by Marko Kloos
I was fully prepared to feed my mother some nonsense about the stuff I traded for those vouchers, but she’s so excited that she doesn’t bother to dig any further.
“Good night,” I say, and walk over to the door of my room. Mom smiles at me, and turns her attention back to the plasma panel on the wall, where some inane Network show is running on low volume.
“Andrew?” she says as I am at the door. I turn around, and she smiles at me, the first one I’ve seen on her face in days.
“I’ll try and go over to the food store in the morning. Maybe we can have a decent lunch before you go.”
“That would be nice, Mom.”
I spend my final night in PRC Boston-7 reading the last fifty pages of Moby Dick. Tomorrow, I will have to leave the book reader behind. I’ve read the novel a dozen times or more, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished now, forever bookmarked at the spot where the Pequod slips beneath the waves.
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan…
Chapter 2
“Don’t do it”, the woman says.
I am an obvious target for the protesters that have gathered in front of the military processing station. I’m carrying a ratty travel bag, and I’ve saved the military the cost of a haircut by shaving the hair on my head down to an eighth of an inch.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
The woman has a kind face and long hair that is starting to go gray in places. There’s a whole gaggle of people protesting out in front of the station, holding up signs and chanting anti-military slogans. They stay well away from the doors of the station, where two soldiers in battle armor stand guard and check induction letters. The soldiers carry sidearms and electric crowd control sticks, and while they’re not dignifying the protest with so much as a glance, none of the protesters ever come within twenty feet of the yellow line that separates the public sidewalk from the processing station.
“Don’t do it,” she repeats. “They don’t care about you. They just want a warm body. You’ll die out there.”
“Everyone dies,” I say. That particular piece of wisdom sounds pompous even to my own ears. I’m twenty-one, she looks to be past sixty, and she probably knows much more about the subject of life and death than I do.
“Not at your age,” the woman says. “They’re going to dangle that carrot in front of you, and all you’ll get out of it is a flag-draped coffin. Don’t do it. Nothing’s worth your life.”
“I signed up already.”
“You know that you can back out at any time, right? You could walk away right now, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”
Right then, I know that she’s never been within ten miles of a welfare tenement. Walk away, and go back to that place?
“I don’t want to, ma’am. I made my choice.”
She looks at me with sad eyes, and I feel just a little bit of shame when she smiles at me.
“Think about it,” she says. “Don’t throw your life away for a bank account.”
She reaches out and gently puts her hand on my shoulder.
A heartbeat later, the elderly lady is on the ground, and the two soldiers from the entrance are kneeling on top of her. I never even saw them move away from their posts. She yells out in surprise and pain. Her comrades stop their chanting to shout in protest, but the soldiers don’t even acknowledge their presence.
“Physically interfering with access to an in-processing station is a Class D felony,” one of the soldiers says as he pulls out a set of flexible cuffs. They pry the woman off the dirty asphalt and haul her to her feet. One of them leads her inside, while the other soldier takes up position by the entrance again. The soldier leading the woman roughly by the arm is probably twice her mass in his bulky battle armor, and she looks very fragile next to him. She looks over her shoulder to flash that sad smile at me again, and I look away.
“The building is made of concrete and steel,” the sergeant says. “It’s extremely solid. You don’t need to hold it up with your shoulder.”
The guy next to me moves away from the wall against which he had been leaning, and gives the sergeant a smirk. She has already moved on, as if there is no point in wasting further time on the exchange.
We’re standing in line in a hallway at the reception building. There’s a folding table set up at the end of the hallway, and someone else is scanning the ID cards of the new recruits. The queue moves slowly. When I finally reach the head of the line, most of the evening is gone. I got here an hour before the eight o’clock deadline for reporting in, and now it’s close to ten.
The sergeant behind the folding table holds out his hand for my ID card and the induction letter, and I hand them over.
“Grayson, Andrew,” he says to the soldier next to him, who searches through an old-fashioned printout and then makes a check mark next to my name.
The sergeant takes my ID and sticks it into the card reader on his desk. Then he pulls my ID card out of the reader and flips it into a bucket beside the table, where it joins a pile of other IDs. The printer on his computer terminal hums, and spits out an unspectacular-looking slip of paper, which he hands to me.
“That’s your assignment slip. Don’t lose it. Out that door, and find the gate listed on your slip. Report to the gate sergeant, and he’ll get you onto the right shuttle. Next.”
The shuttle to my Basic Training station is filled to the last seat. The cushions are worn, the belts of the harnesses are frayed, and the carpet on the center aisle is a loose collection of fibers that have long lost any semblance of coherence or pattern. It seems they use the oldest equipment they could find, as if they want to avoid spending a dollar more than necessary on the new recruits.
The shuttle’s engines send vibrations through the hull, and a few minutes later, we lift off into the dirty evening sky. Some of the new recruits strain their necks to see out of the scuffed windows, but I don’t bother. Even if you could make anything out, you’d only see precisely the kind of stuff everyone’s itching to leave: identical-looking high rises, all clumped together in a sprawling mass of concrete that bears some resemblance to an oversized gerbil maze, except that it smells five times worse and isn’t half as clean.
