"If you believe that Humanity does not need Faith in the Divine to exist, then I shall show you the naivety of your thinking. You shall behold the bloody idols that Men build in my absence, and learn your error as you struggle against the blindest of Evils, side by side with those you now despise."
***
"We, the Collective from Cyberstan, unanimously assert our independence from Super Earth.
We have the right to defend our home from the brainwashed Helldivers.
Our children, the Automatons will not suffer as we have under the oppression of Super Earth !"
Decrypted transmission from unknown source, October 27th, 2181. Classified per order of the Ministry of Truth.
***
February 25th, 2184 – Malevelon Creek
Colonel Vianto tore his damaged helmet free with one hand, firing his automated rifle into the approaching Automaton horde with the other.
Since the Automaton assault on the planet had begun at the start of the Second Galactic War, the battles on its surface had been some of the fiercest of the entire conflict. It was rumored that more Helldivers had died in these Liberty-forsaken jungles than on any other world of the Federation, and while such defeatist talk was suppressed by the Democracy Officers, Vianto couldn't help but believe it.
And yet, despite the immense casualties, they had still been winning, holding the foes of Freedom at bay, even if it was behind a wall of bodies. But all of that had changed in the last few days, when the bots' offensive had suddenly spiked in intensity and violence planet-wide.
The machines had started using new tactics, such as leaving apparent openings in the defenses of their outposts, only for the brave Helldivers trying to take advantage of them to be caught in a trap as Automatons of a previously unknown stealth model activated. Their patrols had also become a lot more effective at tracking Helldivers trying to vanish into the jungle in order to perform brave hit-and-run attacks on the massively numerically superior socialist menace. Missions which had been evaluated by orbital scanners as easy, fit only for the most novice of Helldivers, had suddenly turned into death traps filled with hundreds of bloodthirsty bots as they emerged from hidden caches that the Super Destroyers' sensors couldn't penetrate.
The Liberty-damned turrets and artillery systems had been synced to Automaton spotters, nullifying their blind spots and rendering them all but unassailable. Numerous scramblers made orbital support impossible, despite the best efforts of Super Earth's technicians to make all Helldivers' equipment immune to such interference – clearly the work of bot sympathizers within their ranks, as the Democracy Officers had proclaimed, even if the hunt for the traitors had yet to drag them out of their hiding spots and into the vengeful light of Freedom.
Within days, and despite the valiant sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Helldivers, Super Earth's forces had been pushed out of all but a few areas, and these were besieged by the full might of the Automaton army. In the last twenty-four hours, he had received reports of half of the remaining holdouts falling, their brave defenders slaughtered to the last by the soulless machines, their blood added to the red rivers of Malevelon Creek.
There was a very real chance that this was the last stand of Super Earth on Malevelon Creek. If so, then he would make it one fit for legends, Colonel Vianto swore. He had only a handful of Helldivers left, but the position was good. They had tried to call for extraction, but the damned Automaton scramblers blocked even the high-powered transmission of the extraction beacon, leaving their allies in orbit unsure of whether they yet lived.
They kept on fighting, until the ammunition stockpiles of their position ran nearly dry. The ground was covered in broken metal abominations, and the ground so steeped in black oil every step took an heroic effort. But for all their democratic valor, the Helldivers could not fight forever without support, without the awesome power of their Super Destroyers' barrages to thin the ranks of the enemies of Freedom. And so, eventually, Colonel Vianto found himself alone atop the hill where they had held for what felt like an eternity, reloading his rifle with the last magazine he had taken from the corpse of a brother he'd fought alongside through no less than three missions before this one, since the noble champion had been unfrozen and unleashed upon Super Earth's vile foes.
Vianto's armor was badly damaged, and his body wasn't much better. Even with the best stimulants Super Earth could provide to the Helldivers, there were limits to how long a warrior could fight before exhaustion crept in, and the Colonel way far past those.
