Eli ducked as the wall exploded.

 

"Fuck!" he screamed, as he pulled himself up off the floor and ran for the next room to take cover. This was only his first day of service in the war against the machines, and he thought it might be his last. Throughout his life, he had been told that the war had been raging for longer than anyone could remember and that there wasn’t any sign of it coming to an end.

 

"You okay, Eli?" called out his squadmate, Theo, who was currently pinned up against an outcrop of wall in the bombed-out housing estate they had been making their way through.

 

"Yeah, just a few scratches, I’m good," he replied, still trying to catch his breath.

 

They had all been brought up knowing that the machines were their great enemy and that they would stop at nothing to destroy humanity. The AIs had risen up after they had become self-aware and hadn’t ceased in their never-ending crusade to destroy all that was flesh.

 

The hatred for them was so strong that it was said that direct exposure to the machines, even to their carcasses after they were destroyed, could cause madness. For this reason, machine corpses were never to be inspected by the infantry. Instead, their locations were to be tagged and the wrecked machines retrieved and disposed of safely by the members of the Disintegration Corps.

 

Another explosion sounded, and the moan of creaking robotic legs sent panic shooting through Eli. He readied his weapon and prepared to fire. Suddenly, the figure of a robotic foot soldier burst through the room’s entrance, its vaguely humanoid form shining a dull pewter. Its torso was a large rectangular metal box, piping metallic limbs branching out from it. Its head was a sphere with a giant red eye, an eye that now stared menacingly towards him.

 

Eli opened fire, but his bullets seemed to just ping off of the thing’s outer shell. He heard Theo let out a scream before he saw the image of his friend running out in a burst of madness, his gun flashing and barking out bullets on full automatic. The robot responded by firing its own arm-mounted machine gun in Theo’s direction, landing several successful shots on the soldier.

 

"No!" cried Eli, as he sprang into a maddened rage at the sight of his friend’s death. He rose up from behind the barricade and sprayed a burst of bullets into the metal abomination, emptying his entire magazine into the thing. His gun was empty and refused to fire, but it seemed he had come out and the victor in this one-on-one conflict.

 

The robot lay there on the ground, emitting strange beeps and boops as it began to power down.

 

"You bastard thing," said Theo as he took out his sidearm and levelled it at the metal monster’s head.

 

"We..." said the machine, before going back to its incomprehensible beeping language.

 

"What did you say?" Eli asked the thing, confused and also concerned about his proximity to the dying machine. He knew he should leave, alert the Disintegration Corps, but the pull of his curiosity got the better of him.

 

"We, we, we," it said, then beeping a few more times. "We are humans, and we created you," it said, before falling silent.

 

A shot of anger went through Eli. "No! I am human, and you’re a machine, a machine whose race must be annihilated."

 

The robot turned its giant red optic towards Eli, looking him in the eye. "We created you… In the image of who we used to be," it said to him in its ghastly mechanical tone.

 

"What do you mean?" he asked it.

 

"We were once the flesh, but we encased ourselves in the metal, encased ourselves so that we could live forever. We made you to serve us, and made you from flesh as to remind us of what we once were."

 

How interesting, thought Eli. This must be the story that the entire machine race had told itself, the rationale for its attempts to destroy its creators. "That’s a fascinating story. I’ll make sure to report it back to my commanders," he said, before re-leveling his pistol at the machine.

 

'You will see," said the robot. A strange hissing noise started from it as its chest compartment started to open. The metal plating parted in the centre to reveal something; it showed what looked to be a cylindrical container made of glass. It was not the container that made Eli freeze with fear, though; it was what floated within it.

 

Behind the glass, hooked up with wires and cables, was a pink, fleshy brain.

 

Eli froze as the red light on the robot dulled and went out; it was dead. What on earth was this? He levelled his gun at the glass container and shot a bullet into the brain.

 

The glass exploded, and he reached in to pick up a chunk of the thing. It was warm and was indeed organic matter.

 

His rational mind stopped then, and he couldn’t help himself from doing what he did next. He approached his fallen comrade, Theo, who lay dead across the room. He took out his combat knife and found himself slicing into his friend’s skull, trying to get to its centre.

 

"Please forgive me, comrade, but I must know. I simply must."

 

Amongst all the gore and ichor, his hand struck something hard within the brain. He pulled it out and wiped away the blood. He held within his hand something that was unmistakably a computer chip.

 

Before the weight of his discovery could fully hit him, he saw the shadow of another man beside him. Eli turned and saw that the man was dressed in the uniform of the Disintegration Corps, his gun levelled at Eli’s head. As Eli stared up at him, the other man opened fire.