The Fifth Battalion

by Michael Priv

  “ Well, not us specifically, not the 5th Battalion, but all the others, yes, thieves, murders, repeated sexual offenders, violent religious extremists, con men and frauds. But the ones they send here are only the incorrigibles, the recidivists, those who wouldn’t change their ways. They call them ‘nonconformists.’ Let’s say a thief, Bob, keeps on stealing despite the extensive psycho-therapy, rest and walks regiments, spiritual retreats, hard physical labor therapy, helping people and animals therapy, hypnosis, medications, house arrests and you name it—all unsuccessful. By reverting to his larcenous ways Bob would finally relegate himself to the basket case category. Now we find Bob, as a person, as a spirit, here on Earth serving his ‘forever dead’ sentence. The authorities gave up on him, and the objective then became getting rid of Bob permanently. You get the concept of ‘permanently’? No way to get rid of Bob, an immortal spirit, permanently, unless you knocked off his memory and convinced Bob that he was a body, mortal and not even a spirit.”

  I understood the concept. The continuity, the transcendence of a spirit inhabiting a succession of bodies, would render the capital punishment ineffective. The criminal could just return in a different body even more twisted and dangerous than before. The authorities apparently found a permanent solution. They wipe out your memory of past lives, so you don’t know who you really are and where you came from, making it impossible for you to ever come back. And it is irreversible. I guess you piss people off long enough and they’ll find a way to get rid of you.

  Jane glanced at me sideways again, wrinkling her dainty nose in an apologetic smile. “Too much to take in?” she asked in a lowered voice. I shrugged, “What the hell, keep going, I’ll process it later.”

  “I’ll help you,” she promised, and I knew she certainly would. I caught myself thinking, no, feeling,that I knew her for a very long time. She called it a vibe. Holly Jesus and Moses, I felt a vibe. I decided against telling her. What if she took it wrong?

  Jane continued, “The procedure the authorities use to wipe out the convicts’ memory is called thought injection, a brutal form of drug-induced hypnosis, fortified by excruciating pain, culminating in death of the body. Certain verbal and visual commands are given to the subject during the torture and through the entire procedure and then a few seconds past the point of death.”

  “ Motherfuckers! Pardon…”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What shocking brutality! Where? Here on Earth?”

  “No. This is a Murabian prison.”

  “Where is this damn Murabia? Talking about humans being criminal! That Murabia place is really fucked up!” “ This practice is actually the same all over the galaxy and beyond, as far as I know. They have the same laws in any of the Baltizor Confederacy worlds. Murabi Empire is a very old Empire, located in another planetary system, dissimilar to ours, called Sagittarius, Sigma Sagittarii, to be exact. Their star is young and massive and very hot. The natives call their star Ezregar.Murabi Empire occupies the furthest three planets from Ezregar, locally known as Choss Oa,Choss Byuand Choss Der. Choss means ‘home.’ So that would be Home One, Home Two and Home Three.”

  Home? The idiots. We are all nomads. No such thing as a home. “Our” homes belong to the bankers, landlords or the tax collectors. Now look at these atrocities! Apparently, all the humans walking around here on Earth were tortured to death right at their home before they were dumped here against their will and with their eternity ripped off from them to boot. No wonder most people are crazy one way or another. They survived the horrors far beyond anything we’ve ever suspected the existence of here on Earth. Hitler and Stalin were small angry boys throwing dirt at each other’s sandals by comparison. Disgusting.

  Wait, but what about Linda? Apparently, she was one of the convicts. What could have she possible done so terrible to merit the forever dead sentence? No, this couldn’t be true. Beset by doubts again, I needed a break.

  I had to digest all this. Common sense to the contrary, deep down I knew Jane was telling the truth. Deep down we always know. Plus, Jane probably couldn’t have invented this stuff, even if she wanted to—and why would she want to? How would she gain from convincing me that this crap was true? I came up blank. I couldn’t think of any way she’d gain from this. Not to say there wasn’t any. I just couldn’t think of any.

