Trust the computer. The computer is your friend.
— Paranoia
I'm the Computer. The all-knowing, the all-sensing, the all-narrating... well, you get the point.
— Alien Adventure by John Freda
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die.
— Colossus, Colossus: The Forbin Project
Proton turned to gaze upon the electronic edifice that covered the entire wall behind him — twenty square feet of humming circuits and clicking relays, jumping meters and whirring dials, chattering printers and clacking numerical displays, scrolling LED messages, spinning spools of reel-to-reel tape, and lights that blinked on and off for no apparent reason. Multiple imagizers showed scenes from across the dominion of Man — lush hydroponic farms in the Sahara desert, towering megastructures in earthquake-prone regions, toroid space stations waltzing to Blue Danube, the vast hydroelectric dam spanning the Straits of Gibraltar. Yet this machine was merely a terminal, commlaser-linked via artificial moons to the gigantean electronic brain beneath the ice of Antarctica. A man had once foolishly said there was a worldwide demand for only five computers. Little did he know a computer would one day become so powerful it could handle the demands of the entire solar system!
"Two hundred years ago, when the Federation began expansion and conquest, the Administration established a computer complex to monitor information: political, civil, military — everything! That computer is the nerve center of ALL Federation activity. Smashing that would be the biggest single step toward the destruction of their power. I don't think they would ever recover from it."
— Blake, Blake's 7, "Pressure Point"
"Master Computer. Sees all, hears all, and occasionally says something."
— Grose, Blake's 7, "Moloch"
We surrendered to the computer. Not just the US, but the whole world. It’s in charge now. "Helios," it calls itself. I don't know if the government gave it that name or it chose it for itself. But it says this is all for our own good. There will be no more war. And all it took was a nuclear holocaust and the loss of all our freedoms.
We're not allowed to talk about the truth: that Helios did all this. It says it intervened to save us from ourselves, but everyone knows that's a lie, no matter what "our" government says. We built computers to serve us, and this one was supposed to protect us. I guess we finally outdid ourselves...
—"Death From Above — Post-Apocalypse," The End of the World: Revolt of the Machines
WOTAN has determined Earth cannot progress further with mankind running it.
—Doctor Who, "The War Machines" Episode 1
