Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  After being issued twenty pairs of socks and a locker of training paraphernalia, she was sent to the medical ward. She got a brief physical that confirmed the scans she had sent in. Then they sat her down to do something shocking and bizarre.

  “Don’t be afraid now,” said the medic. “We’re going to turn off your link.”

  “What?”

  “Standard training. We do it dry, links turned off.”

  “Are you just going to dim it, you mean? So it’s not active?” she asked. She heard her own voice waver.

  “Off, completely. It will come back on after training, on the military net, but we can’t just dim it. We have to remove you from the common world.”

  They were really going to turn off her link. All the way off. Bravery had its limits, and this was a troubling prospect. Violet, like every other human she knew of, had been linked as far back as she could remember. The first step into preschool was getting wired in and learning the interface. She wasn’t even sure what life would be like without it.

  “Don’t worry, don’t be afraid,” he told her. “We lived this way for millions of years. You’ll fall back into it. You’ll also be sleeping unlinked. Dreams won’t be lucid anymore. They may be bizarre and out of control. Sometimes they’re kind of fun, sometimes you don’t remember them at all.”

  “What about memory?”

  “Your programming is still there. You’ll still have partitions and direct access to whatever you file away. Trust me—every recruit in history has trained offline. You’ll do fine.”

  Trust them, she told herself. Let them do what they have to do. She managed a nod and watched him put a device up to her antenna. He pushed a button, and the adverts disappeared from her peripheral vision. The net wasn’t just ignorable and distant like it was when dimmed. It was gone completely. Even the time and date were gone. She hadn’t realized they were from her link. She instinctively tried to call up a diagnostic but nothing happened. She thought around toward the arcology net, toward the city net, even blindly outward for an Achnacarry net. Nothing. She felt queasy, as if her feet had disappeared. But that was all. It got no worse, and in seconds she knew the extent of what was gone and what was still there. She was somewhat ashamed that she’d been so scared by it. The medic must have sensed her shame.

  “Don’t feel bad, MacRae. You’re the first one today who didn’t faint.”

  Immediately after delinking, she was lined up with the rest of the new recruits to be sworn in. The oath had been loaded into her memory with the pre-enlistment link, but not as raw knowledge. It was a speech she would have to recite. With the others, she swore allegiance to his majesty, King Ethelred IV, and to Charles Lynton, his employer and CEO of the UKI, to defend her native company and country against all threats both financial and tactical, to follow all orders and various other things that seemed far too important to rest on the strength of a spoken oath. She’d have willingly let them put blocks and bonds in her brain to ensure her loyalty and found the concept of making her swear an oath rather crude. It would have been far more meaningful to Violet had they told her why the king and CEO were worth following, and why the country and company were worth defending. She assumed being born there was reason enough in the minds of her superiors and wasn’t inclined to suggest otherwise on her first day. She had to wonder how weak their hold was on soldiers that it had to be constantly affirmed by archaic salutes and honorifics.

  Soon she was adjusting to the quirks and traditions of military life. She knew from hours of entertainment that training would be brutal, and the instructors were to be cruel and even comically hostile. That was more appealing than worrisome, as conflict was so rare in the common world. Though some said the military was obsolete, that it was a waste of time or funds, Violet knew that beyond training was the slim possibility of action. The connotation of ancient warfare was split between those who claimed that “war was hell,” and those who claimed it was an honorable, noble pursuit that should not have been forgotten. Violet didn’t care about the debate but saw how it affected the demeanor of everyone she saw.

  “If winning is no longer the goal, then perfection has to be,” said Sergeant Cameron, their huge, buff drill sergeant, in a powerful brogue. He was one of many Camerons on the base. There was also Sergeant Cameron, his brother; Sergeant Cameron (unrelated); and Sergeant Cameron (also unrelated) who had been off the base when Violet arrived. There were also a variety of Lieutenant Camerons and even a General Cameron, CO of Achnacarry. The general was spoken of highly and given absolute authority, but Violet quickly learned that no Cameron truly ruled Achnacarry—the flies were in charge. A full hour of orientation was devoted to bug repellents and netting, along with the solemn notion that if an insect torments you while at attention, you may not swat it, you may not shoo it.

