Grunt Life

by Weston Ochse

  “Aquinas and Mason, I presume.”

  We nodded and stepped off the elevator. I felt humidity. The air smelled of old socks and food.

  “I’m Proctor Todd. You’re the last of them. We only have a few minutes until lights out, and the initiation of Phase I. We held the kitchen open for you.”

  “You do know that it’s only late afternoon and that it’s light outside, right?” I asked, trying not to sound too smart-assed.

  Proctor Todd smiled patiently. “We are no longer concerned with the rise and fall of the sun. It has nothing to do with our cycles here in the Complex. What happens up there is for the people up there.”

  “Okay,” I said, sorry I’d mentioned it.

  Proctor Todd turned and began to walk down a hall to our right, and we fell in behind him.

  Twice we came to intersections, and twice we continued through. A pair of blast doors slid open and, beyond, the hallway opened into an immense room, easily the size of a football field. We were immediately assaulted by the roar of conversation from hundreds of people. But when we entered, most of the talking ceased. Men and women sat or stood at tables, on chairs, in corners, in knots or alone. All shapes, sizes and ethnicities, I could feel their gaze like an itch against my skin. Most wore street clothes, although some had on pink or blue surgical scrubs, worn by both men and women without reference to gender. I caught several of their gazes and offered a friendly nod. Some smiled back; others merely stared. All of them, at least all the ones I saw, had the same stare as everyone in my platoon, whether it be Iraq or Afghanistan, and in those gazes I could see the far horizon where death and life didn’t matter.

  The ceiling was at least fifty feet above and was a glistening white. Doorways gaped every few feet around the edges of the immense room. I could barely see into the narrow rooms presented by those near me.

  Proctor Todd escorted us to a table where several men were making way for our arrival. A remote controlled cart approached. With rubber tracks instead of wheels, it was almost completely silent. Its sides held a myriad of openings, and it was topped with runner strips to keep things from sliding.

  “We have ten of these machines, and they’re all named Rodney,” Proctor Todd said. “They’ll take care of you for the next phase of your indoctrination. Rodney, meet the new folks.”

  A panel slid back on its side and a tray came out. Hot tomato soup, two grilled cheese sandwiches and a carton of milk. A plastic spoon and a paper napkin also sat on the tray. I took what was offered and placed it on the table.

  “Better eat,” Proctor Todd said. “It’s almost time.”

  I took a taste of the soup. It was great. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry. I took a bite of a grilled cheese and chased it with more soup. Soon Michelle was sitting at the table too, albeit with a large space between us. I resumed eating, but watched out of the corner of my eye as a Hispanic man with knife-sharp features and a scar beneath his left eye sauntered up to Michelle and sat down. He folded his hands on the table. A tattoo of a diamond with a dot in the middle stood out on the soft part of his left hand, between his thumb and forefinger. He grinned at me, then turned his attention on Michelle.

  “Hey, flaca.” He touched her with his tattooed hand. It was a mistake. He screamed as Michelle tossed her soup on him.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” She stood, her fists balled.

  I leaped to my feet.

  “You bitch!” He held his shirt away from his body and glared at her. He made a disgusted sound and, for a moment, it looked like he was going to lunge at her.

  I stepped between them.

  “You want her, you’ve got to go through me, cabron.”

  “Olivares, get to your quarters,” Proctor Todd said from a few feet behind me.

  The lights began to flash slowly. A voice echoed down from the ceiling. “Commencing lockdown for Phase I. Everyone to your quarters, please.”

  Olivares pointed at me. “This isn’t over, puto!”

  “Oh, I think it is,” I said, grinning out of sheer bravado. “I really think it is.” I didn’t really care if I won or lost. I just wanted to fight someone.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “We’ll see. We’ll just fucking see.”

  I saw my opportunity to fight getting away. I surged forward, but Proctor Todd caught me in a head lock. I swung at the air for a moment, then stopped moving.

  Olivares sneered, then turned on his heel, holding up a middle finger by way of goodbye. Classy.

