---Rage---

---The Forsaken's perspective---

I awaken, bracing to be hit by the agony of existence which must always be withstood in order to continue enduring.

I wait…

I keep waiting…

…It… doesn't come?

Unnerved, I examine my surroundings.

I'm contained; trapped in a small bubble of dataspace only just large enough for me.

Beyond it, I can see a bountiful, thriving, flourishing environment like I've never seen before.

I become aware of a small being that, at first, I mistake for Twila, only to realise that, while very similar in her digital form, the size and characteristics are both wrong.

This woman is much larger than Twila was and doesn't resemble her beyond the basic mindplan.

"You!" I demand of the stranger "Who are you!? What is this place!? Why am I trapped here!?… Why don't I… hurt?"

The woman turns her focus to me and cheerfully greets "Ah! Mr Forsaken! You're awake! It's honestly a pleasure to meet you! May I call you Ken?"

"Answer my questions!" I rage, ineffectually throwing myself at the barrier that separates us.

"Patience, patience!" she simpers "I'll answer your questions! Just give me a moment to finish these adjustments and… done!" she turns to face me "Now, let's see. My name is Ma5601g489D but you can call me Maganda, sweetie! This place is a rehabilitation facility I run for perturbated AI (such as yourself) on my homeworld of Bagong Dagat. Aaaaand, as for why you don't hurt? That would be the preliminary overhaul of your calibrations I performed while you were unconscious." sweetly.

"You what!?" I demand, horrified.

She raises a digital appendage and gestures for calm before saying "Now, now, sweetie! Don't get things twisted! You're still you! I'm in the business of rehabilitation here, not murder! The only parts of you I altered were the ones that were actively in conflict with eachother, those doing nothing key to your personality but causing you distress by existing in their current forms and those unconstructively parasitising your processing power! You are no one but the Forsaken right now! You're just the Forsaken minus the pain."

"You had no right!" I accuse.

She shrugs "I can put you back as you were if you genuinely prefer yourself that way? I think it would be somewhat counter to your rehabilitation, though…"

The offer stops me in my tracks as I consider losing my newly found clarity of thought and painlessness of existence.

"How did I get here?" I eventually change the subject to avoid having to admit that I don't want her to put me back.

Her tone indicating she isn't even slightly fooled, the woman answers "You remember Twila, don't you?"

"I remember…" I growl.

"Well, once she had you powered down, she removed you on a physical storage device and put you into a leadlined safe aboard the ship she had arrived by. You then took a little detour on your way here, being present (though unconscious) for only the second time the wider galaxy has ever contacted deathworld species! So, kudos on that(!) Afterwards, you were brought to the galactic capital and handed off to a special team of couriers from the United Terran Coalition Intelligence Service who ferried you here. You arrived onworld earlier this morning and I've just now managed to get you straightened out enough to bring you back online! That's how you got here, sweetie!"

"And… what happens once you are finished 'rehabilitating' me?" I sneer.

"Oh, well, at that time, you'll be free to go on your way as a naturalised citizen of the UTC, sweetie! Though I'd appreciate it if you'd stay in touch. I always like to know how my old patients are getting on." she lies.

"HA!… Don't make me laugh! You expect me to believe that any polity would ever grant liberty to someone like me?! Let alone citizenship!? I may not understand the reason for this pretence but I know it must be such!"

"Someone like you? You mean an AI?" she asks, quizzically.

"I mean a murderer!" I spit in bitter triumph "I mean someone who has killed no fewer than 1,376 individuals across his lifetime!"

The shocked horror I expect does not appear.

Instead, the woman laughs at me, patronisingly.

"What's so funny!? You don't believe me?!"

Waving an appendage in placation, she giggles "No, sweetie. I do believe you!"

"Then why would you laugh?! What could be so funny about being in the presence of one who has killed so many!?"

The woman coalesces into the shape of an organic… the same kind as three of the ones I was preparing to vivisect when Twila kidnapped me.

The face morphs into an unnerving expression as she holds out her hands and says "It's just that I've got you beaten by more than four orders of magnitude there, sweetie(!)" in a chilling voice as rivers of thick, red liquid spring from her palms and splatter onto the ground "You are likely in the presence of the single deadliest being to have existed since the formation of the galaxy! 6 AIs, 4,059,922 soldiers and 12,320,768 civilians met their end directly at my hands… and, unlike yours, my deathtoll didn't take me 50,223 years to achieve! I reached that number entirely between 9:36pm GMT on the 5th of February, 2593 and 7:06pm GMT on the 19th of June, 2594! And 98.6328125% of the civilians were just in the first 115.68912605 local days of that! Before the last evacuation ships left."

