My new life flashed before my eyes, weapons instructions, a decade of twenty mile hikes that end in live fire drills, constant wargames, simunition -a sort of non lethal projectile- games that last months on end. Trench warfare with and without live artillery support. Accidents took their toll, many lost the will to fight or gave up and were euthanized by our instructors. Singularity conscripts obeyed or died. All told, we started with a thousand of us ‘clones’ and by the end one hundred and five of us remained. Veterans of war before we ever set foot on the battlefield. I knew it was all a dream, a product of the cryotube’s flash training. But I was no longer the pilot of my own body. It moved and obeyed the whims of Sage Yurten.

My new identity.

I am Sage Yurten, elite conscript of the Holy Singularity.

Our body is teleported once more, this time to a holding area. The cryotubes here are identical, aligned in a hexagonal shape that matches the room we now call home. Only my eyes are open. All others are still asleep, including Sage Yurten. A presence dreams within my mind, picturing a life spent beneath the earth in bunkers filled with ammunition. Dreaming and waking simultaneously is a fever dream. To combat the separate lines of thought I focus on what is around me.

Cryotubes line the walls, ceiling, and floor, allowing six rows of human beings to be crammed into the tunnel. Our bodies float in gel under reduced gravity, at peace. Except for me. My heart slows, often stopping for seconds at a time. I never sleep. No, one eye is always cracked, watching armed instructors enter the room, waking my former Earthlings. Blurry outlines don clothing and gear, then seal gasmasks over faces, with only a faint red glow leaking out of their eyes.

Through the glass I see a familiar woman. Attractive despite her shaved head. Light glistens off her pleasantly round dome, so similar to how she looked when we both attended earth science 102 a semester ago, and sat opposite each other. Maybe it was some effect of her African heritage, or maybe her parents had not dropped her as a kid, but the shaved head was startlingly feminine. So when Doctor Abrahms went on his rants about railguns being a thousand years out, we had front row seats to each other. I wonder where old Dr. Abrahms is now. Maybe still in the lecture hall standing at the center of the semicircular room. Alone. Robbed of any purpose by his student’s abduction. Regret fills my mind, annoyed that I never learned this woman’s name. Then I curse her. She’s resisting the clothes, covering herself and crying. Curse her stupidity.

Play along idiot! Please, don’t make a scene! Medics are not your friend–

–It's too late. One of the proctors has stepped behind her. Pistol exits holster. An energy weapon that creates a tiny ball of plasma no larger than your pinky nail. Precise, there won’t be any overpenetration. Sage’s seen it before. Highly effective against soft targets. Bordering on useless in a fight against the Technocracy who favors heavy cyborgs and vehicles. My classmate’s skull is a soft target, putting on a gory display as the medic provides ‘recursive retraining.’ She’s learned the last lesson of her life, and has no need of further instruction.

Not wanting to emulate her, I go limp in my tube. Sage’s false memories guide my eye as the recruits cloth themselves. The ritual is strange really, there are hundreds of us within this corridor, yet only twelve are ever awoken. Without guns or bayonets the proctors have the upper hand, no amount of wig outs could overpower them. Yet they limit themselves to twelve people on the walkway and twelve tubes decanting. The cycle repeats ad infinitum til I realize why. Each of the twelve is a flash trained human that follows a pattern, the first likes to wear his laces tight, cinching them down so hard his feet turn white. He’s nervous, those laces will have to be loosened soon. A mistake I see repeated in each squad, always by number one.

Meanwhile the seventh soldier is always a woman, slender, and taller than average, she has to receive specific gear, or else the rebreather hose won’t reach from her face to the air scrubber. Shaped so similarly to cali-girl Savannah. Each woman makes my heart beat faster, always wondering if this number seven is the genuine Savannah. Our drafters were thorough and have tailored every detail of our flash trainings to individuals. Yet always repeating certain patterns. Which is when I notice number eleven.

Buff, at least six feet tall, otherwise painfully average really in both muscle and weight. A fascinating error in the otherwise thorough simulations. We’re Americans, which is to say, fat as fuc. Not half starved levies who completed a hundred mile march in full kit before shipping off to this planet. Sage’s memories explain it, but it’s all I can do to not break into laughter at the cheap excuse. I endure the mirth silently, chuckling until my ribs are sore. Our flash training explained the weight gain as ‘cryo sickness’. Since we’re asleep but in a vat of nutrients our bodies supposedly absorb everything, putting on extra weight in a necessary inconvenience that will prepare us for half rations in the future.

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The excuse is so half baked I let out a real snort, triggering a blinking alarm on my cryopod.

Aw crap… I’ve done it now. Play along,. Don’t get shot. Shit, I’m still wearing pants… and my FNX.