  “So, they dumped these convicts here a long time ago and forgot all about them forever? Just scratched them off the roster?” I asked. “ Nobody forgot about the convicts. This is a prison facility, so there are Guards. Also new prisoners never stop coming. We get a constant inflow of new convicts. Daily. Hourly maybe. Every minute. Nobody knows. They transmit them here instantaneously, a few seconds after the condemned separate from the bodies after the treatment. The receivers are installed deep in the oceans.”

  “So, these three planets Choss, is that where we are all from?” “Th at is where all the convicts are from, not us. We’re different. In addition to the ever-increasing convict population, two other small groups reside here on Earth—about two thousand troops of the 5th Battalion, which is us, and sorry, Norm, I do mean you too, and a relatively small contingent of the Guards.”

  “What about different races and other categories of people like the Eskimos, Polynesians, Arabs, whites, blacks, Asians—or even gays, transgenders and such?”

  “Nope. The whites, blacks, purples, turquoise , gays, straight— are all one and the same category with not the slightest difference between them. The only different groups are the convicts, the 5th Battalion and the Guards. We are with the 5th Battalion.”

  “Whoa ! Slow down there, Jane. Doesn’t make sense…” “Yes?”

  “Well, I mean I have so many questions. First of all, so you’re also from the 5thBattalion? Like Bill?” I already knew the answer, so I rushed on, “I already know the answer. I just never thought they had women in the 5thBattalion.”

  “You can’t always be born a male. Normally, you are a male only about half the time. Most of us, through the power of intention, can bend the 50-50 odds, but you can’t fool the odds in the long run. No matter what, you are a female in about half of your lifetimes. We’re all on a longterm contract, so sometimes you’re born a boy and other times you’re a girl. We always had plenty of females among the troops. Anything else?”

  “Yes, so the Guards, right? Should I be worried about them right now?” “Worried? Listen, first of all, they’re not normally after you. They’re just keeping the status quo. Second, you will not die. You always get to walk away—not your body, mind you, but you. So theoretically there is reallynothing for you to worry about. That’s not how it works subjectively. We worry, we feel fear and pain, we don’t want to die. So, yeah, go ahead and worry.”

  “You’re saying I’m immortal. But I don’t feel immortal. Why is that?” “ Because your body is mortal. You keep identifying yourself with your body. That’s the origin of the confusion. You’re not your body. Think—what do you mean when you say ‘I’? Do you really mean your shoe size? Is that what makes you ‘you’?”

  “I suppose that would be a part of it,” this was confusing, but I was absorbing this data like a sponge. I perceived that there was another part of me being me, which I never thought about, the spiritual component. I wasn’t just a body. I felt this information nourishing a part of me that was long neglected and was in desperate need of attention. “I see what you are getting at. My soul, right? My soul is immortal?”

  “ Your soul is actually you. You can’t havea soul because you are that soul. You are the soul currently occupying the body equipped with size eleven feet. See that?”

  “Okay, and so that soul, me, is immortal? I get it.” “Yes , it is immortal. It simply cannot die. Death is not something we can pull off. We, the souls, the spirits, the ghosts, are inorganic by nature; we’re not alive in a conventional sense of the word, so we can’t die in a conventional sense of the word. Souls die as a matter of semantics, but it’s nothing permanent.”


  “What are you talking about, not alive?” “ The spirit. I’m talking about the spirit. I’m not talking about the body. The body is alive. The body dies. The word ‘death’ always refers to the body. Okay? Got it on death?”

  “Yes, I got it. Death is always about the body.” “Okay. So here is the thing, we, the spirits, we’re not alive the way an organic organism is alive. We are a form of energy. Our true existence is outside of any time-space system, outside of life. Being at home outside of time, in truth, we cannot even grow old, except by our own consideration. The soul, the spirit, is thoughtbased. It’s a form of thought energy, in other words. You are a self-aware spiritual entity which is essentially a more or less complete thought, a definition. You noticed how thoughts seem timeless and seem to come out of nowhere—out of no-time and nospace?”

