The sun set for the last time over the city of New York. It produced an ugly blotch of orange across the overcast sky, peeking from between the horizon and the bottom of the cloud deck, a slit of brilliant yellow. The waves shimmered with light. As did the skyscrapers, standing behind their dikes and storm walls.

Very few of the city's residents saw this dazzling arrangement as it graced their windows. They were, for the most part, far too busy. There was no doubt a few who did see this last sunset, but even they couldn't grasp its importance.

Far to the west, five aircraft shrieked through the air above the Midwestern badlands. They were sleek triangles, their fuselages painted with a dynamic image of the sky behind them. Each exuded behind it a stream of translucent plasma.

The aircraft were troop carriers, flying due east with a small invasion force in tow. They would land in less than an hour and deploy fifty soldiers each. Ten other identical squadrons were converging on the same point, bearing firepower well known on this old, tired world.

The Mississippi Administrative District was governed from this city. For some centuries, it was the grandest of all cities, and its ancient grandeur was perhaps the district's greatest pride. Were it to fall to UDS forces, the separatist forces would fall apart, would surrender if only to get back their precious jewel. It was unusual, then, that the squadron was flying to a point just north of the city.

The city itself would be pleasantly surprised to learn of the marching army come morning, but first, it needed to sleep. As the sun dipped below the horizon, it plunged into concealing darkness, the sky dimly lit with the shine of civilization. Beyond the pale of clouds lay yet more artificial light, a spinning galaxy of satellites. One of the multitudinous points of light was the Lionsgate Space Station. The view from the station was less than perfect, what with the cloud cover obscuring the grandeur of Earth's surface. Furthermore, the sweep of night was nibbling at the smaller details, chewing away at the tiny triangles of mountain and cloud.

In the hub of the space station, floating in nil gravity, two men watched the world glide by. They were emaciated, with atrophied limbs and long faces. Neither was capable of venturing deeper into the space station, where centripetal acceleration might cause them to collapse under their own meager weight.

Each man wore a trimmed business suit, one blue, one black. Otherwise, they were nearly indistinguishable. The black-suited one now spoke.

"How is the war going from your side?"

"Badly. Ah, what of it? Sobering, perhaps, in the fashion of a classical tragedy."

"Truly a masterpiece of emotional manipulation. It brings tears to my eyes. That, of course, is the mark of a great script. The author must become convinced of its solidity, he must feel the words in his hands become flowing pictures. Only then is the piece worthy."

"Very well put, sir. I commend your skill, and hope to one day match it."

"Not if I have anything to say about it, you won't. Unfortunate really, what a playwright must do in these times, to become a master."

"And what is that?"

The man in the black suit regarded his inferior with sad eyes. "How old are you?"

"A hundred and forty-three."

"I am nearly twice that. It is the only way, you see, to truly grasp the pen that is the world. To write the story of everything, one must first avoid death."

"Have you truly lived this long?" said Blue, somewhat awestruck despite himself.

"Yes. Though, it is only a shadow of life now. My body lies outside of me, my liver a buzzing rectangle at my waist, my heart a twitching block of plastic buried in my chest. But I have seen this world raise its head to the stars, I have seen it topple down in scathing light and creeping plague, and I have seen it begin again and finally leap into the waiting arms of the cosmos. It is a worthy sacrifice, I think.

The five carriers cut their engines as the final approach began. Soundlessly and sightlessly, they coasted to the ground, gliding on their short wings until a short burst of the VTOL thrusters brought them to a gentle touchdown in a small clearing in the verdant Appalachian forests. With a clipped buzz, their camouflage was whisked away and the carriers appeared in their black, gleaming, fullness. The cargo doors opened like birds' wings, and the soldiers marched out.

"You escaped death to watch the progress of civilization."

"No, you fool, I did it so that I could direct the progress of civilization. I already told you this."

"And you chose to do it with our company?"

"It is difficult to carry out such a momentous task without the aid of like-minded others. And, if we are to consider the other meaning of the word, it is a very powerful tool, a hand missing a mind. But of course, the hand does not conceive of the mind."

"Very interesting."

"I'm sure it is. Now tell me, how is the project progressing?"

"Well. All four are complete and fully operational. I have looked at the design. May I ask what purpose the project is to have?"

"Do you know your history, Blue?"

"No, Black. I'm sorry to say that I haven't the time to read any dusty tomes."

"About four hundred years ago, a century before even I was of this world, a group of men made a truly wondrous discovery. They found that one could use a beam of neutrons to trigger a catastrophic reaction in unstable metals. The result was a release of energy unparalleled in human history. This same energy now powers most of our spacecraft between the planets. But at that time, the most obvious application of this discovery was weaponry. So they built a bomb and with it ruled the world. They ruled with fear, the fear that one day, the bomb might come to boil the eyes out of their sockets and scrape whole cities off the surface of the Earth. That never happened, but the fear was quite enough to determined who owned the pen. The project is meant, in many ways, to be a revival of such a weapon, one that will hopefully supplant the current methods. It will never be used, because doing so would cause unspeakable destruction. But oh, the fear"

In the hours that followed, the troops, numbering in the thousands, fanned out across the forested hills, setting up artillery nests and hidden infantry platoons among the trees. They moved with inhuman silence. A deer could walk through the operation without noticing anything out of the ordinary. At the same time, a reciprocating army was moving in from the south, not bothering with the stealth. They were the defenders in their home territory. Let them see us coming, they thought. We will grind them down regardless. The defenders laid their artillery pieces down in a clear hill that commanded the surrounding land for miles away. For now, the green carpet below was peaceful. A few birds took to the air, floating up from the muted green of the treetops and into the deep navy of the sky.