I’ve spent all of my life in the PRC we leave behind, and if the Sino-Russian Alliance nuked the place right this moment, and I saw the fireball light up the night sky behind the shuttle, I wouldn’t feel a thing.
We arrive at the base at four o’clock in the morning.
The shuttle was airborne for four hours. We could be anywhere in the North American Commonwealth, from northern Canada to the Panama Canal. I don’t particularly care. All that matters is that we’re four flight hours away from PRC Boston 7.
When we step out of the shuttle, we are whisked off into a waiting hydrobus. As the bus leaves the shuttle station, I see that we’re in an urban area, but there are no high-rise buildings anywhere, and I can see snow-capped mountains on the horizon behind the buildings of the city. This place looks clean, orderly, neat—all the things a PRC isn’t. Out here, things are so different that it might as well be another planet.
The bus ride takes another two hours. We soon leave the clean streets of this unknown city behind, and the landscape outside is almost alien in its undeveloped state, like the surface of a strange and distant colony planet. I see low rocky hills and scrub-like vegetation that sparsely covers the hillsides.
Then we reach our destination.
The sudden transition into the military base is startling. One moment, we’re looking out onto the strangely barren landscape, the next moment we cross into a security lock that seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Just before the bus enters the lock, I can see miles of fencing stretching out into the distance.
We drive for another fifteen minutes, past rows of identical-looking buildings and artificial lawns. Finally, after many right-angle t
urns onto increasingly less busy side roads, we pull into a lot in front of a squat, unimpressive one-story building that looks like an oversized storage pod.
The doors of the bus open, and before any of us can contemplate whether we ought to stay in our seats or show initiative and get off the bus, a soldier comes up the stairs at the front of the bus. He is wearing camouflage utility fatigues. His sleeves are rolled up neatly, with crisp edges in the folds, and the bottom of the sleeve is rolled back down over the fold so the camouflage pattern covers the lighter-colored liner of the fatigue jacket. There’s a rank device on his collar, and there are many more chevrons and rockers on it than on the collar of the sergeant who accepted my enlistment papers back at the recruiting station. This soldier’s expression is one of mild irritation, as if our arrival has interrupted some enjoyable activity.
“Now,” he says.
“You will smartly step off this bus in single file. There are yellow footprints on the concrete outside. Each of you will step onto a pair of those footprints. You will not talk, fidget, or scratch yourselves while you do this. If you have anything at all in your mouths, it will come out and be left in the trash receptacle of your seat. Execute,” he adds with a tone of finality, and then he steps back out without looking back, as if there is no doubt that we will do exactly as he says.
We get out of our seats and file out onto the concrete lot. There are rows of yellow footprints on the ground, and we each find a spot. When we’re all lined up in untidy rows, the soldier from the bus walks around to the front of our rag-tag group, straightens out the front of his fatigues with a crisp tug, and places his hands behind his back and his feet a shoulder’s width apart.
“I am Master Sergeant Gau. I am not one of your drill instructors, so don’t get too used to my face. I am just here to guide you through the first two days while we process you and prepare you to meet your platoon drill instructors.
“Now,” he says again, and the way he emphasizes that word makes it sound like he is ensuring more than just our attention, as if he wants to make sure we’re mentally and physically in the present moment.
“You are among the ten percent of applicants accepted into the Armed Forces of the North American Commonwealth. You may think that this makes you special in some way. It does not.
“You may think that, because you made the initial cut, we will put in a lot of effort to shape you into soldiers, and help you overcome your individual weaknesses. We will not.
“You may think that boot camp is something like that stuff you’ve been watching on the Networks. It is not.
“We will not hit or mistreat you. You may choose to stop following orders and instructions at any time. If you fail to obey an order, you will wash out. If you fail to make a passing grade on any examination or skill test, you will wash out. If you strike a fellow recruit or a superior, you will wash out. If you steal, cheat, or display a bad attitude, you will wash out. Any of your instructors has the absolute right to wash you out for any reason.
“When you wash out, nothing will happen to you. You will merely be put on a shuttle home. You will not owe any money, nor suffer legal penalties. We will dissolve your contract, and you will be a civilian once more.
“We wash out fifty percent of recruits in Basic Training, and a quarter of you will get killed or maimed in your enlistment period without ever collecting your service certificate at the end. There are forty of you standing on this spot right now, and only twenty of you at most will graduate Basic Training. Only fifteen of you will muster out in five years.
“If you find those odds troublesome, you may turn around and board the bus behind you once more. It will take you back to the shuttle port, where you will go back to your in-processing station. If my speech has served to change your mind about being in the Service, save yourself and your instructors the work and sweat, and step back onto the bus now.”
