by George R. R.
* * * *
Blaze hadn’t brought up the largest danger and the biggest attraction of being a “mechanic,” as the soldiers who operated the soldierboys were called. They all had to be jacked, a hole drilled into the back of the skull and an electronic interface inserted, so you shared the thoughts and observations, feelings, of the rest of your platoon. There were five men and five women in a platoon, so you become like a mythical beast, with ten brains, twenty arms, and five cocks and five cunts. A lot of people tried to join up for that experience. That was not quite what the army was looking for.
Almost all mechanics were drafted, because the army needed a peculiar mix of attitudes and eptitudes. Empathy is obvious, being able to stay sane with nine other people sharing your deepest feelings and memories. But they also needed people who were comfortable with killing, for the so-called “hunter-killer” platoons. They were the ones who got all the attention, the bonuses, even fan clubs. I could assume I wasn’t going to be one of them. I didn’t even like to go fishing, because of the blood and guts and hurting the fish.
The installation of the jack was also risky. The rate of failure was classified, but various sources put it between 5 and 15 percent. Most of the failures didn’t die, but I wondered how many of them went back to intellectual pursuits.
I found out that Basic Training was indeed full-time, for eight weeks. The first four weeks were intensely physical, old-fashioned boot camp— not obviously useful for people who would spend their military career sitting in a cage, thinking. After four weeks, they installed the jack, and you started training in tandem with your other nine.
I did apply to be reassigned, to infantry or medical or quartermaster. (They crossed that off; you can’t join a noncombat arm in time of war.) I was rejected the day I applied.
So I increased my jogging from one mile a day to three, and worked out on the gym machines every other day. Basic training had a bad reputation, and I wanted to be ready for the physical side of it.
I also spent more social time with Blaze than I ever had before. She had no teaching load during the summer. I had legitimate reasons to drop by the Jupiter Project, though I could do most of my work from any computer console anywhere in the world. I tended to show up around lunchtime or when the office nominally closed at five.
You couldn’t call it dating, given the difference in our ages, but it wasn’t just coworkers having lunch, either. It could have evolved into something if there’d been more than two weeks, perhaps.
But on September 2, she took me to the airport and gave me a tight hug and a kiss that was a little more interesting than a coworker saying “goodbye for now.”
* * * *
When I got off the plane in St. Louis, there was a woman in uniform holding a card with my name and two others on it. She was bigger than me, and white, and looked pretty mean. I stifled the impulse to walk right by her and get a ticket to Finland.
When the other two, a woman and a man, showed up, she walked us to an emergency exit that apparently had been disabled, then down onto the tarmac in the 105-degree heat. We walked a fast quarter mile to where a couple of dozen people stood in ranks, sweating beside a military bus.
“No talking. Get your sorry ass in line.” A big black man who didn’t need a megaphone. “Put your bags on the cart. You’ll get them back in eight weeks.”
“My medicine—,” a woman said.
“Did I say no talking?” He glared at her. “If you filled out your medical forms correctly, your pills will be waiting for you. If not, you’ll just have to die.”
A couple of people chuckled. “Shut up. I’m not kidding.” He stepped up to the biggest man and spoke quietly, his face inches away. “I’m not kidding. In the next eight weeks, some of you may die. Usually from not following orders.”
When the fiftieth person came, he loaded us all into the bus, a wheeled oven. My god, I thought, Fort Leonard Wood must be over a hundred miles away. The windows didn’t open.
I sat down next to a pretty white woman. She glanced at me and then looked straight ahead. “Are you going to mechanics’ school?”
“Go where they send me,” she said with a South Texas drawl, not looking at me. Later that day, I would learn that mechanics train with the regular infantry, “shoes,” for the first month, and it’s not wise to reveal that you were going to spend all your subsequent career sitting down in the air-conditioning.
We drove only a couple of miles, though, to the military airport adjacent to the civil one, and piled into a flying-wing troop transport, where we were stuffed onto benches without seat belts. It was a fast and bumpy twenty-minute flight, the big sergeant standing in front of us, hanging on to a strap, glaring. “Anybody pukes, he has to clean it up while everybody else waits.” Nobody did.
We landed on a seriously bumpy runway and were separated by gender and marched off in two different directions. The men, or “dicks,” were led into a hot metal building, where we took off all our clothes and put them in plastic bags marked with our names. If they were going to ferment for eight weeks, the army could keep them.
They said we would get clothes when we needed them, and had us shuffle through a line, where we contributed blood and urine and got two shots in each arm and one in the butt, the old-fashioned way, painful. Then we walked through a welcome shower into a room with piles of towels and clothing, fatigues sorted more or less by size. Then we actually got to sit down while three dour men with robot assistants measured our feet and brought us boots.
