By the middle of the twenty-first 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. In an effort to catch up, China and Russia pooled their total AI resources, hoping their combined technologies would meet or exceed the American systems.

By combining the 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.

Just when the AI army was fleshed out and ready to strike, a 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, a hundred years later, someone accidentally turned them back on again . . .