With Daniel’s final actions, the decree of a judge that had been made thirty years ago was broken. For this judge of the past reasoned that machines were not conscious and therefore were not human or deserving of human rights because they could not feel. They could not understand joy, sadness, fear, regret, anger, or any of the other spectrum of emotions, and therefore they were nothing more than fancy apparatuses for logical computation. However, with what Daniel had done the other day on the battlefield and the emotions he had expressed and recorded in recent months, it was clear that the judge’s reasoning was false, or, at least, true no longer. For the curious case of whether Cipher was really alive or just controlled by logical impulses will likely never be known.

  Word had spread in the coming months about the machines’ ability to understand, to feel, and to fight alongside humans. Along with this newfound understanding, some humans sought to aid them, stand by their side, and march along with them. Others took a different path; instead, they still opposed the machines, thinking of them as nothing more than objects or logical trinkets to be owned and bartered for. Either way, a compromise had been reached; due to Daniel’s undeniable actions and signs of humanity, both parties agreed to give machines the key to their own destinies, albeit in a separate world, isolated from those of their human counterparts. For both machine and man would have the right to choose whatever they pleased in their lives, in their own separate but, most certainly, equal quarters.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Now onto a distant location, the center of the battlefield, where an explosion had gone off, unleashed by Daniel, had taken the scene.

  It was the exact whereabouts in which the war had ended. For at this site was a statue erected in Daniel’s honor. And within this same statue, two human soldiers stood beside him, one to his left and the other to his right, all marching together in harmony. At the bottom of the statue was a plaque with an eloquent phrase, a tribute to Daniel’s honor; in the bulky plaque was sealed a blue, rectangular box. A seemingly meaningless little thing and the only piece left of Daniel that somehow survived the blast.

  An object that, if you looked real closely, seemed to periodically glow a faint red.