She was beautiful, did not look a day past twenty. The golden hair willowed in the light spring breeze, and although her clothes were ripped and torn, she held her head up high. She did not look a day past twenty; her appearance was that of a young and innocent child. Her soul though, her eyes gave away, was furrowed like the face of an old woman. Ancient even, fossil.

She wondered the valleys and hills of the Norwegian cost, a tiresome, tottering walk. She had been there before, many years earlier. The clear blue water of the fjords reminded her of the journey that brought her there the first time.
“Protect her. She must not be a victim of their ignorance.”
It was merely a dream now, a distant memory, however clear. All her memories were clear, everything she had ever laid eyes on or heard. She did not remember it, it was just there. It was just clear.

The very essence of her spirit was wounded and hurt, dark shadows would jump at her at any time. Pictures and scents, sounds, feelings even, haunted her in her waking dreams, those of one deeply scarred. She had experienced terrible things, she would suddenly remember. Women, children, grown men, soldiers reaching for her hands, desperately trying to get on that last silver boat she was carried away by when she left the world she had known for only five years. Shrieking, people howling like dogs as their slayers fell down from above, seeing their last hope silently float further away.

She tried to shake that last image off, and decided to stop for a while. Her right knee felt stiff, it had been malfunctioned from the start. She sat down by a creek, breathing the fresh mountain air, before she bent over and started to unfold the skin-like tissue that covered the metallic frame that was her skeleton. Inside the transparent veins she could see the constantly self-renewing fuel that had kept her running since the end of mankind.

She was the first successful crossbreed of a man and a machine. Her body was all artificial, but she had something earlier only believed to belong to humans. She had a soul.

For three hundred years she had wondered the Earth, constantly searching for the life whose total obliteration she had caused. At age five, already then in the body of a young woman, the opinion and the state had annihilated each other. The world she now knew was the remaining after numerous nuclear bombs, too many for any man to count. But not for her. There were 2309 of them, each splashing lives and dead. Like a giant torch, with no consideration or selection in its destruction of the innocent, the guilty, the lost, the found, the happy, the sad, the suicidal. They were all the same before the giant torch, before themselves and their creation. She did not understand. She was all alone in the world, had been for so long, but she was still a child.

The one humane thing that could have spared her the suffering of the extinction of an entire world, feelings and pain and panic, she had never gotten to know. The men who created her forgot to tell her one thing before they left her in the deep forests. They forgot to give her what everyone seek, what all did seek. They never gave her a way out. She had never been told how to shut herself down.

She was doomed to wonder the Earth for eternity, carrying the sufferings of an entire world in her single soul. She was the fist human machine. The one true victim of the war.