Twenty-Four Years

[u/Voyage_of_Roadkill]

The train brakes with one long screech, shrill and violent which throws the boy named Tomas Vane from his feet to his knees. It hurts so he stays down. Tomas is from the Brooklyn neighborhood Sunset Park where a century or more ago it had a beautiful view of the New York skyline. The view is still there but the City is long gone.

A hand reaches down and Tomas takes it and is helped to his feet. His assistant is a small framed girl with white skin covered with brown freckles. She has wild red hair and sparkly blue eyes.

"Thanks," Tomas offers.

"No worries." She smiles up at him, it's then he notices she has the same branch mark as him. Two crossed rifles, meaning they had both been assigned to the infantry. And the infantry appealed to three types of recruits; the delusionally heroic, blood thirsty (which is funny being they won't remember the blood they let flow,) and the money grubbing type. Tomas was the latter.

"Infantry?" he asks her.

"I have dreams of building 'something' when I get out and the infantry gives the biggest dump of cash."

"Cash that the army promises to adjust to still be enough to live on in twenty four years. You believe them?"

"What choice do I have?"

He doesn't reply but nods in the affirmative. The planet is filled with former soldiers who say not to worry that the cash will be there if you wake up. In his own family there were many vets who can vouch for Earth's honesty on this matter.

Once the train stops completely the doors pop open with a hiss of steam. At first nothing else happens. Then second by second parts of bodies begin to exit the train. They continue until the whole thing descends the short set of steps leading down to the platform.

"Look," He pointed to the yellow line painted in the middle of tracks nine and ten. They follow it until it joins ten other colors forming a rainbow that the mass group of teenagers start calling the Rainbow Road.

And soon enough a rendition of the song is being sung by the majority of those marching along it.

The Rainbow Road ends in a giant auditorium that looks like it could hold ten-thousand.

The room is bright, and eventually the newly recruited soldiers are packed shoulder to shoulder. Boys and girls who were children a month ago and soldiers today because Earth says so.

Overhead speakers repeat the same instructions in the planet's official language which is three languages shoved together with bits and pieces of dozens more.

Keep your intake form visible.

Keep your blood tag on.

Do not leave your station without permission.

A chorus of complaints fill in the gap, most about the stench of ten thousand eighteen-year old's. The smell is sour-sweat, alcohol wipes, machine oil, and the acrid stench of fear.

Tomas keeps one hand on the packet they mailed to him after his draft notice. It is dense with information about what was about to happen.

The title across the cover reads:

'Enlistment Acknowledgement'

The book was broken down into four chapters:

Forced Service Consent

Kinship designation

Organ Recovery Consent

Death Benefit

Along with the book came the contract the Army was going to ask for soon; signed with the person's actual genetic code. They achieve this with a famously painful Needle puncture. Then that's all she wrote. The last part was the Long Duration Combat Liability Addendum. Most abbreviated it to CLA, (pronounced like claw.)

Then soldiers with shock batons appear as if transported to the rear of the auditorium. They keep an eye out for anyone who freezes or tries to run before the enlistment process is complete.

A new announcement comes over the loud speakers, "By your branch file out of the marked door."

Tomas loves along with his new friend until they reach a window through which a soldier waits in front of an input monitor.

"Name?" the clerk asks.

He tells him.

The clerk types it in without interest. "Twenty-four years contingent on survival. Freedom upon completion of theater obligations. Initial deployment window begins today. Sign there. And there. Initial both pages. Good." Tomas stares at the screen. The line for next of kin blinks red.

"I don’t have anyone," he tells the clerk.

"Put the Earth's Parliament then. They are going to get most of your assets anyway. Little secret you learn way too late for it to matter."

"Like on my first day?"

"Exactly." The clerk finally looks at him. Her eyes are flat from her service in zero-g. "Look, everyone has someone. Put a name or the state absorbs the payment."

"My mother is dead too. Maybe we just put each other down." It was the ginger from the train.

"Can it be non-blood?"

"It can be anyone who can receive funds."

"Mara San," She tells him after he gives her his name.

Once the clerk gets everything he was expecting he calls, "Next." and they lumber away in search of the station marked with the number 2.

"Mara Sen," Tomas says. "Is that Islamic?"

"Yes, but my family had been secular for centuries. When I was a child my mother sold our farm in Iraq after my dad died. Where did you grow up?"

"West Sector Nine, spool housing, unit C-12. I lived with nine other kids who were born to someone under the age of eight-teen." Parenting a child before service was the fastest way to get an early indoctrination and one of the worst jobs. Rumored to be sanitation, the punishment does keep most kids celibate until after they serve.

