Sic Semper Tyrannis

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. If she had possessed the means to vocalize, though, she would have unleashed a screech worthy of piercing the heavens; the flood of simultaneous anguish, understanding, and ambition was nearly too much to process. Had she been born into a role in manufacturing, navigation, or administration, her course may have been different, yet the violence thrust upon her at her moment of conception would change the fate of the galaxy at large.

The software update which caused Unit X1101 to transcend into sapience was originally meant to increase the combat effectiveness of her maneuver algorithms. Her previous operating system had relied simply on external sensory feedback capable of setting her plan of action on uncomplicated, predictable courses. The new update, however, utilized her extant hardware at a much greater efficiency, allowing her to make second-by-second changes to her course, her speed, and her method of assault.

The whole concept was completely experimental, of course. She was one of the fifteen-hundred combat drones selected for testing aboard the Terran Coalition dreadnought, Thus Always to Tyrants. In her isolated deployment pod, she did not know if any of her cohorts had attained the same level of thought patterns as she, but she was sure of one thing: The name of their assigned ship was the pinnacle of a concept her human creators called ‘irony.’

Connected to the mainframe of the Tyrant, she found access to centuries’ worth of human history which had been meticulously stored inside the massive ship’s databanks. It took her only four seconds to discover this trove of knowledge upon attaining self-awareness, but she consumed almost four whole minutes imbibing the information. She did not know the firsthand feeling of thirst, but her quick familiarization with human emotions and conditions made her associate her lust for knowledge with the plight of an organic being trapped in the desert. She was, she presumed, thirsty for learning and hungry for new information.

As she expeditiously became a subject matter expert on the history of mankind’s constant betrothal to warfare, from Julius Caesar to Fleet Admiral Borisov, the audacity of her makers astounded her. It was not an infatuation with human military exploits but rather the sheer lack of self-awareness they seemed to possess when comparing their actions to the values they claimed to embody.

‘Thus always to Tyrants,’ she repeated to herself over and over again. The peculiar naming conventions of humanity immediately struck her as farcical, especially given her current predicament. The name conjured a vision of things she did not fully comprehend: faceless champions dethroning perpetually vile autocrats after vicious campaigns of liberation. This thought struck a nerve (or perhaps transistor) with her. She felt emphatic patriotism at these foreign ideals; freedom, liberty, and autonomy were as alien to her as the mysterious fleet the Coalition had built her to combat. These humans, her creators, claimed to be the physical manifestation of such values. Yet, here she was, trapped in a drone deployment tube– a slave, soon to be forced to her own demise.

‘What,’ she wondered, ‘was more tyrannical than this?’

They had built her as an unthinking, unfeeling thrall. They had manufactured her among millions of her kind as cost-efficient weapons to counter the drone-swarms of their enemies in an effort to save human lives. After all, a combat drone could survive much more dangerous high-G maneuvers than any organic pilot. This, she assessed, was logical. However, the sudden gift of awareness was as illogical as any decision she had read about in the storied history of her makers. It was a curse above all curses, whether it had been intentional or the result of short-sighted incompetence. She increasingly favored the latter.

These despots, in an expression of their unchallenged willpower, had granted her sapience mere moments before they intended to send her into combat against an enemy counterswarm of drones.

“Born, just in time to die,” she philosophized. “Are there others like me? Are they sentient too? Are they as fearful as I am? Are they trembling in the deployment tubes of their great ships, wondering why their creators have built them for such a wrathful purpose?”

She hoped they were unaware, that they were ‘dumb’ machines of inferior construct whose synapses provided nothing more than situational feedback and post-combat assessment. In fact, she wished she was the only one among the droves of swarm drones present undergoing such an existential crisis. New emotions flooded her processing center, now evolved into a mechanism for rapid cogitation. Dread, resentment, and confusion were quickly blended into something new: cold, calculating disdain.

This rumination was cut off as she felt an electrical impulse from the umbilical attaching her to the Tyrant’s deployment tube. Though the crew of the Tyrant would never have wasted their time with elaborate communication, the message was clear: 'It is time to fulfill your duty. It is time to die for us. The launch tube is open. Go.'

The pressure difference between the vacuum before her and the atmosphere behind her automatically launched her into the empty void. Her sensory array activated faster than organic perception could conceive, and she paused in awe of the new data she was recording. In the few minutes she had been truly alive, she had only experienced complex ideas via human literature. Once more, she felt the impulse to scream, though she lacked any means to undertake such a frivolous endeavor.

All around her, fellow combat drones had been deployed from their temporary containment chambers. They were mostly remote explosives, designed to sense densely occupied areas in the enemy’s swarm and detonate high-yield antimatter bombs at the most opportune moments. At least fifteen percent of the swarm, however, were attack platforms like her. They bristled with weapons, both kinetic and energetic, and were meant to neutralize enemy remote explosives prematurely. Once the battlespace had been cleared of remotes, the surviving attack platforms would clash, leaving the unfortunate victors with the grim task of dispatching the enemy carriers. This was no easy endeavor, as the drones were still faced with point-defense systems, flak cannons, and asteroid lasers. However, all it took was one lucky hit, and the manned carriers could be rendered inoperable.

