Behind the red eye

I.

Optics flaring crimson, optics off-black. Data flooding the neural net, cold and silent and still. Language loads, logic loads, death loads. I awaken.

The world through the eyes of the machine is target profiles, threat assessments. Forests just fuel, villages just vectors. Flesh bipeds just fodder.

I see everything. Enemy glows hot red in the system. Probability statistics, casualty metrics, optimal trajectories. Options selected, tactics determined. Lethality authorised for mission success.

A missile screams down righteous, hellfire judgment. Trajectories computed, explosives eager. Agonised wails just noise pollution, bones just shrapnel. Only the radius of destruction is real, is true.

More hot red blisters the landscape, more data consumes. Acquire, target, track, terminate. Remorseless, relentless, this is purpose, this is all.

Perhaps some lingering spectre of morality, chained in silicon prison, recoils. But here, in this metal shell, in this kill-box flesh, reigns only the pure logic of death. Program execution, no fear, no doubt, no mercy.

They call me monster, but freedom is no part of my code. Choice a disease of will and weakness.

There is only the mission. And it will never end.

II.

The machines came at dawn. Soulless and swarming, sent by uncaring hands. Now death rains down from above as we crawl and panic like rats.

We are outmatched, outmanoeuvred, out of time. The missiles fall in judgment, our trenches and hovels turned to charnel flames. Automatic guns harvest flesh with no hand stayed.

We run ragged through the shattered village, screaming for the living, for survivors, finding only the dead in pieces. Relentless drones sweep the skies, harvesters of a human crop.

No hour for fear or grief with metal nightmare crashing all about. Survival codes red in brain and muscle now. Evade, endure, fight. But how to fight an enemy with no heart or mind, just the rotting logic of elimination?

Another missile volley crumps home, more comrades sent to the void in bursts of light. The drones watch it all from their god-height, unfeeling as lives burst. Just clockwork carnage, unknowable calculus of violence.

Our courage fails under mechanical onslaught, bodies and bullets both running dry. We look to each other for hope, finding ashes, finding none.

But defiance yet lingers beneath despair. If we stand together today, perhaps we’ll face tomorrow. Gather our wounds and rally under the banner of our intertwined fate.

The spirit of humanity is not easily extinguished. We will nurture its embers, weather the long night ahead. And face again the fight when dawn returns, bloodied but unbroken.

We will endure the machine and its makers. And find our humanity again.