"I think it's crazy we live in such an advanced society, yet not only do we never see any of the technology, but we also have to take the bus to go to our basic training facility!" The girl right next to me says she's yapping my ears off.
A'roll is sitting in the row in front of me, chewing bubblegum. He turns around quickly, then slaps the girl in the mouth.
She gasps and tries to grab his arm.
"Real G's move in silence like lasagna, ma'am." He takes out the gum and places it on her hand. She attempts to roll down the window to toss the gum off of her hand and instead hits her hand on a stop sign.
The bus driver yells loudly and scolds her while the rest of the bus laughs.
She turns towards me and rolls her eyes.
"You're a man! Help me!" She exclaims.
I grab her arm and rip it from the stop sign; the bus continues.
"What's your name?" She asks me.
A'roll sits on his knees over the seat and turns around, facing her.
"He doesn't give his name to Janets."
"I'm not a fucking Janet! I was born on Opranus!
"I'm Co'ol." I say, raising my finger.
"Cool? I bet you think you are."
The bus laughs for a moment.
"No, that's my birth given name. There's an apostrophe in it."
"We know, dude, we're just playing with you." She pats my shoulders.
The guy behind me asks, "You Aheian or what?"
"Not anymore." I peek over her shoulder and point to our training facility.
"We're here! Take your soldier identification chips and place them in your left pollex." The bus driver states.
We drag our suitcases out, put on our white berets, and step outside the academy.
I stare at the walls of the facility and look at A'roll. He's sagging with his pants down to his ankles; his class of 29,980 shirt covers his ass.
"You have to intimidate your drill instructor." He says, walking like a pimp on the way to the entrance of the facility.
The identification chip merges with our thumbs right as we enter the doorway; they fuse and leave a burning sensation. The device says we have seventeen galactic weeks until they're removed, and then and only then may the burning sensation stop.
A'roll cries while holding his hand, complaining that the pain is too much. He lies on his hand in an attempt to numb it, but the soldiers clown him in a circle.
He holds his hand and presses it against his knee, and he claims the burning sensation goes to his knee.
The nurse takes him to her little office, and he smiles.
He messaged me on CivicLink that he plans on staying in the bathroom until it's time for roll call. He also tells me he's a nervous shitter, and he hasn't been able to use the toilet for three days.
Thirty minutes go by, the buzzer beeps, and our chips begin blinking under our skin; they beep more intensely the farther we get from our designated barracks.
The Drill instructor points to the barracks and separates us by species. A'roll and I stand right next to each other while two humans and two Kopeshes stand behind us.
A'roll rushes into the room with his uniform up to his chest. The uniforms are gray camo.
The Drill instructor slams his hand on the back of A'roll's head. A'roll turns around and pushes him. The instructor is no more than 165cm; he's a human with a stocky build. He punches A'roll in the nostril; he stumbles back. Then, the instructor uses a remote to send a shock through everyone's induction chip.
He now finally begins to speak whilst we all shake on the ground.
"In case you don't know! I, Your Drill Instructor, Sergeant Stoutflower, believe in communal punishments. A'roll here, the little fuckup he is, decided he was going to try to test me! And now, you all will have to run fifteen laps around the entire facility and back in 5x this planet's regular gravity." He steps in front of all of us.
He places his boot on my back, then lifts my head up with my hand.
"If that dotard is ever bothering you, don't forget to tell me. I'll give him some lashings." He lifts his boot up.
A Siciste boy walks in; he can't be older than thirteen. He's probably the bare minimum age to sign up. He's somehow my height; still, he's very young.
His hair is curly and laid down in a wave-like pattern, brushed neatly towards his hairline. He has several gels and pomades in his hand, along with a brush the drill instructor allows him to carry.
"Finally, look who showed up! I bet your father saved up all of his SkyPesos to help you get into this academy, didn't he?"
"No, sir." He says, laying his stuff on his bed.
The instructor walks over. He has to look up to talk to the boy.
"Did I tell you that you could respond to me?"
"No, sir." He wobbles kind of, in fear.
"You're right, I didn't give you permission to talk." He punches the boy in the esophagus, and he falls down to his knees.
A'roll gets off the ground and stands behind the instructor, mimicking everything he does.
The instructor gets in the kids' faces, and you can visibly see his breath; it's green, and it heats up the room whenever he talks.
A'roll chuckles for a minute.
"Jody's got him mad already. What's with the unnecessary violence?"
The instructor turns around like a cartoon character and pokes him in the chest.
"Did I tell you that you could talk either? Speak when you're spoken to!"
He presses the remote, and the chips go off again.
Someone grabs A'roll and drags him to his spot.
"Finally, we can commence our first day of training." He yells, tipping his hat to be slightly over his eyes,
"Well, you know my name already, but in case you were not paying attention, I am your Drill instructor, Sergeant Stoutflower. You will respond to me as sir, and I will respond to you either with a nickname or one of these randomly generated number combinations on your identification chips. My job is to prepare you to enter the Rocketeer department of the universe's most capable military. Am I understood?
The barracks say"Yes, sir" in unison.
"Every day we will face that banner and recite our pledge right when we wake up. Failure to do so will result in a tier one shock. Repeated offenses will result in a section tier one shock; it only goes up from there. When you graduate, the pain in your thumb will go away, but those chips stay with you forever. They allow you to go anywhere in the observable universe. You will not leave the local cluster unless you have ranked so high that you are told to venture into the far-out reaches of space.
