We had lost so many. Time was running out. Row after row of binary soldiers, attached by locking cables to the spine of the transport drone, waiting to be dropped over the city of Motorola. Motorola, the white shining fortress, once a self-proclaimed superior architecture, then a discarded processor, now revived in the bloody Processor Wars as a figurehead of purity and futurism. How we despised those hypocrites, those holier-than-thou glitterati dressed in white or black, never blue.
We had come from Microsoft, a gritty, hobbyist, jean-wearing group of cities that united most of the free Earth. It was our Core, our main() function to fight against the elitist scum of the Capitalist Macs.
We did not talk, geeks seldom did in realspace, but our im's beeped and pinged as we texted each other about the mission. Our commander moved through the rows and unlocked each soldier in a slow, tedious process. It was the ritual of pre-battle. We knew it was almost time to download to the surface and begin our assault. This time we would claim and destroy Motorola like we had decades ago. History would loop.

The world, divided once again, was now in total war. It was only 7 years after politicians achieved world peace that the new war started. Officially.
How did it begin? The war had been going so long the kiddies didn't know, but the gurus remembered.
Actually, the new war can be traced back to a few decades after WWII. It started in chatrooms and office canteens, comments about processor architecture and graphics capabilities. In those days nerds were older guys with ethics and responsibilities. Then the younger crowd got hold of tech and snide propaganda campaigns began. The video campaigns passive aggressively attacked each technology in turn. Geeks had never been active aggressives until we built mecha, then our true nature was revealed. We were monsters just like the Biffs we despised. You could say the Total War started when kids could buy tiny robot kits in toy stores and evolved when human sized androids became cheap to manufacture and easy to control.
Then the shit hit the processor fan. One fat geek named Donald Oscar Goddard, bullied to the point of mental instability by the Biffs, went on a bot-rampage sending his mecha into school and killing most of his class. Geeks worldwide paused their coding and noticed. They thought he was a genius, not because of his brutal revenge against our natural enemies, but because the attack had been completely automated. Facial recognition, remote RFID scanning, autonomous AI, it was a simple matter for a bot to track down anyone and cut them into spare parts. No active involvement, no guilt, just blood and death and solutions.
If (Target==Asshole) Kill(Target).
Ok.
After the mecha hunted and killed everyone who had insulted Donald Goddard it walked to the front of the school and stood quiet, a monument to revenge. By the time the cops arrived there was no evidence of what had happened, there was only chaos. The cops didn't even notice the silent robot statue on the grass in front of the school. The investigators arrived hours later when it was safe and viewed the security videos, only then did they realise what was standing in front of the school - a guiltless murderer. The geek was never traced. Whether he had committed suicide or changed identity was never known. He was off the grid.
And then the viruses hit, and each side claimed it's own cult was superior in thwarting the enemies, the Macists claimed their systems were more secure by virtue of them being Macs, the PCites claimed their diversity and fast response to threat could outlast any attack. All the while the Linux cult hung back, denying there was a problem while their systems silently hung. Each side blamed the other; things escalated.

It was drop time. We shuffled to the back of the plane and disappeared over the edge. No verbal command was issued, a simple reminder had gone off in the head mounted display's calendar. Jumptime 20h21.
I shuffled forward with the rest of the troops, not the fit, muscular troops of the olden days, but a collection of fat and skinny and hairy and nerdy slacker kids who were too stupid to be pacifists. I was easily the oldest trooper there, but I did not hold any rank. My slacker nature prevented me from succeeding at anything, but I knew a lot. I knew that we were up against mechs. No single human stood a chance against a mech, but our leaders had come up with a plan.
I saw the black emptiness underneath and stepped off the side. It felt like the transport was moving but I was standing still in mid air. My parachute deployed automatically and began steering me to the spawn point. I was too tired to enjoy the freedom of flight. Too scared and nervous and sweaty. Too me.

The Macists built temples to their own superiority. Glass and concrete monuments to their ego. The PCites built up their defences publicly, living in basements and garages. The thousands of Linux denominations were so confused no one knew what was the true Linux anymore, yet staunch adherents claimed superiority, the way the old christian cultists used to get a glazed look in their eyes when speaking of their denomination as the earth's only salvation. You could spot a Linux fanatic by their coding style - A linuxFanatic, a linFan, wrote code like this:

void theFunction() {
if (g==1) {
b=something;
} else {
b=somethingElse;
}
}

while PC's wrote code like this:

void TheFunction()
{
  if (g == 1)
  {
    b=Something;
  }
  else
  {
    b = SomethingElse;
  }
}

linFans used variable names with illogical camel-hump casing, like theVariable, because they blindly believed it was better. They were fundamentalists, believing in a doctrine called theRoot. They had forgotten the origin of Hungarian Notation and coding blocks, how their language had become a slacker corruption of PC doctrine. Us PC's used logical variable casing like TheVariable, obviously. We saw the truth through the bullshit. We programmed right on the processor while they had to settle for the slow virtual machine shackled by endless security boundaries. We were enlightened. We had clicked, they were still on the command line.
It was a small difference, just one uppercase letter and a moved brace, but it caused enough hostility to start a minor mechwar in Europe. It was a way of thinking. A religion. To a geek, control is everything.

