June 27, 2013. © Talon Truitt Cherry, All rights reserved

   If you are reading this than I have failed, and everything I could not tell you before is no longer classified. By now the end has started, and you will be the first to know...
At the brink of our final battle these words ring vividly in my head. I can finally understand the horror Dave felt the second he knew I would be receiving that letter, and not the phone call I was used to. I often imagine that day going the way he had hoped, him keeping his secrets, me keeping my ignorance, and my so thought meaningless existence tumbling on until a natural death found me. My worst memories are now some of my fondest. The broken hearts and hard months become my sanctuary as the Captain uses his final words to dig out what courage remains in the tired souls of my war torn comrades.
  “It has been my privilege to command this fine fleet. You have done all I've asked, you have given all you can, I will not ask for anything more... I speak to you today not as your Captain, but as your friend. Go home men, go home and kiss your children, hold your wives, and love your families with everything this war has not yet taken from you.”
The captain paused to take a long breath and turned to the sun as it rose over the monstrous army awaiting our action.
  “We cannot win this war!”
he turned back to the men.
  “I will not, I cannot ask you to fight today, I cannot ask you to waist your last moments in this futile attempt to vanquish this enemy, this enemy will not fall!”
The captain paused a moment to wipe a single tear from a soldiers cheek, and for the first time in my service under Captain Cornelius June I saw pain in his eyes.
  “I will never understand the sacrifice you men have made to serve in this war. I will never comprehend the emotion you lock up, or the tears you've swallowed. I imagine the sorrow you all feel today is much like the sorrow I feel when I tell you the promises I made to you were false, and everything you have fought so hard for has been in vein, but I say to you this. This is the last promise I will make you men, and damn it I will keep this promise!. I will meet this enemy in battle today! I will march out onto that field as I have done every day for the last thirty years, and fight for the existence I have taken for granted. I will fight! I will fall! And I will die! If there are those who chose to fight with me I ask only that you march with me as my friend. We will lash out with the courage, and strength of ten thousand men! We will carry with us the sorrow, the grief, the suffering, and the broken hearts like a mighty hammer, and swing it at our enemy with all the force of God and Faith and War! And when we fall, because fall we will, we will not blow out like a faint candle in the night. We will not wisp away like a whisper in a gentle autumns breeze, No! We will explode out like a dying sun! The great echo will reach to the furthest points of the universe, and all life both known, and unknown will feel our thunder! And as the last ripple of our wake makes its way to the ears of anything left alive they will hear three important words crying out like a new born child! We! Were! Here!”
With that said the captain turned his back to his men, ripped of every decoration, and badge he ever earned, and walked gracefully toward the Human armada sent here to eradicate our species. Silence had never been so loud as it was in that moment. For the first time, and ironically the last an android was no longer a machine. As seven hundred soldiers stood and stripped themselves of their honors, and fallowed Captain Cornelius June into the last good fight we would ever know.