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Uncertain Fate by Bionic Pants
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Part 1: The Fallen
Date: 28 June 2006, 11:52 pm
It was a beautiful, sunny day in Sydney, Australia. The island continent had been Earth's military base of operations since the creation of the United Nations Space Command in 2164 in response to the savage Koslovic and Frieden movements. In a war memorial park in the downtown area were stone walls engraved with thousands of names. They displayed the men lost in every war from the Rainforest Wars to the Jovian Moons Campaign, even the wars of generations ago. One particular part of the wall read "HUMAN-COVENANT WAR" boldly at the top of the slab, "2525-2552" was engraved just below that. The following list seemed massive compared to those of other wars.
In the afternoon sun, an old man dressed in civilian clothing entered the park. His once stark-black hair was now a dull gray, his prominent mustache old and frayed. His face was wrinkled and bags rested delicately beneath his eye sockets, and his dark skin had lost its reflective sheen. He was an old man, exhausted of combat and politics. He only wanted to rest now. He strolled through the park, taking time to stop shortly at each wall and scroll through the lists. He lingered at the one he was most interested in, and the same one that he had came to the park to see. The man dug in his pocket briefly and procured a cigar. He lit it with an old, scratched lighter and breathed the smoke in deeply. It curled around his mustache invitingly, yet deceptively at the same time. He coughed hoarsely. He was dying.
Presently a young man in formal lieutenant garb approached the old man. He was a business acquaintance, from a time the man wished to forget. His dark brown hair was shaved to military regulations, and his face was without a single hair. He stepped up next to the man and similarly looked to the wall. "I thought you wanted to quit? You said yourself it was a filthy habit," he said without looking over.
"That just wouldn't be like me," the old man replied with a mischievous smirk.
He began scanning the many names, finding ones that he recognized. One line read, "Private Jenkins, Anthony, KIA". He shook his head and puffed on his cigar. He also found "Private Desola, Carlos, KIA" and "Sergeant Stacker, Pete, KIA." Finally he looked at "Captain Keyes, Jacob, KIA" and sighed.
"I lost a lot of good men and women," he said wistfully.
"We all lost a lot of good people," the lieutenant replied, obviously referring to the military's loss. The old man snorted.
He continued sifting through the names when he came to his own engraved into the wall. After his name were engraved the letters "MIA". He looked over at the officer. "I thought you said they were going to have this fixed?" he said. "And that was nineteen years ago!"
"It's more complicated than you would imagine. First someone would need to fill in the engravings. When that was done, you would have an empty space. If it's left blank, it looks sloppy. If it's filled in with another name, it's a lie."
"Oh, for God's sake," the man muttered. He withdrew a pen from one of his pants pockets and wrote a letter "W" above the "M". The officer smiled.
The man checked further down the list and found another discrepancy. "Master Chief John-117 of Epsilon Eridanus system, MIA" was engraved under a section of the wall labeled "SPARTANS". He looked again at the lieutenant. "This was supposed to be fixed, too," he complained.
"I've gone over this with you before," responded the officer, somewhat annoyed. He kept his eyes on the wall. "There is no evidence of his survival. For all anyone knows, he died up there. But we can't be sure. That's the only reason he's listed as missing on this wall."
"He was on that Seraph. I took one and he took the other, and we got off that city before it went," the man insisted.
The officer sighed. "Even if that were true," he continued, "shouldn't someone have found the body by now? We searched the surrounding area and all the wreckage extensively and no remains were ever found—"
The old man interrupted him. "He aint a body and he aint remains. He's a person," he said disgustedly.
"Ok, we never found him in any of the wreckage or in space. No craft was ever found on the moon or the Earth's surface. It's been twenty years. If he were alive, shouldn't we have found him by now?"
The old man did not respond. Instead he took a long drag of his cigar and blew it out slowly. He gestured to the section where "SPARTANS" was engraved. "Damn fine men and women, those ones," he said reminiscently.
The lieutenant glanced at the lists below. "That reminds me of why I came for you in the first place," he began. "My superiors at ONI are looking into a new project. They want to know if you'd be interested."
"You know I'm retired," the man replied shortly.
The officer continued, seemingly unaware of his objection. "We're toying with the notion of a Spartan III project."
The cigar nearly escaped the grasp of the man's lips when he choked on the lieutenant's words. A pair of raspy coughs sent puffs of smoke into his eyes, stinging them a bit. "What for?" he demanded once his fit had passed and the cigar was firmly in place once more. "The Flood are all dead. The Halos are gone. The Covenant's been overthrown. The ones that are left have made peace with us," he argued.
"Law enforcement, mainly. If they were that efficient against the aliens, imagine their ability to keep humans in line! Crime problems will be nonexistent!"
The man sneered angrily. "You suits don't get it." He blew a stream of smoke out his nostrils. "You just don't get it."