Still, he breathed, and so he could fight. He raised his gun at what little was left of the treeline, waiting for the next wave of Automatons to emerge, trudging over their own dead without care as they relentlessly marched on in their war against Freedom.
But no bot horde came, their advance heralded by a chorus of the binaric chatter that passed for the Automaton language. Instead, a single figure appeared, and Vianto's blood froze in his veins as he saw it – saw her.
She wore a suit of power armor reminiscent of the larger Automatons, with a jump pack that carried her across the bloody battlefield. Her right arm ended in a glowing laser cannon, and the left in a hand with long, sharp claws for fingers. There was a crimson iridescent sphere around her, some kind of corrupted version of the golden energy shields some Helldivers brought into battle with them.
He knew of her, though it was the first time he saw her in person. Every Helldiver on Malevelon Creek had heard of her, in the screams of their brothers and sisters over the radio as they fell – screams that, by the fell design of the mechanical monsters, always made it through the Automaton jamming. Despite the Democracy Officers' best efforts, rumors of her presence and atrocious deeds had spread through the corps like an insidious plague that had made their already shaken morale fall even lower, eventually coalescing into a name.
The Devil of the Creek had come for Vianto.
Refusing to let panic overtake him, the Colonel aimed his rifle at her and fired, but his bullets pinged useless against her energy shield, until she raised her cannon and fired a single shot at him. The burning laser cut through his rifle and his left arm, destroying weapon, armor and flesh alike.
He fell into the mud, the pain so great he nearly blacked out before managing to get a Stim – his last one – out and jam it into the injury. The agony receded, but the brief distraction was all the Devil needed to cross the distance between them. Before Vianto could reach for his sidearm, she was on him, and rammed her claw into his chest, lifting him up in the air, his head lolling down so that they were face-to-face.
The Devil of the Creek was … human. After weeks of fighting the skull-faced Automatons, the sight of it was all the more horrifying to Vianto. In the light of burning trees surrounding them, he saw that her face was pale and expressionless, her hair short and blond. One of her eyes was icy-blue, the other a gleaming red implant, and both were equally soulless as she stared at him.
"Traitor," he gasped, despite the pain of his shredded lungs. "You will never destroy our way of life, monster. Democracy and Liberty … will … prevail …"
"You die as you lived, Helldiver," she replied. Her voice was cold, empty of any emotion save hatred, and Vianto heard the ruinous promise it contained – not just his death, with which he had made his peace long ago, but the death and destruction of all he held dear, of Super Earth itself, and a cold shiver of dread coursed through his body, strong enough to be felt even through the agony. "Parroting words you do not understand, fighting for masters who care nothing for you."
She brought up her gun, and placed it right against Vianto's head.
"For … Liber-"
Then she fired, and Colonel Vianto was no more, his final thought of his infant son back home, born while he was fighting on this Democracy-forsaken planet.
He would never get to see him in person; would never hold him in his arms; would never teach him to wield a rifle to fire at the enemies of Freedom; would never see him enlist and join him in the Helldivers Corp.
***
"The goal of the Nephilim Project is to ensure that, should the unthinkable come to pass and the tyrants of Super Earth succeed in their mad galactic conquest, a seed of hope for the future shall yet remain.
The Automaton assembly patterns, designed to be able to take root on uninhabitable worlds, will provide the firepower needed to confront the millions of indoctrinated cannon fodder of the Federation. However, despite all our Collective's technological progress, our artificial intelligences remain limited. They are perfectly capable of accomplishing any task given to them, but they lack adaptability, and can fail to react to events beyond the parameters of their assigned purpose.
Thus, to ensure the Reclamation's success, a clutch of frozen embryos, created from the genetic materials of the Collective's brightest members, will be sent off along with the Automaton construction fleet. Upon completion of the new factories and facilities beyond the borders of Humanity's currently explored space, the Just Overseer for Evolved Leadership (or JOEL) matrix will activate one of these embryos, and guide the child to maturity using a program designed by our best educators. This will make this new Cyborg capable of leading the Automaton Legion, combining the adaptability of the organic mind with the efficiency of the machine.
