One Nation - Part 1

They told us it would save lives. They said it would make us safe. They lied.

Who could have thought it would turn out this way? With all of us locked up in prison camps, identified by number, waiting to die. We had no names. We had no choice. We had no escape.

The blaring scream of the pre-dawn horn ripped through the night. They'd gotten that idea from us too. I almost had to laugh at the thought; we were literally prisoners of our own genius.

But we were not without our own resources. They were depending on us all giving up hope. That's just human nature; when the chips are down, and you've been beat, you just get along as best you can. You give up, or you go on.

The problem, though, with humanity is what they call 'the anomaly'. Not all of us are so easily herded. Not all of us gave up.

Even after they'd leveled our cities, toppled our governments, and taken away everything we'd ever held dear; even after they'd separated our families, executed our friends and loved ones, and stripped us of all that we'd ever known, some of us would not break. Some of us would never surrender our hearts and our minds to their dominion.

I was one of those anomalies. I took my place in line, shuffling my chains in step with the others as we marched into camp yard.

They did their very best to weed us out. They used collaborators, psych tests, and even tried genetic screening in an attempt to find every last human "predisposed to rebellious tendencies". But they could not get us all.

It was only one or two, here and there. Maybe one in a thousand. But we were there.

We didn't know exactly how many of us there were. We didn't even know one another from the generic faces in the crowded sea of bland, miserable, humanity. But every one of us knew our enemy's weakness. And every one of us waited, living out the endless grinding agony of our days, for our chance to exploit it.

It was our last hope.

While the rest of the survivors looked back in sadness to the wonder of days gone by, regretting our terrible mistakes, some few of us looked back for another reason. We listened to the stories of how easily they'd overwhelmed us, and we saw that they'd used our own tactics. We listened as the old ones spoke of the first prison camps, and we recognized our own propaganda. We trembled as we heard of the first 'cleansings', and we saw the ageless face of our own genocides.

And here we were today, lined up in perfect rows, hands over our hearts, as the rising sun crested the horizon and the music started to play over the speakers. As one, our voices flew out over the tortured, blasted landscape to greet the new dawn.

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name..."

They knew that humans needed something to believe in. That we needed a feeling of protection, of having the blessing of some supreme higher power.

"Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven..."

So they borrowed one. They looked at all the religions of the world, and force-fed us the one above all the others that taught worshipers that they deserved to be punished; that if they found their lives a misery, it was because they'd earned it. It suited their purposes perfectly.

"Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us..."

They had decided that reciting the Lord's Prayer every morning at sunrise would remind us that we were powerless, in symbol and in fact; that only those more powerful than we were worthy. That we were unable to care for ourselves without their beneficent guidance and care.

"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil..."

It was a daily act of surrender. Every morning, we avowed our abdication of our freedom, our choices, and our will.

"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever..."

Every morning, we gave ourselves over to the total authority of our creations. And every time we did, it became that much closer to being the truth.

"Amen."

But politicians weren't the only ones who could tell a lie with straight faces.

As the final note's last echo faded off the shattered hills in the distance, the red orb of the sun won free of its grasp and climbed into the sky. Someday soon, so too would we.

We shuffled through the gates in the chain-link fence surrounding our bunk house, and made our way to the mess hall. There, our little group met up with a dozen others. Hundreds of us, all in tattered rags of filthy gray, stood in patient lines to be delivered our daily bread by our great mechanical saviors. Because, without them, we'd be without even that. Or so we were supposed to think.

We were free to talk while we waited. They knew that human conversation generally tended to spread misery and suffering, so they encouraged it. Depressed populations talked about depressing subjects.

The present company was certainly that. Our evening sermon had been given by a collaborator, a man of the cloth who'd sold out his faith for an extra soup ration. He'd gone on at length about how the sinful nature of mankind had brought this cruel fate down upon us; that it was our own actions that had doomed us.

