My new life flashed before my eyes, weapons instruction, a decade of twenty mile hikes that ended in live fire drills, constant wargames, simunition battles that ended when one side was too battered to continue, like a game of paintball in the arctic, where each paint ball froze rock solid, turning it into a less lethal mallet. From archaic C1 canister rifles, to the next generation of smart-beam technology in the C92 Lightning Rifle I learned them all. Every type of human munition. How to dig and keep my socks dry on a world whose air could not be inhaled without filters. In short, how to fight a trench war of attrition. With and without live artillery support.

  Accidents took their toll, many lost the will to fight and were euthanized by our veteran instructors, so many of whom were missing limbs after repeated tours on the frontlines. Reduced to trainers after being deemed 'unfit for service', keeping the old adage of 'those who cannot do, teach' true. Their personal failings becoming our whip, the implement upon which we broke or flourished.

  All told, we started with a thousand of recruits, each an archetype of the twelve primary 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 clone archetype eleven, Sable Yurten.

  My new identity.

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

  Our body is teleported once more, from one cryotube to another, with the only change being the cryogel's taste, identical yet not. Similar to how ice cream tastes when melted versus frozen, a temperature delta that comes with a gustation variation.

  My elbows bounced off the pod walls, tight, almost claustrophobic. A far cry from the tubes of Jim's Arkship, a theme I saw continued throughout the room, narrow, long, and thin, lined with silent tubes. The cryotubes here are identical, aligned in a hexagonal tube with four walls occupied by densly arrayed pods. Human beings, nude, and alternating male with female fill the pods, asleep.

  Lights dance across their eyes, the final step of those who require additional flashtraining. Sable Yurten is no specialist, she has no need for command school or infiltration specialty. For Sable Yurten is fodder, labeled as useless by the AI.

  Thanks you asshole. As if I haven't had a bad few days. I think, blinking with lashless eyes.

  Everyone else is out cold, silent, motionless, with only the cryopod's external computer to indicate otherwise. Only my eyes are open. While those around me settling into flashtrained skin, becoming their false identity. Sable Yurten sleeps as well, my alter-identity meditating on how to win a war, how to kill, for she has performed the act many times.

  Her presence dreams within my mind, picturing a life spent beneath the dirt, cowering from artillery in bunkers filled with ammunition. Like your fifth marine, the one you forgot existed after loading them in a bunker. Useful, yet unused. Perpetually dreaming of hitting those stims yet never granted permission. Dreaming and waking simultaneously blurs into feverish thoughts, minds combatting each other. My eyes focus, seeking distraction or some agreeable image to us both, a compromise we can agree on. Our gaze falling on the FNX-9 in our hand.

  Sable is fascinated by the gun, so crude, yet ambidextrous, smooth, easily operated, and well manufactured. Iron sights with luminescent tritium, glow in the reduced lighting, night sights made from ingenious manipulation of nuclear waste. Our thoughts align, meshing perfectly for several seconds. To bring sweet relief into our warring minds.

  Pistol rises, aiming across the narrow catwalk at a nude man. Flabby, young, and absolutely one of Bazzhole's college friends. An annoying twat I call Samson.

  My head splits at the name. Sable Yurten's training corrects me, forcing the name 'Samson' on the face of a man I know is Dante. I know she's wrong, know his name is missing, overwritten by the burst of memories. But can only think SAMSON. I look away, keeping my vision aimed at the floor. Unable to fight a battle with sleeping Sable, for it is a battle I might lose.

  My heart slows, often stopping for seconds at a time. I never sleep. 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 eyeholes.