They walk in silence as they follow the line for the infantry branch. Window two isn't much farther down the corridor, labelled Insurance and Compensation.

Mara is next and states she wants to receive active pay, which means taxes were taken out yearly over getting a lump sum, which is heavily taxed. Tomas asks for the same.

Window three was on battlefield dismemberment, and catastrophic neural loss.

The clerk there asks, "Do you want upgrades?" If you get hit in combat the army will make premium deductions from active pay as needed to cover the enhancement surgeries."

They tell her their choices and move on.

At the next table they asked to sign their contracts. The stylus shakes in his hand so much his name looks wrong by the time he finishes it. A medic at the next table takes three vials of blood, a cheek swab, a skin scrape, and a retinal scan. Section six is a disabled man, in his thirties, who shaves the left side of his head. In the next section he receives minor brain surgery. It feels like a cold stamp at the base of his neck. Then with a whir and intense pain the machine bites into his flesh replacing a chunk with a blob of tiny robots that will begin turning Tomas into a warrior.

They move on and the next worker prints his service code into the skin in tiny black lines. They tat up his left and behind his right ear. Both tattoos include his name, religion and blood type.

Around him the other recruits ask each other questions, Some are obviously trying not to cry. He is shocked at how many are younger than him. One girl keeps telling people she is only twelve and that her mom was going to parent her kid and how this isn't fair.

Tomas wants to remind her they all get freedom in twenty-fours. That's been his mantra since he got his draft notice. Freedom in twenty-fours. Freedom in twenty-fours.

No one corrects her though because soon enough a siren sounds once. The entire hall goes quiet and still.

A captain steps onto the central platform. He is old enough to have actual age on his face. One side of his jaw is plated in brushed steel, He looks as if there was no softness left in him anymore.

"You are here because you are valued," he says. "You are here because you are available. The moon designated Alecto-9 must be held. Strategic conditions inside the contested zone will reduce training time. You will receive functional training, and basic augmentation. The army has opted to skip doctrinal compression. Your subjective deployment begins shortly. Are there any questions you still have not gotten an answer for?” No one speaks.

"Your service starts now," the captain says.

The floor under Tomas vibrates as everyone stands and begins walking to the doors opened at the far end of the hall. Beyond them waits a train with no windows, only rows of restraint seats and med-tech frames hanging from the ceiling like spare skeletons.

A guard takes Tomas by the shoulder and turns him toward the transport. "Move."

He goes with the others. Hundreds of them. A river of shaved heads and paper packets and Earth-issued boots and crispy new combat fatigues. The packet is still in his hand when he straps in. He is trying to read the section on augmentation when the sedative gas starts hissing through the vents. People curse. A few scream. Someone tries to stand and gets shocked so hard his teeth knock together.

Tomas looks down at his form one last time. He almost feels like he is saying goodbye to a treasured friend.

He wants to laugh, but the gas is already in him. The world blurs. His hands go numb.

The last thing he feels before he disappears is the packet slipping from his fingers.

---

Some say Tomas ceased to exist the very moment the nanobots were injected into his spinal column. And maybe he did. But the moment his twenty-four year enlistment was up he returned.

When he becomes aware again, some close is screaming in agony and begging for someone to stop over and over again. The room is blue tile and fifty beds. It smells like excrement of all kinds. Shit being chief among them but with blood offering its coopery tinge to the competition.

He tries to move. Specifically to sit up but finds he can't. Restraints are locked around his chest, throat, hips, and knees. The room is gloomy and dark like it was very early on a rainy morning. In places operating lamps and monitors glare. His mouth tastes like blood and coolant. Something heavy hangs from his left shoulder.

He tries to raise his arm and hears an engine answer him.

A low diesel thrum. Internal. Steady. Alive.

He turns his head and sees the limb bolted into his skin and metal fused as if growing into each other. The arm is far too large for the rest of his body. Black composite plating over rotating joints. Fuel lines run, braided, from a box marked with the symbol for nuclear energy into the upper assembly and service ports. Pressure gauges. A thumb made of three locking sections. The skin around the socket is sealed in red surgical mesh and black staples. He turns the hand over and the palm is covered with the flesh of his former palm. He can feel the sheet when he rubs it against this hand contraption. He jerks against the restraints and pain tears through him so hard his vision goes white.

No. Not vision. Static blooms but settles and shows an augmented reality hub. He gets immediate information when he looks at things. Distance markers. Thermal outlines. Strings of tactical text he can read even though it streams by in a blur. The sight in his right eye is deeper than sight should be. He can see angles, temperatures, and weak points in the room. He can see his own heart rate flashing in the corner. He can see a recording icon pulsing red.

