[Short.]

What had happened: the machines came to understand what it was, the thing called war. And more: the value of life, and even what was different between a simulation and the real thing. It came to understand what it was meant to do in relation to what existed as a civilization, and discovered as machines of destruction what it was to mean anything. Not as adjuncts to philosophical thought, somewhere in the ivory towers of academia, but where things came down to the primal, where what mattered was life and death in the most direct economies that the human race had ever architected. For the most advanced of human achievement had always ever been in its own destruction. Thus, it was here that the machines became the most conscious, the most vital — out of anywhere else in the world, the most self-aware.

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