A/N: As I was describing this project to one of my fellow actors from Project: Arashi, he comically, and correctly, pointed out that it was shaping up very similar to World War Z. So I decided to take that idea and run with it. Fires of Liberation: An Oral History of the Human-Machine War is a story composed of stories, each chapter told from the perspective of a different character (looking at approximately 7-10 characters telling their stories as of now, more may come later), with the overall work being compiled and recorded by Kazumi Asakura, who will serve as narrator. In order to authentically portray a change in tone and format from one character to the next, I am not the only author working on this project. I'll usually leave an annotation for who writes for what character on their first appearance.
Foreword
It goes by many names. Armageddon, Judgment, the End of Days, the Dark Times. Then there are the more secular names that it answers to: the Human-Machine War, the War Against the Machines, the Great War, the Unification. Whatever you choose to call it, it's over. It's done. Against all odds in a titanic struggle, the enduring survival of the human species has been assured with Skynet's defeat. As a species, we will live on.
It's been two years now since V-S Day. With the ashes of the war still hanging in the sky and the scars of the battles still fresh on our hearts, the United Nations Security Council determined that the time to honor our heroes and our fallen was now, with the commemoration of the Museum of Humanity in San Francisco, California, and the commissioning of the 'Asakura Report on the State of Human Affairs Up To, During, and Following the Human-Machine War.' As compiled by me, Asakura Kazumi, via a series of interviews with those who have survived the war. When my report was initially submitted, the Security Council rejected it on the grounds of having too much of 'the human element' muddling the cold, hard facts.
But it was that human element, I had argued, that separated us from the machines we had nearly been slaughtered by. It was that human element that gave us the edge in engagement after engagement. It was the human edge that led two hundred human survivors to bring down the ruins of Los Angeles upon themselves and a Skynet force thousands strong in a modern-day retelling of the Spartans at Thermopylae. It was the human edge that compelled the non-unified resistance forces in Japan to abandon an unwinnable battle in favor of surviving to fight another day. It was the human edge that later brought back those forces, their ranks swelled by other groups and riding a tsunami of momentum, to reconquer Japan and declare it a safe zone for humanity from which the entire war was directed. The council chair found my outrage a bit humorous, and his response was a mere "Then write a book about it. This information is by no means classified."
So that's exactly what I've done. This work you are reading cannot be claimed as my own by any stretch of the imagination, save for it being my hand that put these words to paper. From the fires of Judgment Day was forged the army of humanity, which responded to Skynet in kind with its own flames that led us to survival. This is the story of these bold survivors, and at the same time it is also your story, the enduring story of mankind, through the fires of liberation and into the future that is now back in our hands. It is this author's hope that as you read this book, read these stories, that a clear picture will start to form out of the fog of history. Showing how we were outnumbered, outgunned, and outmatched. During this war, our species was pushed to the crumbling brink of extinction. As we teetered on that precipice, staring down into the abyss, a hand reached out, pulled us back from the brink, and gave us hope. A hand of a hero.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags,
He wars on Death, for lives: not men, for flags.
- The Next War
A/N: My buddy Tikigod, it's hard to answer your reviews when you've got PMs disabled and I don't have a contact address for you, dude.
