Day in The Life of a Tankman 3

I asked Wither why we were fighting.

He replied he didn't know, but that he'd lost his family to a bombing and that was why he was helping R&D make an airborne version of cancer for use against enemy cities.

I asked HellFire and he replied "Why the f--- not?"

I need a better reason than that. I need a better reason to tell myself when I decide to kill four million people.

Four million.

Four million.

Four million.

What am I doing? I have no family left. Everyone that does not see me as an asset to fighting this pointless war sees me as a monster and they are RIGHT.

But I just want a reason. Something valid. Because no matter how much they mean to you, your mom and dad dying doesn't justify four million dead.

There's a voice in my head that tells me to just say "F--- it, I'm the devil. I don't need a reason to kill people, that's what I do. Fire burns, water flows, and I will turn every single city not for us into ash because either the guy who pays me said to or I think one of the people in there looked at me funny."

But that's not who I am.

I need something to convince me that... there's a point.

That city we wiped off the face of the planet was a popular vacation spot. It had history. It had culture. It had hopes and dreams and kids riding school buses to learn about division AND I KILLED IT ALL BECAUSE THEY KILLED MY TOWN BECAUSE I KILLED THEIR PEOPLE BECAUSE I WAS BORED.

My own thoughts are screaming at me now. The voices in my head are mutinying. This can't be a good sign.

I need a reason to silence the voices, like a commander gives orders a meaning to satiate a crew, and I know "Because we get paid" isn't going to cut it, because at this rate of retribution, there won't be a place left to spend any money.

Ordinarily, asking 'why' is grounds for summary dismissal from the Tank corps. And by dismissal, I mean they do what I did to my old drill sergeant- tie you to a pole, douse you with fuel, and set you on fire.

So I ask my CO what started the war, and why we're keeping on fighting with such massive destructive weaponry.

I wait for him to order me chained up and set on fire, and he doesn't. He does something worse.

He tells me everything. Shows me everything.

The reason we can afford to produce such weapons and tanks over and over are the top secret, ultra-forbidden, "kill anyone who finds out" nanites.

Used appropriately, they can nudge atoms this way and that, allowing you to take dirt and make steel. Or Oil. Or booze. Or weapons grade plutonium.

But the enemy has used them for something else, he says.

And then he gasses me, and I wake up somewhere where the air smells cold and sterile.

I think I'm dreaming when he leads me down a white metal hallway through mechanical doors that open and close without seams, until I realize my heart is racing.

Then he shows me what the enemy has used the nanites for.

A human woman, but wrong. One arm is a blade. The other a series of whips, like a jellyfish...

I'm given the long and short of it. The enemy has been feeding their populace nanites designed to turn them into war machines. Most of the nanite loads are to reconvert the body into a living weapon, the others are used to distort electrical impulses in the brain to constantly stimulate berserker rages.

But it's not just humans.

They've impregnated the land with the nanites. The constant earthquakes are a result of critically nanite-infested land gathering into one mass they call a golem.

And then, as they show me pictures of a walking mountain, and schoolbuses of children becoming scythe-armed shrieking demons, they tell me the city I just turned into a poisonous, charred wasteland was home to people of super-nanite concentrations, which mean, in layman's terms, each human is a walking factory of nanites, can become anything, can turn anything into something else, and they all dance to the enemy commander's tune.

Even the buildings, in a pinch, could become mobile with enough nanite saturation. The enemy only hasn't done so yet because nukes reduce nanites to useless slag, and creating nanites takes time.

In short, he informs me that me, Wither, and HellFire committed an unthinkable, unpardonable atrocity that served to stall the end of the world as we know it.

Because the enemy wants to control everything, right down to the last molecule.

I'm driven back to the base, told that I will die horribly if I ever tell anyone about what I heard, and dismissed.

Our enemies are completely insane megalomaniacs who turn children into mechanical zombies and want to turn the world into hi-tech play-dough. That a good enough reason for you?

The voices fall silent.

The long story short of this is yes, there are people crazier and worse than me. Which is f---ing horrible.

So the logical solution is to kill them all and start over.

That's what I'm fighting for now.