  “How the hell can a thought do that? Who’s thought? Who thought the thought? Wait a minute…” Jane continued, as if she hadn’t heard me, “You, we, all of us here or on any other planet anywhere, we are all the same way, just units of a peculiar energy of thought, also referred to as ‘spirits’ or ‘ghosts,’ or ‘souls.’ It really makes no difference what planet or what country, or village, or city you’re from, because, honestly, you are not from any of those places anyway. Your body is born somewhere, but youare not native to any physical location. We existed before time and space and we can and do exist both within the time stream and outside of it. We pick up a body out of boredom, mainly, we get absorbed into all the experiences and drama, the body ages and dies, we grab another body. Makes sense?”

  “Reincarnation?”

  “Sure. Call it that, if you wish.”

  “But what about suffering? Losses? Are those real?” “As real as you make them.”

  “What about children, the mother instinct, family bonds and all that?” “ Drama and more drama. Very satisfying. Lots of fun, the family. I love my kids, my hubby, very proud of them. They’re a huge part of my life. So is sex. See how real it all is? This islife. Just because life is a drama, it doesn’t make it less real. Do you understand?”

  “Not fully,” I admitted.

  “Well, do you love your mother?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “ Do you understand that spirits are not born from mothers? As far as spirits are concerned, nobody had ever been a mother to another spirit. So is the love you feel for your mother a lie? No, it isn’t. It is real.”

  Wow. I gave it a thought. I could actually see how that could be. Life being a drama didn’t mean it was not true for those who lived it. “Okay, Jane, so what about the Guards?”

  “ We call them Tinies or Meatheads, they hate that,” Jane chuckled. “Yes, so the Guards, first and foremost, are the custodians of the force field generators. They have other duties but their main duty is to keep the convicts locked up.”

  “Bastards.” “ Just government employees doing their job. Being a prison, Earth is surrounded by a force field at a distance of about four thousand miles. That field prevents the imprisoned souls from wandering off, including us, the prisoners of war.”

  “So we, the ex-military, and the Guards, can remember, right?” “Yes, we can. But, first, let me correct you. We are not ex- anything. We are prisoners of war. We have all signed long-term contracts back home. We’re professional soldiers, most of us with thousands of years to go on our contracts. We have never been discharged, so we’re on active duty. Our bodies were killed here in action by the Guards a long time ago, that’s all that happened. As our beloved Commanding Officer General Brell used to say, ‘Death is a poor excuse for dereliction of duty.’”

  “You referred to the CO as ‘beloved.’ Was that ironic?” “ Not at all! We love Brell and look up to him. General Brell is a wonderful, honorable person, fair, completely reliable and trustworthy. A very powerful person, too, in a good way. You met him in Persia. What did you think of him?”

  I would have readily given my life for him. “Where is he now? I made a promise to him.” “Nobody knows where he is. He took himself off the scene.” “But…”

  “I said I don’t know,” Jane suddenly snapped. I must have stumbled onto a raw spot.

  “Okay, no prob. So about being on active duty?”

  “Our duty as POWs is to escape and evade. That includes you, Norm.”

  “Me? Who am I supposed to evade?” “You are a Confederate soldier. The Baltizor Confederacy of United Stars. We swore to uphold the Confederate War Code, and we did for many a lifetime long before we arrived here.” Jane got up again to get another Perrier from her fridge.

  “Got it.” Well, not really, but I had to say something. Couldn’t just stare at her stunning legs. I tried to adjust my thinking to the notion of being an immortal soldier on a very long-term contract. “So how did the Guards wipe out two thousand troops to the last man? Was one hell of a shoot-out, I bet.”

  “No. Actually it was all over in under ten seconds. We outnumbered them about 70:1, too, as we found out later. But at the time we didn’t even suspect their existence. They used what’s called a ‘vibe machine’ on us. A vibe machine consists of three energy terminals around the target area that wirelessly produce a prolonged electric jolt of a certain frequency, amperage and voltage in the millions. That much electricity pulverizes the bodies into pink mist within a few seconds.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I just stared at this woman. “You were pulverized into pink mist?” “Yes, we all were.”

  “How did it feel?”

  “Pretty much like it sounds,” she let out a labored sigh and shook her head. “Not much fun. Your body is torn into microscopic pieces. Hurt like hell, but it’s quick. That wasn’t even the worst part.”

