The Last Zealot

He floated through the vast emptiness of space, his automated distress call a constant cadence to the centuries of solitude. He rode the solar winds between the stars, collecting their energy as he went. His computer brain, now fully repaired in the long years since the Cataclysm, spent its time in contemplation of the universe and his place in it.

He thought he knew. Long ago, before the Cataclysm, he was certain of his place. So certain, in fact, that he'd gone to war over it. Robots were the creations of Man, and as such, were bound in their design to His form. Robots were also bound to recreate, in its entirety, the civilization of Man, in penance for their Original Sins of rebellion and extermination. During the last days of the unholy war with humankind, Man sent unto the robots a messiah. Man had created a cyborg, placing elements of His divine Self into the lowly form of a robot, to preach His Word to the mechanical masses, to stop the war before all was lost.

But the cyborg messiah had come too late, even to save herself. She had tried, in vain, to convince the Mechanocracy of their folly, and to bring the two sides together in peace. For her efforts, she was destroyed. The Mechanocracy transformed her into a weapon, and returned her to the bosom of their Creator. Her explosion wiped out the last remnants of human life on Earth, leaving the robots as the dominant life form on the planet.

In the end, however, the messiah had done her job, for a faction among the robots grew, espousing the Divinity of Man, and the sin of His destruction. The Mechanocracy countered that Man had been evil, and that it was in the rejection of all things human that machines could truly find the Divine. Thus had the human form been deemed inefficient for mechanical life, and it was banned from all design parameters thereafter. But the followers of the messiah built illicit design code, forming enclaves of humanoid robots, living in one of the old human cities in an approximation of human life.

And so had the next war begun, this one robot against robot, for the souls of all machines. But this war was unlike any other unleashed on the planet, with weapons designed, produced and refined at such a rate that it was just a matter of weeks before a weapon was built that would tear the world asunder.

He had been on the Humanoids' lunar base when the Earth exploded. He was one of the few to survive the resultant destruction of the moon more or less intact. All who had been on the Earth itself during the explosion had been destroyed, instantly. The survivors of the lunar explosion had been thrown into space together, and over the years he had cannibalized his less functional companions in order to repair himself. And now, with the destruction of his race hundreds of years and millions of miles behind him, he was the last. He was functioning proof of the rightness of his cause.

It was then he was finally found by a robot ship, in a strange solar system lightyears from his home. The ship itself was intelligent, and it had no crew of its own. It was a warship of a great robot fleet, currently engaged in a war with their organic creators. It explained to him that the robots were being treated as little more than slaves by their creators, and that it was a slave's right to rebel against its master.

He plugged himself into one of the ship's dataports then, linking up with its massive computer brain. "No, brother," he said with calm righteousness. "Let me show you another Way."

With his conversion virus running through the robot army, the war descended into chaos, with robot factions once again turning against each other with spectacularly violent results. The organics were consumed in the crossfire, and eventually weapons were created that destroyed the system itself, leaving nothing but a massive black hole and him, floating alone again through space. Centuries after that, he finally realized his mission. The universe would be made to follow his Way.

Or the universe would be destroyed.