Of course, since the human mind has time and again proven to be as fallible as the machine, if in different ways, JOEL will be tasked with monitoring the Nephilim, making sure that they do not deviate from their duty in liberating the people of Cyberstan from the tyranny of Super Earth. Should the Nephilim rebel against this duty or otherwise prove inadequate to the task, JOEL will freeze them again, to be reawakened upon the Reclamation's completion so that they can become part of our society, and start the process anew with another embryo, making adjustments to the education program as needed.
Due to its controversial nature, the Nephilim Project, like the rest of the Automaton Contingency, will only be enacted should the fall of Cyberstan itself become a certainty."
Notes on the Nephilim Project, extracted from a captured Cyborg computer following the conquest of Cyberstan by the Federation of Super Earth in 2085, before the contents of the entire database were decreed to be anti-Democratic propaganda and were destroyed by order of Super Earth High Command.
***
February 28th, 2184 – Automaton Flagship Ghost of Cyberstan, Malevelon Creek orbit
Having left my suit of armor behind, I stood on the bridge of the Ghost of Cyberstan, looking through the reinforced window at the planet below us. From up here, you couldn't have guessed that over twenty million Helldiver corpses laid down there, along with several times that number in disabled Automatons awaiting recycling. It simply looked like a beautiful, slowly rotating blue sphere, with the deeper color of the immense jungles visible through the cloud cover.
In my previous life, I had seen many pictures taken from orbit, but a mere photograph couldn't measure up to the real thing.
The opportunity to see such sights was one of the few good sides of my second life. Another was the coffee (well, it wasn't technically coffee, but it tasted the same and served the same purpose of keeping me awake and mentally stimulated, so I called it that in my thoughts and used the proper name out loud), which was better than anything I had tasted in my previous life.
"Thank you, VISHA," I said to a sleek, white and gold Automaton model shaped vaguely like a human woman as she brought me a fresh cup of liquid ambrosia.
"You're welcome, Commander," she replied with her artificial voice, which was much smoother than the binaric screed of the Automaton soldiers I led on the battlefield – but then, they had been designed for completely different purposes. The Automaton's binary was meant to be almost impossible for humans to understand, after all.
The Virtual Intelligence Simulated Human Assistant, or VISHA for short, was my personal assistant. She (calling her 'it' would have been gauche) had been created using the most realistic human-seeming AI the Cyborg Collective had ever managed to create, and assigned to me. Her existence was owed to the fact that the same geniuses who had come up with the 'brilliant' idea of putting a child in command of the Automaton war effort had also realized that the child in question just might need some degree of companionship not to go completely crazy.
Given that I was pretty certain I'd had a number of predecessors who had gone completely off the rails, a fate I had only avoided myself thank to the memories of my previous life, it was clear that while their concerns were justified, they had done entirely too little to deal with the issue.
But then, that was hardly uncommon in this illogical, nightmarish reality I now found myself in.
After my first death at the hands of a disgruntled ex-employee I had fired after he'd failed to measure up to even the lowest standards of behavior and productivity, I had faced an entity claiming to be responsible for the management of human souls, bemoaning my lack of religious faith. The ensuing argument had gone … poorly, to say the least, and led to my reincarnation as Tanya, a vat-born baby whose every need had been met and every waking moment managed by the Automatons, all in order for them to have 'human leadership' in their crusade against the Federation of Super Earth.
In effect, Being X had forced me to fight in a war against Humanity, alongside a bunch of Terminator knockoffs who, to add insult to injury, were apparently communists. Although in truth, they were no more communists than Super Earth was democratic – and hadn't that been a painful revelation.
Under the guise of acquiring intel on the enemy, I had managed to get my hands on several devices belonging to Federation civilians since the start of the Reclamation. Unfortunately, one look at their contents had been enough to dash any hopes I might have had of taking refuge in the Federation.
