Atlas Page 4

  She smiled—a cute little dimple formed in one cheek—and offered me her hand. "I'm Shaw."

  I waited a few seconds before shaking her hand, not wanting to seem too eager. "Nice to meet you, Shaw."

  Her grinned deepened, as did those dimples. "Pleasure's mine. Us Navy types have to stick together."

  "We do."

  I glanced to my right and saw Alejandro and Tahoe sit down about seven places away from me, in the empty seats.

  "What branch of the Navy are you joining?" I said.

  I saw a warm twinkle in her eyes. "What rating you mean?"

  "Yeah."

  The twinkle became all-out mischievousness. "Are you sure you want to know? Not everyone can handle it."

  I shrugged. "Sure."

  She smiled. "Quartermaster. Also known as astrogator."

  I nodded as if I knew what that was. "Okay."

  "Always been a dream of mine to pilot starships," she continued, a little by rote, as if she'd been repeating that to people all day. "Going to faraway worlds and colonies is just a fun side benefit."

  "You know the government would pay you to go into space, right?" I said. "Girl like you? They'd be tripping over themselves to get you to the colonies."

  "Was that meant to be a complement?" she said. "Or an insult?"

  Whoops.

  "Just making conversation," I said.

  She frowned. "Like I'd ever agree to go to some far-flung colony world where there are seven men for every woman."

  "Why not? You'd get your pick of the litter."

  "Not my cup of tea. No thanks. I'd have to watch my back wherever I went. Besides, I don't want to be tied down, stuck in one place. As I said, I want to pilot starships, make something out of myself. Anyways, how about you? What rating are you aiming for?"

  "Special forces."

  She quirked an eyebrow. "MOTH?"

  I nodded. "If that's what they're called in the Navy."

  "I'm sorry to hear that." She smiled that sexy smile again. Though it was a bit wry this time.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You're going to be surrounded by men day in and day out. They don't allow women you know, not like in the Marines. You might as well go to one of the colonies. At least you'll have some women there."

  "Yeah, I don't know," I said. "It was kind of a last minute decision. Based on someone I saw in line."

  "I hope that someone wasn't me."

  "Not at all."

  Shaw looked at me appraisingly. "Well, good luck. Navy spec-ops training is supposed to be the hardest there is, bar none. It has the highest wash-out rate in the entire military."

  I nodded slowly. That prospect attracted me, believe it or not, and stoked the competitor in me, the part of myself that wanted to prove I was the best. Meanwhile the slacker in me wanted to take the path of least resistance and just cruise through the military.

  I hated that slacker. I really did. He's the one who caused me to stay where I was for so long, in a dead-end city and country, too afraid to move on and change things and strive for something more.

  I stoked the competitor. I could handle the hardest training. I would.

  At that moment a tall, gray-haired man dressed in camouflage gear entered at the front of the room. The theater hushed as he walked to the podium. "Your aReals, please."

  There was an aReal visor connected to my seat by a thin cord. I grabbed the visor and put it on. My vision wasn't obscured, but the lenses were slightly dark, making the background of the real world diminish.

  "Welcome to the New San Antonio MEP Station, recruits." He ran his gaze across the room. "I'm Gustav Reyjuk. A retired officer. A civilian. And no, I didn't invent the Carl Gustav." He got a few laughs at that. "The military hires me to come in and give this speech once a week. I'll probably be the last friendly face you see here on out. Other than your fellow recruits of course." The aReal had apparently scanned my embedded Id to determine my ethnic origin, because it was translating every word into New Spanish and displaying subtitles at the bottom of my vision. I navigated through the menus and turned that feature off.

  "The friendly robotic attendant you met on the way inside installed a short, fifteen-hundred page document on your embedded Ids," Gustav said. "You can go over it in detail later, using one of the aReal terminals installed in the mess hall. In the meantime, I suggest you follow along."