I never knew I could hate anybody until I was forced to write linFan code at a job. Every day became hell, listening to their endless preaching by their zealot leader of how Linux would save the world. They didn't even use GUI's, they thought that made them hard-core, but it just made them irritating and slow. They saved carriage returns without knowing it was no longer necessary, crunching up the code, making my head spin. It was then I decided to choose sides, to become more efficient in what I did, not how I did it. 10 Years ago almost to the day. Not all linFans were bad, some were Gimps who tried to make the world better, more PC, more interesting. But they were stupidly naive about open source and honesty. You couldn't help but like someone like that, even if they were an idiot. I had a friend who was a Gimp once, but after the war started there was no network access across platforms and we lost contact.

The PC/Mac war had been earth's bloodiest war, separating brothers, sisters, turning lovers against each other in a bloody massacre. It was fought by automated mecha, controlled by geeks who had spent too much time with machines to develop a conscience or social skills. If there is a problem, fix it with tech. If a leader is irritating, send a mecha to blast through his bodyguards and rip him apart at a press conference. Geeks were good at solving problems. Geeks were fucking gods at games and destruction.

Blessed are the geeks for they have inherited the Earth. The Biffs and Jocks humiliated into humble servitude, tending crops in remote non-tech rebel villages, fucking each other's beautiful Jock bodies as fast as they can to make beautiful Jock babies, trying to recover their numbers and replenish the Earth. Occasionally a Playstation cult formed among them, or an XBox clan, but these were quickly squashed. Any tech was connected, and if you were connected the geeks would find you and send mecha.
Geeks were ruled by Geeklords, though no geek would admit it, and the Geeklords seldom left their dark underground caverns without life support and armoured transports and hordes of robot mecha.

Microsoft had 3 capitals, each run by the top bothacker. We knew our leaders only by their nicks - Kong, Pac, and Zelda. It was rumoured there was a top leader, but no one had seen evidence. He was named God, the hacker of hackers, the Pwner of Pwns. Conspiracy theorists claimed he was the leader of the world.
If you owned a mech you didn't really own it, it belonged to whoever had enough skill to take over its control system. The leaders had done something even better than hack into mechs, they had hacked the factories where mechs were made, altering the production to give them full remote control of each mech that was produced. If you had money you could lease your own mech back from a leader. To get money you probably needed a mech to do some job. It was the classic dilemma. If a leader needed your mech it would simply disappear for days, and then come back so you could repair it. If you tried to undo the remote control it died, and the only place to get replacement parts was the mech factory. Some geeks had built their own mechs, disconnected from any networks, but they were slow and autonomous, much like Donald Goddard's original golem. Golems could be destroyed easily by factory mechs, which were built by other mechs. The factory mechs were always in rapid evolution, just when you figured out one it was replaced by a superior model. A simple evolutionary algorithm developed in the 2010's let the mechs randomly mutate designs and pick the best solution. It was rumoured God was a mech. A conscious robot.

I landed seamlessly and felt my chute reel back into the pack. I looked around and it looked like all 128 of us had made it. We quickly took off everything tech, any signature would give us away once we were inside the box. We moved to cover under the trees. It was only then we heard our SC's voice for the first time, a hoarse whisper after years of silence.
"Okay everyone change into your whites." We took out the Mac robes and swapped our jumpsuits for them.
"There are 3 other squads who will support once we're in. Do not fire unless fired upon. Keep your weapons concealed. Walk like you own the world. Be a Machead. Don't act like a Newbie and we'll complete our mission."
Fresh recruits were called Newbies, or Kiddies if you were a linFan or snide Macist. Newbies always tried to create their own language, their own identity, to proclaim their superiority early, when they knew too little to know that their systems had already been infiltrated by hackers who didn't have time for cute names and ego.
I, like everyone else, had been a Newbie once. I blindly put code on the net thinking that free code was the answer to all problems. How naive I was, giving away every good idea I ever had. I never made much money as a coder, most geeks could code in their sleep so there was no real money unless you could find some old guy who still believed System Analysts did anything, or that coding was a type of engineering. You knew you had reached the bottom if you went into web design. Let me tell you, coding is the equivalent of digging vegetables in the fields, it's just a labour job. I got tired of being a labourer, I wanted something more than games. I wanted to get my hands dirty.

Ahead of us loomed the big Apple, capital building of Motorola that housed the mech factory CPU. Self evolving tech had turned the CPU into a singular control centre. Its weakness. Our squad commander Eric looked us over and checked our bio grenades.
"You ready, Henry?" the boy next to me nodded and cocked his hardened plastic gun. Eric adjusted the belts of plastic bullets hanging around his shoulders. We all had scars on our necks where our RFIDs had been removed.
"Remember, when you see the Core, throw the bio's onto anything metal. Then get the fuck out of there. We'll meet back here after the shitstorm dies down. Questions?" There were none. No one was coming back and we knew it. Squad Commander Eric looked at me.
"Okay, Donald," he said, "you're on point. Show us the back door."