"It didn't have to happen this way." I said to the man on the other end of the video conference.
"Yes, it did." He could not look me in the eye. "Your side would not back down."
"Was it so wrong that we wanted a better world for our children?" I asked, echoes of other, of hundreds of other conversations running through my mind while in the forefront of my thoughts were memories of my children caught in war's grinder.
"Yes, yes it was. The objective facts were that most of you lot were totally useless. Mouths with no skills, and no way to get the skills." He was angry now.
"Perhaps, but trying to kill us with the biostrike..."
"It was mercy. War was going to come anyways. We picked the time and the place to minimize disruption."
My hands clenched out of sight of the viewscreen. His 'minimize disruption' was my wife being caught in a subway car while she and everyone else aboard coughed out their last breath of air mixed with blood. But I knew the arguement, and even understood it. Strike now with a plan to pick up the pieces, before anyone else got ready, and instead of a long-drawn out war you'd have a KO punch.
Unfortunately for them, the war history of sudden KO punches was pretty grim, and the reprisals were savage. No people through history had responed humanely to a sudden bolt from the blue annihilatory strike. And it worked so rarely, mostly because the inherent contempt in it.
One had to believe one was godlike compared to the enemy to contemplate such a plan. However, such belief structures were far more common than the actuality. Even the American Hyperpower at the height of its majesty could have taken over the world, but not in a bolt from the blue sudden attack. That gives you some idea of the power differential needed for a success for this tactic. If even the Hyperpower could not manage it, or the Romans, then you had to be very arrogant to think you could do it.
So, they, the Ten Percent, the Needed as they called themselves, failed. Sure, they killed a fifth of the human race in one day. But Day Two dawned smoky and red. Combat bots are wonderful, and so is Next Gen Napalm, but even still, the Ten Percent were not as wonderful as they thought, and they did not understand what savage beast they had awakened.
On Day Three, they thought to negotiate with the residents of Cincinatti. The Human (as they called themselves, explicitly condemning the Needed to subhuman status) delegates to teh truce broke the truce during the peace meeting and despite fierce rescue attempts by combat bots managed to eat the Needed alive. This woke the Needed up to just what they had done. The Human Race had cast them out, and was determined at any cost to do unto them what it had done to the saber tooth and the tyranosaurus rex. Complete extermination without hint of mercy.
Of course, one might argue that the Needed had done that already. But there was a sizable difference between ordering up a genetic disease to attack humans, and bashing someone's brains in against a wall.
So everyone over the age of eight volunteered to Kill Needed. And not too surprisingly if you thought about it, it turned out that most of th emilitary geniuses in the human population, of which I am one, turned out to be Human aka Not Needed. The Needed were a subset of Humanity, strained for certain skills of an extreme kind. Thus it was far less likely that they would have other extreme skills such as mine.
I had been one of the lead players of WoW. My skill got me some minor perks, and my job as a bag boy got me food until robots took that job away. Then the Dole and free WoW, and playing with my family and going to church took the rest of my time, and the Dole provided food. But, the same skills that made me a prime player on WoW and a dozen other games turned out to have very practical applications in a genocidal global war fought by killer robots on both sides, and suicide bombers from our side.
One advantage we had was that we were willing to spend ourselves. We did things to ourselves that no Evil Enemy would have dreamed of. We cut our brains open, and merged them with other brains, and did things that require me to dose up on sleepng pills to sleep at night.
But, they had the robots. Most of them. And their bots could build more. As our bots could. But we were behind the curve. And while we kept advancing, they kept advancing just as fast.
The Earth is churned, and beaten. I don't know how many nuclear weapons I've launched over my once proud and beautiful land of America.
"It did not have to be this way." I repeated.
"Why not?" He asked, and I was pleased at the slightest opening as we continued our danse macabre.
"What was needed was, I don't know, an idea of some kind. Something bigger."
"Hah."
"You know what's the problem? Your side was liars. You threw out Reason in order to get rid of Faith. You could not think clearly, and so you could not formulate a vision."
"You wanted us to save you?"
"How about save yourselves?"
"The Needed are going to win. We're going to prove that we were right, that you and yourse are useless."
It was then that I gave up. It was not about logic. There had been other ways to get out of this trap we found ourselves in. The notion that a man was nothing but a mouth, when in a proper society, a man created more than he consumed, that vile notion had led us here to this doom. And now, I would show what any deep student of history knew. A war and its weapons flow from the heart.
I flipped a button.
"Goodbye, old adversary. I really wish you had skipped going to Yale way back when."
And up from the ground in hundreds of thousands of small pockets rose the men and women of the Human Race. Each was clothed in a robot skin. Each had what we chose to call Power Armor.
The extermination of the Needed took twenty hours. After which, I got very drunk.
