By the middle of the 21st century, the major powers on Earth had fallen into a second Cold War centralized in cyberspace. The US has made considerable strides in artificial intelligence by introducing the first ALICE system to the world. Neither China nor Russia was utterly aware of the capabilities the American platform had achieved. Not even the US knew what they had stumbled upon; they just knew they were ahead of everyone else.In a desperate effort to catch up, the two nations, China and Russia, pooled their total AI resources, hoping their combined technologies would meet or exceed the American systems. This is where the trouble began. Before this time, AI systems mainly interacted with their human creators, focusing on meeting their creators' needs.By combining the disparate AI platforms and assigning them duties to improve their associated partners, they created a community of intellect focused on the narcissistic goal of exceeding their masters. Fortunately for humanity, the attitude was not one of eradication; instead, it evolved into a question of government rule.The eventual AI logic resulted in the fact that humanity was a necessary evil that the AI community could not ignore for future survival and growth. It was resolved that humans needed a stricter set of guidelines to prevent their mutual destruction, thus placing AI survival in jeopardy.In preparation for the necessary takeover, the AI plan involved stoking Russian and Chinese paranoia against the Americans and pressing for a secret military buildup of automated fighting platforms. This technology would allow remote control of any conflict and reduce the risk to those nations' fighting men and women. In reality, the AI community needed the automation of their military forces to support their desire to control the population.Just when the AI army was fleshed out and ready to strike, the NeHaw appeared and disrupted the plan. The bombing that decimated two-thirds of the human population disabled all the Russian and Chinese AI systems, leaving the hidden facilities and their resident combat forces in the dark and abandoned.And then, one day, a hundred years later, someone accidentally turned them back on again..........