I never would have guessed gums could itch like this.
Teeth are coming in.
I’ve already grown two in the last few days, and I get the feeling that’s not the end of it.
At least my head’s stopped hurting.
Small mercies.
Now the wristbands handle wake up calls for feeding.
A weak jolt of current, and we’re up.
As far as I can tell, our little enclosures, more like pens than anything, are here for growth.
After we got moved out of the “nursery,” they put us all in identical cream colored onesies.
Must be inconvenient for using the bathroom, since they never come off.
But, as it turns out, the second you need to go, a flexible hose with a suction cup shoots out from the corner of the pen and handles it right through the fabric, vacuum cleaner style.
The clothes come out dry afterward, with no smell at all.
Impressive fabric.
It stretches well too.
For growth, I assume.
Fast growth, because eating, and yes, it deserves the capital letter, has gotten bigger and more frequent.
More is putting it mildly.
We eat something like eight times a day now.
Same tube from the corner of the pen, though the taste of the stuff has changed.
Blander, sweeter.
But we only get fed on schedule, whenever the wristband sends the signal.
I tried eating outside the schedule once.
Went hungry until the next feeding.
And I mean genuinely, unbearably hungry.
I never wanted food like that in my old life.
Our baby monitor these days is just the pulse in the wristband.
That’s what I’ve started calling it.
One pulse to get up, one pulse to eat.
Pavlov’s dogs, basically.
Moments like that really drive home how little your own life is worth around here.
No wonder the clones in the stories died in droves, practically cheerful about it, if this is the attitude they’re raised on from the crib.
The same pulse puts us to sleep too.
At some point there’s a soft click, and we all just go down.
Almost none of it is up to us.
Every one of us just switches off, like a television with a remote somewhere out of sight.
One press, and lights out.
At least whoever’s holding that remote isn’t messing around with it for fun.
They take good care of us, credit where it’s due.
The people who made us.
There’s discipline here.
A regime, a routine.
Why “we,” “us”?
Because there are close to fifty toddlers like me in this room.
Forty eight little tags glowing on the screen above the pen, if I count right.
They show us cartoons too, cheerful little ones.
Ever seen a story about a bolt of plasma leaving home from the barrel of a carbine, heading out into the world to reach the guaranteed kill radius of some enemy’s chest?
There’s a character, some kind of armor mascot, who always turns up right when the bolt is about to accidentally visit your torso.
You probably haven’t seen it.
I watch it every single day.
Lucky me.
Honestly though, calling any of this a “cartoon” is generous; it’s closer to an illustrated field manual on tactics for toddlers.
And in every one of them, the plasma bolts from the carbine are meant to go visit the internal organs of the Enemies of the Republic.
The Republic being, conveniently, the one and only reason any of us get to exist.
Very tidy propaganda.
The other kids stare at the screen like they’re hypnotized.
Meaningful little stares, too.
Funny thing is, once those screens turn on, it’s genuinely hard to look away.
You can pace the pen, lie down, stand on your head if you want; I tried, didn’t work, but pulling your eyes off the picture takes real effort.
Maybe it’s possible.
I haven’t managed it yet.
Makes me wonder if there’s something more than just bright colors doing the work there.
Here’s a discovery: I can read.
Not that I forgot how, just that I didn’t know the local alphabet yet.
Turns out that’s funny too.
At some point the cartoons started scrolling a line of text along the bottom and sides, specs for whatever weapon or gear was being shown.
And not only could I read it and understand it, I remembered it after a single pass.
The learning curve here is unsettling, and my memory’s started soaking up information at a rate that feels almost wrong.
I had time to line some of it up against facts from my old life before the lights went down, since we get a couple of minutes to gnaw on the sides of the pen and watch the others before sleep hits.
The last cartoon just wrapped, some voice over the speakers going on about what brave soldiers and brothers we all are, and I’m standing here thoughtfully gnawing on the rail of the pen.
Teeth itching like crazy.
Thinking helps distract from it.
Right, my old life.
Strange, talking about yourself in the past tense.
Any adult gets thrown by a situation this far outside their experience, because by a certain age you’re used to slotting everything into familiar patterns.
And here, the part that gets under my skin the most is that I don’t understand how any of this happened to me.
Close behind that is not having the faintest idea what to do about it.
Too many unknowns, not enough data, and nowhere to go looking for more.
A second chance?
Fine, let’s call it that.
Except back in my old life I wasn’t exactly a great person, and now, knowing roughly what’s coming, I genuinely don’t know what to do with that.
I can set the soul searching aside for now and default to the one plan I actually know: keep your head down, act like an operative deep in hostile territory.
Rule one: don’t let on what you know about this world, which should be easy enough given how far behind the local tech seems to be.
Rule two: don’t show any skills, though whatever used to be muscle memory probably didn’t come along with this body; only the knowledge did.
And the last thing worth thinking about: how to actually survive, given there’s a war coming.
If the setup here matches what I think it does, sooner or later they’ll send all of us off to be spent or slaughtered, more or less the same outcome either way.
Trying to hide in the crowd?
Don’t make me laugh.
Who am I, really?
A meat and bone copy off an assembly line, one more stamped duplicate of some bounty hunter named Jango Fett.
And after that, then what?
Go home?
Back to Earth?
Does it even still exist from here?
And if it does, where is it?
And if it doesn’t, then what?
Well, hope dies last, they say, but who knows.
Maybe.
“Nom nom nom.” The plastic rail is tasteless and barely gnaws at all, useless thing.
Ugh, these teeth.
I really should sit down and try to remember whatever I can about this universe.
I watched some of it back when it was on, though a lot more got made than I ever saw, and I read a few of the books, if only I’d known ahead of time I’d end up living inside it.
Okay.
Stop.
Stop overthinking this.
Our old drill sergeant used to hammer a pretty simple truth into us during training, usually with the butt of his rifle for emphasis: if you don’t know what to do, either follow the rules or do nothing at all, because showing initiative without knowing the rules gets your teeth knocked out.
I don’t know the rules here yet.
Nobody’s told us any.
And it’s probably too early for that anyway.
Physically, my body’s about where an eighteen month old would be.
I’m growing fast, like the rest of them, and as far as I can tell, I’m not ahead of schedule, and I’d like to keep it that way.
So for now, I’ll just be like everyone else.
The war will make the plan clear enough when it gets here.
And it’s about time I stopped splitting my life into “before” and “after” whatever it was that ended it back home.
Someday I’ll probably stop being amazed by all this, because right now it’s still hard to take any of it seriously for more than a minute at a time.
I didn’t even notice myself drifting off, sliding down the side of the pen into sleep on the back of some barely there pulse from the wristband, leaving a trail of drool behind as my head slid down.
No.
This is definitely not fun.