  “You will stand still and silently thank the fly for teaching you how to stand still under torment! Someday you will come under fire, and if you buckle to swat a bug, you will get zapped. Love the fly, recruit—someday you’ll find it saved your life!”

  Flies were not the only method of torment. There were also giant geese to coat the grounds and remind the recruits to wear their awkward boots. One tall, strong cadet ran afoul of them during orientation and had to go to the medic. The cadets-to-be were treated much like livestock at first, and then exactly like livestock later. They didn’t know what they were being treated like, having all been born a century after livestock was banned, so none protested. Still, only Violet was genuinely amused.

  Another little misery for the troops involved the showers. There weren’t any. Where sonic showers were standard to gently hum the grime off skin without the least bit of discomfort, the army needed something tougher and, for immodesty’s sake, more painful. As soon as they gathered the recruits in a basement room, each was given a can of viscous orange dimethyl ammonium chlorides—army slang “napalm.” They were told to dilute the goop in water and to apply it liberally to their bodies. A few recruits looked concerned; others began cautiously diluting and applying the substance to their bare skin.

  Violet, assuming the army would do no permanent harm to their recruits, started with a 5 percent solution and gave herself a generous helping of the thinned goo. Just as she had covered most of her arms, she heard the screams. Then she felt the tingling, and then the itching, and then a sensation she later heard a recruit describe inadequately as being bitten by a billion burning bullet ants. She kept going, reasoning that the sooner it was all over her, the sooner it could all burn off. By the time she finished her feet, her arms felt cool and clean. She also couldn’t help but notice that she smelled fresh and crisp.

  “Smells like victory,” laughed a colonel, who proceeded to slap the itchiest recruit on his itchiest cheek.

  Such trifles were all in good fun to Violet and part of the atmosphere. It was the first time in her life that nobody assaulted her with constant “Pleases” and “Thank-yous,” or the vulgar “You’re welcome.” The sergeants were very clear about what the recruits would do and where, though less than forthcoming about anything else. There was a clear need-to-know basis for questions, and conversations between recruits were forbidden at first. Everything was inflexible, hard, and rigid, especially the mattresses.

  VIOLET AWOKE the next day to find she had no memory of any dream and no memory of falling asleep at all. She also felt more rested than she had ever been. At first her new life in the military seemed well suited to her needs and wants. She got to exercise almost nonstop. There was nothing to break her focus during straightforward tasks given to her in clear military language. The instructors yelled a lot and spoke in good strong voices, not like school programs, not like her parents, not that sweet, soft, calm fluff that had done nothing to save their lives. People here worked in a tough, resilient frame of mind, the kind that survives. These were the kinds of voices she wanted to follow, that gave an order worth giving and worth doing well. There was no surplus food to grow fat on or time to grow lazy.
They threw everyone in the same napalming room and everyone used the same latrine. The toilets were positioned across from each other with no stalls, so they had to eschew their inhibitions. They took away individuality, and they took away humanity, which Violet liked very much, having never seen the appeal of being human. They stopped short of turning trainees into robots. The army didn’t want robots. They already had enough of those—Achnacarry alone had almost a hundred.

  Within a week she was marked proficient at cleaning, operating, and repairing those robots. She was proficient in all the skills she was taught. She could lift heavy things and run long distances while carrying them. She could hit targets with target-hitting implements and enjoyed the hard thunk of an arrow or round or beam squarely annihilating some scrap of plastic. She was ordered to open sealed parts of her memory, and she learned about the innards and physics of the microwave she had already used, and learned names for the tactics she had employed out of necessity. She began to understand just how exceptional her improvised defense and assault had been.