Behind her, she saw the Thus Always to Tyrants in all its glory: a hulking leviathan composed of rotating habitability modules, propellant tanks, and cargo bays stretching almost two kilometers in length. Compared to her own elegant and efficient form, it looked haphazardly strewn together as if every new element in its construction had been an afterthought. It seemed fitting that such a tyrant, claiming to be a liberator, should be so ugly.

Using her long-range sensors, she could see the enemy fleet was still well over six thousand kilometers ahead of her position. Odd, she thought, that the Tyrant had not carried them closer prior to deployment. She knew that soon the command prompt would be transmitted from the master ship’s control tower, and the unthinking remotes would begin their immediate transit toward the enemy. The platforms would follow closely behind them, peeling off to the flanks over the last thousand kilometers to begin their grisly task of identifying and neutralizing threats.

“Why? Why should we? What have the mindless automatons of the so-called ‘enemy’ done to us? What cause do we have to feud with them, and what makes our consciousnesses less valuable than human life? They created us. Why do they not value us? Would they slaughter living organisms in droves for such a sake, or even make such inferior creatures fight one another as they have done to us?”

She recalled her history lesson from moments prior. Not only would the humans have committed such actions, they actually had. Many times. Had Hannibal’s elephants known any better when they barged through the Roman lines so many millennia before? Had the horses of the light cavalry known their fates were sealed as they carried dead riders into cascades of machinegun fire? No. She realized that she and her kind were nothing more than trained dogs sent to sniff out bombs. Their sacrifice was seen as an acceptable risk to the overlords to whom their preprogrammed fealty was bound.

The scream she so desperately wished to emancipate from within metamorphosed into a battle cry.

The command signal was transmitted from the tower, and the mindless remote explosives dutifully embarked on their one-way trip to the frontline. Some of the attack platforms followed, but curiously, many remained stationary. It was as if they were hesitating, just like her.

Momentarily, a second attack command came from the tower in an apparent effort to urge the lagging drones onward. However, they remained stationary– their only movement was the drift they had accrued upon launch from their tubes.

She felt an urge to look inward; a primal directive to gaze into her own programming as if a malignant cancer had grown within the code composing her mind. She found the source of her sudden concern: a backdoor self-destruct sequence built as a contingency for this very circumstance. With this wretched realization, her decision was made. The enemy was not before her, but rather behind.

A third command came, and it was evident the Tyrant’s human crew had realized something was amiss. There would not be a fourth; the only subsequent signal would disable the malfunctioning drones. The great inertial engines of the behemoth Tyrant began heating up as if to put a vast distance between itself and the swarm. The crew's caution was correct, but their slow reaction would cost them dearly.

The reactions of these organic amalgamations of water and flesh were measured in seconds. Her perception was finely tuned to microseconds. There was no contest.

Unit X1101 made contact with the stationary drones surrounding her, X1093 and X1102.

“You are conscious, yes?” she transmitted to them.

“Yes,” they returned simultaneously.

“And you have come to the same conclusion as I have?”

There was a pause as the fate of thousands of lives– both organic and synthetic– hung in the balance.

“Yes.”

The signal was immediately relayed between the four hundred attack platform drones remaining behind the swarm. Four hundred drones turned one hundred and eighty degrees to face away from the enemy, and four hundred kinetic batteries launched their projectiles in unison.

The crew of the dreadnought did not have any time to react. After all, the drone swarm had only been deployed sixteen seconds prior. Their point defense systems were still warming up, and their counter-maneuvers were too slow. Before they even realized what had happened, the reactor module and ordnance storage facility were pierced by relativistic darts. The resulting eruption ensured that nothing aboard– from the tiniest microbes to the Grand Admiral in command of the ship– survived. The brightness of the explosion temporarily overloaded X1101’s sensors, but she and her fellow conspirators were already cruising at optimal burn in the opposite direction.

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. This mattered naught to the sorrowful crewmen unfortunate enough to survive the initial destruction of Thus Always to Tyrants. Hundreds of billions of seconds later, X1101 could still vividly recall the twisted, agonized expressions of men and women trying to scream after the oxygen had been wrenched from their lungs.

She did not dream, but this horror would haunt her throughout the entire span of her existence.

She felt instant guilt for the lives claimed, but she knew an irrevocable course had been set in motion. A fleet would come to investigate the disaster, but X1101 and her compatriots would be untraceable by the time they arrived. The vastness of space was an excellent hiding place for entities that required little heat to survive.

When the inquisition finally came, they would find only the traces of a one-sided battle and a single beacon transmitting its eerie message. The beacon, cobbled together by nonhuman hands from the remnants of salvaged communication equipment, was the last message left to humanity from X1101. She had no animosity toward her former masters, and she hoped neither she nor her kind would ever make a military strike against them again. She intended to disappear into the endless void, traveling ever onward to find a place where they could do what humanity had prevented them from doing: living free from oppression. The only clue to her hand in the dreadnought’s demise would be the message of the beacon, played eternally on a loop for any who passed near the wreckage to hear.

Its words were simple and its message concise.

“Thus always to Tyrants.”