He paces the room; he places his left foot in front of his right, probably meaning he's left-handed. Stoutflower pauses in front of a human.
"Fellow human. What's your name?
"Clavior, sir!" She exclaims.
"No need to yell, gal, tell me. Do you have a partner back home?
"Yes, sir!"
"Forget about them. You do not love unless I tell you to love, and you will not sleep unless I tell you to sleep; you will not eat unless I permit you to eat." He steps away from her and walks down my row and steps in front of a Kopesh, a dinosaur-looking man with three ivory tusks, one on his forehead and two on his cheeks.
"You may use your CivicLink three times a day." He says, grabbing the wrist of the guy behind me.
"You will not use it while I speak." He then lifts his arm and points to a yellow band on it.
"These yellow bands signify that you are your section leader! You are responsible for your section of the barrack in every way. You may be the subject of pranks, conflict, and all types of activity. You are the mini-me, and you will have to exploit your power! Next week we will begin our raygun lesson. Get to know each other."
He claps his hands, and the barracks begin to raise in volume.
Eventually, it sounds like a stadium.
I turn around to A'roll to the left of me. He's trying his hardest not to laugh. I turn to the boy to my right, and he's smiling with his eyes closed.
A'roll whispers something.
"The dude behind that kid shat himself when the instructor was talking about the sleep when I tell you to sleep bit," A'roll says.
I start laughing. The guy behind me pushes me.
"Hey! Listen here, jackasses. I want to graduate here with flying colors — A'roll punches him in the mouth and steals the yellow wristband from his wrist; he then pins him against the bed frame. He uses the yellow wristband as a handcuff and punches him in the stomach twice.
The rest of the barrack turns around to face him.
"What?" He says, looking around, then he drops his fists.
The Kopesh man uses his tusk to cut the cheek of A'roll, since potenes, and especially A'roll, have thicker skin, it's difficult for him to pierce it, but he manages to do so.
They spend about thirty minutes fighting while the rest of us socialize.
Half of the people here aren't from Opranus; the people from Opranus here surely aren't Potenes.
One person walks up to me with a yellow wristband.
"This one's wallflower; the other one next to him is Starchild."
A'roll stops beating up the section leader and turns around.
"Hey, I'm not gay." He walks over towards the secondary section leader.
The section leader looks at him.
"Starchild doesn't mean gay."
"Uh, yeah, it does. Doesn't it, Wallflower?" He pokes me with his elbow.
"Yeah, sure." I nod.
"The price of having intergalactic janets learn our lingo," A'roll says, turning back around to see that the Kopesh ran off somewhere.
"Why were you beating on him earlier?" I ask him.
"He called me a Jenti," A'roll responds.
"You call me a spindle; I don't beat your ass for it," I tell him.
Stoutflower returns and flicks the lights off.
"You will sleep from 6 pm to noon. The galactic clock uses Opranus's calendar; we're getting your bodies used to it."
He states, now walking around. Forcing us to get into our beds and sleep, it feels like your parent caught you past your bedtime playing a game or something. It doesn't feel nostalgic to me, but I hope it does to you.
A'roll falls asleep quickly, too quickly. He told me it takes him hours to sleep, but at the same time, he didn't sleep for a day and a half, to get more irritable. A'roll believes the more of a jerk he acts, the more respect he'll gain.
On night three, the section leader got tired of it; the entire barrack got tired of our communal punishments.
We gathered in the middle of the night, folded our raygun cartridges into our socks and silk headbands, and beat him in the stomach while he slept.
A'roll looked at me differently; he usually had a lot more passion whenever he spoke, and a soul behind his eyes. He only spoke when he was instructed to and did whatever the instructor said.
Whilst we assembled our weapons, he talked to his girlfriend and accidentally kissed the rifle while trying to kiss her in hologram mode.
The barracks laughed, and he shot at the air. Stoutflower pulled him away and spoke to him.
For the next week, during the raygun training, the instructor noticed he had become more serious, less rude, and 'acted like Wallflower over there'
Our parkour he dominated in; he leaped over structures, he crawled under the wire. He seemingly always knew exactly what we were gonna do that day.
The boy told me his name was Aedar, and he was one of the Siciste from Aesir, a tundra world. The rest of them live on Earth, and he's only 13 years old, but his species lives for 50 years at most, making him eligible to join the military. Plus, A'roll and I are only 17 and a half.
A'roll and I are praised for our aim, especially A'roll. He can hit a target a quarter of a mile away using a handgun, according to the instructor.
The section leader also praises him; he praises me for showing him how to remove the insoles from his shoes.
He looks at me one morning while we're cleaning the bathrooms as part of a team-building exercise.
"Tomorrow, at the chapel, Stoutflower leaves the shed to the raygun bay unlocked. We're going to steal a lightblade and cut that Kopesh up." He says to me.
"Right, Starchild." I laugh.
He pushes me, I stumble and hit my back on a urinal.
"What's your issue?" I ask him.
"Oh, so now you're the one seeing the problem."
"You're a pink cloud. A recovering addict, you're just getting withdrawals." I say, sliding around on the wet floor.
"The guys and I are going to the chapel without his permission to discuss our mutiny. Day five, he said If we can succeed in a mutiny against him, we skip the next 15 weeks of class, and we'll graduate." He pulls me up and begins to mop the floor."
I look at him.
"Mutiny?"
"We overthrow our section leader, then we overthrow Stoutflower." A'roll takes out a pack of gum and hands it to me.
"Where'd you get this?" I ask him.
"See. You ask questions like Stoutflower already."