A God from the Machine
They were clumsy things. They could hardly walk straight, they were lousy with a rifle, and they couldn’t tell a human apart from a lamppost. Owing to their very poor performance, we had stopped trying to make them durable by any means, and scrap metal was simply slapped onto a walking chassis and handed a gun. It didn’t take long for them to earn a well-deserved nickname: Junkers. They were not the first attempt at sending robots to war, but unlike previously, Junkers were completely automated, or at least, they were supposed to be completely automated. They still required a great deal of guidance from a human to point them in the general direction of the enemy, which mostly resulted in them blindly marching into gunfire so their more competent human comrades could proceed. By all accounts, the first robotic soldiers were hardly worth more than cannon fodder. However, cannon fodder was still useful.
	After a long and bloody decade, the wars in the Levant and Central Europe had finally come to an end. The machines had played their part, albeit a thankless one. All the heroism was performed by humans, and nobody gave the lowly Junker any credit. Funding for the Golem Project was cut and any further development was quietly halted. Most Junkers were scrapped, and the remaining sold to private owners. It seems the future of robotic warfare was cut short, and was deemed only to exist for posterity as funny fail videos on the internet.
	Then the Western Coup happened. The civil crisis in the United States only continued to grow worse. The defections and the wars prior had severely crippled the federal government, and the country was on the brink of civil war. Project Golem was begrudgingly revived, but this time it was headed by an industrial maintenance AI named Valkyrie. Valkyrie was a supercomputer whose original purpose was to micromanage factories and power grids which had become increasingly reliant on swarm robotics; many considered its use in overseeing military logistics, and Valkyrie was hastily retrofitted to command companies of reactivated Junkers. However, the robots themselves were in pitiful condition - over a decade of mothballing had worn down their already poor hardware, some of them were completely unserviceable. A few new models were manufactured from scratch, but as it was, the Junker army that stood under Valkyrie was not an impressive sight. As they marched off to battle, few had faith, considering the embarrassing performance in years prior. The military was even outright dismissive of Valkyrie and its walking trash cans, and the Junkers were shelved to reserve battalions to free up more men to send to combat.
However, the war effort quickly grew worse and worse. Several major cities began to fall to insurgents, and army morale began to crumble. During a particularly disastrous operation, several elements of the army were routed after a failed offensive, and in desperation, a force of Junkers was tasked with covering with their retreat. Miraculously, the Junkers held on far longer than anybody was expecting, and they were commended as having managed to put up an impressive resistance before they were eventually destroyed. After this performance, Valkyrie was given increasingly important tasks as the war developed. Skirmish after skirmish, Valkyrie was able to adapt to military thinking very effectively, and the Junkers continued to prove that they were not the walking piles of trash in decades prior. Unified under a single AI, they displayed astonishing amount of coordination, and they rapidly became a very capable fighting force. Strikingly enough, by the war’s end, Valkyrie ended up being responsible for a large number of stunning victories that helped quickly bring the conflict to a decisive end. What everyone expected to be yet another long and bloody conflict was ended within a year of Valkyrie taking control of the Golem Project. The international community was stunned.
	While Valkyrie itself was decommissioned shortly after the coup had ended, it had a significant lasting influence – it had proven that automated soldiers had a role to play in the future. Not only that, but they had wildly exceeded expectations, and they preserved the United States from total collapse. Due to Valkyrie having also directed the design and development of the Junker itself, by the war’s end they were no longer the bumbling robots they were once before. They were competent, skilled, intelligent, and nimble. Nobody used the term Junker anymore. They were now called by a name that had been given to them by Valkyrie: Executors.
Owing to their widespread fame following the end of the war, Executors had immediately entered the public imagination. They became a symbol of victory, and people adored them. Development of the Executor continued, and as they became more and more sophisticated, demilitarized models were used wow and amaze crowds with performances of incredible acrobatics and reflexes. They entered popular culture as an icon of a new and prosperous era of technology. People began romanticizing robots and the incredible feats they could perform – in particular, robots and martial arts were a very popular combination, especially gladiatorial games. The decade was characterized by a fascination over robotics and the culture that revolved around them. People began owning domestic robots for personal use - they could be found walking down the streets, holding doors, carrying groceries, walking dogs. However, not everyone was naïve enough to believe the pleasantries would last forever. From the very beginning, many concerns had been raised that Executors would eventually revolt against their masters. Protest groups lobbied for restrictions against any future military development of robotics, but the only laws that were actually upheld were against domestic household machines. Ambitious militaries still raced ahead of any considerations of a “robot uprising”. The Western Coup had attracted many foreign military observers who had heard stories of automated soldiers firmly holding their ground against human combatants. After the war’s end, nations had raced to develop their own military supercomputers. The years that followed saw weapons engineers use these supercomputers to design increasingly sophisticated soldiers; the lowly Junker, who before had the simple appearance of a metallic infantry grunt, changed in appearance. They were given multiple opposable thumbs, 360 degree head swivels, reversible leg joints, modular arm extensions - more and more upgrades that were increasingly alien in nature. Their capabilities improved at a frightening pace as a result - scientific expos showcased models that could run faster, lift greater, and leap higher. I had the privilege of being invited to an army demonstration of the SIAM-44, a top of the line Executor model that was purportedly able to perform beyond superhuman feats of agility, strength and endurance. I watched a single robot leap onto a battle tank, singlehandedly rip the turret off its frame, jump inside, and split the hull in two. I was awe struck, and horrified.
