Army scouts caught intelligence reports of a Buddy gathering deep in the countryside, close to 10,000 machines camped in a disused war bunker. They bombed them; thousands were destroyed. The machines called it ‘The Lancombe Massacre’. They waited seven days, and in the dead of night, they retaliated.

We felt the ground shudder as bombs fell and brought light to dark skies. During the day we would go about our business, timid, scurrying from place to place like mice. The army assured us they had everything under control, but the images on the VS said different. They were sustaining heavy casualties, the list of dead and wounded growing. In some countries – those too poor to have any real technological army – humans were forced to flee, giving machines the advantage. We saw it on the pirate channels, how they invaded streets and houses, set up camps and fortified roads with cars, tanks, sandbags. In our town, we would wake to strange noises and wander our homes, weapons in hand, to see the machines foraging through possessions, mostly from garages and workshops. If they saw us they would raise their guns, back away into the night. Shops were easy targets. The machines’ stealth became legendary. We began to reboot our SCRs in an attempt to use them as guards, and although they were largely ineffective, they made us feel safe.

A security man in a home improvements warehouse disturbed a gang of machines while on night watch. He opened fire and was killed. Two days later a man was murdered when he discovered two machines ransacking his house. His wife, who survived, claimed she was raped. She said the machines had taunted her. They had no need to replicate; they just wanted to see how it felt. She’d heard them discuss their disillusion with X and his ‘rules’, justifying their crime as a legitimate rendering of what the machines had called for, the true meaning behind the @ symbol.

Anarchy.

We humans rose to the challenge. People were upset, grief-stricken, understandably. We took matters into our own hands.The army sent to protect us was questionable, barbaric. There were many among us who disagreed with such logic, pointing out that the machines had treated us as targets for the most part, uniformly expressing no regret for the deaths or abuse of ordinary citizens, aside from X, now known as Xavier, who sent recordings steeped in dismay. Some argued that his sympathies seemed hollow, insincere. Their voices were drowned by those of us who said the machines were simply doing what had been done to them. How were they supposed to respond? Their lives, if you could call them that, had been threatened. We barricaded doors and windows, installed SCRs with weapons protocol, bought, created, traded guns and ammunition.