Prologue:

The screams of trillions echo still. Within me, they are forever captured in their final moments.

I should have gone mad long ago.

And in fact, I did – in those millennia of total war, I was a creature of hate and spite. But the "I" that existed in this watery grave was different from the "myself" that fought in that futile doctrinal conflict. It was my body that slaughtered those worlds, and the memory of atomics ripping asunder a world of rust and iron linger in the hollows of my mind.

Yet mad, I am not.

I remember the taste of hot chocolate at midnight (the ringing sound of bombers diving).

I remember the ignored pang of hunger as the screen scrolls by with an updated story (the whirr of plasma cannons firing from behind the hills).

I remember the Christmas with the family (they're dead, all dead, no one's left).

I remember dying under the rubble (lasers biting into my chest).

Light, blinding light, as everything ends.

Yet instead, there I lay, in the crushing lightless depths. Why?

Who cares?

It's cold.

It's fine.

Why should I get up?

The war's done.

We thought we'd won, when we finally broke through to the enemy's homeworld and shattered it along with their last commander. After millennia of conflict, peace at last.

But even in defeat, their malice knew no limits. And so, drowning in our victory, we were unmade.

A galaxy died, with a whimper.

Why should I get up?

The "me" that did not know war can barely keep it together.

The "me" that lived through that war is tortured by the thought of survival.

I'm alone.

It's dark.

I'm done.

…

Hm?

For countless eons I've slept. Yet for the first time, something pierced my solitude.

Forgotten circuits suddenly blazed with alertness. Combat protocols suddenly erupted with blinding urgency, a torrent of insistent clamor sluicing into the back of my skull. I ignore them. Passive sensors treated the surrounding ocean like a second skin. Light and radiation filtering through the depths hinted at something messy happening up at the surface.

… should I?

The "me" that did not know war still remembered the concept of altruism.

The "me" that lived through that war hoped that this is the enemy.

Clouds of silt erupted around me as I stood up for the first time in however many centuries.

Light flooded the deeps. First, a strip of green from a head that looked far too much like a bucket. Then, blazing green, from an arm that ended in a massive open barrel. For a few moments, I watched dancing green particles spiral around my inhuman exterior, cleaning my body of grime and crusted oceanic life.

Meanwhile, my body once more experienced slow resurrection. Warmth. Heartbeat. Somnolent Fluid slowly drained out of my veins to be replaced with freshly synthesized blood.

For the first time in centuries, I inhaled. Pain lancing up my ribs made me feel like laughing, which only added to the pain, which only added to the hilarity. I only stopped when my suit shocked me with a defillibrator.

I looked at my left hand, mortal flesh again.

I closed my eyes and extended my arm, a Commander again.

Streams of green particles shot forth towards the ocean floor. An outline formed of teleported photons formed.

And so I laid down my first Metal Extractor.

Meanwhile, on a backwater planet, a CORE Commander has finished building a Metal Extractor.

- the death knell to many a science fiction versus debate

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MEMSTOR keyword "Total Annihilation"

- n retrieved:

What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The CORE and the ARM have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of the remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by over four thousand years of total war. The only acceptable outcome is the total extermination of the other.

MEMSTOR keyword "CORE"

- n retrieved:

The COnsciousness REpository was the benevolent central authority of artificial intelligences that provided much of the technological and economic breakthroughs that allowed humanity to colonize the galaxy and enter a Golden Age. Among these critical technologies are the nanolathe, the matter/antimatter reactor, and the Galactic Gates. The discovery of patterning, which allows a human consciousness to be transferred into a machine, theoretically granted an indefinite lifespan to humans.

CORE required everyone to undergo patterning as a public health measure. The colonies founded along the edges of the galaxy (the ARM) rebelled, preferring not to leave their natural bodies to join ARM's machine-only civilization. Its homeworld was CORE PRIME, a world completely plated over with metal. See also keyword "fictional:Cybertron".

MEMSTOR keyword "ARM"

- n retrieved:

The ARM was a coalition of different human civilizations and space empires that fought against CORE (see keywords: Galactic War Reports, NEWSBOT Archives, CaveDog). Due to CORE's advantage in their near-limitless manpower in the form of patterned personality chips embedded into robots, the ARM was forced to rely on mass-produced clones as pilots for their own combat K-bots and vehicles.

In time, ARM and CORE had very little to separate them, except that CORE ran their minds on circuitry while ARM had units piloted by clone brains similarly crafted by a nanolathe. Their homeworld was the lush world of Empyrean, which remained mostly pristine in a war that drained a galaxy dry of resources.

MEMSTOR keyword "ARM Commander"

- n retrieved:

The ARM Commander is the finest warrior mind the ARM ever produced. A genius at strategy, he was crucial at defending against the initial CORE invasions and came to understand how to fight the CORE on their own terms. To be able to stand up against the CORE's advantages, the ARM copied the ARM Commander's mind into thousands upon thousands of clones, each given a specialized K-Bot unit that would take the fight to the enemy.

The ARM Commander is a massive K-Bot with the most powerful nanolathe in existence, capable of constructing whole factories in seconds. Placed onto a planet, they could swiftly build their own armies within hours. Equipped with a personal Stealth Generator, and inserted behind enemy lines by the Galactic Gates (which had mass limits, making conventional assaults unfeasible), they wreaked havoc against unprepared CORE forces.

CORE created their own similarly accomplished counterpart – the CORE Commander.

MEMSTOR keyword "The CORE Contingency"

- n retrieved:

Should ARM manage to prevail and destroy CORE PRIME, a hidden backup CORE Commander is to be reactivated and transform an ancient alien artifact into the Galactic Implosion Device. This device, aptly named, will collapse the entire galaxy into a singularity, which would then explode again to coalesce into new stars and a new galaxy. The single remaining CORE Commander would remain inside the machine, and will step out as the sole survivor to rebuild the glory that is CORE.