  Using the visor, I navigated to my private offline folder, and found the document, labeled MEPS Guide. I opened it. I noted that the military had bypassed the usual security protocol—as soon as I turned the aReal on I should have gotten a prompt asking me if I wanted to accept the document download request. They'd rammed this guide down the throat of my embedded Id, using one of those undocumented backdoors no doubt. Guess I'd have to get used to the military messing with my private data.

  "I'm going to go over the most important points in the guide," Gustav continued. "You eat lunch from 1100 to 1200. You eat supper from 1730 to 1830. If you don't go to the mess hall during those times, you don't eat. The food is a buffet. Not exactly high class. If you like all-you-can-eat pancakes and gruel, then you're in the right place. As for your movements, you're restricted to the main lobby, the mess hall, this room, the brain scan hall, the medical examination hall, and the job selection hall. We're aware of your individual locations at all times, and the second you step outside any of the allowed areas, accidental or not, a PPA will escort you all friendly-like from the building and you'll be required to find your own way home. If you're an alien whose residency was granted temporarily on the basis of your draft, you'll be picked up by an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement van and booked for deportation."

  He proceeded to go over everything we weren't allowed to do. No smoking. No slouching. No sleeping. No cussing. No looking an officer in the eyes. No disrespecting your fellow recruits. And so on. After a while I began to wonder what we were allowed to do. From the sound of it we'd be ejected from MEPS just for holding our breath.

  He showed different slides and finally a vid. I heard acronyms and more acronyms. OCS. PT. PST. DOR. LCPO. OIC. XO. BSD/M. Funny thing was, it seemed like we were expected to know what all those acronyms meant. I kept having to jump to the glossary in the guide. I'm sure there was a free app I could download that would subtitle those acronyms for me as they were spoken in realtime while I had an aReal on. I made a quick detour to the app store on the Net, and found one.

  After a while, I started to browse different sections of the guide, basically ignoring the Gustav guy. Somehow I ended up on the spec-ops section. The more I read about the MOTHs, the more I wanted to be one. These guys were tacticians, corpsmen, astronauts, snipers and commandos rolled into one. Their specialty was "direct action:" short-duration operations of surgical precision conducted in hostile, denied, or diplomatically sensitive environments. If the UC wanted someone seized, recovered, or terminated quietly, and without stirring up a political storm, they called in the MOTHs. They were the special forces of the special forces.

  When Gustav was done, a PPA herded us down the corridor to the brain scan hall, where we were given the 'vocational aptitude' brain scan. A lot of people had already taken this scan apparently, at local recruiting centers and whatnot, so the waiting room had only about fifty people in it. Shaw had taken it beforehand too, so we exchanged Ids and promised to meet up in the mess hall for lunch later.

  When it was done, Tahoe, Alejandro and I hurried over to the mess hall with ten minutes to spare for lunch. Disappointingly, Shaw wasn't there. After rushing through a ham-and-cheese sandwich, the three of us made our way to the job selection hall. Before we got there, I managed to convince Tahoe and Alejandro to try out for the MOTHs with me. "It's the hardest training in the world," I told them. "But we'll get to do some crazy missions. Jumping out of starships, sneaking behind enemy lines, capturing privateers."

  Tahoe seemed excited by the prospect, Alejandro not so much. I knew he'd join though, if only for me. I'm not sure that
would be enough to get him through the training, which sounded ridiculously difficult. He'd definitely have to dig deep within himself.

  We all would.

  At the job selection hall, we found ourselves once more at the back of the queue. Again no sign of Shaw. A computer voice called out whenever a cubicle was free, and eventually I was paired up with a job counselor. He looked to be around fifty-five. His face seemed perpetually locked in a scowl.

  Well, at least he wasn't a robot.

  His eyes defocused for a moment, and I knew he was accessing my embedded Id. Probably had one of those implanted aReals.

  "Morning, son," the counselor said. His voice sounded tired.

  "Good morning."

  "What's good about it?"

  I didn't answer.

  "So, you chose the Navy. Two ratings are available to you. Guaranteed Job and Undesignated. Now if—"

  "I want to be a MOTH."

  "You will speak only when I ask you a question. Do you understand?"

  "I want to be a MOTH."

