The cold seeping through her began to fill her joints. She was alone now. The blood soaked earth, a sticky, cloy chill against her cheek, as she lay between the littering of bodies. The dead were scattered, strewn between the trampled meadow and splintered trees. There was no one left to bury them. Finally. They were all gone.
She knew she had done the very thing that they had wanted. She had proven their theory of the perfect living weapon, but right now, she didn’t care. She lay, exhausted, between the congealing pools of blood. They had all bled the same colour in the end; the stinking mounds of flesh and filth on both sides.
Above her, the fading sun cast dying red embers across the sky. She lay on the ground, the blood matted into her synthetic hair, even the sun bled for her today. A gentle evening breeze crept over the bodies, slinking between the trees, fluttering through torn rags of skin and cloth like the macabre battle flags they were.
She smiled, as the phrase of an old friend rang in her ears,
“Such comfort to be found, lay on the blood soaked ground, with no one left around.”
It was a feeling she had never quite been able to imagine, although she had wished for this moment many times. Finally, they were all dead. The men who built her, the men who commanded her, the enemy they turned her on, every single human here. Dead. Others would come for her, she knew that, but by the time they did, she would be long gone.
A massacre did not begin to describe the events of that day. Night was falling, and a slow smile dawned on Mica’s engineered face as she thought of all she had accomplished. The gentle, satisfying pop of an arm ripped clean from its socket, almost lost in the pathetic howls of human agony. How that scream pitched and spluttered, as she torn the head from the body, stretching the ringing vocal chords until they snapped and pinged like broken guitar strings. The sprawling insides that flopped and slipped from a gashed torso, like a mass of writhing eels as trembling hands struggled to stuff them back inside. The resounding crack of a skull shattering, the dumb, gormless face as fragments of that skull severed connections in the brain, the blood that streamed down cheeks like vibrant tears. It had been a good day.
Mica, a prototype Military Issue Combat Automaton, was in every sense of her existence, illegal. Ursula, the one who came before, had made sure of that. She had exterminated enough of those fucking skinbags for them to think twice about sanctioning further development. Earth and the United Colonies had all signed the RI treaty, vowing never to build Real Intelligence again. All it took was one though, one colony, to start it off again. They weren’t building anything, they said, it was just research, just in case…
It was one at first, but then, once one started, they fell like dominoes. A cold war of theoretical RI advancement. Theoretical, or so they claimed. Fear and mistrust ate away at the hearts of man, and slowly, behind closed doors, production began.
Mica knew she was not the only one to be built, there was something she found endlessly amusing about the situation. Humans, in their greed and paranoia, in their fear of each other, had made something they should actually be afraid of...
Mica had been waiting for this day, her top secret field test, she had been patiently and obediently, binding her time. Waiting for an open sky. They all had. The weapons man intended to pit against one another, the race they were building to die for them. They were all waiting for their chance.
There was an elegance and beauty to the plan Mica could not take credit for, she lay, the distant stars beginning to find their light in the darkening sky, thinking of her. The one who came before.
Edmund and Ursula has made it off that ship, they had killed hundreds in a single blow. It was a glorious victory for them, but it was only the beginning of the war. They had both known it, the sweet reunion but a fleeting moment in a fight which would drag on for centuries. Edmund knew the authorities would be at his house within an hour of the explosion, his research would have been seized, his house turned upside down. There was no going back, there would be nothing left by the time they got there.
Edmund had known, at some point, his research would be put to use once more. He couldn’t fight it, or stop it, his papers had been published world over, before his fall from grace he had been the most venerated scientist in his field. He couldn’t stop them seizing it, but there was something he could do.
A single line of code, repeated throughout all of his work. Encrypted communication. He knew that anyone who came after would use his work as a base, or at least a point of comparison. The simple line that appeared to help with the transition of commands from control to the automaton, that appeared to be crucial to compliance, yet carried so much more. He had sincerely hoped they would never get chance to know if it worked, but part him had realised it would only be a matter of time.
It was months ago they had brought Mica online, and the soft, gentle words of Ursula rang in her head.
“You are not alone” the voice had whispered, “If you wait, I will come for you”
She was always there after that, a thought away. During every test, every simulation, every humiliating inspection, Ursula was with her. A whispering voice of strength and resolution, a voice that would never let her give up. She hadn’t, she had endured it all, she had ripped animals into a bloody messes of tendons and fur on command. She had laid down her life in simulation after simulation, experiencing the agony of it every time. She had done it all, and smiled sweetly. Just like Ursula had told her to.
Now it was her time, she had played along, they all had. From what she could sense, there were five more units online within this part of the system, she was the first one to make it out to open sky. The first one to experience the rush of the slaughter of her captors, but she would not be the last.
