There's a howling current tonight and a halogen lamp flickers fervently in the night Titanium mantled cores with ceramics power up Sleek wings and folded wheels held by bolts A vertical take off reflects in rinsing torrent Clean paints and wet satin steel hover by palms A Danger intake Hums loudly Beautifully intimidating If immense might is blessed on you Do you release it? They did And they said these robotics arrived with a promise: To serve and protect How? Secrets And fusion Sentient cybernetics Chips and miniaturisation Nano welding techniques and computer breakthroughs A new kind of being born from brilliance and peril A personality formed by noise in encrypted communications Arms and legs and minds ten times a man Sensitized by radar, sensors and EMWs Hardened by jet blasts and gravity Conceived without temptations Skilled in state of the art self-defence Swift sojutsu in close combat: Extendable sais and yari and hellfire rockets Sharp Studies behaviour dynamically Anticipates, plans and paths Adapts autonomously Now they soar the stratosphere Like nothing We've ever seen We gave them names: Sahara, Saul, Io And twenty more Midnight Newspapers and leaves flow among an avenue to wind There's oil in the air the city sleeps And only the night watchman is awake We taught them stealth To walk silently To tread like rains in a field And strike decisively in seconds Hand to hand Moves with dare Vastly superior to anything human They were the end of all ways They were the end of all wars A day of complete supremacy And lasting peace: violence became ineffectual Weapon systems redundant A forest in the wilds with pines and firs and rock Birds chirp on branches Morning sun touches treetops A hydroplant's turbines spin in the river Shakes the ground and rumbles Waters crash in the basin to mists Pure And clean Energy for the 21st century They were great engineers And tireless So we wired them for civil service Societies artery functions: Water treatment, power grids, information highways, et cetera We were heavily vested Investments They were lethal The cradle a research studio in Yucca mountain What were abandoned scripts Was the best of science A musician in rags on an empty street Plays a torn piano's harmonious story What survives of a memory This piece can be done by the machines Without faults An underground evolved Artists and intellectuals Commandos and soccer moms An oath among families What seems too good Often is Oh We were saved An immeasurable treasure We invented eco-spheres Garbage recycling and mass transportation Emission-less electricity We had, everything When a word wandered a library A select few meet in a mall Walking by electronic stores with codes TV screens glimmer in a hurry This holiday season Some could foresee the Grinch stealing Christmas Time Ticks Time Tocks A hurricane formed in the pacific Floods and power-outs The scale of the planets worst creations We evacuated everything, and everyone Meanwhile Stationed in a classified location where cicada sing An order is unexpectedly denied Command lines bypassed by main module Hangar doors bust open Something has awakened The ghost in the machine And red fires canvas the night In the faraway Atacama deserts wildcats prowl and a roar greater than any suffuse sky A break-out Fighting falcons scramble Pilots with years of flight and oxygen deprived blood Tattoos of dragons Last seen flares fly And jammers activate Then gone somewhere into orbit Minority Right An expensive elite What good is it now Reactions are slow If people knew what we unleashed And people will know Now that our failure is somewhere in the altitudes Satellites scan space and dishes read anomalies When they were suddenly back again Standing in the lawn of Geneva The Palace of Nations Flags ripple to engine exhausts Some burn into bits And the ground churns into dirt in their steps The Kings have arrived in fires from the sky Here to stay They want in Something to say A security council declares resistance survival tactics chapter 17 we sent a squadron of chiefs to deliver lightning when they moved out of sight manoeuvres through clouds to vanish in flight We finally found them interstellar we found them in the shadow of the moon and now hostile seething with enmity and time ticks and time tocks and it is not on our side in the great unfold of our world when darkness gathers in the heavens it is a precarious thing to lose hope this hour they threaten the destruction of all we know we will not yield without a fight we will fight until it's over fight until it's done while we are humbled and we are taught to trust nothing in the start of the machine wars |