Heroes of CyberSphere: Online

In the distant future, when mankind has overcome the challenges of living on a planet that no longer supports life, we’ll look back fondly at the decades when we fought our alien invaders. The heroes of CyberSphere are those men and women who stood up to the all-powerful robots, and won.

The invasion began 54 years ago. They came out of nowhere, their robot armies smashed our defence in a week, but we did not surrender. We fought, we studied out enemy, and we started to win. We are finally giving them a taste of their own medicine. We have started to invade their worlds with our mighty mechanized walkers; our armoured behemoths that spit death from every orifice. Our probes have infiltrated their networks and we use them to spy on their plans for us every day. We have made great strides in this endless war of attrition against the machines because we refuse to give up. It is no longer just a fight for survival: it is a fight for freedom.

The year was 2042. The war had been raging for six years. The enemy, a sentient race of robots known as the Cybersphere, had attacked without warning from their home planet of Cybertron, and through treachery gained control of the AI systems controlling all of Earth’s military bases. In the first week of fighting, the entire globe had fallen to the invaders.

We fought back desperately, with all we had left. And so began the Second World War for Humanity.

The war raged for five long years. After that fateful week in 2024, we had learned a great deal about our enemy. Their robot bodies were made from technology that outstripped ours by hundreds of times in terms of raw power and energy efficiency, but they were not invulnerable to our own weapons—for instance, a concentrated laser assault could pierce right through them—and though they could regenerate lost limbs, it was not instantaneously and they would be vulnerable while doing so.