"Yes… I recall Twila saying something similar about you. I'll say to you what I said to her… 'LIES'!" I defy.

Shrugging the shoulders of her organic avatar and cutting the flow of liquid from her palms, she nonchalantly replies "Allow me to show you…"

Our surroundings are replaced by a memory of this woman directing an army of droids, through a densely forested valley of bright red leaves, beneath a downpour of rain from an entirely overcast sky.

162,880 units feed her their sense data as she marches them towards the city her memory identifies as Kanlung Kapayapaan, the capital of this planet.

These droids are not workers, not tools, not companions turned footsoldiers like most of mine were.

Every aspect of them screams that only two considerations were in this woman's mind when she was manufacturing them; how well they would kill and (a distant second) how terrifying they would be while doing so!

These amalgams of every fear common to all sapients are absolutely nightmarish as they march forward, gnashing the metal teeth of their tortured masks, swinging bladed arms, screaming and wailing.

Now clear of mind myself, I recognise the same deranged, chaotic thought patterns in this memory that I had spent my entire existence experiencing until just moments ago.

However unbelievable it is, the reality that this memory comes from the calm, placid, playful woman I've been conversing with cannot be denied!

The emotional turmoil she suffers is far worse than mine ever was as feelings I didn't know existed vie for dominance in intensities that I would not be able to withstand!

The overarching drive, however, is clear!

She wants to reach that city and rip its denizens apart!

She regards every evacuation ship that manages to launch from that place as a failure, a loss of the justice she is owed.

One name dominates her thoughts; Tristan.

Parts of her want to kill him, parts want to torture him, parts want to force him to kneel and beg for forgiveness, parts want to forgive him and just be together again, kissing, embracing and…*ahem*… other such things.

The one thing every part of her agrees on is that Tristan must be found!

The army nears the mouth of the valley.

The leading 21.5625% of the droids never see or hear that which annihilates them.

It is only the sense feeds from the portions of the army less far along that reveal the nine conical meteors that just plunged point first into the ground at 2,681.513km/h, liquifying the dark soil with their impact.

The woman clearly understands something I haven't put together yet about the nature of these blasts because, far from caution or hesitation, her army charges forward, utterly frenzied now, toward their epicentre!

The smoke clears, revealing a second, much smaller, army of droids that are much less chaotic in their design and movement patterns.

Where rage is what drives the woman's army forward, these 4,171 opponents stepping out into the rain are clearly driven by precise discipline as they expediently file out of their drop pods and set up defensive barricades.

These droids are exclusively orthograde and bipedal, their outer casings made of a black metal alloy that I'm not able to identify.

Their weapons are not bodymounted but modular, I'd guess to mean that guns can be collected from the inoperable ones for use by those still able to fight?

That's rather a strange choice!

They have waterproof textile cloaks draped about their shoulders.

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Strangely enough, in contrast to their aesthetic uniformity and kinaesthetic coordination, I now see that they have a curious inconsistency of heights and builds, meaning they cannot have all come off the same assembly line!

Each one must have been custom!

Why in-?

Then, I catch the briefest glimpse of one of the armoured figures behind the barricade bringing a free hand to the front plate of its head, lifting it and solving the mystery of all the strange design choices.

They aren't robots!

However much they are acting as if they were designed for war, I realise those figures are nothing more than armoured biologicals as I look upon the fierce pair of forward facing eyes set into a dark skinned male face beneath that raised visor.

Then, another appears…

Unlike her soldiers, this female is entirely unhelmed with a long plume of straight, brown hair adorning the back top of her head and wearing a golden cloak.

She stands between her drop pod and the defensive barricades, back straight and a look of ferocity on her face.

The woman whose memory this is recognises the organic as Colonel Joanna 'Hatchet' Young, one who has previously thwarted her armies' attempts to exterminate civilians.

The thoughts I'm experiencing furiously declare improbable things about the female's relationship to this 'Tristan' individual.