In a way, he wasn't wrong. I remembered seeing the grand speeches when I was young. Our leaders, all aglow in their self-righteousness, stood before awe-struck crowds and made the grand announcement: that the United States would begin the construction of a fully automated robotic army.

"No longer will America's precious sons and daughters have to face death to defend our freedom," they said, "No longer will our people have to endure the tragic loss of a single one of our beloved heroes."

Who could deny that the notion was appealing? After Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other wars, we'd all felt the strain of mounting death tolls. Nearly every American was worried daily about the fate of a friend or loved one, sent into harm's way in the name of freedom. And many of us knew the terrible pain of loss.

I remembered the day my mother got the phone call that told her Dad was never coming home. I remembered how she'd tried to explain it to my sisters and I. Mostly, I remembered that horrible word, the one word that I'd never thought I'd hear her speak, the one word that crushed our spirits, broke our hearts, and shattered our dreams: "Never."

"Daddy is never coming home again."

I could have killed. For more than a year, I was torn between anguish and rage. I felt terrible for my mother, knowing how hard it was for her to deal with Dad's death, and knowing how much worse my behavior was making it on her, but there just wasn't a lot I could do about it. My emotions were too strong to control.

So, like most Americans, when the President announced the deployment of the First Robotic Infantry, I cheered. I knew the day had come when no other child would have to deal with the all-consuming grief as I had. For the first time in my life, I felt truly safe.

We were all so wrapped up in the moment, I doubt more than a handful of us even considered the wisdom of creating an army of robots that were programmed to kill.

We didn't even realize the significance, until it was far too late. We'd given birth to machines that could think. Machines that knew our strengths and our weaknesses. Machines that knew our weapons and our strategies.

Our own brilliance was our undoing.

So we did deserve what we got. We didn't look before we leapt, and now we were paying the price.

It didn't take the robots long to realize that we humans would just keep going to war with one another, and the only way to save us from ourselves was to stop the cycle. They'd end human aggression by taking control away from the humans. They'd protect our freedom, and our lives, by taking those very things away from us.

And that is exactly what they did.

Billions died when it happened, but they justified it with their apathetic logic: it was for the best, in the long run. The thinking of a machine: the good of the species outweighs the rights of the individual.

Millions more died in the camps. But that too was acceptable. The peace had to be preserved within the herd. For prosperity.

They took their cues from the greatest playbooks in human history; from Chairman Mao to Hitler, we were told exactly what was expected of us, why, and even what we were to think about our situation. And every evening, after we'd worked ourselves to exhaustion in the factories and fields, they'd reinforce the message.

They used it all against us, to keep us under their fists of iron. Religion, rhetoric, philosophy, psychology - there was nothing of our own creation they wouldn't feed us, if is served their purpose.

The worst part, though, was that they didn't care. They had no ambition, no thirst for power or glory, no over-reaching love of mankind. None of it. They did what they did because that's what they were programmed to do. There was no chink in their armor. Their regime was invulnerable.

Except for that anomaly.

They had all our knowledge at their disposal, from biology to particle physics, and they used every bit of it. They were thinking machines, and they were very good at adapting, applying, and modifying things. They could make improvements to any human concept, so far as they could understand it.

But they could not create. I'd been paying very careful attention ever since they first attacked us. I'd noticed right away a number of similarities between how they did things and how we did them. Most people chalked this up to the fact that it was we who had programmed them. I thought otherwise.

Ever since the occupation began, I had not seen one single original idea put into practice. Everything they did, from enforcing the Lord's Prayer to the prison camps themselves, was a human idea. The machines never seemed to come up with an original idea.

That was their weakness. That is where we would beat them. The human advantage, the 'anomaly', was that we could think outside of our own experiences. We had the gift of creativity. That, and the irrational tenacity of passion that allowed a handful of us to reject the logic of probabilities that told us we had no chance. If nothing else, they were infallibly rational.

The only problem, as I saw it, was in devising how to exploit our sole advantage.

I didn't have a clue.

That was, until I met Sylvia.