Sergeant Gau pauses and looks at us in anticipation. There is some rustling and shuffling in the ranks, and three of our number step out of line and walk back to the bus. With the first few stepping out, the more timid find the encouragement to do likewise, and four more no-longer-recruits step out of formation and amble back to the bus with hanging shoulders. I notice that none of them look back.
“Thank you, people,” Sergeant Gau calls after them. “And I mean that. It’s good to see that some folks still have the smarts to see when they’re about to grab the short end of the stick.”
Then he turns back to us.
“The rest of you are dumber than an acre of fungus, and I mean that, too. Now go through that door, single file, find a desk in the room beyond, and quietly wait for further instruction. Execute.”
The room is empty except for several rows of creaky desk chairs. We each take a chair. I count the empty chairs after everyone is seated; there are precisely as many chairs in the room as there were people on the yellow footsteps outside before the end of Sergeant Gau’s speech. There’s nothing but a black marker on each of the desks. Some of the recruits take the black markers and uncap them, which displeases Sergeant Gau when he enters the room.
“I didn’t say anything about picking up those pens. I said to find a desk and quietly wait.”
The scolded recruits hastily replace the markers on their desks. Some of them look at Sergeant Gau as if they expect the offense to be grounds for a wash-out already.
“Now you will pick up your pen and uncap it.”
We do as we are told.
“You will use the marker to write the following number onto the back of your left hand: One-zero-six-six.”
I write the number 1066 onto the back of my hand.
“This is your platoon number. You are Basic Training Platoon One-zero-six-six. You will commit your platoon number to memory.”
Ten sixty-six is the date of the Battle of Hastings. I file the number of my platoon away in my brain. I briefly wonder if the platoon numbers are assigned consecutively, and when they started counting. Are we the one thousand sixty sixth group of recruits this decade, this year, or this month? With a dropout rate of fifty percent, how many platoons have to cycle through boot camp in one year to keep the NAC forces staffed?
Sergeant Gau produces a stack of papers and drops it onto the desk of the recruit directly in front of him.
“You will take one form off the top of the stack, and then pass the stack to the recruit next to you. You will place the form on the table and leave it closed until I tell you to open it.”
The stack of forms makes its way around the room. When it arrives at my desk, I peel off the top form, and pass the stack to the right. It feels strangely liberating to do precisely as instructed. I don’t have to worry about displeasing the sergeant as long as I follow his orders exactly. For now, I resolve to not even scratch my nose unless being ordered by someone with chevrons on their collar.
“You will take your pens and fill out the forms in front of you. When you are finished, you will place the cap back on your pen and put it on top of the completed form. Execute.”
It’s administrative paperwork, which seems redundant at this point. After I signed my application for enlistment back at the recruiting office, I spent many hours at the processing station, filling out stacks of forms with all kinds of information. When you live in a Public Residence Cluster, the government knows everything about you including your DNA profile by the time you’re a month old, but the civil and military bureaucracies apparently don’t talk to each other very much.
So I fill out the forms in front of me, entering the metrics of my existence for the thousandth time in my life.
The last page is a contract, five dense paragraphs of legal language, and I read over it briefly. It’s the same information they gave us back at the recruiting office. Once upon a time, the job of the recruiter was to entice potential recruits into signing up for service by emphasizing the benefits and downplaying the drawbacks of military service, but that is no longer the case. Now, they hardly talk about
benefits at all. Everybody knows you’ll get fed, and that there’s a real bank account and a Certificate of Service if you make it through your enlistment term. Now they try to discourage as many people as possible from signing up by describing all the drawbacks of service. I have no doubt that there’s a monthly quota for turning away people before they sign an application for enlistment.
At the end of my term, the account will be activated, with the accrued balance of sixty-two paychecks available for withdrawal. If I die before the term of enlistment is up, all the money in my account flows back to the government, as reimbursement for the cost of my training and equipment.
I sign the contract. This is why I am here, after all—to get out of the PRC and have a shot at a real bank account. I don’t care what they do with the money if I die. Until I have that certificate of service in my hand, that money is an abstraction anyway, just a bunch of numbers in a database.
When everyone is finished, Sergeant Gau has one of our number collect the forms and deposit them on the lectern at the front of the room.
“Congratulations,” Sergeant Gau says. “As of this moment, you are officially members of the Armed Forces of the North American Commonwealth. Be advised that this status is probationary until you graduate from Basic Training.”
There’s no ceremony, no oath of service, no pomp or ritual. You sign a form, and you’re a soldier. It’s a bit of a letdown, but at least they’re consistent in that respect.
Chapter 3
We spend most of the first day standing around and waiting for stuff to happen. There’s another medical inspection, a pair of doctors looking at an entire platoon, so it takes almost three hours for all of us to be examined. We get a quick scan and a blood check, to make sure we didn’t engage in any last-minute chemical excesses. Then we get a series of shots, six different injectors that are administered in quick succession. I suppose I should be curious about the kind of stuff they’re injecting into my system, but I find that I don’t care. It’s not like they’d let me refuse the shots, anyway.