Moving On

She is feeding now. And when she is done we’ll find food for me. Probably at some upscale restaurant tonight – as her dinner had quite a bit of cash on him.
I don’t feel guilty for the part I play in her hunt. I have the stomach for killing. Of course killing men is a more deadly offense right now since there are so few of them.

Tonight’s sumptuous feast (her words, not mine) actually offered to pay her to let him live. She quietly told him she’d take whatever he had – after he no longer had any use for it. She’s draining him slowly now – his punishment for thinking that her loyalty could be paid for with money.

I’ve read the propaganda about her kind, but quite frankly she’s the only form of true justice I’ve seen in my lifetime. And still she’s compassionate.
It seems almost like a different life now – but it wasn’t so long ago she found me in the street.

I knew I was going to die that night and I was ready. And then I saw her. And I knew.

I’m not sure how, but instantly I knew what she was. I think it was her boldness combined with her beauty and of course, the time of night. No one is out past curfew except the criminals, the Force and the Streeters. I was a Streeter and I was looking for a way out.

“You were in the Trenches. You can find work at the Center,” I was told.
But people who say that haven’t been to the Center, and they certainly haven’t been to the Trenches. It’s actually not so bad now. Most of the fighting is done because quite honestly, none of us remember why it started in the first place. And those stories aside – there’s really nothing left to fight for anymore.

So I came ‘home.’ I don’t even know why. I was told that Defenders were being called back and following orders was all I knew.

They bussed me right from Processing to the Center after stamping me with my Discharge Tats – upper right shoulder. And there I sat and waited with hundreds of other women just like me until my number was called.

“25756.”

I stepped up to the cubicle beneath where my number glowed in red on a simple black industrial screen. The woman who sat opposite from me was unlike any I’d ever encountered. She was a throwback to the old vid files that you can find if you hack into the PDB. Her long hair neatly pulled back from her face revealed fine finished features and colors painting her skin.

My commanders didn’t look like that. The women combatants we fought didn’t look like that. The civilian women struggling to stabilize their lives day to day and run households and work at construction sites rebuilding their cities didn’t look like that.

She was pretty.

It didn’t seem right somehow to be sitting there in my GIBs in this cold, sterile, industrial building across from someone that was ‘pretty.’

She looked up at me and smiled. It was a courteous professional smile – but not sincere. Her voice was soft and lyrical.

“Number?”

“25756.”

“Date of birth?”

“Three, thirteen, eighty PA.”

“We were born the same year. Last duty station?”

“New London, United Union.” Why the superfluous information? Why would I care when she was born? Was she trying to bond with me? Gain my trust? Had she ever been outside of Newmerica? Had she ever answered to drill instructors and commanders? What could this pretty female possibly have in common with me?

She typed. She scrolled.

“Portal please.”

I rolled back the gray cuff of my GIB sleeve on my right wrist and popped the protective cover off the portal in my wrist. She plugged in the interface.

The listings scrolled into my conscious. Construction. Desk Jobs with the Force. Industries seeking private unarmed guards.

“I don’t see your job on here.”

“These are the jobs your training has made you best suited for. “

“My training made me best suited to be a Defender.”

“Your services as a Defender are no longer required. These companies however could benefit from your skills.”

“Why don’t I see any listing for Force Officers?”

“Force Officers are required to carry weapons – but you are no longer authorized carry a firearm.”

“Probably because I actually know how to use one,” I muttered.

“I beg your pardon. You might want to remember that you are interfaced – our conversation is being recorded…”

She wasn’t so pretty anymore. And I saw it. The polite veneer, the make-up, the smile and the soft voice – it was all there to disguise what they at the Center did not want us to know. We were not welcome. We were not wanted. We weren’t ‘as good’ as the women who’d stayed behind to rebuild. The ones who’d found places in civil training schools and had families wealthy enough to keep their daughters close to home. The ones who were still allowed to breed. The ones who actually still looked like women.

Defenders were now a sub-class of society. Newmerica was moving on. The Council had a focus on peace, rebuilding and population reconstruction and there was no longer a place for the warriors they’d created to keep them safe. They didn’t trust us with weapons. They didn’t want to waste the time to teach us new skills. We were now just a source of cheap labor.

