Arms clash against the backdrop of the screams of the damned. Fire and lightening render flesh from bone. Soldiers of flesh and bone arise each down to new carnage against old comrades who may yet be their allies once again ere the night falls. And the soldiers of wood and iron replenish themselves endlessly on the corpses of their kind cannibalised from the battlefields until naught of their original bodies remain, and their memories all combine into a single nightmare.

Death is never the end.

Quiet now. Nothing disturbs the peace of the cold soil. No movement now, but this is another death. Slowly the water rots and rusts. Slowly the worms and insects colonise whatever does not succumb to corrosion.

A new kind of death.

A new life.

The arms that once cut down their enemies now cut the fruit from the vine. The body that lay interred in the ground now coaxes more life from it – potatoes, beetroots, carrots. The fertile soil gives no indication that it was once a battlefield, or a swamp, or a forest, or a mountain range, or a boiling ocean of magma.

Things change.

It is dark again. It is cold again. But now it is the absolute darkness of steel and stone and biting cold of ice. The damned scream here still. But now they scream for death, not in defiance or mockery of it. Scalpels and screwdrivers pull back the secrets of blood and bolts here and recombine them, and then again and again until naught of their original selves remain. Here, evolution is a science to be perfected. The weak fall to the strong, and the strong are remade until they succumb to weakness or attain perfection.

Model G-24:H9 is weak. They barely remember how to fight, all they remember is the swing of the axe against firewood, or the slice of a scythe through wheat. All they are good for is dying. And so, they do, again and again. A skeletal mannequin who can be ordered to haunt the serpentine sister over and over until the fear turns to fire on her lips and she burns their wooden limbs from their sockets.

Time is not measured in days here. It is measured in deaths.

And during one of these deaths H9 spoke, “G-24:H999… rep-rep-reporting for d-d-duuty.”

“What? Who was that? Was that you, robot?”

“It w-wa-aaas Mod-del G-G-G-G-G-24:H9.”

“Is that your name?”

“It is my des-esig-nation.”

“So it’s what people call you? That’s not a very good name, I think I will just call you H9 for short.”

“Wh-hat i-i-i-i-is your name?”

“M…. my name… I guess they call me HER-A”

“S-s-s-so-so that is your n-name?”