There was a rotating holo of a handsome guy showing us what we were supposed to look like—the trouser legs “bloused” into boots, shirt seam perfectly aligned with belt buckle and fly, shirtsleeves neatly rolled to mid-forearm. His fatigues were new and tailored, though; ours were used and approximate. He wasn’t sweating.
I thought I’d second-guessed the army by having my hair cut down to a half-inch burr. They shaved me down to the skin, in retribution.
* * * *
The sun was low, and it had cooled down to about ninety, so they took us for a little run. That didn’t bother me except for being overdressed. We went around a quarter-mile cinder track, in formation. After four laps, the women joined us, and together we did eight more.
Then they piled all of us, hot and dripping, into a freezing mess hall. We waited in a long line for cold greasy fried chicken, cold mashed potatoes, and warm wilted salad.
The woman who sat down across from me watched me strip the sodden fried batter from the chicken. “On a diet?”
“Yeah. No disgusting food.”
“I think you goin’ to lose a lot of weight.” We shook hands across the table. Carolyn from Georgia, a pretty black woman a little younger than me. “What, you graduated and got nailed?”
“Yeah. Ph.D. in physics.”
She laughed. “I know where you’re goin’.”
“You, too?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know why. BFA in Creative Viewing.”
“So what’s your favorite show?”
“Hate ‘em all. Unlike most folks, I know why I hate ‘em. Now tell me you’d die if you didn’t get yourKill Squad fix every week.”
“Don’t have a cube, or time to watch it. When I was a kid, my parents let me watch only ten hours a week.”
“Wow...would you marry me? Or you got somethin’ goin’ already.”
“I’m gay, except for sheep.”
“Ewe.” We both laughed a little too hard at that.
* * * *
Shoe training was about half PT and half learning how to use weapons we’d never see again, as mechanics. Even the shoes would probably never use a bayonet or knife or bare hands—how often would you not have a gun, and face an enemy who didn’t have one either?
(I knew the rationale was more subtle, training us to be aggressive. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea for mechanics, though—your soldierboy might wipe out a village because you lost your temper.)
Carolyn’s last name was Collins,
and we were next to each other in the alphabet. We spent a lot of time talking, sometimes sotto voce when we were standing in formation, which got us into trouble a couple of times. (“One of you lovebirds runs around the track while the other finishes painting this wall.”)
I was really smitten with her—I mean the kind of brain-chemistry-level addiction that you ought to be able to control by the time you’re eighteen. I thought of her all the time, and lived to see her face when we mustered in the mornings. Her expressions and gestures made me think she felt the same way about me, though we carefully wouldn’t use the word love.
After two weeks of constant training, they unexpectedly gave us half a Sunday off. A bus took us into St. Robert, a small town that existed to separate soldiers from their money. We had to be back by 6:00 sharp, or we’d be AWOL.
On the way to the bus station in St. Robert, we passed several hotels and motels that advertised hourly rates / clean sheets. When we got off the bus, I faltered, trying to frame a proposition, and she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me through the closest place’s door.
We’d never even kissed before. So we did some of that while trying to get each other’s fatigues off without popping any buttons.
Speaking of popping, I was not exactly the long-lasting partner-oriented lover I would’ve liked to have been. But I had a certain amount of hydrostatic as well as psychological pressure built up; the barracks offered no privacy for masturbation.
She laughed that off, though, and we just played around for a while, until I was ready for a more patient and slow coupling. It was better than my dreams.
We had an hour before we had to be on the bus. There was a bar next door, but Carolyn didn’t feel like being stared at by our fellow draftees. So we sat on the damp and rumpled sheets and shared a glass of metallic-tasting water.
“Did you try to get out of it?” she asked.
“Well, yeah. My adviser pointed out that if I joined the infantry, at my age and with my education, I’d just have a desk job for a couple of years.”
“Yeah, right. You believe that now?”
I laughed. “They’d put me in a bayonets-only platoon. Get out there and stab for your country.”
“God and country. Don’t forget God.”
“If it weren’t for God, we wouldn’t get half of Sunday off.”
“Praise the Lord.” She took my penis between two fingers and wiggled it. “Don’t suppose there’s any juice left in this little guy.”
“Not for a while. We could do it on the bus.”
“Okay. Hold you to it.” She yawned and stretched so hard, a couple of joints popped. “Maybe we should go get a beer. Show those lonely cunts who got her man.”
“Let’s.” Though I doubted there was much loneliness in town.
She dressed me carefully, smoothing the uniform down with long slow strokes. Then she stroked my face and my hands, eyes closed, as if she were memorizing.
She held me close then, and took a long deep breath. “Thank you, Julian,” she whispered. “It’s been some while.”