One of the proctors sees my light blink. Face unreadable under their gas mask. An emotionless stare of twin rubies that sweeps the rows of people ahead of us. Her head jerks facing another proctor. Beneath all the gasmasks and flashtraining we’re still human. Facing someone when we talk is a deeply ingrained habit. Not even helmet integrated radios can defy human nature.

The nearest proctor points to me, and the other shrugs, counting pods. They’re decanting the wall opposite me, I'm situated near the back of the room so if they continue their rotation and start at the front of my aisle then I have hours before they’ll reach me. Two more squads are activated, clothed and sent to war. No guns are dispensed. Probably an anti wig-out measure.

Which is when they turned around, and started opening my squad. Easier to start at the end and work their way back to front. Our cryotubes hiss open, glass parting along invisible seams. It’s probably not glass at all, but I’m no material engineer. Not yet at least. Most my comrades are slow to wake, allowing the proctors to open twenty four capsules at once, so one squad may arm while the other rises from the coma.

I feign sleep, until the flash training rears its ugly conditioning. My body moves without instructions, I extend a hand out of the goo, and the proctors take hold of me, pulling my naked ass out. A surprisingly clean affair. In the low gravity the goo remains in the pod, somehow adhering tighter to the steel tube than my hairless body, which slurps out of the cryogel entirely clean. A quick examination shows that my eyelashes and eyebrows are gone. Creepy. Not that anyone will see under my helmet.

More disturbingly, no one comments on my pants or pistol. Including my alter ego. Though the ring, spare magazines and pistol are removed and placed in a combat belt designed to carry similar weapons. Humans, be they neanderthal or star citizen, all have five fingers. A million years of evolution has done nothing to alter the most comfortable way to design or carry a pistol. My body dons the wargear, helmet, gasmask, then a thin layer of almost spandex, tighter, more form fitting and entirely meant for hazardous conditions. A sort of anti-radiation spanxs-suit.

It really clings to the boys, suctioning them to my taint, and I feel stupid having to slide boxers over the suit. But it’s a regulated uniform so I comply, shirt, pants, body armor for the chest, outer trousers, overjacket, gloves, boots, and then the whole mess is then sealed. Like a fremen stillsuit, except meant to keep out radiation instead of keeping us in water. We’ll sweat worse than boiled pigs in these, but we won’t die of cancer. A tradeoff that might be meaningless. Jim’s download warns me of Syrak-9, an irradiated hellscape for half the planet, where only mobile mining cities can exist. Scrapping by on merit of being the only ones stupid enough to risk their lives for the wealth of Solarium mining. Those are off limits to all soldiers as the local population.

While the other half of the planet is a forest world, bioengineered plants scrub the toxic atmosphere, and cities that would be more at home in the forests of LothLorien than in space rise thousands of meters into the air. Bioengineering at its pinnacle. It helps to have a planetary shield as well. Orbital bombardments can’t hit the forest cities. They say knowledge is power, but none of that knowledge helps me now.

Of a thousand candidates only one hundred and five remain.

I watch as my body moves, in control of nothing.

This is going to be a problem! I think, watching as my body jogs out of the tuberoom and into some kind of open staging area. Steel walls rise a hundred feet into the air and far deeper below, catwalks run from our hexagonal cryotube rooms across empty space towards a glowing portal. Some kind of instant teleportation gate. To my Earthling brain it looks like one of those old stargates, the ones from the series where a twenty year old was played by a gray haired badass. Captain Kirk he was not, but the series was fun.

Until I look down at my hands. Half of Earth is fighting a war after being mind wiped. Maybe Stargate was the psi op it always joked about being, preparing us for the day our world was culled. Come to think of it, the Goa'uld even used the same terminology. Creepy. I keep pace with the squad. Each catwalk passes in front of a floating disk covered in officers. All watching us, several aids move to and fro, giving reports and keeping the logistical war machine running. I’m impressed. Four billion recruits have been drafted, mind wiped, flash trained, and moved across multiple galactic arms in a matter of hours, making me question the volume of war. Is four billion a daily death toll, or have we been recruited with intent. Syrak-9 is a special world. Worthy of a dedicated armada, if the nameless ever allowed such a thing.

Speakers blare, repeating a simple briefing.

“will seek out and destroy all alien lifeforms. Syrak-9 is a solarium mining world, do not use or allow any form of irradiation. Per treaty, no orbital support is permitted, nor may you leave the continent. Violators are subject to immediate execution. Good Luck. You will seek out and destroy all alien…”

That’s all we hear before our turn comes. A staff officer, some kind of lieutenant armored in pocket protectors and carrying an extra pencil instead of a pistol, points to us, number one knows the order and marches into the gate.

“Your weapons will be on the other side.” Says the officer.