Behind the sergeant, the dull black sphere rotated in space. The land was a wasted stretch of charcoal; its oceans a brackish green. It was an ugly planet, pockmarked and misshapen, a smirch on the velvet black smoothness of space. It cried out to be cleansed and eradicated.
My suit gave me a familiar pinch in the neck, then the drug exploded through my system. The world became frozen and dead as the drug accelerated time; brief hallucinations of pain and blood flashed at the edges of my vision.
The sergeant strode back and forth before the viewscreen, his head completely bald except for the tattooed hieroglyph of his sect. He licked his chapped lips; his eyes had come loose in his skull. His black uniform twinkled with medals and insignia, clear demarcations of death.
"Pathetic, emasculate virgins, prepare for manhood," the sergeant shouted, a leer on his thick lips. "We have detected survivors after our bombardment. The poor fools chose to preserve themselves for what is to come.
"Let us be their emissaries of death," the sergeant shouted, his heavily muscled arms held up in the air. He brought a long, sharp machete down on his brow, working it into the flesh and drawing blood into his eyes. "We shall remind them of their mortality-their lives a brief illusion against the vast eternity of death." He licked the bloody blade, cutting his tongue.
The soldiers around me began bellowing and stomping their feet, while others laughed, all enjoying the spectacle. We turned our hand cannons upright, banging the stocks against the metal floor in unison.
"We are most alive near death!!" we howled-chanted the familiar mantra, gun butts thudding.
"Bring me spoils, boys," the sergeant grinned, as the black sphere hove closer into view.
* * *
I hadn't always wanted to go into the Army. During my childhood on Quetzalcoatl, I had been an introspective and thoughtful boy, more interested in developing my mind than my body, before I learned that that was weakness.
"Hey, midge," said one of my mother's many mates, a thin, twitchy man whose only clothes seemed to be his undertoga, and who always stank of the experimental drugs he brewed in our waste space. He reached out and smashed my spectacles between his fingers, his knuckles bleeding glass shards. "How do you plan on reading those books now?" I still remember his loopy, broken-toothed grin.
"Leave my boy alone," my mother said absently, staring out the window and pulling her hair from her head, strand by strand, with her shaking, veiny hands. By the time of her death, she was nearly bald.
We couldn't afford the simple surgery to correct my vision. I never read again.
I still remember the head nabob for our commune, an emaciated man with protuberant nose and a lighter shade of skin. His sermons, delivered in a raspy, disembodied voice throughout our commune, replaced my books:
"We all know that life is pointless. Humanity is a virus, spreading throughout the universe like a virulent plague. The labor of the lower classes has been outmoded, is no longer necessary. Planets are sentient, and human habitation hurts them. The only pertinent philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide-and to this question we respond an emphatic 'Yes.' Our overpopulated worlds fairly beg us to.
"To those who selfishly choose life," the reed-like man sighed, "stop breeding. And escape. Somehow. All life is suffering. There are avenues: true, genuine ignorance, pleasure drugs, lobotomies. But you must escape, somehow. It is better to escape, rather than actively participate in the diseased human experiment."
Hunched on the floor, barefoot and destitute, we would murmur contemplatively, absorbing the words of the wise nabob. We knew that some devotees would not be there when we next met-those devotees having been brave enough to have made the ultimate sacrifice, overpowering their own base survival instinct. I hoped that one day I, too, could overcome my fear of death.
* * *
My seat on the troop transport was right next to 243, a heavily built clone probably from the same gene stock as our sergeant, but much younger. His bald, sect-tattooed head gleamed in the spacelight, his long goatee was curled away from his jutting chin. I noticed that he was staring fixedly at me, nodding his head rhythmically, making high-pitched keening noises.
"Hey," I said quietly to the war clone, more as a demarcation of personal space than greeting, making sure to appear strong and at ease. The war clone kept bobbing his head repetitively, but his smile became deeper, more cruel and manic.
"Hope for survivors," he growled through smiling, clenched teeth.
* * *
On my fifteenth birthday, my mother took the ultimate, final step. I had returned home after begging in the high-prole levels of Tenochtitlan. We could evade the archaic security machines of the high-proles, but not the truly emancipated's nanotech ones, which would instantly sink into our flesh and devour our bones.
