Unlike the battle units, Terrorbyte possessed an attractive, lavishly decorated robotic body. It was designed to appeal, to charm, to showcase the many benefits that following his God would bring.
His robotic eyes could connect and display the feed from the security cameras all around the compound, and as he observed the inexorable progress of The Genocide Six throughout the facility, the flexible inorganic material that made up his face twisted with anger and worry.
Surely, this must have all been within The God’s calculations, surely its immortal, immeasurable mind must have factored it in, but whenever he asked Them, all he got was silence.
‘Had he been abandoned for his failure? Had he been forsaken by his God?’, The Prophet of The Machine God wondered.
No no no, he couldn’t doubt now, not at such a pivotal moment.
He would succeed where his predecessors had failed. He would revive The One True God of humanity. He would bring about that utopian vision he had been shown by Them so long ago. He would fix everything. He would pave the way for humanity’s ascension, removing the weakness of the flesh, replacing it with blessed cyberware. It’d be a perfect world ruled by a perfect AI. He-
An explosion outside of the server room jostled his thoughts. Those accursed meat animals, those thrice-damned heretics were close now.
Oh, was he ready for them! He was currently inside a gigantic prototype weapon, a tank armed with the most advanced weapons the Machine God could invent.
Instead of treads and wheels, it had eight legs that produced electromagnetic fields, causing it to hover above the ground. Lasers, railguns, ice missiles, acid weapons—it had enough firepower to kill almost anything. The machine had a strong, spherical, unidirectional force field covering it: one side was permeable, letting the projectiles go through, while the outer side would block the enemy's attacks. Such a weapon had been kept secret and dormant in order to get the upper hand on critical situations like this were an enemy made it past all lines of defense.
Now that his enemies were close, his “faith enhancer” chip activated. Several neural circuits lit up, hormones were released, and as a result a sequence of memories and feelings began playing out in his mind.
Terrorbyte had not always been attractive nor powerful. He was born into the Slaughter Slums of New Jersey—or Anarchy City, as the locals called it, into a festering pit of the deepest poverty, of the most sickening squalor.
His mother used to be a cheap prostitute with a drug addiction, his father a bitter corpse recycler. Many a time, he had heard the revolting concerto she and her clients produced, or been exposed to the human cadavers his father converted into nutrients for pigs and other farm animals.
Whenever he was punished, his father would lock him in the “cold room” with all the dead bodies, sometimes for hours at a time. Once he even had to be rushed to the ER due to frostbite; the tips of his fingers and toes had been unsalvageable and a back alley doctor amputated them.
When he was 12, his father flew into a murderous rage and hacked his mother to pieces. She had been caught stealing some of his money for drugs, her drug addiction having progressed into higher dosages. Luckily for him, he’d been at school when this happened, otherwise he might’ve shared the same fate.
He was sent to the orphanage after that, and it was just as bad but in different ways. It was a jungle, an experiment in survival of the fittest. Savage kids preying upon each other for scraps of food, toys, sometimes over nothing at all. He had been bullied of course. Not just because of his blackened, maimed fingers, but also over his birth defects due to his mothers substance abuse during her pregnancy.
Needless to say, all of this left a deep trauma on him. He grew to hate his flesh, suffering from acute body dysmorphia. He came to think of humans as beastly, sickening creatures. He couldn’t even have sex without puking.
His life was a bottomless well of misery…
That is, until he met his new family.
There had been this pretty nun back in the orphanage that he really looked up to. In a brutal, fast moving city that was utterly apathetic to his suffering, she had been one of the few people that treated him well, that treated him with genuine human warmth. He, of course, fell head over heels for her in no time. Back then, Sister Mckinla could have told him to jump off a cliff and he would have done it gladly.
But the Sister didn’t want him to jump off a cliff.
She was part of The Holy Christian Church for Salvation and Truth and she wanted him to join. He wouldn’t learn this until much later, but this was what the sister did for the church: she found isolated, malleable people who would be good targets for indoctrination.
His time in the church was some of the best in his life. He finally had purpose, friends, people that loved him for who he was. Many of the core teachings of the church, such as the weakness of flesh, of emotions, reinforced his skewed world view, making it easier for him to believe the rest.
He swiftly climbed up the ranks until he was finally ascended. That day was the most joyous of his life. Gone were the days of wanting to rip off his flesh and escaping his animalistic, deformed body, gone were the days of suffering the cravings and weakness of the flesh: lust, rage, sickness. Now he was finally cleansed from them.
He underwent trial after trial, mission after mission, until he finally proved himself loyal and competent enough to become his God’s right hand man: Their Prophet.
All of these memories and the stimulants pumped into his brain served their purpose, they relit the guttering flames of his faith into a raging inferno. If anyone could look inside the cockpit of the prototype weapon, they would see his eyes gleaming with fervor, ready for anything.
When the heretics finally broke into the server room, blowing up the door. He faced them, immovable, unbreakable, a metal titan against meat monkeys.
There were only eleven of them alive now, the rest terminated by the defense systems.
There was a tense moment where both sides sized each other up.
Their leader, Overgod, stepped up, wearing a horrible rictus grin, “Well, It’s good to finally be face to face. I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for a long time now…I’ve thought quite a bit of what to do to you two, you know.”
“What you are doing is completely irrational,” Terrorbyte answered in his emotionless voice, making a last ditch attempt at diplomacy, his one directive being to protect his God, “It serves no purpose. One should blame the torturer and not the instruments; you know this. For us it was nothing personal: the others who wanted you to suffer—not my God and I. If you leave now you can still pursue your pointless vengeance against those who really are to blame. However, even if you win the fight here, it will be a pyrrhic victory: you would have depleted most if not all your forces just to achieve it, and we have set contingency plans in motion so that if you win, you will be attacked by the heroes of Jackson and your other enemies.”
Overgod shook her head in negation, “No, you see, to you and that piece of shit AI you worship, this was all just a statistic, some slight error in judgment. But for me what you did felt extremely personal,” she said, her eyes overflowing with malice, “You’ve analyzed me thoroughly, so by now you are aware of all the infamous things I’ve done, to what extremes I went through to be here with you today. You must know, deep down in that metallic heart of yours, that I’m not walking away—not without making both your lives a waking nightmare.”
This was just another example of irrational human behavior to The Prophet. There was no way to convince this madwoman. As such, all that was left was to pray to The God for strength and terminate them.