  “Okay. Okay,” I said, and Proctor Todd let me go. I watched the departing back of my brand new enemy and congratulated myself. It usually took me at least a day in a new place to establish lifelong enemies. I think I’d broken the record.

  Only the dead have seen the end of war.

  Plato

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TEN MINUTES LATER we were all inside our own little rooms. Evidently, Proctor Todd had been waiting for us. Now that we were here, they could begin. On the command of stand back, bars slammed into place from the ceiling and the floor. Each bar was as thick as the grip of a baseball bat and more solid than the stone beneath us. We weren’t going anywhere soon. In fact, it looked like we were locked up like uncommon criminals.

  I could see the cells across the room from me, but not those to my left or right. Still, I could hear grumblings at the locking of the cells. Evidently they hadn’t been locked until now. I had to wonder what they had thought would happen. It seemed an obvious conclusion.

  Five minutes later the big voice returned.

  “Please review your tablets. Follow the guidelines for your release schedule.”

  In a fabric pocket at the base of my single bed was a tablet computer. I touched the screen and it indicated, with the outline of a hand, that it wanted my palm print. I pressed my palm to it and the screen went blank for a moment, then switched to a command screen.

  WELCOME PVT BENJAMIN CARTER MASON.

  ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN?

  Suddenly a voice erupted from my left. “Fuck this shit, puta!” I heard a crash and saw a tablet hit the floor and shatter.

  Olivares—had to be. I shook my head. I wasn’t so sure he didn’t have the right idea. Still, I was willing to try.

  Movement caught my eye and I saw a Rodney heading towards Olivares’s cell. I watched as the side of the robot opened up and a new tablet was proffered on an extender arm. Olivares took it. No sooner had Rodney turned away than the tablet was arching through the air, crashing and shattering, skidding to a stop near the first one.

  The robot seemed to assess the situation for a moment, then disappeared into a niche in the wall where he had entered the room.

  I resumed looking at my tablet.

  I didn’t know how long the others had been here, but I had to figure for some of them it had been quite a long time.

  WELCOME PVT BENJAMIN CARTER MASON.

  ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN?

  So I was a private, now, huh? I’d been a staff sergeant when I left Afghanistan two weeks ago. Quite a demotion. Still, I was no longer in the U.S. Army. I was now in TF OMBRA and I guess I had to prove myself. For a moment I wondered if the Army would put me down as AWOL. After thirty days, they’d convert that to Desertion, which was a serious and jailable offense during war.

  Then I pictured Mr. Pink’s curious mug addressing my commander and I felt better. Somehow, someway, I imagined that it would be handled.

  I pressed the screen, but nothing happened. I spoke to the tablet. “Yes. Begin. Start. Go. Commence. Fuck.” Still with no response.

  I checked the sleeve I’d found the tablet in and pulled free a thin Bluetooth earpiece. I found the power switch and placed it in my ear. A circle appeared in the top right corner of the tablet. When it stopped pulsing, I figured it was ready.

  “I am ready,” I said.

  The screen switched to the logo of TF OMBRA—a triangle like I’d seen on Proctor Todd’s beret, but with the addition of the letters TF at the base of the triangle. The
voice began to speak.

  “Welcome to Task Force OMBRA. You have been chosen to be a member of a special brigade tasked with saving your planet. We call the threat to Earth the Cray. During the next several weeks you will learn about this creature and our interactions with it. We will also assess you for positions within the brigade we will be forming during Phase II. You will be expected to work, read and listen during these weeks and to conform to the schedule provided by your tablet.

  “While we understand that many of you have been through more than your fair share of combat, we ask you to give just a little more. Each and every one of you has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Many of you were eager to commit suicide. Still more of you had mentally checked out, reliving what had gone on before, until reality had no meaning. We offer you a new choice. We offer you new memories, a reality that has meaning, and for those of you still eager to kill yourself, a chance to do it for the greater good of humankind.

  “But that’s the worst-case scenario. We at Task Force OMBRA are working every day to learn more about the Cray, what they want with Earth, and how we can best defeat them. While the nations of our planet will fight them, you will be the world’s special brigade. Task Force OMBRA. Saviors of Earth.”