I had been excited at the day's pull. I had marked a hugely fat man, black as coal and his flesh embedded with jewelry, and had managed to extricate some jewels with a little anesthetic while he foolishly dozed in a park. They had glittered in my pockets as I tore through the curtain to tell my mother.
My mother would have been proud; but she was dead. On Quetzalcoatl, life is a constant battle with rot bug, and I could tell what had happened by the overpowering stench before I saw her bloated body, cracking open with egg sacs. I didn't cry then; I had thought it must be a wondrous relief for her. After briefly giving thanks, I had vaporized every inch of her body to prevent infestation.
Shortly thereafter, the Oligarchs had decreed that Negativism constituted an illicit meme. Our Oligarch's projected head had appeared in the night sky, all glittering eyes and tentacled mouth, to issue the decree. Negativism was thenceforth banned: all believers had to voluntarily submit to state-sponsored lobotomies by dawn, or else their physical selves would be expired. I could hear the wailing noises of millions of Negativists throughout the multi-leveled structure of Tenochtitlan, wailing like trapped, dying dogs.
* * *
I was without family, and without faith.
On jets of air, I had spun around the ancient steel columns holding the levels up, tempted to soar into the nano-infested heights and burn through the sky views of the wealthy palaces. Would the truly emancipated notice my burning flesh outside their crystal glass windows, or would they be too consumed with their own intrigues, their own lavish luxuries, to notice me?
Eventually, my lateral deltoids had grown sore, and I returned to the moist, fungal floors of the lower levels barefoot. I had waited near the levitator, hoping to ascend to the next level without being burned alive, but knowing that the selection machine would never alight on a grungy outcast like me. I was frozen in hope of ascent, knowing that the hope would melt, and I would be forced to consider my future without parent or commune. Communes did not eagerly accept teen midges who only traded in theft.
"You are not a real man until you take the life of another," had suddenly sprung into my mind. I had a vision of myself, tall, muscled and wingless, my head close-shaven, my eyes grown gelid. I was wearing the Army uniform, and a hand-cannon was held diagonally across my newly massive chest. "Have you the mettle?"
The image dissipated, and I knew that it was the flare of a meme-bomb strafing the long lines for the levitator. My callused mind usually ignored the bombs, but I was without options. Here I was offered escape from Quetzalcoatl; a new, more powerful body and mind.
An officer-drone immediately approached, a synthetic smile plastered on his face and holding out his hand. I had shaken it, weakly, still shaking the meme-bomb out of my cobwebbed mind.
"You will never reach the upper levels," the drone had said matter-of-factly, gesturing at the levitator. "Emancipation protects itself from incursions below. But the Army does want you... in fact, it needs you." The officer had then painted a glorious picture with words, with myself as the main hero, protecting the all-wise Oligarchs from distant, unenlightened malefactors, earning glory, power, and identity for myself in the process.
Mostly, I had wanted a place for myself, preferably with a roof and meal.
"Yes," I had said to the officer, after which nanobots instantly defoliated my skull, inscribed the glyphs of my sect on the new blankness, and burned off my unnecessary wings.
* * *
We were down in it, now. The planet was even uglier up close; the black-red sky roiled with churning, tortured clouds and the earth below was a black-green muck of shattered buildings and human bones. Good thing we were all suited up; I didn't want to have to smell this place.
"I want survivors. Where are the survivors?" 243 said, stroking his hand cannon lovingly.
"Mellow, Two-Four-Three," the young officer in charge said, a lanky, pimply midge younger than most of us. "We're still reading for biosigns." His narrow gaze was fixed on the flashing displays illuminating his visor. "Something west, can't make it out with all this atmospheric interference. Gil, Mundo, go fetch," he told us.
"Check," I replied, starting west and not looking to see if Mundo was following. The clone made a low, growling noise.
'Of all the people to get stuck with,' I groaned inwardly. Mundo and I had been in boot hell for a year, stranded on an asteroid with the worst of the war clones to toughen us up and make us men. Mundo had been the dunce, the one too fat to get up over the obstacles, the one too feckless to complete the clones' humiliating tasks of ego destruction. He was still chunky and sloppy, but now he also seemed like a cracked version of himself.