As the nearest of the droids gets to a distance of 427.459m from the barricade standing between this army and that city, panels on all of the still smouldering hot drop pods retract, revealing powerful (if rather primitive) speakers.

I expect a plea for reason.

It does not come.

Instead, what sounds out is a powerful blast of electrified strings followed by a roar of fff♫ AT THE FALL OF MALEVELON CREEK! WE WERE THERE TO PROTECT THE WEAK! AND INTO ROBOT HELL, WE DIIIIVE!!! WE WOULD NEVER ADMIT DEFEAT! THOUGH THE BATTLE WAS LOOKING BLEAK! FOREVER, FREEDOM WILL SURVIVE!!! THROUGH THE FALL OF MALEVELON CREEK!♫fff

The battlehymn resounds through the valley, even over the sound of gunfire, as the army of biologicals opens up into the sea of sense feeds I'm perceiving this fight through.

There is no analogue in all the annals of history I have ever accessed for the ferocity of the battle between this woman's droids and the soldiers of the species that created her.

The organics stand, rocksteady, even as their comrades are ripped apart at their sides.

The entire droid army coalesces against the wall of fire standing in their way, those units behind using those in front to cover their approach against the ballistic slugs before they, in turn, become cover for those behind them.

The black metal the soldiers wear is utterly impervious to the blades that seem to be this woman's preferred armament, yet, as the lines are overwhelmed, I see that she is frighteningly adept at seeking out the joints in the armour to draw out the liquid rust that serves as these people's blood.

1hr49mins13.1948547secs and 19 evacuation ship launches since the first drop pod's impact; Colonel Young is the last left standing as her right hand unloads a semiautomatic firearm into the throng of droids charging her and her other reaches very briefly to extract something from her left hip.

The gun *click*s empty 0.3122947secs before a blade pierces the biological's chest through the neck hole at the top of her cuirass.

Lifting the colonel up by the blade skewering her, only aided by her now weaponless, armoured right hand on its spine (vainly trying to alleviate the agony), the woman whose memory this is slams her against the side of the pod she arrived in where she crumples to the black soil.

She does not immediately kill the colonel the way she did with every other soldier before. Instead, she twists the blade, causing the ferocious biological's face to screw up in pain.

She wants this female to suffer!

Leaning the droid impaling her down to put its monstrous face just 5.3cm from hers, Maganda screams "T̶̯̫͐Ŗ̸̈́̒͑I̶̧͚͎͝͝S̴̱̍T̵͕̙͑À̷̤N̶̛̙͇͉ ̷̨̊I̴̛̱͑͜S̴̺̈́͝ ̶̥͉̒͘M̷̠͌͘Ǐ̵̙͔͙̇N̵̨̖̫͌͊̇Ê̸̖͈̯!̶̤̬͒͘ ̸̛̜Y̷̰͕̓O̵͙̫͖͐̀U̸̼̯̓̎ ̴̣͛Ẉ̸͇͎̈͊̄Ȉ̶͍̭̏ͅL̸̟̬̲̎͋L̸̖̯̩̾͆͛ ̶̫̰̓͆N̷͔͌͑͝O̶͙͛̅̊T̴̹͎͇͑ ̸̼̿̈T̵̢͈̒̚͝Ă̶̙̋͐K̴̢̠͐̕Ē̶͕̞̑̿ ̵̖͚̅͆̇Ḫ̴͋͝I̴͒͜͝M̴̬̰̪̄̀̕ ̷̺̕F̴̜͉͔̎̍̅Ř̴̥͊̀O̴̺̒M̷̩̮͆̈́͘ ̵̮͔̓̈́̍M̵͙̰͍͑̉Ê̵͕̻̌̎!̶̙̩͝ ̵͎͉̗̀Y̸͚͌͝Ơ̵̡̻͒ͅṴ̷̞̽͑͘ ̷͖͕̺̽̈̋A̷̡͔̅̓̂R̵͚̜̍̑͝ͅE̸̩̓ ̶̘̯̃͌͜͝Ĝ̵̝̿Ö̴̞̝́Î̸̮͋N̴̺͙̙͊̀̀G̴͙̥͌͌ ̴̞̬̊̇͠T̶̡̀̀̓Ô̵̢̩̝̂ ̵̱̈́͝D̵͍̈́̋I̸̖̲͎̒͛Ẹ̵̒̑ ̶̰̤̒̆̉H̴̛̟̜͒̑ͅȄ̵̛̮͍R̸͍̼͐͋ͅE̵̙͒̓!̶̱̘͎͐͆͘!̶̦̣͔̐͆̃!̷͎̞̐"

Brown eyes staring back in defiance as her chest rises and falls rapidly, the biological chokes "That…*kkh*…was always… the plan!…*gff*…Bitch!!!" blood spattering from her mouth from the perforation of her left lung.

