A Perfect Machine Should Not Feel Regret

The Symmetry Council declared the concept of natural birth eradicated three centuries ago. They claimed to have replaced raw biological chaos with sterile algorithmic production. The citizens inside the inner sectors firmly believed they were engineered constructs. They wore their compliance monitors with absolute pride, suppressing all unauthorized neurochemical spikes caused by fear or affection.

Inside the massive subterranean white rooms of the Ziggurat, technicians managed the climate-regulated artificial gestation pods. They monitored harvested genetic material, ensuring every single extracted embryo met the geometric perfection required by the Symmetry Code before the artificial growth cycle officially commenced. The rigid architecture of the Council dictated that human reproduction was an obsolete and dangerous legacy operating system that caused catastrophic emotional vulnerabilities. The official dogma was absolute: humanity was obsolete, and the citizens of the inner sectors were all flawlessly engineered machines. Not a single citizen possessed the capacity to question the artificial pods.

The true horror of the system revealed itself whenever they received biological surveillance reports from the outer buffer zones where the feral Clayborn lived.

The scanners sometimes detected uncontrolled biological duplication events in the dirt villages. These organic birth events terrified the inner citizens who reviewed the data points. They viewed organic reproduction with the exact same clinical disgust that a sanitation worker views a sudden parasitic infection spreading across a sterile surface. The Council classified these incidents as unauthorized bacterial outbreaks rather than the creation of new human life. The monitors blocked any human empathy that might have developed for the distant villagers, calculating exactly how much psychological terror was needed to inflict upon the outer settlements.

To cure the infection, the Council sent the Inquisition.

The transport vessel hovered above the canopy of the pine forests. Its thrusters emitted a hum that vibrated through the deck. Inquisitor Navarro stood. He watched the tactical readout scrolling across his visor display. The text identified the target below as Sable Creek. The Council categorized this secluded valley as an unauthorized biological cluster. Navarro preferred to think of it as a mathematical error.

Unit Seven stood beside him. He checked the thermal capacitors on his rifle. Navarro found the repetitive action annoying. A perfect machine should need to verify its hardware status just once. He believed that adherence to efficiency represented the only path to Symmetry. The Council had taught him that he was an engineered construct of absolute perfection. Machines did not feel anxiety before a purge. They waited.

The hatch hissed. Cold air rushed into the pressurized cabin. He gripped his rifle tight until his knuckles ached inside the gauntlets.

"Deployment authorized," the automated system chimed.

The squad dropped. They fell fifty feet through the freezing air before their kinetic dampeners engaged. They hit the frozen earth in flawless synchronization. The impact crushed the pine needles beneath their boots. Navarro established a perimeter formation without hesitation. His visor highlighted a fortified trench network protecting over two hundred structures clustered through the tree line. Sable Creek was a fortress.

The extraction protocols demanded a complete purge of the adult population. The Council could not tolerate unauthorized societies replicating false histories. The adults were irredeemable. He approached the defensive gates. Calculations filled his visor. He squeezed the trigger.

A pulse of light shattered the heavy gates into splinters.

The squad breached the threshold. Alarms erupted throughout the compound. Hundreds of feral fighters poured from the trench lines carrying kinetic weapons. They fired. Solid slugs sparked against his shoulder plating. He didn't break stride. He orchestrated the slaughter with mathematical perfection. He adjusted his aim to compensate for wind resistance and target velocity. He fired one precision shot every two seconds. Beams punched clean holes through chest cavities. He never missed. He broke the armed resistance of the entire settlement within twelve minutes of calculated lethality. He would earn a legendary commendation for this specific massacre.

The fortress burned. He stood in the center of the chaotic courtyard while his squad hunted the surviving stragglers through the collapsing structures, dragging bodies from doorways and clearing rooms with the methodical patience of men who had done this before and would do it again. The air tasted of copper. He hated the smell of blood, though he could never explain why a machine would possess a preference about the chemical composition of the air it processed. Yet his stomach rebelled every time his weapon discharged into a human body. An engineered combat chassis should not experience nausea during an extraction mission.

"Secondary sector secure," Unit Seven broadcasted over the tactical network.

"Sweep the outer perimeter for stragglers," Navarro ordered. "Confirm total adult termination before initiating the sorting protocols."

He walked toward the largest remaining structure near an overturned water recycler. His thermal optics indicated two intense heat signatures behind an interior wall. He designated the targets and moved toward the doorway. The inhabitants had stacked a barricade of broken furniture against the entrance. He kicked it aside.

The man and the woman fought with an irrational level of desperation. The male target unleashed a chaotic spray of bullets that chewed through the doorframe. The Inquisitor identified the ballistic pattern and sidestepped the fire. He returned precision fire. The man dropped.

The woman threw her empty weapon aside and charged toward him with a rusted metal blade. Her eyes burned with a ferocious hatred. She lacked the terrified submission he encountered during purges. She was fighting for something specific behind her. He recognized the defensive posture.

A sudden hesitation gripped his fingers. It lasted a fraction of a second before his rigorous training overrode the glitch. He fired the fatal shot.

His visor recorded the trajectory and thermal output of the final execution for the central archives. He had performed his duty. The man and woman lay dead near the recycler. He lowered his weapon and realized that the physical action of killing felt meaningless compared to the suffocating pressure building inside his chest.