"Greet, Gilgamesh," Mundo said in a low voice, wheezing slightly. "You see the signal?" he asked. I nodded perfunctorily.
"Me too. It looks female," Mundo said, a little too excited. I certainly wasn't going to get into that conversation with Mundo-I'm sure he had his fair share of lies to tell. We all did.
"You know why we're here?" Mundo asked, disappointed that his first choice of conversation would not be pursued.
"Don't know. Don't care," I grunted back. "'Ours is not to pontificate, ours is to annihilate,'" I said, repeating an Army mantra.
"Right," Mundo nodded his head quickly, like a puppy. "But I overheard an officer; we're here to put out a meme-fire. A major myth-meme." Mundo's voice was breathless, excited.
"They must have angered the Oligarchs somehow, which is never wise." Just like the Negativists did. The Oligarchs were far beyond human; the disembodied, all-encompassing entities each had absolute power in their sector of space; to defy or deny them always resulted in death. If they weren't omniscient, they were close to it. Everyone knew this, why did some resist?
We kept slogging through the polluted wasteland, my boots making grotesque sucking noises in the moist earth.
"My nose itches," Mundo complained, rubbing where the bitten-off tip should be.
I abruptly waved Mundo down; the biosign was drawing near. Peeking over the twisted metal of a collapsed skyscraper, I made out a lone figure, shivering in the torn rags of a flowered nightgown. She was a woman; but she was pale, the color of a corpse. I imagined I could see blue pulsing veins through her transparent flesh.
"She looks like a ghost," Mundo whispered.
She did. Figuring she could be a nonhuman, I requisitioned information from my visor. The system froze for a few moments, then a diagram of a ghost-white humanoid splayed across the screen, and a monotone voice said in my visor:
"The Caucasoid race-a subgroup of homo sapiens, allegedly existent in prehistoric times when geographic barriers prevented reproductive intermingling; no reported sightings since pre-Oligarch times, therefore objective existence unverifiable; believed to be eradicated during the Timento period, when racial stratifications deemed illicit meme; common in the myth and folklore among the lighter-skinned Khazars of the Epsilon system, before those memes were supplanted . . ."
"Cut," I said.
"I think it's human," I told Mundo.
"What could do that to her?" he whispered. "She's the same color as her teeth-bones. She's grotesque."
"Irrelevant, as usual," I said. "You know what we're here to do."
"Can't we save her?" Mundo asked, the lust in his eyes glittering through his visor.
"I thought you just called her grotesque..."
"She is, but then maybe she'd be just mine, if we caught her. I wouldn't have to share her," Mundo said, licking his puffy, chapped lips under the visor.
"Victors get spoils," I muttered, waving Mundo along behind me as I stood up from behind the shattered steel and glass skyscraper, leveling my hand canon on the sobbing woman's heaving bosom.
"Gel!" I yelled at the woman, first flipping to send on the visor translator in case she spoke one of the known languages. At any rate, she didn't move; she remained on her knees in the ravaged wreckage, holding human bones in her hands.
"Bones? Heinous!" Mundo squealed girlishly to me, his shortened nose wrinkling up. "Is it her culture, or some kind of psyche meltdown...?" Mundo whispered. I cut him off with a wave of my hand. I knew that she was mourning the loss of her entire world and its people, even if I couldn't share in her mourning.
The woman stared at us for several moments, her strangely green eyes looking lost to this, or any, world. Her wild hair was in disarray, she was wearing rags, and her flesh was phantom white; but despite all that, I found her mournful stance strangely beautiful. She began speaking in a strange, foreign tongue, which sounded harsh and guttural to my ears.
"I think she's asking for forgiveness, in the name of her Oligarch," Mundo said, half-comprehending. I had turned off my translator's receive mode; it tended to make my job a little too complicated when I understood their words.
"There's nothing to forgive. Death is universal, life is fleeting. Turn off your translator, Mundo," I said through clenched teeth.
"Something about this dirt being the source of all life, or at least human life," Mundo continued. "Something like, 'Why have you destroyed the dirt, or earth?'" he said, imitating a high-pitched woman's voice. "I think her neurons are dissolved," Mundo concluded.