  Through the glass I see a familiar woman. Attractive despite her shaved head. A look only she can pull off due to her skull's pleasant smoothness that scatters light. 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! The medics are not your friends–

  –It's too late. One of the proctors has stepped behind her. C3 pistol exits holster. An energy weapon that creates a tiny ball of accelerated particles no larger than your pinky nail. Precise, there won’t be any overpenetration. Sable’s seen it before. Highly effective against soft targets but bordering on useless in a fight against vehicles or shielded opposition. 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. Sable’s false memories guiding my eye as recruits don the standards of their station. The ritual is strange really, there are hundreds of us within this corridor, yet only twelve are ever awoken at the same time. Without guns or even a bayonet to split twelve ways we are vulnerable, 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 long after I recognize their cycle. Each of the twelve is a flash trained human that follows a pattern, the first is male and 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 or loss of circulation could become nerve damage. 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, a piece of my home, someone familiar to-

  To what? I think, pondering what an ally could do.

  Fight? Of course not.

  Remind me of Earth? Sure, but the day I forget our homeworld is the day I die.

  Hundreds of men, women, and children are released, clothed, and march forth, a procession I observe with growing annoyance as I see professors, schoolmates, girls from my dorm, the gas station clerks, even the Mcdonald's drive through attendant, I see them all.

  Then comes the sight of something that breaks my last reserve of patience. Baz steps from a cryotube, receiving salutes from the proctors as if my EX is their new commander. Two of the soldiers run from the room, returning later with six women in white lab coats. Doctors maybe.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Well, at least there is some justice in the world. Doctors will mean recursive retraining for Bazzhole. I think, only for my mouth to fall open. The women salute, then help him dress, fawning over him like a harem of Whorelys. A pistol is provided, as is a sabre -an actual bladed sword-, then flak armor and shoulder epaulets, all the marks of an officer. A fully commissioned and highly ranked officer.

  They made Baz a general.

  God damnit Jim.

  No longer do I accept this as a hallucination. No longer do I believe someone will rescue me. No, I'm fuming with so much rage that I never notice Whorely's appearance, nor how she dons a similar white lab coat and is ushered out alongside Baz; leaving me to simmer in silence.

  Do not move, do not scream, do not shoot his stupid face. I mentally repeat, watching Baz through a half lidded eye.

  Baz is here, installed as my commanding officer. The one sable Yurten trusts with her life.

  One of the few people my flashtraining prohibits us from killing. So I seethe. Hate boiling in a stew of impotence as others are woken. Finally shattering my reservations. I'm gonna shoot that motherfucking Bazzhole. No longer will I allow others to guide my fate.

  Other Earthlings awaken, some are retrained, their blood dripping through metal grating, thousands more march from this chamber, advancing into the unknown. More patterns for my brain to analyze. Especially the eleventh candidate.

  Busty, not too tall, or short, painfully average really in both height 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. Sable’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.

  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. I think, fingers reflexively tightening on my FNX. Shit, how did I keep that and no clothes? Jim, you letcher.

  I swear vengeance against him, then add all those who have wronged me to that list. It's time for a scorched world approach, kill those who have done evil, annihilate those who facilitated our draft. Never again shall the wicked go unpunished. No cost will go unpaid.

  My agitation disturbs the cryogel, setting off alarms on the pod. 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 are still human. Facing someone when we talk is such a deeply ingrained habit that not even helmet integrated coms can defy human nature.

  The nearest proctor levels an accusing finger, imputing treason, requesting my execution. Words pass between the proctors, eventually resolving into a shrug. Something to the effect of 'they'll get what's coming'.

  I sweat, watching for thirty minutes as pods are activated all around me, the proctors moving ever closer. Two recursive retrainings hit number eleven. My clonal identity.

  A proctor walks by my squad gloved hand tapping each cryotube to begin the activation sequence. Until my pod. Time seems to stop, heart thundering in my chest, as the proctor steps past me, activating the next pod before circling back to mine.

  Red tinted gas mask looks up at me, pistol in hand. A second -armed- proctor joins the first, two wardens to decant one soldier.

  My grip tightens on the FNX. These bootlickers will die before I do. No matter what, I am going to survive. Everything is second to that goal, from going home, to shooting Bazzhole's stupid face, to finding my step siblings. Survival comes first.

