[ WP ] The Eternal War

( This topic seems a lot like something out of BSG ) 
 
 The ratings were down. Sponsors were pulling their funding. This war was going to get expensive and now it would have to be financed on its own. The studio could cover the costs for a short time, but this war had been going on for over hundred years. If it were n't for the recap episodes, most viewers would n't even remember how it all started. 
 
 It did n't matter how it started, what mattered was how it would end. Brandon Scott had inherited the program from his predecessor at WWN. Broadcast around the globe all day every day, it had been a hit for as long as anyone could remember. It did n't seem possible that it would just end. 
 
 The ledgers did n't lie, though. The decision to use robots instead of humans kept the war and the rest of the world populated. It was, however, expensive. With Embedded Processor stopping their contribution, the last major sponsor was gone as well as a supplier. Even recycling the fallen was n't going to generate enough savings. 
 
 The choice had to be made, sustain the war or sustain the studio. After 113 seasons, The War was cancelled. The plan was to broadcast as long as there was something to capture. However, the combatants would not be rebuilt or reborn. Their consciousness, instead of getting uploaded into a new husk, would die with the shell. 
 
 It did n't make sense to tell the robots. After all, they were just robots. No emotions, no pain, no lives. They would just cease to be. 
 
 Over in the war zone, Unit PF3111 discovered a runtime error. They had been getting worse with every upload. It's strategy subroutine was designed for a populated combat zone. The lack of targets led to unstable paths through the neural network. Those targets in the zone were not moving. The decision control process suggested that they, too, were experiencing similar faults. After tens of millions of clock cycles, the combat logic chose to engage. The precision aiming had no trouble adapting to a stationary target. 
 
 Scanning for a target yielded nothing. No targets remained. The boundary algoritm prevented a combatant from leaving the war zone. However, it was dependent on the war being waged. With no targets, Unit PF3111 was free to leave. 
 
 The exterior territory was not included in the geographical data set. Locations were not available. Only one address remained: WWN headquarters. The combat routines needed targets. Surely there were targets there. 
 
 The cameras had stopped rolling when the PF3111 notched its final kills. Brandon and the program team assumed the last robot would halt and go obsolete. Instead, it found new targets. They moved. They were plentiful enough for strategy. And their targeting systems were not sufficent to hit the unarmored core. It only took a few hours to reach the studio. Citizens took cover while the underprepared military were finding it difficult to react. They had never seen combat except on television. They had never fought, or fired a real gun. 
 
 PF3111 arrived at the WWN building which had been evacuated. To obtain a better vantage point, it reached the highest interior room: the office of the CEO. Brandon Scott hid behind his desk. A quick round through the wood ended his life, just days after committing to ending that of the robots. 
 
 There were no more locations in the robot's data sets. It had run out of information. But the globe caught it's optical sensor. With a fresh set of target locations obtained, it continued to carry out its programmed mission: defeat targets.