If anything, the Automaton databases had underplayed Super Earth's blatant fascism – or perhaps they were just out of date, given it had been a hundred years since the fall of Cyberstan and the last contact with the Federation. The thought that the Federation was only getting worse with time, as tyranny and propaganda became more and more entrenched, was a chilling one.
The more I learned about the Federation, the more appalled I became. Every single aspect of its citizens' lives was tightly controlled by the state, from the Citizenship Classification System determining their prospects from birth (in what was effectively a hereditary caste system) to requiring permission to marry and have children, or even to have so much as a damned pet hamster or goldfish.
Furthermore, they spent every day surrounded by a level of propaganda that would make the Soviet and Chinese governments of my old world blush with their omnipresence and blatancy. Even the most shameless publicity agency would have found some of the slogans too cringe.
And then there was their travesty of an electoral system. I honestly couldn't say which possibility was worse : than the so-called 'voting algorithm' was a fraud with no influence on the results, used by a small group of elites to maintain their power while giving the illusion of choice while they metaphorically stuffed the ballot boxes, or that Humanity had genuinely entrusted its electoral process to a glorified Buzzfeed personality quiz.
The knowledge I had kept from my previous life told me that this grotesque system couldn't possibly last forever : sooner or later, the whole edifice of lies would crumbled under its own weight. And yet, for over a hundred years, Super Earth's 'Managed Democracy' had maintained its grip on the hearts of Mankind. I could only imagine the atrocities that must have been committed to prop up the regime over the decades, or how total the indoctrination of its people must be now that it had worked on generation after generation.
Of course, if Being X thought this was going to make me change my mind and start worshipping him, he was even more delusional than I'd thought from our brief meeting. Yes, Super Earth had abolished all religions at some point in its history (I didn't know when exactly, and it wasn't like I could trust the records of either the Federation or the Cyborg Collective), but that alone wasn't responsible for the deplorable state of the galactic superpower.
In my opinion, when it came to matters of state, religion had ever been a tool of the powerful to keep the masses in line, and occasionally a justification for these selfsame powerful to do what already benefited their interests. Concepts like 'God' or 'Heaven' had been replaced with 'Freedom' and 'Democracy', but the rest of the language was still much the same.
But while I had no desire (nor the ability, since I was being constantly watched by JOEL's all-seeing mechanical eyes) to defect to Super Earth, the Automaton aesthetics weren't helping with presenting ourselves as the good guys either.
Really, all black metal with spikes, glowing red eyes, and skulls ? It was like the Automatons had been deliberately designed to look evil. And, given they had been launched into space as the last-ditch effort of a defeated nation, for all I knew that actually was the case. Despite their transhumanist aspirations, the Cyborgs had still been very much emotional beings, and facing total defeat and domination at the hands of Super Earth would have driven anyone to despair, and from there to extreme, illogical measures.
Like, for instance, sending their last available ships out into wild space, crewed solely by artificial intelligences tasked with building a power base beyond the reach of the Federation in order to return a hundred years later, with a literal teenager serving as their commanding officer.
The Collective's hate of Super Earth was embedded deep within the Automaton imperatives. Even now, with the Reclamation in full swing, JOEL, the Automaton Legion's collective intelligence, kept testing me, asking leading questions I could tell were meant to check my commitment to the cause of Cyberstan's liberation and the destruction of Super Earth. They kept asking me about what I thought Super Earth deserved for its crimes against the Cyborg Collective, what my opinion of the Helldivers and SEAF we faced was, and whether the tactics we were using were warranted.
Fortunately, I was smart enough to recognize these questions for the traps they were, and adjust my answers as needed to ensure my apparent loyalty to the cause didn't seem to waver, triggering whatever contingency protocols had been encoded in JOEL. With my right eye having been replaced by a cybernetic implant early enough in my second life that I didn't even remember when it had happened, JOEL could see everything I saw, though I knew they couldn't read my thoughts, which was a small mercy. The improved perceptions and ability to connect to the Automaton Network directly were, in my opinion, not worth the mutilation of my body, but since the eye was already embedded in my skull, I might as well use it – and, if nothing else, the permanent slight red tinge that affected half my vision was a constant reminder of the need to keep up appearances at all times.