"I see. Then you would repeat history," said Blue.

"That is what humanity has been doing since its dawn. I'm trying to break the cycle."

"I would disagree. History is not a set of the same events repeated a hundred times, it is a causal chain and nothing more. Take the war, for example. At no other point in human history has such a thing happened. Where is the cycle in that?"

Black thought on this for a moment. "Not in scale, no. But the war was just another event that overthrew the pre-existing political structure. The same thing happened when Rome was sacked by the barbaric hordes, when Adolf Hitler marched his armies across Europe, and when the People's Republic of China launched a missile loaded with modified Marburg virus at Tokyo. All of them were world-changing, and by their culmination, the people who wrote the story were very different than what they once had been."

"Of course, you can also twist historical events to fit a prescribed structure. No, these events may have all been important, but only in their own right. One event may lead to another, but there is no overarching plot, no cycle."

"That is a valid interpretation. Let me rephrase my goal so that you may better grasp it. History, as you have stated, is a causal chain of events. What the project will do is allow me to forge all future links in this chain, exactly how I see fit. And there is another detail I have failed to mention. The project is not only a whip to strike fear. It is the torch that will lead us to the stars."

By oh three hundred hours, the forest was thick with troops. No one had made a move, both sides waiting for some sign of the enemy. The glow of morning seeped through the eastern sky like yellow ink through grey fabric. Or perhaps it was the city, thought the troops in the rear lines. Then they refocused on the sky, looking for a tracer bullet or aircraft.

Two hours slipped by in absolute silence. The shadowy light of pre-dawn began to paint the sides of the trees. Finally, one of the attacking troops moved into the bush, rustling the leaves slightly.

It seized and toppled in a heap of plastic and whining servos. A sniper nestled in the top of a nearby tree silently reloaded.

Nearby soldiers saw their comrade fall, saw the arc and direction of his descent, and the sniper dissolved in a sphere of flames the moment after. Now the battle could begin in earnest.

The attacker's artillery pieces boomed into the morning gloom, followed an instant later by the defender's. The forest was alive with the sound of treads and explosions as the two mechanical armies beat each other wildly into the ground. The few animals that still lived in the area scattered frantically, and most avoided the worst of the barrage. The soldiers themselves, meanwhile, did the precise opposite, and charged headlong into the waiting muzzles of their enemies. Line after line of sleek drones collapsed into the dirt while railgun shells whistled above and gouged yawning holes into the forest.

But, other than the artillery barrage, there was nothing in the sky. The air was, indeed, eerily devoid of its normal traffic that morning. Flights had been rerouted, or canceled without warning. And here were no bombers. An easy way to demolish the opposition, one would think, but no. The two armies were content to bash each other on the ground, noisily and wastefully.

So the battle continued, and no force made any significant advances. When one began to march forward, the other struck with a devastating thunder of artillery from above, allowing the other to regain what it had lost. The sun seeped onto the horizon, a great, murky spot of grey and white through the clouds, and still the armies fought. The new light glinted off the ruined carapaces of the fallen, shining into the now sightless camera eyes.

"Quite the lofty, altruistic goal. Seems rather uncharacteristic."

"Oh, come now. I am not so terrible a man."

"Of course you are. So am I. There is a common saying, I doubt you haven't heard it, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Perhaps a generalized observation, but it rings true, doesn't it? You have absolute power, which any ordinary man would use to personal advantage."

"I am no normal ordinary, my fine sir. I am more than that. I have already achieved the ultimate goal of man. I have transcended death and become immortal. There is nothing that I desire but the lasting stability of the human race. An altruistic goal, because I already have all that I will ever need or want."

"Perhaps. I am merely slightly concerned, that all this should be in one man's hands."

"That is the only road to true unity. It cannot stem from committee, from a conglomeration of minds working in some pitiful attempt at harmony. Only a single man gripping the pen in one hand can hope to write clearly."

By oh-six hundred hours, the battle was dying down. The artillery units in the hills had been smashed to smoking piles of scrap metal. Only twenty or so infantry units remained, firing short bursts of clacking bullets at each other from behind broken trees. One by one they fell, until only a single soldier still stood, its armor pocked and smudged black, the UDS emblem still glowing cleanly under the light of the sun. It rolled forward, toward the charred enemy lines, and there was no one to stop it.

With it went billions of watching eyes, all of whom felt the burned ground crackled beneath its treads and saw the ruined forest all around. Most cheered as they saw the lone victor march bravely through the remains of the MIAD army, some cursed the men behind the whole fiasco, claiming they could do better any day. There was no fear. Civilian casualty was illegal, so their own lives were quite safe, regardless who won. No, this was just a game.

"Oh," said Blue, his eyes glazing over for a moment. "It seems I've lost the war."

"Don't worry, old friend. The Yangtze AD is still in the fight."

"You know as well as I do that they will fall before the week's end, one way or another."

"Well played regardless, sir. Besides, there are more important things to attend to."

With that, Black leapt away, frog-like in his agility, and into the waiting cockpit of his personal transport craft. It showed no markings at all, no blazing EXN or humble UDS. But it was his.

The next two hours were silent but for the soft music of the engines burning every now and then. Black was working in the confines of his mind for most of that time, heedless of the Earth and twisting around below.