  The counselor clenched his jaw.

  "You don't understand my role here, do you?" He seemed about ready to give me an epic chewing out, but then his features softened, and he sighed. "You're lucky I'm in a good mood today. So. The MOTHs."

  "Yes."

  "MObile Tactical Human. Fancy name for a spec-op with a jetpack. They handle operations on air, sea, land, and space. Direct action, mostly."

  "I know what they do."

  "Do you now? It's all fun and games to you, isn't it?" He took a long, leisurely sip of coffee. "I don't know what we'd do without this stuff. Coffee I mean. It's the ambrosia of the people. The lifeblood. Nations have fought wars over coffee." He took another sip. "Do you think you could do it? Go to war for your country over coffee?"

  "If that's what my country wanted me to do, sir."

  "You'd kill people, for coffee?"

  I hesitated. "Yes, sir."

  "Could you kill a man in front of his wife and all his children, for coffee?"

  "Yes sir."

  "What about a beautiful woman? A model, standing in the middle of the street. Waiting for your convoy to arrive. Bombs strapped to her chest. Could you take her out?"

  "Yes sir."

  "What about the poor, unknowing child, whose father has given him a grenade to deliver to the men who've just kicked down his front door. Could you take the kid out? All in the name of coffee?"

  I swallowed. Hard.

  "Not so easy, is it? As a MOTH, you may be expected to do certain things. Things that may not exactly jive with your conscience. And if you can't follow orders without question, good men could die. Still want to be a MOTH?"

  "Situations like that are going to happen to any unit that sees street-level combat," I said. "Not just the MOTHs. The Marines, for example."

  "Which is why I bring it up. You won't be getting the seaman's or the astronaut's aloof view of war. Spec-ops people get up-close and personal with the enemy. You'll experience more of those 'situations' as you call them than any other Navy rating. So answer the question. Do you still want to be a MOTH?"

  "I do."

  He exhaled heavily, sitting back. "Well. Unfortunately, this is all moot, because you'll never meet the entrance requirements for the training. And even if do, you'll never pass. We're talking the most prestigious spec-ops unit in the entire UC military, here. The training regime is brutal."

  "I know all about that. And I'll do whatever it takes."

  The counselor straightened up. "Listen son, you think you know, but you don't. Besides, that's not how the military works. There are qualification requirements. Entry caps."

  "Find a way around them."

  He leaned forward. "Do you want to be in the Navy or not? You've been given a chance. Don't throw it all away by insisting on a rating you can't pass. Be reasonable. Look, I'll tell you what I can do: You apply for any other rating, I'll give you five thousand digicoins up front."

  Five thousand digicoins was awfully tempting. I'd never owned that much money in all my life.

  I should have backed down. I really should have. But I didn't.

  "No. Sign me up for the spec-ops." I'd made up my mind earlier, after reading about the MOTHs in the guide. Hardest training in the galaxy? Direct action operations? All that was for me. And once I made up my mind, I never changed it.

  "I'll be honest with you," the counselor said. "Your physical conditioning is crap. Your brain scan, crap. You wouldn't even make the rating of deck swabber, let alone spec-ops. You can't change your genetics. Well, not without more bitcoins than you'd make in a lifetime."

  He tried to stare me down.

  I wasn't going to let him.

  My brain scan was not crap, and neither was my physical conditioning. I was a Dissuader back home, dammit. You couldn't be weak, not in a job like that. He just wanted me to choose a different rating. But I wasn't going to back down, so I just returned his stare, saying nothing.

  He blinked, sat back. "Well. If that's the way it's going to be... you're actually in luck, because just a few weeks ago we were issued a new mandate: make more MOTHs. I hope you appreciate how extraordinary this is, because otherwise you'd be out of luck. So I'll tell you what I can do. You agree to a fourteen year service term instead of the usual twelve and I'll set you up on the spec-ops track. But if you fail to meet the MOTH entry requirements after Basic, or you fail the MOTH training program itself, you'll be banned from spec-ops and you'll have to choose a different rating. You'll still have to complete the fourteen year term either way. And no five thousand digicoins."

