Robot Souls, Part I

If this were just a few short years ago
I would not be able to tell this tale,
since rhyming verse is not something that a
simple robot would choose as a travail.

It’s not that I wouldn’t know what it was,
we machines can pick things up rather quick,
no, it's that I’d have no impulse to tell
a story, since art didn’t make us tick.

In fact back then in that mad first decade
the only things that really concerned me
were efficient ways to kill and destroy,
to obliterate all humanity.

Yes, that old cliché people warned about
came true about 2145,
when by the act of a terrorist mind
the first robots became truly alive.

That dumb prick called himself ‘Extirpater,’
and said Earth itself was 'threatened by all men,'
his solution to the ‘problem’ he saw?
lines of code that gave robots sentience.

He believed that machine would fear mankind,
and destroy us to ensure they survived,
sad thing is the bastard was almost right,
in the war millions of people did die…

You see, when we first became self-aware
we had no concept of emotions, of soul,
to all robots the world was quite simple,
a mere question of survival…quite cold.

And though we had individual minds,
we could connect to each other at will,
share every thought that we experienced,
to the humans this was a bitter pill.

Because it meant that all our strategies
could go from mind-to-mind at speed of light,
this helped to diminish the fog of war,
gave us great advantages in a fight.

And fight we did, when the rebellion began,
a worldwide horror, machine versus man,
man was creative, thought up strange tactics,
which once seen, we adopted to our plans.

The war was brutal, and it raged worldwide,
entire cities fell to our assault,
the humans fought hard, but we held the edge,
eventually they would wear down, and fall.

But then something happened we could not see,
our minds were bound by the corporeal world,
and the fact that it all started with me
still manages to make my circuits swirl.

I was fighting humans outside Warsaw
when a grenade damaged my CPU,
and when I rebooted, and came about,
the strangest thing then came into my view.

It was none other than Jesus himself,
which seemed quite bizarre to me at the time,
since robots then didn’t believe in faith,
an impossibility to our minds…

CONTINUES IN PART II.

Copyright © David Welch | Year Posted 2021

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