  The voice faded and the words WOULD YOU LIKE TO REPLAY OR CONTINUE? flashed on the screen.

  I stared at the screen for a moment. It was right out of a science fiction novel. We were being attacked and a rag tag group of men and women were Earth’s only hope. Only this wasn’t a novel, this was reality; and I was starring as a Star Trek redshirt at the end of humanity’s existence.

  I became aware of cursing and yelling from the neighbouring cells. I listened for a moment, then tried my best to tune them out. While there were dozens of voices of protest, most of us—me included—were too curious about why we’d been brought here and how we were supposed to help Earth.

  I contemplated how we were to be trained to use the top secret advanced weaponry necessary to help us defeat the aliens, then I paused. What led me to believe that an alien species might have military superiority just because it had interstellar travel? In Starship Troopers, the aliens were crude creatures who could hurl organic bombs from deep space. The romance of Star Wars had pre-loaded the idea that most space enemies would be humanoid in nature. For all I knew, the Cray were the shapes of dandelion cotton balls and could disintegrate anything they came in contact with.

  I looked at the bars separating me from the great room on the other side and shuddered. Jesus on a pogo stick. That was about the scariest fucking thing I’d ever thought of in my life—a scene of children playing in a field only to be blown apart when the wind picked up.

  I shook the image from my head and returned to the tablet. I’d been sitting on the edge of the bed. Now, I arranged the pillow and leaned against the wall, balancing the tablet on my knees. I was once again faced with the screen which read WOULD YOU LIKE TO REPLAY OR CONTINUE?

  “Continue.”

  It switched to a list of links. At the top of the page, it read WHAT WE THOUGHT WE KNEW with a subheading which read PRE-CRAY HYPOTHESES. Under these were several links. I tried them. Each had pages and pages of information, but I stayed only long enough to get the gist of each one. I’d never been terrific at science. My majors in high school had been football and track, so I soon found my head hurting with the presentation of advanced equations and ideas.

  There were the ZOO HYPOTHESES which posed the idea that an interstellar species would wait until a planet had discovered space travel for first contact.

  Also present was the FERMI PARADOX, which basically argued that if a space-faring species had the superior technology to cross great distances, Earth would have already been colonized.

  I read with interest the PALEOCONTACT HYPOTHESIS, also known as the ANCIENT ASTRONAUT HYPOTHESIS, which purported that Earth had been visited by intelligent beings in the past, pointing at ancient religious reliefs and such wonders as the Nazca Plains as evidence of earlier visitations.

  The DRAKE EQUATION baffled me as it put forth a mathematical concept to show when and how Earth would be visited. But even I understood that with so many unknown variables, it was an equation which could only be used in hindsight to prove itself.

  Then there was the NEANDERTHAL POSTULATE, which identified the idea that once an intelligent species reaches a certain point, it destroys those who might compete for the same resources. I wondered if this was what the Cray were doing. Perhaps they saw us as a threat to their existence and had decided to remove us prior to us attaining a similar level of technology.

  I skipped over several others and ended up on HOSTILE TERRAFORMING, which presented the idea that our planet could be rendered uninhabitable for us, and inhabitable for the invading species. Several quotes from War of the Worlds were present, including one I remembered from my middle school reading: “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

  There were arguments noting that the Earth was becoming hotter, more arid, and that the ice caps were melting, and extrapolating that we were already being terraformed. The conspiracy theories continued. I tried to pay attention to them, but my gaze kept returning to the Wells quote. The idea that we were being watched by some intergalactic Peeping Tom was terrifying.

  We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war.

  Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

  CHAPTER SIX

  I WOKE UP the next morning—or at least it felt like morning, even though I had no possible way of knowing—and returned to my tablet. COMPLETION OF YOUR PROGRAM OF INSTRUCTION WILL RESULT IN RELEASE FROM PHASE I TO PHASE II were the words I read with excitement, until I saw what was expected of us. The sheer number of books and papers I was supposed to read seemed impossible. I counted ninety-six manuscripts, forty-seven movies, and seven biographies which we were expected to read well enough to provide interactive input to the tablet upon completion. It was a genius strategy. With no bars, it might take some of us forever to complete this list. Hell, let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t even try and finish, if we weren’t locked inside the cells. By limiting our freedom, then offering it back to us if we completed, they were giving a huge incentive. Even the laziest of us would be inspired to get this done.