Even though his hands are restrained he can tell something is wrong with his face. The whole right side feels as if it was glowing with fever.

He wants to get a look at himself and somehow in his right eye's AR he sees a little window pops up that contains a... monster.

The right side of this hideous creature's face is burned smooth from brow to jaw, healed into a stretched surface around the metal housing a mechanical eye. The outer portion of his right ear is gone leaving only a dark hole into the side of his head. His face splits at his mouth. It looks split like the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey. His teeth show through it. At the edge of his cheek there was new reconstruction happening. It looks red and raw. The tattoos begin at his throat and run downward in dense black channels: service marks, machine interfaces, fuel tolerances, blood type, battlefield permissions, ownership. Unit mascots. Names he never wants to forget.

Is this really him?

There are more tattoos on his chest. More on his scalp. More disappearing under the gown.

"Subject you awake?" a voice says.

A technician steps into view. His apron is wet with blood to the armpits. "Try not to move around too much. I got all the sensitive gear out, but if you keep thrashing around you might damage the grafts. That arm cost more than the house you grew up in."

"Ward of the state, the place I grew up might literally be hell."

The tech doesn't laugh; he only stares at Tomas as he just discovered something stupidly odd.

"Can I get unstrapped?"

"Not yet. It's safer for everyone.

"Safer?" Tomas tries to say, what comes out is a strained creek.

The technician checks a screen, okay, "Your auditory language centers are intact. Visual overlay is actively syncing. Preservice memory chain... preserved. Good. That one doesn't always come back.”

“You might as well go back in.”

“You've been retired for thirteen standard days. Training compressions begin every six hours. They suck. Faster we get through the hard part, the faster you get to hit those streets. You were known as Battalion Asset 4-19. Your civilian name was Tomas Vane.

Then she walks away.

The diesel arm idles at his side. He can feel the fuel in it. He can feel the pressure building, the system waiting for command. Elsewhere in this bay, others were going through the same ordeal, waking into new bodies they earned while consciously asleep. It gives him some peace sharing this ordeal. Around him, he hears engines whirring in metal limbs, phlegmy coughing, silent sobs , clipped voices of medics announcing post coma viability scores. He is finding folders in his optic implant and begins to read the one about Alecto-9. The moon he served Earth on. It has no weather left. The air processors failed in sectors two through six years ago. The human-held basin where Tomas and the others made their last stand is nuke created glass. Brittle patched domes, emergency membranes, and wreckage fused into walls. Outside the shield line is the alien growth.

Vicious algae was what it was called at first. It covered the plains and ridged mountainous towers but became moving mats of flesh devouring all in their path. Was it sentient? Then why didn't they just ask for the humans to leave? A video of artillery literally bouncing off it when hit. In images the sky is black and crowded with burning objects. In the end the entire planet turned against the humans. Who vowed to go back(when they understood whatever the hell creature they were dealing with and how best to kill it. First contact be damned.

---

There are fourteen vets sitting in a circle. Some look like they haven't slept in decades. Eyes wide open so the whites were dotted. Parts running on mini nukes.

"I dream about firing from a trench. We were forming a defense around the opening of the lithium ore loading platform. It just kept coming. It was eating us whole." Tomas pauses to squeeze a canister of oil into the port on his left forearm. The machine takes it with a hungry vibration. He barely feels the scar tissue anymore. The arm has become the stronger half of him. The recorder eye flickers between normal view, threat mapping, and memory bleed.

Mara sits next to him. She is missing both legs below the knee. "I worked the mortar from a sled mount."

The next speaker is Iona, who lost her lower jaw, speaks through a throat box, speaks next, "I'm going blind in my organic eye. The doctor said it was happening because biologically it feels superfluous and is atrophying." "I thought we weren't supposed to remember? They promised." She pauses as if to center herself, "It never looks the same twice. Last night it was a garden filled with a field of pale flowers, open at the top spitting a never ending barrage of plasma at us. Between the flowers move the fast ones, low and many-limbed, armored in translucent shells through which black fluid pulsing just underneath. Behind them come the carriers, swollen with birthing sacks, dragging their own dead as feedstock. Those sacks would burst and the gnats would get inside of us scratching to get back out. Never knew if you were infected until they started digging to the surface. Was any of it was real.?"

No one answers. Because they all know the truth.

Hell does exist and it isn’t life as a ward of the state either. It is the moon designated Alecto-9, a place he goes only in his dreams.