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Fulda was several thousand kilometers to the north and east. Where an Earther like me would say Sumabad was about forty-five degrees south latitude, Fulda was just north of the planetary equator. Sumabad had a warm, wet climate that was sometimes muggy but usually pleasant. Fulda was roughly ten degrees Celsius hotter, and the humidity was oppressive. It rained even more often, and anything not somehow maintained quickly developed a coating of a lichen-like growth that seemed to be everywhere. Fulda was also about three time zones worth ahead of Sumabad. We could have used a public transport, but it was inside our teleportation energy envelopes, so that’s what we decided to do, which left us just under six hours Imperial (ten Earth) before reporting.
Given the choice, we wanted to spend as much time as reasonable in Sumabad. We’d both been in Fulda before, and there was a public portal at the base entry, only a few meters from where we were to report. Total transit time would be seconds. So we returned to the residence and borrowed Lady and More back from our young aunt and uncle. We took them down to a residence park in the arcology and spent half the time walking around, letting them run free. These days, there were always a few other dogs in the park, a result of my own labors. I’d had Lady about four years now, but I was keeping her physical age in the last stages of puppyhood. Result: the sixty pound black lab mix always had lots of energy and an infectious enthusiasm for everything. More was chocolate colored and probably close to a purebred lab, bigger and about twenty pounds heavier than Lady. He’d been about three Earth years old when we took him in, and was a lot mellower than Lady, so it was generally him following her around. Every few minutes, they’d both come back to us to make sure we were still there, then run again off on a new adventure. The park occupied roughly half of a double level of the arcology, so they had a lot of room to run, and it was kept comfortably climate controlled. There were no leash laws in the Empire and we weren’t worried about incidents. Since telepaths had come into contact with dogs, we’d been discovering dogs were more intelligent than they’d been given credit for on Earth. Once they understood the rules of the pack, they could be relied upon to abide by them. They lived in the now, but if we ever decided to bring them up to human sentience, it would be easy. It was doubtful anyone ever would, but it would be easy if they did. Watching them frolic in the bushes and short trees of a residence park was invigorating, a simple pleasure we’d both miss. We let them run and do what they wanted for about four hours, just enjoying our last family time for a while, then took them back up to Ononi and Imre, gave them parting hugs and pets, then left without ceremony. They knew something was up, but Ononi and Imre would handle it. Being operant Guardians from birth, they were quite advanced for thirteen years of age (nine Earth).
We decided we wanted real food for once, rather than something that came out of a converter. If the technician was any good, there wasn’t really a difference, but sometimes you just want to. It wasn’t like we couldn’t afford it. Asto and I both had substantial personal assets and income. There was a restaurant a few levels down from the residence that used real farm grown foodstuffs and had almost as good a view as our apartment. None of it tasted like anything from Earth, but it was all melt-in-your-mouth good. Nothing fancy, just basic food prepared by good cooks who got lots of practice. Picha ribs, from an animal that occupied a niche like pigs on Earth and looked and tasted not too different. A coarse grain whose ancestors came from Weircol, the planet where the Empire had started over a hundred thousand Imperial years before, and a salad with components whose ancestral plants had originally come from at least three different planets. It was heavenly.
Then, with an hour still to go, we took a walk, the two of us meandering through the public areas of the level, hand-in-hand, just being alone together in the crowd. We sat on a planter and watched people go by, then with ten minutes until the reporting window opened, we teleported into the transport terminal in the small city at Fulda, no more than three or four million people. From there, we took a public portal to the base gate, used our orders to pass the gate and approached the induction center. Entering, we found that there was no line. “Excuse me,” I asked the attendant, “We have orders to report between fortythree and fortyfour, but it’s only fortytwo fiftytwo. Would it be better to formally report now or to wait?”
“A good start,” the woman in the uniform of a Staff Private commended us, “We’ll take you now.”
The hardest part was cutting off my hair. I’ve never been a beauty (unless you asked Asto) but I took good care of my hair. It was very dark brown, almost black, and thick, with just a hint of wave and went down to my shoulders and they simply told me to stand here and cut it all off in about fifteen seconds. I’d been expecting it, but it was still difficult to accept. They took our measurements, issued us recruit clothing, subjected us to a quick medical exam despite the fact that as Guardians, we were as qualified to heal as their doctor, told us to get dressed and told us to go wait in a room with two other people, both of whom were obviously operant as well. There we sat for several hours, waiting. A couple more people came in, one at a time, all operant. There was a purpose to everything the military did with recruits, Parnit had informed us. Part of the purpose was to start off making it obvious that according to the military, nobody was any more or less special than anyone else. That said, it would be ridiculous to start Guardians and other operants on the same training regimen as natural state recruits, so they didn’t. They’d be shipping us off to a training unit designed for the fact that we could do things natural state humans couldn’t. We were stronger, faster, more agile, physically superior in every way because we’d won the operancy lottery and were able to augment ourselves better than healers could augment natural state humans. But our training was designed to accomplish the same thing theirs was: force us beyond our normal limits and teach us what we needed to know. Make us understand that to the military, a soldier was a soldier was a soldier. Nobody was intrinsically more valuable than anyone else, as a soldier or as a human being.
Eventually, they sent an inoperant trained private in to take us to a meal. He formed us up into a file, and walked us about half a kilometer to a place where they served three different kinds of tasteless glop; protein glop, carb glop, roughage glop. The glop was nutritious, but about as appetizing as cold baby food. It was likely mass extruded out of a converter that could just as easily have produced something appealing. Once again, the military had their reasons for everything. They wanted you to think of yourself as one more cog, no more important than the one next to you. Once that pattern of thought was engrained, trained soldiers got better food. Oh well, I suppose they could have just thrown us a chunk of Life and a cube of water, so it could have been worse. Come to think of it, as unappealing as the glop was, I’d rather have gnawed a chunk of Life.
Meal concluded, the same private escorted us back to more hours of waiting. One more operant inductee joined us, and then the same Trained Private came in with an operant Staff Private. Addressing us, he said, “This is Staff Private Ugatu,” gesturing at the Staff Private, “He will be escorting you to your training facility and turning you over to your unit Instructor. Follow his instructions.” Why was a lowly Trained Private instructing us to obey a Staff Private, several grades higher? Because staff ranks were not part of the chain of command. Yes, a Staff Private was senior to us, but wasn’t normally entitled to give orders, to us or to anyone else. Technically speaking, if we obeyed an order from a Staff Private without such an instruction, we’d be responsible for the consequences. “There are reasons for everything the Imperial military does,” Parnit had explained over and over. “You might not understand or even agree with those reasons. You might think they are pointless, even counterproductive. The reasons are never explained, for reasons that won’t be explained to you, either, at least not until you achieve your first staff rank. But every single one of them has been field tested and cross-checked over thirty square (75,000+ Earth years) of successful operations covering an incredible volume of space and situations too varied for you or even me to imagine.”
The Imperial solutions were definitely different than the ones the US military had employed. My older sister married a Navy Senior Chief, so I thought I understood what sorts of things to expect. I was wrong.
Copyright 2014 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.
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