Dear reader.
The military is nothing like when you're out of boot camp.
It is deranged and filthy. The people you work with are the bottom of the barrel.
The Federation is gross and perverted. Those chips dissolve while inside your hand; there is no removal process.
Before I joined the Liberators, I was offered to be cloned, and I took that offer naively.
The process was horrible, and I still feel it.
There are thousands of needles poking into your skin, slowly draining skin cells, organ tissue, and blood cells from your body. Every part of your body is cloned into a skeleton made from a substance called 'Mythril,' over 4x more durable than the regular substances found in the Potenes' skeleton. They then replicate your consciousness using a 'Cerebral Euthanasia Machine." Making your original body brain-dead and transferring you to the clone with procedurally generated memories from your life, your eyes become cameras that record everything, and every emotion you feel is logged in your database.
You are no longer an actual being; you serve one purpose, and that's to be a soldier for the Federation.
The one thing I kept from my old body, besides that mark I told them to remove on my forehead, was my syreline glands.
Your eyes are drilled through and replaced rather quickly; they've become interchangeable with thousands of your own selection of eye colors. I chose black, purple, and yellow. Every clone will have one of those three eye colors; they told me yellow had some sort of history behind it. Nobody chooses yellow—the last person who chose yellow was a soldier named 'Bowman,' and he was one of the first people cloned; the legend has it he saved the first federation's president from dying at some battle on Surerowa over thirty thousand years ago.
Three thousand years before that dude got killed, the founder of the Auillan branch of Aheian theology was born and prophesied the Federation's coming into existence.
And, of course, he was right. The Federation was a massive concept in science fiction for hundreds of thousands of years.
While humanity was just beginning to discover fire and the Siciste were just venturing into the stars, we Potenes were already waging interplanetary war.
They claim that in 3 months, you should completely forget the cloning process.
I doubt it. I remember my own birth because of this process. I remember the first time I ever shat my pants because of this process. I doubt there's anything I could possibly forget.
Aedar underwent the cloning procedure as well, and the substance he chose to be remade from was Ronite, a black substance an earthling created and accidentally launched into deep space to solve some sort of material crisis. They call it 'The Era of the Black Sun' or something, where for over 7 years there was zero sunlight following a massive eruption, a world war, and major pollution.
Aedar took to his new cybernetic body fondly; it's easy to use. The same as your old one; they then began answering the questions you're probably thinking.
"Yes, you keep your reproductive parts; they function the same. Yes, you're still the same you with slight differences. Yes, we've been able to transfer your consciousness somewhere else for millennia. Only thirty billion soldiers have been bold enough or stupid enough to want to be cloned. We toss away that old brain and turn it into nutrients; we keep core parts of an individual in the off chance they undergo a mind wipe. Yes, it's not actually a clone, but we can clone you. The average soldier goes through the true cloning process five times throughout their career, unconsciously." The man at the front desk tells me. He stamps a paper, then hands me a card.
"Welcome to the machine, Co'ols Cool." He says, shaking my hand.
Aedar walks out the door with me.
"I was going to ask if it extended my lifespan or made me age up quicker." He says.
"I heard it keeps you at twenty-seven whenever you age." I sit on a park bench, scratching my wrist. Every twist, I can feel wires and gears shift; they rub under my skin, and it gets annoying quickly. It's silent, but if a room is quiet, you can hear us walk in like someone has really heavy boots. Our bodies gain an extra 20kg from the procedure. I'm confident there had to have been a better way to do this.
A'roll spins his raygun outside the clinic and leads us to the parking lot where Bo and Oza have been waiting for three hours.
At this point, we've known them for no more than six hours, and we've been to Oza's parents' house twice; we've visited Opranus five times, and we've spent over 70,000 taxpayer credits on fuel.
Bo loves making the spacecraft go as fast as it can go.
She then asks me how the procedure went, and I tell her it went well.
"I had something similar to that happen to me when I was a bit younger." She says, twisting her left arm, revealing a robotic prosthetic.
