The Great Escape by Robert Williams

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Unit 51823 had a distinct memory of a surgeon with bloody hands lifting a severed human arm into the air. 51823 had recognized a scar on the forearm, and it knew then that it was "his" arm, the arm of its human self, which the surgeon had coldly and systemically cut away and replaced with a metal limb. It remembered how its human self had gotten that scar after cutting his arm on a barbed-wire fence as a child, and how his mother had bandaged it while he cried, saying, "For Christ's sake, Paul, it's not like somebody cut your damn arm off."

But Paul was gone now, and Unit 51823 had taken his place. It was no longer a "he." Now it was an "it," and it meant to escape the horrors of the future. It had to weed out the root cause of all these wars and create a better timeline, even at the risk preventing its own existence.

That was a paradox, and its logic circuits had gone round and round trying to resolve it. Its one hope rested in the theory of alternate timelines. It theorized that a causal paradox cannot exist and something cannot prevent its own creation, so any changes made by a time traveler would simply send it into an alternate timeline, like a driver who puts his car in reverse, backs up to a fork in the road, and then takes the other turn. The original timeline still existed in an alternate universe, from which the time traveler could now escape... it hoped.

It couldn't go back and stop the Alliance from releasing the nerve gas, nor could it stop the atomic explosion over Paris. The terrorists that had stolen those weapons had covered their trails well, and history had never discovered how they did it. However, they had discovered that the nerve gas and the bomb had come from the old Cold War arsenals of the defunct Soviet Union.

But how could Unit 51823 prevent the Cold War? That was a direct result of World War II, which some historians called the last great of battle of World War I. And the First Great War had started right here, at this time and place, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, Sofia.

Unit 51823 watched Gavrilo Princip move through the crowd. He wore a broad-rimmed hat, much like the cyborg's, to hide his face. He thought this rendered him unnoticeable, but his stillness and furtive manner made him stand out in the shrieking, excited mob. No one from further back in the timeline would believe this young Serb, barely out of adolescence, could change the course of civilization with a single bullet.

The Archduke's motorcade drew near. The road made a sharp turn here, at the bridge over the River Milgacka, and the motorcade had to slow down to negotiate the turn. Unit 51823 saw a steel gleam within the folds of Princip's jacket. A semi-automatic pistol. Princip moved to the front of the crowd.

51823 moved to intercept, but hesitated. It had risked everything for this moment, but still, it knew the dangers of tampering with the timeline. By assassinating the Archduke, Princip would set off the tightly woven ethnic tensions of this region into a series of conflicts that would escalate into World War I, which led to World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold war, and an endless series of massacres into the future ages beyond, wars that would lead to the creation of cyborg weaponry, and finally to Unit 51823 itself.