  My pod hisses open, waking Sable Yurten. My body moves without instructions, I extend a hand out of the goo, and the proctors take hold of me, pulling my naked butt out. A surprisingly clean affair. In the low gravity the goo remains within the pod, somehow adhering tighter to the steel tube than my hairless figure, which slurps out of the cryogel entirely clean. A quick examination shows all body hair removed, and I mean all. Even my eyebrows! Creepy. Not that anyone will see under my helmet.

  My body dons the wargear, helmet with it's integrated systems and 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. Then comes bra -no way am I going to war without support!-, shirt, pants, body armor for the chest, outer trousers, overjacket, gloves, boots, and 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 boiling pigs in these, but we won’t die of cancer.

  A tradeoff that might be meaningless. Between flashtraining and Jim’s download I'm well warned 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 or local populace.

  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. Genuine space elevators, so tall that warships can doc directly to them, allowing a person to walk from dirt into space with their own two feet. 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.

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

  I will us left, trying to pursue Baz, only to continue straight, marching with my squad of twelve troopers. Steel walls rise a hundred feet into the air and far deeper below, railed gantries and catwalks run from hundreds of rooms identical to ours, all aimed at a single glowing portal. Some kind of instant teleportation gate, looming like an ancient sentinel, more than fifty feet in diameter and covered in bulbous protrusions, as if steel spheres grew from the swirling energies. It glowed with an otherworldly radiance beckoning us into the unknown.

  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 a household favorite, a weekly outing when dad would grill ribeyes while me and mom shared the latest gossip over homemade popcorn.

  Melted butter tickles my nose, lingering in the filtered air of my mask, the half-empty bowl resting between us, casualties of our snacking scattered across a napkin. Every so often, one of us would toss out a theory about what would happen next—sometimes right, sometimes hilariously wrong. But it didn’t matter. What mattered were those moments: the warmth of being together, the shared excitement, the way the show was more than just a sci-fi adventure. It was ours.

  My home.

  Sable Yurten tightens her gloves. Half of Earth is fighting a war after being mind wiped. Maybe Stargate was the psi op it always teased, preparing us for the day our world was culled. Come to think of it, the Goa'uld even used the same terminology.

  I keep pace with the squad combat boots striking the metallic floor in unison. Passing by a floating disk covered in officers. The embodiment of controlled chaos, half watching us, half focused on screens or communication arrays. Several aids move to and fro, giving reports and keeping the logistical war machine running. I’m impressed.

  Across Syrak-9 the war raged in terrible splendor. Towering heavy tanks with plasma-scorched armor rumbled across the blasted plains, once verdant forests burnt to bare dirt, cannons belching fire into the writhing mass of saurian warriors. The creatures, reptilian nightmares with gleaming plasma rifles, howled as they surged forward, their clawed feet churning up dirt as they returned fire in dazzling neon sparks.

  Above, the sky was a graveyard of falling stars. Dropships roared in from high orbit, only to be intercepted by sizzling beams from hidden anti-air batteries. One came screaming down, hull aflame, engines coughing black smoke as it spiraled toward the battlefield. It hit the ground in a detonation that sent a shockwave through the ranks, the force crushing her hull.

  The burning wreck vanished, replaced with a siren wailing from the command post enemy Juggernauts have breached the eastern trench.

  Sable's mouth begins to water, this crazy bitch chomping at the bit to fight.

  Ohhhhhh boy... I'm in danger. Please get assigned to bunker duty, or digging trenches! I'm only a squishy lil human girl without power armor or Protoss shielding!

  Four billion recruits have been drafted, mind wiped, flash trained, and moved across 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? As part of a conquering push to take the entire star system? 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…”

  Squads run into the portal in waves, half armed, half armored, and a few -like mine- without either. A staff officer, some kind of lieutenant armored in pocket protectors and carrying a spare clipboard instead of a pistol, points to us. To number one, to Specialist Rogers, a trainee on the verge of Corporalhood and defacto squad leader.

  “Your weapons will be on the other side.” Officer clipboard calls, nasally voice echoing through the gasmask.