"I can procedurally generate any tool I want using my mind! Check this out." She turns her hand into a potato peeler, then a lighter, and then a rifle.
A'roll looks at her in surprise.
"Wait.. Why don't you just make more copies of your arm using your arm?" He asks.
"I don't generate any of this matter; I'm reconstructing it. I got it done two days after I got into boot camp. Blew my whole arm off dawdling." She says, talking like an old man.
We get our first deployment; our commander, Major Naku Slimacall, is a blob. He's a blue blob. Gelatinous freak, he can shapeshift and do a whole bunch of weird shit with his body.
Oza woke us up and began assigning us roles.
"Co'ol, you're our specialist, Bo, you're the engineer, A'roll, you're our scout, and Aedar is our support guy. You all have a pamphlet on what you're meant to do in a time of battle. "
A'roll looks at me.
"She's kind of bad." He whispers in my ear.
I smirk and chuckle a bit.
Oza laughs along with us; it's not like boot camp. We mostly make jokes; outside of the warzone is extremely unserious.
The war zone is completely different.
There isn't any emotion that can describe the war zone, especially considering it was our first time ever in battle.
The objective was simple.
Save the Federation official, Iri, from a guy named Ysolith on Soldar.
The Federation says Ysolith is one of the most capable fighters in the entire galaxy.
My drill instructor told me there are three people you should never fight: Telugen, Ysolith, and Angner.
Telugen only lives on Hedsa, a little jungle planet. Completely irrelevant; never plan on going there.
Ysolith calls himself the 'Hammer of Aheia.'
Angner is the most powerful guy in the Federation physically; he has no special ability, no unknown talent. Just raw physical power.
He's on the Crisis Service Division. They'd be doing this mission right now if they weren't giving the Daichin 'the business.'
Soldar is a dry and humid world, located just far enough from its star to have liquid water still, but it's always over 120 degrees. And at the equator, there's zero water, and it looks like there's a sharp line cutting through.
A myth has it that an immortal earthling flew off to that world and 'fused with the planet.'
Whether that's just a myth or not is irrelevant.
It'll take five days to get to the planet; it's across the galaxy after all.
Naku forces us into our sleeping chambers for all five of those days and lets the ship's autopilot take care of it.
The night before we visited the planet. I have a nightmare.
A nightmare like how it was when I took that Kabbalah.
That white tundra, those featureless faces, and Anemir in that black coat.
This time, he seemed to be happier.
He spoke to me, saying, "You're going on a proper path. A right path. You're going where you need to be. And for that reason, I'm giving you this ability."
And then he placed his finger on my forehead, my mark lit up, and I could read way better.
Like, comically better — I could read anything on the ship, code, languages, everyone's handwriting.
Something about it was off.
We touch down; our desert camo makes us practically invisible.
We also feel invincible. Bo is great at giving us coms.
She constructs a drone out of old Civiclink parts and uses it to scout the area; we deduce Iri is in the 'Desert Storm Fortress.'
On the way there, our hovercar is rigged with an explosive. While I try to start it, it completely explodes.
I feel my body being ripped and pulled apart in every direction, and then I wake up. Tubes in my nose, naked, the cloning process aching my body again.
My pod then clothes me and zips me to wherever it was that I died.
A'roll was breaking down in tears before he watched me come back to life.
"Every friend I have fucking dies!" He exclaimed.
Death doesn't feel like dying when you have clones.
You take more risks; you're bold.
I died five times on this mission, all before we got to the castle.
Aedar died nearly 15 times, and he actually died three times. We went through every trap, bait, and ambushed everyone we got the chance to.
This cloning shit made us feel like gods — we were the Federation's perfect killing machines.
I felt nothing while attacking the enemy, nothing. I struck them so many times that I didn't feel any remorse or empathy either; it was odd.
I used to feel awful for just bumping into somebody, but now—killing someone feels the same to me as using the bathroom; it's gross, but it's kind of a part of day-to-day life.
We've been on Soldar for three days, and we're about to enter the fortress right now.
I'll let you know how it goes.