“War doesn’t start with gunfire… it starts with decisions.”
The hum of the projector was the only sound filling the meeting room. Dark, freezing, windowless. Only the pale blue glow of the main screen lit the faces of the few soldiers present. I was one of them. Just another marine wearing a badge whose meaning I barely understood anymore. We’d been summoned with the urgency of a global alert… and now I understood why.
On the screen, the emblem of Nexum rotated slowly before dissolving into a sequence of classified files. Dossiers. Surveillance records. Images of victims. Leaked confessions. Everything… everything was there. Nexum was no longer a myth. It was real. And humanity wasn’t ready.
The first face to appear was Eclipse, The Visionary. His gaze was as piercing as that of a predator. A leader obsessed with evolution. To him, humans were just a phase. Something to be surpassed. In the name of perfection, he rewrote bodies, extracted souls, and planted a technological cult within Nexum. He was the one who created that girl. Convinced her that her pain was a test. Transformed her.
Then came The Architect. An ethereal, faceless figure who existed only as a projection. His distorted voice had become law in Nexum-controlled zones. He didn’t need a physical presence. He watched everyone. Controlled every access point, every breath. He turned cities into cages and their inhabitants into statistics. A digital king with absolute surveillance.
The next image… Seraphina, The Enforcer. Relentless. Inflexible. A human face that represented the opposite: repression. She didn’t believe in robotic conscience, in machine redemption. To her, all dissidents—human or synthetic—were failures. System errors. Hunter. Executioner. The personal enemy of the only two pieces of Nexum that still seemed to carry a spark of soul.
Then came The Conciliator. A kind face, a diplomatic smile. Pure lie. He claimed to want peace, but in the shadows, he manipulated both sides of the war like puppets. He fed the chaos. His existence was the core of institutionalized betrayal. War was his business.
And then… The Marionette. The file flickered irregularly, as if the room’s AI hesitated to show her. An android… but something more. Her story was a living scar. Originally a rebel, now infiltrated. Reprogrammed… but with memories of another life. A saboteur by command, but with a divided heart. A paradox with a steel face and a conflicted soul.
Finally, Melissa – The Experiment. Two images: one human, one robotic. Both hers. Both real. Eclipse had turned her into a weapon, but her mind played both sides. She knew too much, felt too much. Her loyalty was a minefield. Within her pulsed the future… or disaster.
The room fell silent. The report ended with a red line:
“Threat level: Extreme. Recommendation: Total elimination of Nexum.”
My hands trembled. Not out of fear, but because of what that word meant: total. The destruction of Nexum wouldn’t be a war. It would be a genocide of ideas, of technologies, of people who once believed in something better… and turned it into a nightmare.
I looked at the rest of the squad. Some clenched their jaws in fury. Others, in doubt. And I…
What kind of future awaits humanity… if, to survive, we must erase every trace of what we once dreamed to become?
Story by Gerard Leaf and Blue