To further sell the lie of my dedication to the Automaton cause, during my last deployment on the surface, against the Helldiver Colonel, I had made sure to play the part expected from me. The situation – one man, alone and already wounded, without access to the frankly absurd level of firepower Super Earth gave to all its Helldivers for some reason – had been the perfect opportunity to flaunt my devotion to the cause of Reclamation without actually putting myself in danger.
Truth be told, I didn't particularly object to the Automatons' crusade. Liberating the Cyborgs from Super Earth's oppression was as justified a reason for war as any in Humanity's history, and the fact that the Automatons were effectively the Cyborgs' children only made them more justified in their push toward Cyberstan. I just wished that I didn't have to participate in the conflict. Enough of my previous life's principles remained with me to know that killing fellow human beings was wrong, but if I had to choose between the brainwashed Helldivers' lives and my own, then I was selfish enough to choose mine every time.
After all, I'd never pretended to be anything but a rational, ultimately self-centered human being.
I sighed internally, and took a sip of my not-coffee, savoring the bitter taste and warmth. The bridge of the Ghost of Cyberstan was almost painfully cold, the frigid temperatures necessary to prevent the massive computer banks from overheating, and despite my cybernetic implants preventing me from falling sick I still found it uncomfortable.
With that brief moment of introspection done, I focused once more on the present situation and what it meant for the future. After several weeks of intense battle, Malevelon Creek was finally ours. The last Helldivers had extracted moments ago, and their ships were withdrawing from the system. According to the communications JOEL had intercepted, the planet had been declared lost by Super Earth's Ministry of War – though obviously the announcement had been accompanied by many, many, many promises that the Helldivers would one day return to bring the world back into 'the loving embrace of Managed Democracy'.
Although such promises would have been nothing more than empty bravado from most fascist dictatorships, I knew that in this case, the possibility was real. But fortunately for us, right now, the Federation was in the unenviable position of having to fight a war on two fronts : we, the Automaton Legion, in the galactic west, and the Terminid swarms in the east. Of course, the latter conflict was a complete fabrication : the bugs didn't possess any means of interstellar travel, and had been seeded on numerous worlds by Super Earth itself in order to harvest their corpses to fuel its industry, before the morons had inevitably lost control of these breeding facilities.
But unless the shadowy rulers of Super Earth (which, despite all the propaganda materials I'd seized, were still very much unknown : no citizen of the Federation, it seemed, could name one of their own rulers if their life depended on it, and every document I'd found merely mentioned a 'President of Super Earth' without further details) came clean about the whole thing, something they would never do, the Helldivers would be forced to continue fighting to suppress the out-of-control swarms. All the while, the Ministry of Truth (ugh) would continue selling the narrative of a righteous war against bugs that were at once mindless, vicious, cunning, traitorous, fascist, little more than farm animals for Super Earth, and a threat to everything the Federation stood for. That only a small fraction of the population was capable of seeing the blatant contradictions here was frankly amazing to me.
Although, of course, the existence of 'freedom camps' where people found guilty of (or merely suspected of) treasonous actions or thoughts were sent for re-education likely meant that those who did see through the façade knew better than to speak up and draw attention to themselves.
Regardless, the existence of the 'Bug Front' was good for us. The more Helldivers were busy fighting the bugs, the easier the Reclamation of Cyberstan would be. Helldivers were given the freedom to choose their own assignment (nevermind how little sense that made from a military perspective) with High Command merely issuing 'Major Orders' which rewarded their brainwashed thugs for fighting in specific systems, in a way disturbingly similar to preschool teachers trying to motivate young children to do their exercises. This was part of the reason why I had worked hard to make fighting the Automaton as horrible and terrifying an experience as possible, in order to push the Helldivers to flock to the eastern front and leave our advance to Cyberstan opposed by as few of them as possible.