"Get what?" he said, almost uninterested.
The man plucked the cigar from his mouth and stared into the names engraved on the wall. "Son, I was trained to kill. I learned how to pull a trigger and break a bone, and when I was good and ready, for that matter." He licked his lips. "But they, they grew up killing. They learned to play catch with hand grenades, hopscotch with obstacle courses, snowball fights with training weapons. They had no childhood. Even what they'd already learned was wiped clean when you stole them."
The lieutenant gazed ahead. He opened his mouth to say something.
"And that wasn't enough," he continued. "You bastards had to play God. You had to change them, make them better. You stole their humanity from them. You made them machines. You told them what to kill and how to kill it, and they did it without a second thought. You made them take what they knew about war and throw out the rest. You killed them." He was silent for a moment. "I didn't realize that until after the war." His lips clamped shut on the cigar and he puffed anxiously.
The officer did not say anything. He suddenly averted his eyes from the list of Spartans and looked down at his polished boots.
"You said you wonder why no one has found the Master Chief?" asked the old man. The lieutenant looked at him inquisitively. "Maybe," he continued, his eyes locked on a single name etched into the wall, "it's because some people don't wanna be found." With that, he took a last drag of his cigar, dropped it to the ground, crushed it under his foot, and delivered to the wall the crispest salute he could muster in his old age. He turned and strolled onto the avenue, his eyes faraway with memories of people he once knew.
The lieutenant stood shortly with his face to the ground before looking up at the wall again. He scanned it briefly, but looked away again when he saw the word "SPARTANS" engraved as though it were on someone's heart. He turned and left the fallen to rest.
Part 2: Former Self
Date: 28 June 2006, 11:56 pm
The sun burned intensely over the Pacific Ocean. The first ten feet or so of water was ablaze with bright light and heat, but darkness and cold reigned supreme just below. Schools of tropical fish swam near the surface, frolicking in the warmth of the day. The water protected the fish from the star's rays, but creatures on land had to seek shelter during most of the day, being this close to the equator.
A lone seagull lazily drifted above the water, its white wings spread wide in the morning sky. However, despite its seemingly careless demeanor, it was carefully scanning the ocean below. The bird's beady eyes caught something in the water, a reflection, a ripple, nothing more; but it was a sign as clear as day to the gull. It effortlessly banked its body to one side and gracefully swooped down to the water. The bird plunged at full speed toward its own reflection, stopping only centimeters before crashing into the waves, and grasped a slick, silver fish with its talons. The fish struggled mightily, but it could not escape the iron grip of the seagull, which now turned around to head back to its home.
The bird glided toward a small island. Two mountains stood in the center of the island; neither was quite tall enough to accumulate snow at its tip. The entire isle was heavily forested, save for the beaches, despite modern civilization tendencies. In fact, the place was quite sparsely populated, with only three small fishing villages, though modern they were. The seagull flew over the fishing and shipping port of one such village on the east coast, and proceeded to disappear over a rugged hill nearby. There were an odd dozen men unloading fish and other supplies from offshore at a docking facility protruding from the coastline. The "docks" were actually stone and steel square-shaped platforms in the water, quite unlike the inferior wooden-planked docks of centuries ago. Although there were numerous machines for offloading and transporting the supplies, the men preferred the old method of manual labor. The group was just finishing loading the crates and fresh sea life onto the trucks that would bring them into town.
The island community lived a simpler life with older techniques, not because they lacked new technology, but because of preference. While they still used hydrogen-powered cars and had roads connecting the different towns, they preferred older-style houses and equipment. The majority of the inhabitants had simply become tired of the streamlined, high-maintenance lifestyles in the cities and wanted more uniqueness in their lives. Many of the workers liked to wear "plaid shirts" and "baseball caps," which were very popular several centuries ago. Even the regular islanders wore antique style, very colorful and lively clothing, as opposed to the current civilian wear. The departure from technology and city life was very relaxing and therapeutic on the small atoll.
One dock worker was wearing the aforementioned "plaid shirt" with cutoff sleeves and a pair of old "blue jeans" that he had cut the legs off of, which were surprisingly comfortable considering the heavy material they were made out of. A tan cloth "bucket cap" shaded his head, quite effective despite the inferior material, which he removed to wipe his sweaty forehead. His short hair was almost completely overrun with gray, and his brow was crisscrossed with dozens of deep wrinkles. His salt-and-pepper mustache was long and scraggly, and his face was reddened from countless morning suns. The man was into his early sixties, but had a very solid build and strong muscle complex. He ran his fingers through his wet hair shortly and replaced the cap.
"Is that all we're scheduled for today?" he asked another man with a datapad. His voice was deep and raspy, but one could detect great knowledge and great weariness in its hues.
The man with the datapad glanced at it briefly and replied, "Yeah, that's the last shipment till tomorrow."
