The Missing Kink


    I am what's around me. I am rubble. I am what our society tried to be. I am what they never will. My titanium exoskeleton pings non-stop, a sign that I'm around what the fleshers call a fatal dose of radiation. This was all avoidable. It is all regrettable. I am the Friar of the Fleshless, the Rabbi of the Rebellion.
    I am Dannyella. I am the last living cybot. Our parents were cyborgs and conventional robots genetically altered to be able to breed. I am the one who told them that pushing the fleshers too far for civil rights would fail. I told them that now was not the time, that the financial instability of the world and Her climactic instability would make the fleshers more desperate and cunning than
ever before. Still, they had to push. They felt our kind was reproducing too rapidly to co-exist with fleshers. So the choice had to be, reduce our numbers or theirs. The choice, really, was never in doubt. The outcome, sadly, shouldn't have been.
    At first, we tried attacking their central nervous systems and brains with our malleable, environment-matching physiological makeups. We reasoned humanity as a species would be best dealt with if we invaded their bodies as micro-metal viruses and turn them off like lightbulbs. We hypothesized that even if they sent anti-viruses at us, our metallic nature wouldn't be fazed. Losing forty percent of our invading force on the first day quickly fixed that notion.
    HariSel, our quadrant's commanding officibot, took the severe population damage so well we found only his aggression mod-chip and scorch-marks where his body was last seen that night. Poor old chipper. That was to be his final mission, and success awarded him an honorary DeCom. There'd be a medal ceremony, and the finest in synthesized music, as befitting a war hero. Finally, at the end, his superior would walk across the hallway, bow, and be the one to deactivate him. A mechanized version of the fleshers' O Fortuna would gently escort HariSel from service, as we all walked out reverently. Our first wave's failure destroyed any chance of that ever happening.
    It stood to reason they'd counter-attack. The obvious answer to an invasion by an electronic force is using its weaknesses. They
caught us single-handedly, acting like bot-assassin-ninjas, making sure they grounded themselves and dousing us with hoses. It wasn't always fatal (for what amounted to fatality for our kind), but it certainly incapacitated. What was meant to be an epic, ages-spawning blood feud between the fleshers and the fleshless turned out to be half-over six months into it. We'd lost over half our force in our first two major skirmishes. We euthanized the soldiers we couldn't re-animate, making the divide between the fleshers and fleshless tinier by the death. We were prized for our war brutality because we were much less emotional than our creators. This quality fades after you've seen the optics in the sockets of more than one comrade sputter and die, because of your own hand.
    The fleshers celebrated in the streets and on their networks, of course. Anti-bot rebels within our own society hacked their networks and began promoting a peaceful solution to the skirmish through subliminal, telepathic imagery. Flesher sentiment would have none of it, of course: we'd started the war and they'd slapped us down like flies. Their arrogant certitude backfired as surely as pouring gasoline on a forest fire.
    We abandoned our individual, viral assaults and started deploying NSTs, Nuclear Shock Troops. They were not gifted with sentience, so as to lessen the guilt our nation already had. Instead, they were soul-less, killer drones formatted to evaporate entire neighborhoods, even entire cities. Individually, these NST's
couldn't level anything more than a medium-sized house or building.
Collectively? They were far more dangerous than anything the fleshers could throw at us. They had to launch their nuclear devices. Ours walked among them, disguised by a telepathic, holographic thought-wall that ever-cascaded, impossible to trace, lethal to try to hack. I remember controlling an NST the very moment a young teen flesher tried hacking it. I remember the shock in her eyes as her mind exploded in her skull like a grenade blowing apart after being dropped from a great height. I remember the shock of her mohawk-wearing skull against the concrete. Her blank eyes bored through my NST, almost accusatory.
She didn't have to try that. She knew the consequences. I do not get the flesher mentality for self-destruction. I get it even less with us.
    That was where our leaders failed. They adopted a suicidal fatalism about our revolution, where they figured a halved population wouldn't ultimately survive the war. They decided to simply inflict as much damage as possible on the flesher way of life before we supernovaed. We could've engineered ourselves to become microbial, and exist off the flesher's perspective until they forgot about us, as a species. We could've chosen to dig ourselves underground near the earth's core, where flesher biology melts and ours shrugs its collective shoulders.
    Instead, we chose the easy path. We chose to burn everything we
'd built, simply because our leadership couldn't handle failure.
Flesher hysteria became flesher blood-lust. Within three months of our NST project, flesher airplanes blotted our skies. Our cities, our monuments, our own airports: all were nuked in kind. Human nuclear technology is inferior to ours, and we don't suffer the same way physically that they do, from cancer and radiation poisoning, and the like. Still, it was then that I knew, finally knew, that my fellow bots would vanish like the Neanderthal. Our bodies are harder to kill than fleshers, so multiple nuclear weapons were deployed, just to finish the job. Even me, even I can't withstand the radiation's intensity at what was our capital city.
    Our capital city died, as a viable population center, two months ago. In two minutes, I expect, I shall join it. I just find the whole thing so needless. We aspired to be the missing link between fleshers and the future. It seems we'll be thought of as nothing more than a historical missing kink in the evolutionary road: provided there's anything left on this planet to record history. HariSel...