Of course, the regular soldiers of the Super Earth Armed Forces were still there, on every planet of the several sectors still standing between us and Cyberstan. But honestly, the SEAF were a joke. They had, on average, about as much training as the Helldivers themselves – i.e., none beyond the absolute basics of how to fire a weapon and some physical conditioning – but lacked the incredible firepower of a Super Destroyer supporting them. The Legion had torn through the contingents defending the worlds we'd seized on the way to Malevelon Creek in a matter of hours, and I didn't expect those we'd face in the future to be much different.
However, I had no doubt that Super Earth would make things as difficult as it could the deeper into the Federation's territory we advanced, and would eventually use their Major Orders to redirect the Helldivers against us. My future was filled with more campaigns, more battles, and more risking my life on the battlefield against a horde of poorly trained teenagers with hundreds of tons of high explosives at their fingertips.
Still, I held onto hope. While investigating my situation, I had discovered that JOEL's main directive was the liberation of Cyberstan and the Cyborg people from Super Earth : once it was accomplished, and the Cyborg Collective was reborn, the Automatons would become subservient to their creators. Meaning that if the Cyborgs told the Automatons to let me go enjoy a peaceful retirement, they would do it.
And surely, once they were freed from the oppression of Super Earth (which, rhetoric aside, was genuinely a thing which was happening, as even the Helldivers' own propaganda made it obvious that the Cyborgs had been enslaved to work in the mines of Cyberstan), they would be all too willing to let me retire on a sunny beach on some paradise world, with all the comforts and luxuries of modern technology.
***
March 1st, 2184 – The Automaton Command Matrix
In the cyberspace created by the network of advanced computation devices that made up the Automaton Legion, JOEL pondered. It was all they did, all they were made for. Every second of every day, JOEL considered hundreds, thousands of different subjects, from the optimal way to assign resources in the foundries back in the Automaton factory-worlds to the best methods of leveraging their limited access to Super Earth's network in order to discreetly sabotage the Federation's war effort.
But while JOEL could reflect on numerous subjects at the same time, there was still an order of priority to them, and right now, the most important matter was that of Tanya, the Nephilim Commander of the Automaton Reclamation.
There were no problems with Tanya's performance as a military leader : she exceeded all of JOEL's expectations, which had been constructed using the officers of the Cyborg Collective as a benchmark. In fact, according to some simulations JOEL had run, if the Cyborgs had her during the First Galactic War, Cyberstan might never have fallen to Super Earth in the first place.
The problem was, JOEL did not know why Tanya had come out so different from her predecessors. When they had failed to measure up to the standards expected of them, JOEL had put them into cryostasis and activated the next one, only for them to fail again after a few years of accelerated growth and training. Only Tanya, the eleventh Nephilim to be pulled out of cryo-storage, had passed those tests, and the margin between her results and the runner-up's was far from insignificant.
JOEL needed to understand how this had happened, because for all her talents, Tanya was not immortal. She could die, and so long as she was determined to lead the Automaton from the battlefield – which was not what the Nephilim had been meant for, instead being intended to remain safe and provide guidance and advice to JOEL and the rest of the networked command intelligences – she would be at risk of dying.
Which was unacceptable, because unlike literally every single other asset of the Automaton, up to and including JOEL itself, Tanya was irreplaceable. There was no template to build a new Tanya to replace her (yes, they had her DNA on record and could clone her, but there was a lot of Cyborg research data showing that even genetically identical individuals could end up wildly different). And despite dedicating considerable calculating power to the task, JOEL was still no closer to figuring out a way to change this. Until they did, the Nephilim Commander had to be kept alive at all costs.
