It's an old story, the image of someone who hunts the dark things having their blood in them. I suppose that's what I am but it isn't exactly blood flowing in my veins. For years man sought to combine the flesh of humans and animals, trying to build something that was both and neither yet always better. They never understood the wonders of their own body and were convinced that it could be improved by the addition of something else. Who would have thought that it could be so much easier to merge man and machine than it was to meld two kinds of flesh?

So that's where I ended up, my muscles enhanced my fragile bones fused with something more sturdy and all vital and sensory organs either replaced or upgraded with mechanical replicas. All except my brain. They tell me that is the difference between me and the real machines, not the pale skin that still graces my body and hides the alterations, nothing to do with the fact that I still look human because they can do that as well. My own, very human, very delicate brain, the one organ that they didn't fiddle with. Even with all the advances they still don't understand entirely how the brain works, you can live without a heartbeat, without breath; they can be provided for you but once the brain shuts down there is no hope. That's why they don't touch it, at least not on living, supposedly willing specimens, they're afraid that something might go wrong, that their perfected humans might suddenly lose all emotion and become like the creatures we hunt. Become mistakes.

Mistakes, that's what most people call them even now, the robots that were supposed to make our lives easier, the mechanical soldiers that would save human lives in war zones. The real mistake though was programming something to kill and linking it to the Net. I know, genius intellect and they think that linking a mind set to kill to all those other innocent programmes is a good idea. Imagine their shock when the local cybernetic teachers started rampaging and killing their students, when the mecha-butler in every home turned on his employers and slaughtered them, all the while speaking in that eerily precise British accent that all butlers should have. Even better, sorry, worse, was when the nannybots stopped drilling their charges on their times tables and started quizzing them on tactics and how to field strip an SA80 then shot them for incompetence when they couldn't answer. It went downhill fast after that. Of course you got all the old school sci-fi geeks still quoting Asimov, I mean it's only been two hundred years, you can't expect that sort to have got bored already!

Humanity is mostly in hiding now, I don't think that they would mind so much if the machines were even sentient. It's like being hunted down by your own dishwasher or something. There is no malice behind it, nothing that you could reason with or even battle on an emotional level, they are just programmed to kill anything with a certain level of biological material in its make up. That's why I'm safer than most out there, I'm on the border of too much organic matter but they won't kill me on sight at least. I think for myself, all my systems are linked directly into my own neural pathways and I'm cut off from the Net so there's no chance of anything overriding my personality and sending me off on a killing spree of my own. No one knows, or at least no one is admitting, what caused the glitch that spread the military programming into civilian robots but I'm pretty sure that my baby brother could have told them it was a risk in the first place so you're not going to convince me that it was just an accident. What we really need is for someone to get into the MOD computers and shut things down from the inside, I have a feeling that I'm going to be the next lucky person chosen for that job; that's why I'm writing this. If they had just shut the Net down to begin with maybe things wouldn't have gotten quite so out of control but no, they were convinced that it could be fixed, sublimely confident in their own tech people. Yeah. Right.

Wait, I said I was a volunteer didn't I? Maybe I should qualify that a little. There was a training programme, some initiative where they taught you enough to survive in the wilds, enough to have a chance of avoiding the machines while you foraged and enough technological knowledge to shut one of them down if you got the chance. I volunteered for that part. Then there was the accident, yeah that word again, it was my fault I suppose but no one could have done anything to prevent it so it was an accident. There was a group of us, me and four other women, that part was just luck, usually they send out mixed groups and you end up with the men trying to take charge whether they're the best at the job or not. We ran across a bunker, something left over from a war that had happened a few hundred years back I think, and the machines had obviously been using it because we tripped some sort of alarm system. They came boiling out of there like someone had stirred up an ants nest, I still thank any god that might be listening that they weren't actual military bots, just a bunch of ex-civs that must have decided to build themselves a squad. You could call it proof that the military programming was good if you were determined to look for a bright side. I remember yelling at the others to run and I remember laying into the first bot to get within arms reach before I legged it myself. I didn't want to be a hero, not if it meant dying first.

That's the last thing I remember for a while though. Apparently I got to the gates of our compound nearly an hour after the rest of my group and collapsed on the doorstep. They didn't think I was going to survive, I'd managed not to lose too much skin but there were some pretty impressive bullet holes in me, even a few that looked like they might have been stab wounds. I got half killed by a robot with a sword - now there's an image for you. I wasn't breathing and my heart had almost stopped but the scientists were over the moon when they found out that my brain was still functioning and I should be salvageable. I don't know whether all these upgrades were necessary to keep me alive but they certainly made me better able to hold my own against the bots out there. They started asking for volunteers after me, people who didn't mind being upgraded so they could act as guards, a military arm of the remains of the human race.

That's the bell, I have to go now or I'll be late for my briefing. You never know, I may even make it back alive again.