during the opening title sequence. Cyber Chicken is more apt and has alliteration to boot.