"In that case," he said, standing up, "I'll see you all in the morning."
"Ok, see ya tomorrow, Ray."
The man cringed imperceptibly. Ray Burkland. It had been twenty years, but he still couldn't help flinching every time he heard the name. Burkland wasn't such a bad name—he couldn't even remember his old last name—but Ray didn't suit him at all. He was most certainly not a Ray. He liked his old name much better.
Mr. Burkland said goodbye to the rest of the men at the docks and began his leisurely stroll home. He walked along the sidewalk beside the small road and admired the surroundings. They hadn't become one bit dull over the past two decades. He thought how nice it was to just walk, to take in the world, without any help from moving walks or transport machines. There was so much green all around him, even in the space between the road and the sidewalk. It still stunned him and filled him with pleasure to see grass and trees everywhere he looked, instead of the gray buildings and concrete he had become so accustomed with in his younger years.
As he walked along, nearly every person he saw out and about greeted him kindly, to which he returned the favor. It was not uncommon for someone in the town to know everyone else who lived there. Mr. Burkland also took pleasure in seeing the quaint little houses around the street. And every single house had something called a "yard." It was just a small plot of empty land, but it was completely unheard of in the densely-populated parts of the world. It was a good place to just sit outside and think.
He reached his own home in around ten minutes and placed his hand on the scanner near the front door. The electronic locks weren't all too necessary in such a small town, but many people still took the precaution. Once verifying his finger prints, the system unlocked the door, which he had to turn a handle on to open. In fact, every door in the house—in every house on the island, he assumed—was manually operated. There were no sensors and no sliding doors. But it was a simple task, an opportunity to think about what he was doing, that Mr. Burkland liked. When he first arrived on the island, there were several occasions when he ran into the old doors without thinking. He chuckled about that as he stepped inside.
The interior of his house was just as distinctive as the exterior. The walls were painted a whiteish-cream color, and a deep blue "carpet" covered all the floors. He loved the feel of it on his feet, and walked around indoors barefoot quite frequently. The carpet also required another ancient instrument to clean it, a "vacuum cleaner." He also had antique forms of clothing washing and drying machines and food preparation appliances. The most advanced thing in his whole house was the television broadcast headband, which he sparsely used.
Mr. Burkland didn't like the old machines only for their personality, however. He also liked the manual labor because is kept him busy so he couldn't think about things. Not that he didn't like thinking, he just didn't like thinking about the things he usually found himself thinking about. When he let his mind wander aimlessly, it almost invariably began thinking of war, death, and corruption—the very things he came to the island to escape. He had trouble sleeping quite frequently, because when he tried to not think and go to sleep, his mind thought of these things. Consequently, he had to think about other things, delaying sleep until he could no longer stay awake. Even then he had dreams of such things. Horrible dreams. He often woke up in a cold sweat, and once he was screaming. He wished he could shut off his brain sometimes.
Mr. Burkland decided to go to his bedroom and rest, since he had gotten even less sleep than usual the previous night. He didn't recall exactly what he had dreamed about, but he knew it was something he didn't like. As he entered the bedroom, he found himself walking to his closet. He stopped himself at the door, his hand on the knob. Immediately his brain flooded with thoughts of war, suffering, and loss. He tried to suppress his thoughts, to make his mind behave, but he couldn't. Hundreds of memories flooded it, and he began to see things he remembered instead of the closet door. He saw training, children, weapons, a destroyed city, a strange shield, aliens, dying brothers and sisters, a ring, explosions, Earth, plasma, soldiers. The memories ran uncontrollably, and their speed picked up. He became so disoriented that he let go of the door handle, and the memories stopped, like the closing of a water valve, and he saw the wooden door again.
Then he remembered his suit. It was so new in terms of technology, and yet it seemed a thousand years old in his mind. He remembered how it shone in the sun, how it glittered fantastically. He remembered how it fit him perfectly, like an extension of his body. He remembered the feeling of the gel interior on his bare body, the spark in his brain when an AI entered, the ease of movement, the AI. He remembered how everything was a part of him, how it was him. No, he told himself, no goddammit! That's not me! It never was me! I just thought it was! I'm different now! I don't need it! In fact, it's gone! It's gone forever, and I DON'T NEED IT!
And then, as if to reaffirm himself, he grasped the door handle and flung it open with all his might. The closet was empty, save for clothing hanging from a rack mounted in the ceiling. He looked inside for several moments. His mind, rather than his eyes, probed every dark corner before he could bring himself to shut the door. He was suddenly extremely tired. He walked over to his bed and fell onto it, his face to the ceiling. He closed his eyes and thought. It was gone. His suit was gone. But where? What happened to it? He decided that he didn't care. It was somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean now. But it didn't matter, there was no great loss. It was merely a shadow of a former self.
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