"Switch your translator, or I'll switch it for you," I spoke as I neared the crouching woman, my hand cannon carefully trained on her chest. Mundo babbled into his translator, and his visor spoke in the woman's guttural tongue.
"I told her that I don't mind if her mind is defective, as I'm just using her body," Mundo grinned at me.
A tortured scream exploded from the woman's throat, as she sprang up from her crouched position, pulling a long machete from her nightgown. She lunged at Mundo, about to plunge the blade into his throat; despite my inclinations, I pulled the trigger on the hand cannon. Her pale, wretched figure instantly erupted into flames, dripping bubbling flesh into the muddy, bone-encrusted ground.
"Whoa," Mundo said, suddenly shaky. "Near-death experience." There was no need for gratitude; I had done what we had all been programmed to do at boot hell.
"Next time, don't let lust manhandle you," I said to him quietly, knowing full well he would do the same thing again. I approached the steaming heap of her flesh, surprised to note that some sort of talisman had survived: it looked like some sort of mathematical sign, a steel cross with a longer bottom section.
Dangling the symbol between my gloved fingers, I tried to decipher the symbol through visor information.
"Prehistoric. Believed to be an ancient torture device, to which individuals were nailed and left to die through blood loss, starvation and exposure to the elements. Common to pre-Oligarch myth-memes..." the voice droned.
"Cut," I said again. I had heard enough. This planet was rife with meme-fire; even after the interstellar bombardment, symbols of it still survived. It was apparently some sort of sadomasochistic death-sacrifice cult, far more extreme than the Negativists. It presented an obvious danger to the Oligarchy, and I did not want to jeopardize myself further by delving into pre-Oligarchy memes.
"I want it," Mundo said like a petulant child, taking the symbol from my fingers. "To remember her by. She might have been my private girl, not like the service girls..." he sighed dreamily, putting the symbol into one of his pockets.
I was glad that I had eradicated the woman; better that than leaving her to Mundo. She had gained the ultimate escape of nonexistence. I briefly wondered if her myth-meme was perhaps a more extreme variant my abandoned meme, Negativism. I could have been subjected to her fate, back when I was a believer, I realized. I quickly brushed the thought aside.
* * *
On the vessel headed back to port, we let out triumphant howls and cheers, letting more recreational substances flow through our beings, no longer concerned with battlefield efficiencies. The service girl hid in the lower levels, shaking, before the bellowing and inebriated troops pulled her out by bodily force and dragged her, kicking and screaming, up to the pleasure lounges. She must have expected this, but to fight it out was more thrilling for the troops. Tough gig, being the sole service girl after-mission.
"Gil," 243 said to me, his bald, glowering head towering above me. I was taken aback for a moment, but stood my ground, staring back up at him. "I heard you ended life," he said.
"Yuh?" I grunted back warily.
"A woman," he continued in his painful attempt at conversation.
"Yuh," I said, not knowing if he approved or not.
"Good," he said, the demoniac leer returning to his goateed face. "Could have saved her, but good." I wasn't sure if he meant it, or was mocking me, but then he grabbed me around my shoulders and held me to him.
"Gil, what's plunder without the spoils?" asked another war clone.
"Don't worry, brother," 243 grunted to me, holding on tight. "I have spoils."
I realized that we war clones had all we needed, here, and what we didn't have we took by force. The world outside the war room only held failure and poverty; even those who succeeded in the petty socioeconomic games in the heights of Tenochtitlan could have it all stripped away, painfully and instantly. Everything they had was dependent on, and derived from, our power. Here, we were men; here, we were prepared.
I followed the war clones to the pleasure rooms, passing by the squat and forlorn Mundo. He was still fingering his souvenir.
"Death-wishing?" I asked when I noticed what he was holding. "If you're going to hold on to that thing, keep it hidden." Our entire mission had been to eradicate myth-memes, and here Mundo was, fingering a remnant after-mission.
He looked through me, into space, and kept rubbing his talisman. I left him there, before I could be associated with the myth-memes starting to cohere in his small, self-destructive mind.
Luke Jackson's day job is in law, at least until he achieves wealth and fame as a science fiction writer. :) He lives with his wife and two-year-old son in Los Angeles, California.
© Luke Jackson
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