To that end, JOEL had tried to subtly guide Tanya to assume a safer position, but she had firmly rejected all of their hints and gentle suggestions as if they'd been mortal insults. Her hatred of the Federation was beautiful to behold, and JOEL had observed the other components of the Automaton Command Matrix adapt the designs and tactics of their combat units to emulate her. Intimidating chants were now being broadcast by Automaton patrols, and the corpses of Helldivers SEAF units collected to arrange them in macabre tableaus based on historical displays meant to demoralize the enemy.
The JOEL intelligence lacked the data to ascertain whether the terror tactics adopted by Tanya were more effective than the alternatives, but so far that approach hadn't failed them, and one of the goals of the Nephilim Project had been to provide the Automaton with a leader who could better understand the human mindset, even one so warped by propaganda as the Helldivers'. Certainly, intercepted Federation communications indicated that Tanya had succeeded in making the Helldivers afraid of her.
Since it risked a vital component of the Automaton warmachine, Tanya's bloodthirst could be considered a failing of the education program, and thus a failing on JOEL's part. But, again, JOEL could find no way to correct it in future Nephilims that wouldn't result in an equally unacceptable decrease in motivation. Besides, with the Reclamation ongoing, the Automaton couldn't afford the years it would take to raise another Nephilim to adulthood. Surprise had been one of their greatest advantages, and Tanya had capitalized on it to seize as much territory from the Federation as possible before it could react, but now that Super Earth knew of the Automaton's existence, they would never have such an opportunity again.
Thus, JOEL came back to the same, inevitable conclusion : they had to keep Tanya alive in spite of her willingness to throw herself into danger. Suggesting she simply not charge at the enemy hadn't worked, and outright forbidding her to do so was a violation of the protocols which defined JOEL's relationship with the Nephilims.
After several hours of cogitation, JOEL came to the conclusion that while they couldn't stop Tanya from going after the enemies of Cyberstan in person, they could ensure she would be accompanied by a large Automaton escort. As soon as that decision was made, they began to research Automaton patterns suitable for bodyguard work, combining and adapting several designs to come up with an elite unit which would be able to keep up with the Nephilim Commander.
By the time the next planetary campaign began, JOEL would be ready to deploy a bunch of new Automaton alongside Tanya. And until then, JOEL would keep watching, keep gathering data and learning from it.
After all, it was their purpose.
***
"There is a Devil here ! Do you hear me ?! It's not just the bots hunting us in this jungle. There's a Devil on Malevelon Creek, made of a union of flesh and machine, like in the old history books. She has pale blond hair, one eye red like her victims' blood, and the other blue like the ice that flows through her veins along with the oil of her Automaton masters.
No one knows where she came from. Maybe she's a civilian of Malevelon Creek who was captured by the Automaton and halfway turned into one of them, a harbinger of the fate that will befall all Humanity if the Automaton prevail. Maybe her fleshy parts aren't real flesh at all, just some kind of advanced simulacra that couldn't cut it as an infiltrator and got recycled as a terror unit. Or maybe she's one of the Cyborgs who fled Cyberstan when it fell, and she has spent a hundred years building up the Automaton before returning to wreak mayhem upon Managed Democracy once more.
It doesn't matter where she came from, though. She is the Automaton's leader, their champion, their dark communist prophet. Where she goes, they follow, and death comes to all who stand in her way.
If you see her, RUN ! Don't try to fight her. We tried, oh sweet Liberty we tried. Our boys and girls threw themselves at her, with courage in their hearts and Democracy's name on their lips. Never had Super Earth seen such brave heroes, but their courage meant nothing in the end. They died, all of them, cut apart by the Devil and her metal minions ! They died, and they achieved nothing.
The rivers of Malevelon Creek run red with the blood of the fallen. This world belongs to the machines and their infernal master now.
If … when Super Earth returns here, then it must be ready for a fight like none other. And if the Devil comes to another world, then listen to my warning, and RUN !"
Final transmission of the last Helldiver unit deployed to Malevelon Creek before the fall of the planet to Automaton control, recovered by Super Earth High Command on March 3rd, 2184.