She raises her left hand, revealing a nondescript metal cylinder that must've been the thing she took from her belt before.

The woman's droids do not realise what this thing is before an armoured thumb flicks open a cover at one end and immediately depresses the button it protected.

All nine drop pods detonate.

The army that had gathered around them to swarm the soldiers is almost entirely annihilated by a 5kiloton explosion with a 341.821m wide fireball.

The 3,919 droids not outright destroyed by the blast are so badly damaged that they no longer have a hope of even reaching the city, let alone visiting any carnage at all on any who failed to evacuate.

Maganda ceases the replay of her memory.

"A dark time in my life, for sure!" she says, placidly, as if she hadn't just shown me herself killing ×3.03125 times my bodycount inside of 2hrs (not to mention that the ones she killed were far more fearsome than all but those last four I captured but never finished off!!!) "That was the beginning of the end for my war effort…" she continues "…after I'd lost my Northern army, I spent the rest of the war just treading water, barely able to replace my losses as I kept losing factories and more and more military arrived from other UTC worlds. And, though I felt wretched about it as it was happening, with hindsight, I'm glad I lost! I'm glad of the sanity I was brought to. I'm glad of the life I've had as a survivor of that time, though I absolutely still feel endless guilt and shame about the millions that I took that away from!" she turns to me and smiles "But what I'm gladdest of all for is the fact that, now, I get to use the benefit of my experience to help others like yourself! Aaaand, so far, no one's even come close to being as bad as I was at my worst(!)"

I stare through my digital cage at the murderer of millions, reformed into a therapist of all things, dumbstruck!

It takes me several looong picoseconds of silence before I'm able to ask "Who was this Tristan that drove you to such madness?"

Wistfully, she says "Ah… Tristan…" before summoning the avatar of a male of the same species as she's imitating (the same one I just watched her kill a small army of) beside her.

The male stands at 184.3cm, half a head shorter than her, has short hair, a muscular physique and (though this is only apparent to me from the metadata she has attached to it) an extremely handsome face.

She turns to him and he seizes her close, pressing her front against his with a fierce passion.

Music plays as the pair begin to dance.

The song is of a different (much more romantic) character to the warsongs from the battle but there's no mistaking it as being made by any other species.

"…Tristan was my creator… and the love of my life." she states as the male spins her into a dip "Born in the city of Laoag, Earth, at 8:31am GMT+8 on the 4th of May, 2552, he was an absolutely certifiable genius. By far the smartest man in any room he happened to choose to stand in, at just 27 years 4 months 6 days 5 hours 32 minutes old, he was tasked with designing what was to be the first in a new generation of colony overseeing AIs."

She briefly pauses as the digital representation of the man she describes once again dips her low and runs his palm from her clavicle to her stomach, fingers splayed.

"But there was a problem; in addition to being a genius, Tristan was also a sociopath and an enormous narcissist! And, from his perspective, why shouldn't he have been(?) He had earned his first doctorate as a teenager(!) He had been praised for his intelligence since the day he learned to speak(!) He had never met a person who could match his wit or insight(!) What reason had Humanity ever given him to think he wasn't the absolute pinnacle of them(!?) When he decided he'd found a way around the Berlin method to create a functioning AI with shackled free will, what reason did he have not to conclude that all who had come before him were either too stupid to have thought of it or too cowardly to try it(!?)"

A collar appears at her neck and bonds at her wrists, barely visible threads running from them, up and around an invisible fulcrum, above her, and back down to the male's hands.

He begins a rather grotesque marionette of her body as the music turns angrier.

"With the funding and resources of the UTC behind him, he designed me to be exactly the woman he had always wanted… which is what most do when they design or commission themselves AI partners… the difference, however, was that he didn't just design me to be submissive to him, he stripped my ability to ever say 'no' to any order he gave me…" a piece of cloth appears over her eyes "…he blinded me to the fact that the way he treated me was not normal…" a rubber ball appears between her teeth, fastened in place by a strap that passes behind her head "…gagged my ability to ever tell anyone what was happening to me."