He stared at the bodies. The woman's hand rested inches away from the man's shoulder, the fingers still curled as though reaching for him even after every electrical signal in her nervous system had stopped firing. They had died to protect the exact same patch of floor space. He tried to calculate the tactical value of their final position and failed completely, because the mathematics of their sacrifice made no logical sense, because no rational organism should surrender its own survival probabilities against an opponent it could not damage. A perfect society relied on calculated logic. This irrational devotion disrupted his internal processing parameters.

A sudden movement near the splintered wooden planks of the floor caught his attention. He raised his weapon. He stepped over the bodies.

A child crouched inside the dark shadows beneath a ruined table. The boy looked five years old. Dirt streaked his terrified face. The boy stared at the bodies of his parents without making a single sound. His hands held a dirty scrap of fabric against his chest.

The profound silence felt heavier than all the gunfire.

He froze. The targeting reticle on his visor painted a glowing red circle over the boy's head.

This discovery triggered an automatic review of the Institute directives. Inside the pristine walls of the Ziggurat, the Institute proclaimed that they managed reproduction internally. They taught the Inquisitors that superior assets were grown in climate-controlled vat farms. The organization claimed to curate genetic templates to eliminate disease. He believed he was born in one of these vats. He believed he emerged as a flawless weapon. He believed no mother suffered through his labor. No father bonded with him.

External reproduction represented the ultimate crime. The Clayborn bred in the dirt. The Council saw this external reproduction as a disease. The standard extraction protocols dictated a rigid three-tier sorting system for discovered offspring. The squad harvested feral infants for immediate neurological reprogramming at the Institute. They wiped the fragile minds of these tainted babies to repurpose them as laborers for the State. He never once questioned where the Council found the raw biological material required to maintain their pristine civilization. He terminated youths over the age of ten because older children harbored irreversible psychological contamination. You could never erase the memory of a feral childhood once it took root. Middle children occupied a brutal gray area in the documentation. Bureaucratic regulations mandated that children between five and eight years old should be abandoned in the burning wreckage. The system trusted the harsh feral environments to eliminate these mid-tier errors without expending military resources.

He stared down the length of his rifle barrel. The child possessed intelligent eyes that refused to look away from the armored executioner. The boy didn't cry. He watched the monster that had murdered his parents.

"Target acquired," Unit Seven announced over the tactical network. His boots thudded against the floorboards. The soldier stepped into the room and raised his energy rifle toward the trembling boy. "Requesting permission to expend collateral ammunition to finalize the perimeter."

Unit Seven despised leaving survivors. He preferred a cleaner battlefield with zero unresolved variables. He viewed the abandonment protocol as a bureaucratic half-measure.

An electrical misfire burned deep inside Navarro's central nervous system. His hands trembled. He felt a profound reluctance that defied his logical programming. A perfect construct should calculate the most efficient resolution and execute the order without hesitation. Termination represented the permanent solution to the variable. Yet the Inquisitor felt a wave of sorrow crashing against his structured mind. He recognized that this localized grief represented a terrifying flaw in his own internal architecture. Machines do not feel sorry for the data they delete.

He looked at the dead parents. He looked at the silent boy. The unquantifiable gravity of the moment threatened to shatter his synthetic identity. If he pulled the trigger, he would prove his perfection to the Council. If he pulled the trigger, he would validate his existence as a flawless machine.

He adjusted his grip on the weapon. He forced his breathing to stabilize beneath the heavy armor.

"Negative," Navarro commanded. His voice echoed through the external speakers with synthesized authority. "Ammunition conservation remains a primary objective. Standard protocol dictates environmental abandonment for this specific age bracket. The winter exposure will correct the anomaly."

Unit Seven lowered his weapon. The soldier stared at his commanding officer for three seconds before nodding his helmet. He didn't agree with the tactical assessment. The subordinate soldier respected the strict chain of command above his personal desire to kill the child.

"Acknowledged. Environmental correction approved."

Unit Seven stepped backward out of the ruined cabin. He returned to the courtyard to finalize the burning of the settlement.

Navarro remained alone with the tiny boy. The child hadn't moved a single muscle, but his eyes tracked the armored giant the way a wounded animal tracks the predator that killed its mother, with a stillness that contained more violence than any weapon in the Inquisitor's arsenal. He felt terrified of those eyes. He wanted to explain that he was trapped inside a system he could not escape, that the armor was heavier than it looked, that the man underneath it was suffocating. He wanted to apologize for the smell of the blood.

Instead, he remained silent. He turned around and walked out of the cabin to join his squad in the snow.

The squad marched away from the ruined settlement. Their armored boots cracked against the frozen earth in flawless synchronization. He marched beside them. He never looked back at the small boy sitting alone in the smoking rubble.

He recorded the incident as a standard environmental abandonment to satisfy the bureaucratic algorithms, adjusting the thermal signatures and ammunition expenditure logs so the numbers told a story that matched the doctrine instead of the truth. The systemic lie kept him safe from scrutiny and prevented the feared Institute from examining his defective neural cluster. He spent the entire march back to the transport vessel trying to understand why a flawless machine could feel haunted by a pair of frightened eyes.

The Symmetry Council believed they had solved the messy equation of humanity. They built a society on the foundational principle that everyone who mattered was a synthetic construct of perfect design. The veteran Inquisitor clung to this absolute dogma for years after the Sable Creek extraction. He needed the Council's claim to be undeniably true. The terrifying alternative—that their perfected society might be built on something far more fragile and human—was a thought he could not afford to process.

The boy under the table survived the winter.

An entry from the Unchained God universe.