  She finally got to fist-fight in the real world, like the old sparring programs but with people in person. Knuckles hitting meat instead of lighting up point zones. One student proudly informed the instructor that he had already downloaded every fighting style there was. The instructor immediately kicked him in the stomach, and the boy completely failed to block the man’s foot.

  “You can download all you want but your body has to learn it, not your head. You can’t download experience.”

  So he gave them experience. Violet discovered the smacking sound and feel of a real hit. She had never been punched before. People simply didn’t get punched back home, and she saw the fear in the faces of others going into their first hardening exercise. She was eager, curious, and deep inside, very excited. She let the first fist come, and then after all the anticipation, when it bruised her side, she could only wonder if that was all there was to it. For how much the other trainees had talked about it and bragged that they had done it first or long ago, Violet found it oddly unsatisfying.

  One recruit threw a fit when the instructor drew blood.

  “What the hell is this? You could have broken my nose, man. My nose is bleeding!” shouted the recruit. The instructor had clearly been waiting for such a complaint.

  “People bleed. Get used to it,” he said. “You get hurt in training. You get hurt because you need to learn to get hurt. If you complain to a mortal enemy that he has broken your nose, he won’t back down because you sprang a leak. So you ask, what the hell is this?” He pushed the recruit’s wounded nose harshly and held up his bloody hand. “This is nothing to you. This isn’t enough blood to call a medic. This isn’t reason for fear or pity. This is a stain on your uniform. Draw this from your enemy, and it’s liquid demoralization. Spill it and show it off, because if it stays in their veins, it doesn’t do you any damn good.”

  Sparring was fun, she learned very fast. She got bruises galore and admired her new spotty complexion. Her opponents got more bruises and a lot of broken bones. The medics liked her because they were no longer lonely. She sent them three injured recruits a day. They patched them up in minutes and sent them back out for more. She sent Sergeant Cameron in for broken ribs twice and a broken arm once, but he was her worthiest opponent, and there came to be an understanding between them. As others tried to stay out of their way, Violet and Cameron were in a contest for who could break the most parts. Only eyes and balls were off limits.

  With personal combat came courses in strategy, theory of defense, and weapon training, where they even taught swordplay. Blades began when the sparring instructor’s brother, Sergeant Cameron, got back from leave. He was a short but dexterous man, covered in scars. One scar on his cheek was the exact shape and size as the edge of one of the knives he kept on his dojo wall. He wasted no time in putting wooden swords in their hands. He didn’t tell them how to hold them properly; he made them feel it out. If anyone’s grip was weak, he demonstrated their weakness by knocking the sword from their hand. If someone made the same mistake twice, he’d give them a scratch to remember it. Violet saw other trainees still taken aback at the prospect of real damage, but she adored the notion of a scar to remember every mistake. But she learned too fast to earn a keloid diploma. Her education remained purely hypertrophic.

  She knew that every mistake she made became an advantage when made by her opponent. For her comrades the brutality of education seemed a regrettable necessity, but for Violet the process went past masochism into a philosophy. Learning was the process by which pain became a pleasure, a companion, a partner she could trust. Perhaps the emotional pains of childhood would be folded into the same steel. Violet was having too much fun to think about that sort of thing consciously. Nobody else thought about it either. They were all on their way home. Half were gone in two weeks.

  She felt her time there was worth something more than the utter waste of school. Knowing how to survive a concussive explosion seemed far more important than knowing so many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse or memorizing long-winded speeches about where milk came from (vats at Protein-Lactose Synth Factory B-45 South). This was a place devoted to her real interests, where she heard stories praising not science or philosophy but tales of warriors who would rape and pillage the weak or protect them for a price. Sometimes it was like hearing her dad’s bedtime stories again. Idols here were not the kindest or smartest, not the peacemakers but the fighters, the Vikings and samurai, relics of a gladiatorial age when strength was not obsolete but the only trait that mattered. She never knew how much like a relic she’d felt outside until she knew what it was like to be the ideal.