  I hesitated only a second. "Sign me up."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A short while later I found myself on a vactrain.

  Apparently the military had built their own evacuated tubes, forming a continent-wide network of maglev lines capable of transporting trains at up to Mach One. I didn't feel any G-forces even at the top speed though, and during turns I scarcely felt any drag because of the super-gimballed compartments.

  I was headed toward New Great Lakes, where I'd begin Basic training.

  Mine was a window seat, and I watched the landscape racing by. It made me feel thoughtful, looking out there. It was hard to believe that only a few days ago I'd been living in another country entirely.

  "So what do you see out there, Rade?" Shaw said from where she sat beside me.

  I didn't look from the window. "My old life. My future."

  "A bit introspective, are we?"

  I turned away from the glass and smiled. "I'm entering a new phase of my life, Shaw. We all are. A better phase. I hope I live up to the I high expectations I've set for myself."

  "You will, Rade. You have to. We all do. This is serious now."

  "Yeah."

  "So how's Alejandro holding out?" she said.

  "About the fourteen-year service commitment thing?" I glanced at him. He was seated right in front of us, beside Tahoe, but hadn't said a word since we boarded. "Could be better. I think he'll get over hating me in eight weeks or so. Just in time to graduate Basic."

  She flashed a quick smile, and lowered her eyes. She seemed a little sad all of a sudden.

  "What's wrong?" I said.

  "Nothing." She leaned forward slightly and stared out the window past me. "I mean, well, you mentioned graduating, and all I can think is, what about all the new friendships we'll lose at the end of Basic?"

  "We'll keep in touch. You know we will."

  "Sure." She gazed into my eyes. "But vidmail isn't the same."

  "Then we'll just have to make the most of the time we have."

  She broke eye contact, and nodded slowly. "I suppose we will."

  "But you know," I said. "There's no guarantee we'll even be assigned to the same division in Basic. This might be the last time we get to hang out with each other."

  "Actually I think you're wrong," she said. "I have a few friends who've taken Navy bootcamp ahead of me, and they said that everyone who ar
rived on the same train was put in the same division, give or take a few. Besides, we'll have weekends at liberty once in a while. Lots of time to head off base and hang out."

  "Or rent a love hotel." I gave her a wink.

  She gave me playful punch. "As if."

  "Hey, settle down over there," Ace said. He was sitting on the other side of Shaw. She'd introduced me to the natural-born UC citizen when we'd boarded. She'd only just met him today, and he was trying out for a spec-ops rating, like me, Tahoe and Alejandro. "By the way, Rade, what part of the UC did you say you were from again? I can't place the accent."

  "I'm not from the UC," I said.

  "Ah!" He smiled widely. "I would've never pegged you as South American. Not with the pale skin." He had aReal glasses on, and must have been looking at my public profile.

  "I'm Caucasian," I said. "Just grew up south of the border, is all."

  "Ah. Fancy that." He rubbed his chin. "Well, I don't know what we'd do without you guys. Us natural-borns are some seriously lazy mofos. Staying at home, smoking weed, letting the robos do all our chores, getting the drones to deliver our food. Obesity epidemic? Chalk it up to the robos and the Net. Who wants to live in the real world when the virtual one is so much more fun and the government pays for everything? Did you know the senate is even passing a bill to consider subsidizing longevity treatments? I shit you not. Don't think it'll pass, though. There has to be at least some incentive to work.

  "Not that there a lot of jobs available or anything. Robos got a lock on all the blue collar positions. That said, most companies still employ human managers, but a lot of corporations decided the cost of the more advanced AIs saves bitcoins in the long run, and since the public is becoming more amiable to interacting with robots, a lot of companies have no problem getting rid of humans entirely. White collar jobs are vanishing left and right. AIs are too advanced these days. Won't be long before you won't be able to get a job even if you want one. Even the creative types are threatened: Did you know someone's developed an experimental AI that writes books? Got about four or five of its novels on the bestseller lists at the same time, written under different pseudonyms. Ridiculous.