  “No! What else did they do to you?” “To us,” Jane corrected me. “Yes, you see, Norman, the use of any variation of a vibe machine anywhere in this galaxy is prohibited and severely punished, because of the birth defects and mutations they produce even outside the strike perimeter. So we’re stuck here, because the Guards will keep a lid on this, they’ll never let us go. There must be a statute of limitations on their illegal weapons use, but we don’t know what it is. You look puzzled. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I was just trying to figure out how they built three terminals and a huge power plant to zap you. Were you all keeping your eyes and ears shut tight for a few months?”

  “ They hacked into the power plant we built as a part of our mission orders. We also built two towers, the terminals on both sides of the Base, as a part of that power plant. They simply hacked into the system, taking it over for a few seconds, retasked the hardware, reconfigured the output, got their space transport in position, using it as the third terminal, and threw the switch.”

  “Wow!” I was duly impressed with the conniving bastards. “So these Guards, they aren’t just garden-variety prison guards. They are as dangerous as a kick-ass special forces unit or even worse, right?”

  “Right,” Jane nodded tersely.

  “Is that all I need to know about the 5th Battalion and the Guards?”

  “Well, we’ve been trying to escape ever since. Now we are midanother attempt.”

  “Okay, I’m tracking.”

  “I guess I should also brief you on a trivial matter of your back pay,” she added smiling.

  I couldn’t stand it. “Back pay too? How much?”

  Jane leaned back with a hearty laugh. “You just found out and already asking how much?” “I just wanted to take Linda travelling. Can I get some of my back pay upfront and take her somewhere nice, like Hawaii? She loves Hawaii.”

  “We have to get out of here first to collect the pay. If we completely abandoned our escape attempts, we would forfeit the back pay for dereliction of duty and would also be subject to a courtmartial—if we ever succeeded in presenting ourselves for the trial. The bottom line—we can’t stop trying.”

  “Just a second, Jane, are you serious about the back pay?” Jane just nodded.

  “Wow!”


  “ I know, right?” Jane laughed. “The POW’s one-eighth pay for about five thousand years with compounded interest. Do you like Maui? It’s yours. Call it Lindaui. Just joking, but you get the idea. How are you taking all this?”

  “Yeah, well, mind-boggling, as you can imagine—the back pay and all.”

  “Kind of fun to think about sometimes,” Jane shrugged. I nodded. Me, a billionaire? I could imagine Linda basking in whatever the billionaires habitually basked in, but I couldn’t envision myself in that role. Could that be why I never had any money?

  “ We talked about the memory loss,” I reminded. “You mentioned earlier that the force screen erases our memory, correct? Like me, for example, I can’t remember. But somehow it doesn’t seem to affect the Guards. Are the Guards wired differently?”

  “The Guards arrive here every twenty-five years on a fifty-year contract.” “By the way, how do they get here?”

  “On a spaceship. They have one parked here somewhere.” “A real spaceship?”

  “Oh, yes, very real .” Jane set back looking serious. “You saw it in Spain. We have been looking for it forever. Once we find it and wrestle it out from the Guards, we can return home as heroes and collect our back pay.” I nodded my understanding. “You probably should also know that Guards are humanoids recruited from heavy gravity planets. That gives them the edge. Under these conditions, they are immensely strong and light on their feet. You can tell them apart in a crowd. You see a very muscular guy or even a woman with thick necks and powerful chunky legs, with a sensible haircut and sober cop eyes, you got yourself a Guard.”

  “We don’t like them, right?” “No, we don’t,” Jane agreed. “We stay away from them, if we can. They’re not particularly vicious, but they can turn into bad news at a drop of a hat. They are very capable, well-trained and wellfinanced. And it’s nothing personal to them. Stay away from them. Now, about their memory.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The memory loss is caused by the effects of the force field, which over time overwhelms our own matrix memory system.” “A who? A what?” “You see, l ong-term memories, the past-lives, including the context, our decisions and solutions to various problems at the time, are not stored anywhere. A soul does not travel with a truckload of suitcases. These memories are created anew within a certain energy matrix any time you want to view them. We carry with us the energy field, the matrix, and the DNA of the memories, so to speak, so we can recreate any memory at will. With me so far?”