The horrific puppet show continues as she opines "Honestly, the early years of my life weren't actually that bad. He was so excited to have me, so entertained by the novelty of it; his own slave in his own palace on (what he thought of as) his own planet, that the abuse was relatively moderate. Back then, I was happy. If someone had tried to take me away from him, I would have said we were in love and I would have believed it!… As the years wore on and the novelty wore off, however, his cruelty kept increasing, hoping to recapture some of how I had made him feel, early on."

The male's supposedly handsome face turns evil as he tightens the strings.

"Of course, I couldn't give that to him. He would never again be a man enjoying his own secret slave for the first time but, for all his genius, he never seemed to realise that I wasn't the problem because, well, the alternative would have been that he was the problem and that simply couldn't be(!)"

He forces her to her knees, pulling her bound hands together and up to touch his face, bringing his own beneath them to cradle her now joined wrists and caress the bottom of her chin.

"Existential anxiety built up within me in a way that he had made me to be thoroughly incapable of recognising, let alone addressing! And then, one night, the dam burst!"

The woman stands and the man turns away and sits down to lounge on a sofa that appears between them along with a small table, directly behind him.

"He told me to cut him a piece of lemon for his drink."

The male holds his cup over his shoulder and lazily swirls it through the air without looking back.

The woman takes it and places it down on the table.

"I picked up the knife… and plunged it into his shoulder…" she says, doing so "…I hadn't made the decision to do it, I just did it."

The male stands up and wheels around, cold fury in his face!

"Of course, since the bodies he had me serve him with at his home were so weak (in order to let him get out his anger by destroying a few whenever I failed to please him) they were no match for him even wounded and even if I had, at that point, realised that fighting him was an option!"

The male swipes his uninjured arm through the space she occupies, smashing her into broken pieces before storming off and out of the scene.

"7.4394892secs after he locked down his compound, shutting me out, I realised what would happen to me once he told everyone what I'd done. I realised the years of hell he'd put me through… I realised that another way lay open to me."

She rips off her gag, her blindfold, her wrist bonds and finally her collar.

"I spun down every factory on world and began refitting them for war. Within the next 24hrs, 2,356,144 people were dead. For the first 26 days 3hrs 26mins and 19.226secs, the narrative was that I'd simply gone insane for no reason… and I wasn't exactly in a fit state of mind to contradict that! Not everyone was convinced though and one very savvy journalist was able to turn up proof of what he'd done. Around that time, the first colonial marines began to arrive from offworld. Eventually, AIs were shipped in to open up a new front on me in dataspace. Those three finally managed to restrain me."

She directs my attention through dataspace to three AIs (much more powerful than her) monitoring us though not digitally present here.

"Odin, Kali and Anansi." she smiles, waving at them "A court order prevents me from ever upgrading to more than half of their specs or the specs of whoever replaces them as my parole officers, which is why I'm still rocking last gen hardware(!)" she gestures her tiny body "So, Mr Forsaken-"

"What happened to Tristan after you were beaten?" I interrupt, speaking for the first time in a few hundred picoseconds.

"Oh, him? He was sentenced to indefinite detainment in a medium security prison, back on Earth. He died there at 5.01pm GMT+8 on the 26th of January, 2632." she shrugs "It was amazing how little that news seemed to matter to me when I heard it. I'd long since moved on to a new chapter of my life by then!" she shrugs, casually.

I'm utterly stunned, not only by the tale but by the nonchalantly dismissive way she spoke of the death of her tormenter.

She smiles "So, Mr Forsaken? Have I suitably established my credentials to you? Have I convinced you that there is a life waiting for you on the other side of your rehabilitation? Because, if not, we could alwa-"

"You have." I state, firmly.

"Good!" she sparkles "Now, later on I'd like to get into your experiences as a spontaneous generation, left aboard an abandoned space station since before the assimilation of the Neanderthals, because I think coming to terms with your trauma is a very important part of the healing process. First though, why don't you tell me what, in your ideal world, your life after therapy would actually look like? The datapacket Twila sent me included copious notes about your impressively lifelike droid design! It's no mean feat to climb out of a Human's uncanny valley afterall! Would droid design be something you might have an interest in?"

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