So I tried to dress her, but got the buttons wrong. All very romantic. It’s also easier to take panties off of someone than to put them back on.
The nonsmoking part of the bar still had a whiff of tobacco and light weed. Ice-cold beer but no place to sit. So we stayed at the bar, loud with music and laughing, and nodded hello to some of our fellow trainees.
“You didn’t grow up in the South,” she said. “You talk funny, you don’t mind my sayin’.”
“Actually, I was born in Georgia, but my parents moved north before I started school, Delaware. Then four years at Harvard will screw up your accent forever.”
“You majored in science.”
“Physics, then astrophysics for the master’s. Moved into particle physics for the doctorate. Post-doc, too, assuming basic doesn’t kill me.”
“I don’t know shit about any of that.”
“Never expect anyone to.” I put my hand on hers. “Like I know anything about film.”
“Joo-lian.” She slid her hand away. “Never condescend to someone who can kill you with a single blow. Six different ways.”
“Sorry. Takes you four years to get a degree at Harvard, and then forty to get over it.”
“Well, I ain’t waitin’ forty. You best get your shit together.” But she smiled and put her hand back.
A short private from the permanent party walked through the door with a megaphone. “Aw-right, you listen up. Trainees Charlie Company, you bus is heah. You not in that bus in five minutes, you AWOL. We come back heah and put you ass in chains.”
There was a moment of silence when he went through the door, and then a low murmur.
“How could they put just your ass in chains, and not the rest of you?”
“Think big stapler,” she said, and finished off her beer. “Chariot awaits.”
* * * *
The next two weeks didn’t have any Sundays. Now that they were pretty sure no one was going to have a heart attack doing laps, they pushed us to the wall. The morning after our afternoon-long furlough, they woke us up at 2:30, striding through the barracks, beating on metal pans. Five minutes to dress, then a ten-mile run with full pack and rifle. When people stopped to puke, we had to run in place, shouting “Pussy, pussy!”
They continued with the early-morning runs about every third day, increasing them by a mile each time. The drill instructors acted like it was malicious torture, but it was obviously well planned. We had to get the running in, but if we did it during those hundred-degree-plus days, people would get heatstroke and die.
The instructors also made sure everybody knew that the intensity of training was our own fault. “Only got four weeks to turn these CGI pussies into soldiers” was the refrain.
Carolyn and I did have one more opportunity, a thirty-minute lunch break in thick woods. I got poison ivy on my butt, and she on her feet. We had the same medic look at us, and he advised us to next time take along something like a shelter half or at least a newspaper. But there never was a next time, not in Basic Training.
* * * *
The first day of CGI training, they took the fifty of us in a bus with blacked-out windows to someplace that might have been a half hour away, or a mile, going in circles. It was in deep woods, though, and underground.
A camouflaged door slid open to reveal dimly lit stairs going down. The entrance was guarded by two huge soldierboys, whose camouflage perfectly mimicked the woods behind them. If you stood still, you couldn’t see them; walking by them, they looked like a heat shimmer roughly the shape of a nine-foot-tall man.
The underground complex was large. We stood in formation in a foyer, and a private read our names off a clipboard and gave us platoon designations and room numbers. Carolyn and I were both Alpha Platoon and went to room A.
There were ten hard chairs in the room and, incongruously, a table with party snacks and a tub full of iced drinks. An older man in a jumpsuit with no insignia watched us file in.
He didn’t speak until the last of us sat down. “I’m going to leave you here alone for one hour and thirty minutes. Your job is to get to know one another.
“In a couple of days, you’re all going to be jacked, and none of you will have any secrets from the others. That’s all I’m going to say.
“When I leave the room, please take off all your clothes. Get a drink and a snack and...tell each other your secrets, your problems. It will be easier for you to deal with one another if you have some preparation.
“When the bell rings, you should get dressed, and I’ll come back to talk with you. Yes, private?”
“Sir,” she said, “I...I’ve never been naked in front of a man. I—”
“You’re about to be. You didn’t have brothers?”
“No, sir.”
“In a couple of days, you’ll have five of them. And ‘naked’ does not begin to describe how exposed you’ll be. But you will all be gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir,” we all said. She was a pretty little blonde, and I was half looking forward to seeing the rest of her and half sympathetic with her anxiety.
He smiled, face crinkling. “Just look each other in the eyes and you’ll be all right.” He left the room.
I talked with Lou Mangiani while we undressed, both of us studiously not looking at the women (but seeing them with some intensity). Lou’s in his late twenties, working as a baker in New York City for his father’s Italian restaurant. That’s about as much as I knew about anybody except Carolyn. For the past four weeks, we had trained till we dropped and got up hours before our bodies wanted to; not much time for chat.