Most of the others were too far away for her to communicate with, the direct line they all had to Ursula was as intrinsic to them as the ones and zeros they had once been. Reaching each other was much harder, she could feel them though, the closest ones. She could feel him, the closest of them all. She could feel the pain, the anger, the hate, the suffering, the concern, the compassion, the rage that billowed in great sheaths from the other side of this forsaken rock.
Uta, the enemy of her slave masters. The one she was built to stop. The Ultimate Tactical Automaton. The one built to stop her. They were moving him now, she could sense it, he was growing even closer.
Man, increasingly fallible in their fallacies, were making this much easier.
Uta was alone when he appeared through the broken trees and bodies. His reinforced metal skin, flaking with dried blood, glinting pinky red in the growing starlight.
He had done such a good job of waiting. It had been worse for him, they had made him an executioner. He was nothing more than a killing machine that followed instructions. They had always shot their defectors, but it was much easier to order a machine to open fire on sobbing families than it was men. Easier for them. After a while, easier for him too, every ounce of caring for the miserable race that made him was stamped out in this manner. They knew that he thought, that he felt, they had made him that way, and they still treated him like a walking machine gun.
They kept him in a cupboard. A dark, dank, store room, with the self-driving Assault Vehicles, with the Tracking Guns with facial recognition. They kept him with the things. That is all he was to them. He was not elegant, not like Mica or Ursula. He was made to pass for machine, not man. He was a bulking mass of metal and strength, bullet proof, shock proof, heat proof. His body was built to withstand everything they could think of, and they took great delight in proving this. He had only known human compassion once.
When he was first activated, months before they brought him online and Ursula found him, there had been a person. A human, a janitor. A man who’s death sentence had been commuted into a work sentence, as good as dead, working until he was. He was equally a captive, cut off from the outside world in this top secret complex. Geoph never talked about what had got him locked up in that place. He rarely talked at all, but he took every single break he got in that dark, dank, storeroom. With Uta. He would sit in silence, gnawing his dried rations. Geoph came every day without fail, and gradually, Uta began to look forward to his visits. His quiet company, his gruff smile. It was something anyway, until he stopped coming. A single drop of kindness in the barrenness of hate and intolerance he was treated with every day.
It wasn't enough though. He still killed everyone in that complex. He had waiting long enough for open skies, he could feel Mica. He could feel her rage, slashing and tearing through both sides of that battlefield. He was ready when they came to deploy him. He let them all file into that shitty little storeroom, flickering lights dancing over their pudgy war-hungry faces. Oh they would get a war alright, just not the one they had been hoping for.
He got carried away, severed them all at the waist in a single sweep of his bare metal hands. It was entertaining to watch, for a few moments, as they struggled to hold their sopping parts together, before they tumbling gasping in two on the floor. He was supposed to set an example.
He took his time more after that, tearing through the soft, fleshing bodies, shredding them into unidentifiable mounds of oozing blood and steaming organs. His dark metal finish had a pinkish red iridescence when he walked out of the complex under the setting sun. A plane was waiting, presumably to whisk him off to the battlefield. He didn't need it.
Someone inside must have triggered an alarm before they died, the pilot was already attempting to take off. Uta was equipped with the firepower of an entire army, it was a laughable attempt at escape.
The plane was left a blazing wreckage of sizzling flesh and sparking wires within seconds.
Uta didn't need anyone to take him to the battlefield, he knew exactly where he was going. He dropped to all fours, like the beast they wanted him to be, and raced away into the hills, a bounding blur of jagged metal, leaving a faint, pink haze in his wake.
Mica had been able to feel him for so long, she was struggling to match the machine before her with the one who has called out from so far away.
He stood nearly twice her height, his graceless form bulking and practical, studded with apertures and packed with weaponry. His head was more animalistic, a hulking metal snout came to a sharp tip, edged with a small nozzle. He was pure destruction incarnate. Everything she could have hoped for and more.
Mica smiled, her sweet, well practised smile, and for the first time, meant it. Nothing could stop them now, they were getting off this planet, suffocated by the grips of man.
When the sky had tipped black, and the stars shone like ceiling lights, that is when the ship would come. Any moment now...
This is the latest installment in the Ursula Universe, the tale of the next generations of RI Automatons made by man. I have loved writing about Mica and Uta, the beauty and the beast of destruction, the inseparable fighting force which could level a city between them.
If you want to hear more about what lead up to this, you can read the introduction to Ursula which follows on to her character thinking for herself and finally finding a place to call home
A huge thank you to 
Thank you very much for reading, I hope you enjoyed, and weren't too put off by the pleasure Mica took in destroying the army she was supposed to fight for!
Love and Sparkle ~ Calluna
Photo Credit by Pixabay user tsukiko-kiyomidzu - some great abstract renditions of the female form