Lightspeed: Year One

The one who got us here, and who can’t ever get us out.

So, you say I’m unusual. How nice for me. The ones who separate usually kill themselves before the MPs ever get into the chamber. The others, the ones who integrate with their thing, get reused.

You think that the women I trained with—the ones not in my unit, the ones who didn’t die when we got back—you think they’re still out there, fighting an enemy we don’t entirely understand.

I think you’re naïve.

But you’re preparing a study, something for the government so that they’ll know this experiment is failing. Not the chip-in-the-brain thing that allows you to communicate with me, but the girl soldiers, the footsoldiers, the grunts on the ground.

And if they listen (ha!) they’ll listen because of people like me.

Okay. I’ll buy into your pipe dreams.

Here’s what everyone on Earth believes:

We don’t even know their names. We can call them The Others, but that’s only for clarity purposes. There are names—Squids, ETs—but none of them seem to stick.

They have ships in much of the solar system, so we’re told, but we’re going to prevent them from getting the Moon. The Moon is the last bastion before they reach Earth.

That’s about it. No one cares, unless they have a kid up there, and even then, they don’t really care unless the kid is a grunt, like I was.

Only they don’t know the kid’s a grunt. Not until the kid comes home from a tour, if the kid comes home.

Here’s what I learned on our ship: Most of the guys never came home. That’s when the commanders started the hormonal/genetic thing, the thing that tapped into the maternal instinct. Apparently the female of the species has a ferocious need to protect her young.

It can be—it is—tapped, and in some of us, it’s powerful, and we become strong.

Mostly, though, no one gets near the ground. The battle is engaged in the blackness of space. It’s like the video games our grandparents used—which some say (and I never believed until now)—were used to train the kids for some kind of future war.

The kind we’re fighting now.

What I learned after a few tours, before I ever had to go to ground, was that ground troops, footsoldiers, rarely returned. They have specific missions, mostly clearing an area, and they do it, and they mostly die.

A lot of us died that day—what I can remember of it.

Mostly I remember the fingers and the eyes and the tentacles (yes, they’re real) and the pull of the face mask against my skin.

What I suspect is this: the troops the Others have on the ground aren’t the enemy. They’re some kind of captured race, footsoldiers just like us, fodder for the war machine. I think, if I concentrate real hard, I remember them working, putting chips places, implanting stuff in the ground—growing things?—I’m not entirely clear.

And I wonder if the talk of an invasion force is just that, talk, and if this isn’t something else, some kind of experiment in case we get into a real situation, something that’ll become bigger.

Because I don’t ever remember the Others fighting back.

If Squids can look surprised, these did.

All of them.

So that’s my theory for what good it’ll do.

There’s still girls dying up there. Women, I guess, creatures, footsoldiers, whatever they want to create.

Then we come back, and we become this: things.

Because we can’t ever be the Remembered Ones. Not again.

But you know that.

You’re studying as many of us as you can. That’s clear too.

I’m not even sure you are a doc. Maybe you’re a machine, getting these thoughts, processing them, using some modulated voice to ask the right questions, the ones that provoke these memories.

Since I’ve never seen you.

I never see anyone.

Except the ghosts of myself.

So what are you going to do with me? Reintegration isn’t possible; that’s been tried. (You think I don’t remember? How do you think the Remembered One and I split off in the first place? Once there was just her and the thing. Now there’s three of us, trapped in here—well, two trapped, and one growling, but you know what I mean.)

Sending us back won’t work. We might turn on our comrades. Or ourself. (Probably ourself.)

Sending us home is out of the question, even if we had a home. The Remembered One does, but she’s so far away, she’ll never reintegrate.

Let me tell you what I think you should do. I think you should remove the chip. Move me to a new location. Pretend you’ve never interviewed me.

Then you’d just be faced with the Thing.

And the Thing should be put out of its misery.

We should be put out of its misery.

Monica and LaTrice weren’t wrong, Doc. They were just crude. They used what methods they had at their disposal.

They were proactive.

I can’t be. You’ve got all three of us bound up here.

Let us go.

Send us back, all by ourselves. No team, no combat formation. Hell, not even any weapons.

Let us die.

It’s the only humane thing to do.

JENNY’S SICK David Tallerman

It’s a cold day in February, and Jenny’s sick again.