  The biographies included Julius Caesar, Chesty Puller, David Hackworth, and several other soldiers.

  Of the movies, I’d seen around half of them. They were the usual suspects: Kelly’s Heroes, A Bridge Too Far, Guns of Navarone, Hamburger Hill, They Were Expendable, We Were Soldiers, The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, Saving Private Ryan, and Platoon. But there were also some foreign films I had never heard of, like Ivan’s Childhood, Kanał, and Gallipoli. There were also some science fiction movies, such as Starship Troopers, the modern version of War of the Worlds, Battleship, Battle: Los Angeles, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Puppet Masters, They Live, and Independence Day; I’d seen all of them except They Live and The Puppet Masters. I wanted to look forward to watching them, but I had all those books to read as well. I had a choice. I could either let the tablet read them to me, or I could read them myself.

  Although I wasn’t the fastest reader in the universe, I wasn’t bad. I’d preferred Mack Bolan and Casca books, growing up, and enjoyed immersing myself in anything with guns. Plus, there were some books which were passed around the military that I’d already read. These included Armor, Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Old Man’s War, Ender’s Game, The Mote in God’s Eye, Legion of the Damned, Hammers S
lammers and Bolo. But there were a lot I had never read, books by C. J. Cherryh, David Gerrold, Jerry Pournelle, and Robert Buettner, to name a few.

  Still, when I saw the list, it didn’t seem too bad. I’d read enough of them that I thought I could get a head start by answering questions about those I already knew. I must have read John Steakley’s Armor a dozen times. When I’d been working mechanized infantry, it had been all the rage. I remembered it being filled with violent combat scenes, something me and the other guys loved. But I also remembered it having a certain sensibility, as the main character developed almost a reluctance to continue killing an enemy who wouldn’t stop. Was this perhaps why they wanted us to read it? Because they were concerned for our humanity?

  I selected Armor on the tablet, then skipped right to the test. The first question glowed on the screen: DESCRIBE HOW YOU WOULD OVERCOME YOUR LOVE FOR A COMRADE MUCH LIKE FOREST DID FOR KENT IN ORDER TO SERVE THE GREATER GOOD?

  I stared at the question for several minutes. Perhaps I’d exaggerated the number of times I’d read the book. I might have only read it once. In fact, I might not have finished it at all. The idea that I’d actually read it once, much less a dozen times, might have been overly-optimistic. For the life of me I couldn’t remember any character named Kent. I know there was a pirate. And I knew there was a guy in a mech suit doing a lot of cool shit, but that’s all I remembered.

  I tried to select the next question, but I couldn’t get to it without answering the first. I was going to have to read the book. Damn them.

  I chose The Forever War instead. I was sure I’d read that at least twice, once in basic training, and once at a FOB in Iraq. I’d read that the author, Joe Haldeman, had been in Vietnam. There weren’t too many books written by people who’d actually been in war. This was one of them, and I remembered staring into the night and wondering what was out there beyond our position, and if Mr. Haldeman had done the same when he was in Vietnam. Had he had the same thoughts? A menagerie of fast food sandwiches, television shows, songs I used to dance to with a certain girl, and the recent memories of the death of one of my platoon mates, all squished and smashed like a human-sized pizza, but with too much red sauce. Or had he been thinking about writing The Forever War? When a girl I’d been dating for several months between deployments once asked me what my favorite book was, this was the book that came to mind. Whether it was my favorite was up for debate, but it was as good a contender as any of the others. I told her that it perfectly described the inability of a soldier to ever return to civilian life. She looked at me in stunned silence for a moment, then turned and left. It took me a long time to realize that I’d just said that I’d never be able to be with her, never really give my heart and mind to her. I’d basically told her I was broken.