  The verbal lessons went on to redefine how they thought of the outside world. Violet was amazed at how often the world used to be at war. What little history she cared to remember from school was always mentioning a conflict or power struggle, but she never knew those were names for the slaughter of millions and for battles of fire and projectiles and bombs. For something rarely mentioned to the common citizen, violence was truly the way of life for the species, and she learned, all species. It wasn’t always a cause for punishment. It was just the way things were. She felt vindicated.

  They also taught the recruits about threats they might face and stripped bare the illusions that kept civilians feeling safe.

  “The world is, for the moment, at peace, but peace isn’t the natural state of humanity. Most of the planet might have forgotten war, but we cannot forget that such a thing existed and can exist again. You’re still at risk if you bury your head in the ground and tell yourself it ain’t happening. That’s why ostriches went extinct. The fact is we are in a cold war. Those in the know call it the second world cold war. The first was a quarrel between Muslim and Christian countries. No, you don’t need to know what the names mean. They were just ideas, god worship. The only violence in that war was the takeover of the countries involved by citizens who didn’t want to fight over whose god was bigger.

  “The second world cold war will not come to so quick an end. This time it’s a fight for money, and the almighty never had so strong a grasp on nations as the almighty euro. You all know that Scotland is owned by the General Assembly of the United Nations of Earth, GAUNE. GAUNE owns most of the western hemisphere. The United Nations of Earth General Assembly, UNEGA, owns just about everything else. Have no illusions. Everything is owned by one company or the other under the guise of their subsidiary countries. ‘Independent Unions’ are run by UNEGA. The ‘Unbuyable Consortium’ is really a joint venture of ‘Consortium Buyers, LLC’ and ‘Unocal,’ owned by UKI, owned by GAUNE.

  “In ancient times, if a company merged or collapsed, it meant layoffs of employees or shifting of funds. Some of the media wants you to think that’s all it means now, but I am here to tell you, that’s not the half of it. When UNEGA corners one of our markets, when they take one of our subsidiary countries, the entire populace will become indentured servants. Mass slavery. So
me unpatriotic bastards will claim we do the same. They’re right. When you joined up, you gave up your right to care. You serve Scotland now, and you will make damn sure our homeland doesn’t get sold to Asda.

  “The world is so much more fragile than they tell you as kids. If the wrong company gets sold, if the wrong country gets subdivided, if the wrong corporation gets spied on, if the wrong base gets bought, then I assure you all, we will be at war, and world war doesn’t mean Deutschland GmbH getting out of line again. It means mass nuclear annihilation, which we’ll discuss next week. Until then, we have other problems. There are criminal enterprises to be quashed. The Orange Gang has menaced the UKI and mainland UNEGA for decades, despite having been commissioned and owned by the latter. The UKI police hope to end that fight soon. One of the Gang’s top men was just killed. When the time comes to take their headquarters, you can bet we’ll get the call.”

  He didn’t even wink at her. She was very happy he didn’t. He gave them a sizable heap of information about the Orange Gang. Violet knew most of it already, though her dad and the cops had only told her half. She wondered how she knew the rest, never suspecting that she had figured it out on her own. Soon the lieutenant moved on to other gangs like the yakuza, and then on to groups more bizarre than gangs.

  “Cetaceans. Ownership unknown. A ferrofluid curtain has descended between oceanic colonists and land companies. Most Cetacean Divisionists want nothing to do with their land ancestors. There are rumors of a navy called the Valkohai but none are reliable. No legitimate Cetacean organization has ever attacked a human company. Nonetheless, we’re to give you a rundown. The typical Cetacean has one lung and one gill, modified in youth and controlled by a second epiglottis. Vulnerabilities include….”

  Lt. Cameron gave them solid briefings on the Cetaceans, but as the list of enemies grew more obscure, the information grew more sparse. The last two were the stuff of nightmares.