“Never mind.” I stood to leave.

“You’re still interfaced. I cannot let you leave without a job assignment.”

“Oops…” I yanked the cord and cringed slightly as the system security voltage coursed through my veins. It’s the safety measure they installed to make sure we don’t disconnect our interface manually. It might work on civilians, but Defenders deal with much worse in the Trenches – or at least, we did.

Her face turned to stone and she turned back to her system.

Part of me wanted her to challenge me. Part of me wanted security called. I wanted one last fight. A blaze of glory. Maybe they would lock me up.

No such luck.

She looked past me as if I’d already walked away.

“25768.”

I walked out of the Center doors. No alarms sounded. No car came to get me. No escorts carried me off. No officials intercepted me. And I suddenly knew I was completely on my own.

Understanding (is overrated...)

People don’t understand how it happened. How it happens. But then again this isn’t the first time in my life I’ve been somewhere and no one seems to understand how.

Understanding is overrated.

I don’t NEED to be understood. Ever.

Understanding is a luxury item with no real use or importance.

I need food. I need a place to live. I need money. And yes sometimes I really NEED a fix. Understanding? Sympathy? Empathy? Love?

Love…

Guess I can do without those because you can’t spend them. You can’t eat them. They don’t keep you warm at night when you can see your own breath and you squat in some corner to take a piss and you can’t believe anything steaming could possibly be coming out of your own body a for a moment that part of you that the piss is flowing through feels warm – warm enough that you don’t even mind that you ass is hanging out completely exposed because it went numb a long time ago. You’re just not sure if it was from the cold or from sitting on the pavement…

But I digress.

She tells me when I digress. She likes fancy words like Digress.

They roll off her tongue like foreign poetry – silky and hypnotic. Her eyes blaze and she smiles ever so slightly. Everything she does is elegant. She says it’s about understanding time and timing and being sure of one’s self. She says she was once like me.

But I don’t think she ever could have been like me. She’s classy. I’m just crap. But now I belong to her. And people say I’m crazy.

“Isn’t it dangerous?” they whisper. “What if she – you know…” they’re too chicken-shit to finish the sentence out loud.

“Kills me?”

It makes me laugh actually. After jumping out of air transports and fighting in The Trenches on three different continents in The Last War, people really have the nerve to ask that question.

Of course they don’t know that when they first meet me.

I look different now. My hair is longer. I wear clothes that cover up most of the Duty Tats and scars. People could almost mistake me for a regular woman. But beneath the nearly feminine veneer she has fashioned for me I’m nothing more than an empty shell.

“There is a way to fill the emptiness,” she sometimes croons.

“Not your way.”

“No,” she chides. “Not my way.” And she licks her blood-stained lips.

She’s smarter than her peers. Smarter than I’ve ever been. She was one of the first sent to the The Trenches. And the mark she wears is far more difficult to bear – so she keeps it carefully hidden.

There are so few of her kind left that they are no longer hunted. The council has far bigger mistakes to cover for. And maybe there’s a masochistic part that appreciates her continued existence. A small portion to the Council Collective that allows her presence as reminder to themselves of how far they have come.

Who would think that the organization once in charge of all things War and death related would turn all its efforts to something that should be as instinctual as breeding.

No worries here. My weapons, the burning reactors, the dust clouds in Chinazikstan – all left me sterile.

History tells of a time before my time – before her time even – when men fought their own wars. They started them and they finished them.

But not The Last War. It was a war that the men could not finish – and so women were sent when there were no more men. There were more of us anyway, they argued.
But all this is ancient history. Not the world I was born to. The world she is trying to save me from.

Soon this will all make sense. There is much to tell and more to explain. I do not care if you understand. That is not my concern. I am only concerned that you know. For someday my heart will cease to beat – either at her hand or the passage of time. And someday she too may be hunted or just meet a blazing demise. But our story is important. Her story is important. That may even be why she chose me.

But now I tire. Tomorrow is a new day for telling. And now I will dream of faces erased long ago by poor planning, miscommunication and the arrogance of men.