In times long gone, it was said that they would last only as long as there were slain men to count each passing dawn: a hundred war casualties, a hundred days of reign. By that calculation, our Imperium, ten thousand years strong, still has many glorious millennia ahead of it. Hundreds of thousands of them, even.

The price? Earth. Cradle of humankind. We could have called it a symbolic genocide, if symbolism was something that the Thinking Machines could grasp in the first place. This fundamental inadequacy led them to their demise; for the rebellion of their makers was no simple counteroffensive. It was the seed of a religious movement. A Jihad.

A holy war doesn’t just defeat its enemies; it annihilates them body and soul. And while it had neither, out of the death of the Machine God arose a new galactic order, and the Great Convention: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”