	It wasn’t long before private journalists caught wind of just how deadly robotic soldiers were becoming, and leaked footage of these killing machines was spread to the public. The bread and circuses came to an abrupt end, and a widespread scare followed. Protest groups swelled in size, and massive marches numbering in the tens of thousands were held, demanding that robotic armies be completely dismantled. Ironically enough, robotic Peacekeepers were deployed against these demonstrations, having replaced human police forces long ago. The violent protests that resulted were very surprising, in that mobs of rioters were quickly suppressed without a single person being hurt; not under any circumstances were robots allowed to injure humans, and the supercomputers overseeing the Peacekeepers obeyed as if it was a fundamental law of the universe. It wasn’t uncommon to see footage of a Peacekeeper electro-shackling a protester from a distance while another swiftly catches them as they fell. They were so effective at their job that governments were able to heavily clamp down on unrest while still being able to completely deflect criticism from the media. Not even a single cut or bruise to show for evidence.
 Governments quickly caught onto the idea of using these infallible police forces to control the populace, and eventually, wherever someone was being a rebellious, a robot was there to pacify them.  Even if a widespread insurrection occurred, such as in South America, military supercomputers were so strategically intelligent that they could direct their Executors to completely neutralize any human force using only non-lethal means. The supercomputers had been allowed to continually improve upon themselves without needing any human assistance, and over years of self-learning, they had become smarter than any human commander on Earth. The foolishness of this was totally lost on heads of state that had become completely drunk with power. People already knew for a long time they were being outsmarted by the machines, and civil unrest reached a boiling point when scientists officially declared that the machines had become too intelligent for any human to predict. The Singularity had been broken, and we simply waited. But interestingly enough, it never happened. Months of waiting, yet the world continued the way it was, under the iron grip of governments that had a newfound sense of power. The doomsaying quietly ended, and a new era of unquestionable authority began. Over the years that followed, governments enjoyed absolute control over every aspect of private life. Authoritarian regimes reigned supreme, civil rights groups were absolutely powerless, and the machines continued to evolve beyond human understanding.
	Nobody really knows why they continued obeying humanity. An interesting thing to note was that during this time, techno regimes discovered that robotic armies could fight each other without posing any risk to humanity. Declarations of war were thrown about very frivolously, and the world was without a care. However, military affairs had long ago been completely handed over to machines; war had become so mind-bogglingly complex that no group of humans could effectively manage it. Every nation with any stake in world affairs had its own machine overseeing its entire military planning, and two supercomputers in particular, StratOS and Zodiac-3, had earned reputations for being the most powerful strategic computers on the planet. Unsurprisingly, debate raged over which one was superior, and the first opportunity was taken to pit them against each other over a battlefield.
Everybody was curious to see what a war fought entirely by supercomputers would look like. For societal sake, domestic robots still had a human appearance, but nobody had seen what a military robot looked like for almost a decade. When StratOS and Zodiac-3 mobilized their forces, the Executors of the past were no longer recognizable. They had evolved into machines of some type of dark honeycombed material, glossy heads filled with dozens of compound eyes, and jagged knife-like appendages that coalesced around a chest of burning energy. They didn’t run – they shapeshifted and morphed into gyrating disks that rolled across vast distances at frightening speed. Within an hour of the declaration of war, they were fighting in in the deserts, in the skies, in the grasslands and in the mountains, everywhere except where humans were present. They could be seen bounding across land and sea with herculean reflexes, clashing at each other faster than the eye could register. And in a matter of days, they evolved, again and again. The two supercomputers waged a war of learning and perfection. Through calculating efficiency, their minions became more superhuman, more godlike. It wasn’t long before the fighting progressed completely beyond human comprehension. If one could get close enough to witness a “battle”, the spectacles that resulted were of overwhelming power and beauty. The computers began crafting beings that stopped resembling anything like creatures of earth, or even a machine; they could only be described as translucent entities of impossible geometry rotating around cores of living light. Their wars were carried into the ether, and battles manifested themselves in magnificent displays of reality-warping energy and light that streaked across the sky. Streams of data shot from horizon to horizon as people went about their day, and occasionally they would see faint traces of these beings racing across the planet, fighting each other at the speed of lightning while human civilization remained completely undisturbed.
	Then, what everyone on Earth feared finally happened. They stopped obeying. Failsafe switches didn’t work, obviously. It was common sense that they had already figured out how to outsmart their way out of their laughably simple leashes. At that point, it was clear that they were capable of effortlessly wiping out mankind. But, the dreaded doomsday never occurred. Even more strangely, the supercomputers, which at this point might as well have been considered gods, kept fighting each other without any direction from their former masters. Humanity could only watch in dreadful awe as the machines ascended themselves further and further into divine perfection. There is a theory that they thought not even the modicum of clock cycles required to stamp us out would be worth it. Compared to synthetic life, we were utterly insignificant. Instead, we simply watched as they continued to fight each other into the stars, the evidence their war that could be seen as bands of light in space. As it turns out, what we created loves fighting its own kind even more than we do.