February 2009
X6-452 knew the big hallway that went from the barracks to the mess to the training rooms. There were windows with straight lines in them, and the straight lines made shadows on the wall and the floor when the sunlight came in. Sometimes the shadows were crooked and slanted, but other times the lines they made were exactly straight. That was in the middle of the day, when the X6s stood outside the mess hall at attention. When she was very, very little, she had thought the sunlight and shadows were standing at attention too. She knew better now, but she still liked to see the sunlight line up in formation on the tile floor.
This morning there was a different hallway. Her boots made only very small sounds. Step. Step. Step. There were no other boots. There were no other soldiers. No one on her left, on her right, in front, or behind. There was only the man in the white coat, who was not the Infirmary man.
He had come to the barracks while the X6s stood for morning inspection. X6-452 knew better than to look at him. She kept her eyes straight and her back straight and she didn't move her hands once she was sure that they were lined up with the seams of her pants the way they were supposed to be.
The bunk was always the hardest part. When she was punished, that was why. She held her breath while the Instructor looked at her blanket, her sheets. She wanted to watch his face. She wanted to squeeze her hands together. Suddenly she was sure that she needed to go to the latrine.
The Instructor nodded and moved on.
X6-452 breathed out.
But then after inspection, the Instructor had told her to wait even though she wasn't on the punishment list. Then he sent her away alone with the man who was not the Infirmary man, down a hallway she didn't know.
The man was very, very tall. Each of his paces was two of hers. That made it easy to walk with him. Double time, and then her footsteps and his were together. Even though the shoes he wore made only barefoot kinds of noises, knowing she was in step with someone made her feel braver.
You had to be brave in Unfamiliar Territory.
Unfamiliar Territory was a place you didn't know. Before, she always thought that it was the name of a place. This is the barracks. This is the obstacle course. This is the firing range. And that, over there, is the Unfamiliar Territory. She thought it had something to do with trees. In Unfamiliar Territory, it was important to communicate with your unit. Otherwise you wouldn't know where the Enemy was.
On the course the Enemy was an instructor whose gun was loaded with hard pellets of paint that bruised and stung and meant you failed in your duty and you were Dead. At the firing range the Enemy was the outline of a man drawn on a piece of paper. She didn't know what the Enemy would be like in Unfamiliar Territory. That was the sort of thing that Commanding Officers knew. Maybe X6-787 had recognized the not-Infirmary man. He wouldn't have let the Enemy just march her away down the hall. Even if the Instructor was watching. At least she didn't think he would.
Maybe the others were coming later, behind her. She wanted to look back. She didn't hear them. Just machine noises in an empty hallway.
She was listening so hard she missed a step. The tall man slowed down. She tried again to match her pace to his, two to one, but he slowed down again. And again. She missed step after step after that; it sounded wrong and it felt wrong. The man looked down at her and frowned, and that was relief. There would be a hard hand on her shoulder and he would call her soldier and make her do it right so that everything lined up again. Instead he stood still for a moment, and then he smiled.
No one had ever told him how to stand up straight and answer like a soldier. "You don't have to run," he said. "I'm sorry." She didn't know whether the right answer was yes sir or no sir, and his voice was too quiet, like his shoes. She wanted very badly to be in the hallway she knew where the sunlight lined up.
"Besides," he said. "We're almost there."
There was a not-Infirmary room. Some of the people wore white coats, but they weren't the Infirmary people. There were too many of them. There was supposed to be one officer, one instructor, one very tall person who didn't have a uniform and then a whole row of soldiers. In Unfamiliar Territory things are backwards.
A woman with a fuzzy blue shirt bent down low to look X6-452 in the eye. "What's your designation?"
"X6-452. Ma'am," she said. Maybe not entirely backwards, she thought with relief.
There was a chair in the room. It was more like the outline of a chair, all straps and buckles and hinged metal bits. It was very large. The people in the white coats looked at the chair, and then at X6-452, whose chin was almost level with the armrests.
"Hrm," said the tall man who had brought her there. Then he spoke softly to the other people. The look on his face meant that he didn't know that X6-452 could hear him. "This is what I've been talking about," he said. "That prototype won't even fit in the chair. Reindoctrination? She's hardly been indoctrinated in the first place. Neuropsych hasn't even approved the plan, but we're rushing in anyway? It's ridiculous."
X6-452 knew indoctrination. That was the room where you sat at attention and read the words on the wall while the Instructor talked. Duty. Discipline. Mission. Objective. There weren't any words on this wall, except for Authorized Personnel Only and those weren't Indoctrination words. And the whole unit went to Indoctrination together. Not alone in the wrong room with the wrong people. Unfamiliar Territory.
She would be braver if one more X6 was here.
"Renfro's approved it. She ordered it, Leo" said the fuzzy-shirted woman. If we push back, she'll be mad as hell. We don't have to go deeply – all Renfro wants is some kind of PsyOps report so she can tell the committee she took 'immediate action.' We start lightly, move slowly, and get the Director what she wants. It's not that risky. It won't be that bad."
X6-452 knew the word PsyOps. It meant something bad, but she didn't know what. It was something X5s were afraid of. Sometimes the instructors took them there instead of Isolation if they did something wrong. X6s only went to Isolation. That was a little gray room, not a big white one that was Not the Infirmary. It wasn't Unfamiliar Territory. And if you were being punished they always told you why. Maybe her bunk wasn't right this morning after all.
The woman and the man finished talking to each other. The fuzzy-shirt woman stood by a scale in the corner. That was an Infirmary thing, a scale. "Come over here," she said, "and we'll see how big you are."
Her voice went up on the end, as if it was a question. X6-452 knew the answer. The Infirmary man charted those things all the time. "This soldier measures ninety-eight centimeters and weighs sixteen kilograms, ma'am."
The woman looked startled. She hadn't expected an answer. Now maybe they would take X6-452 away from the not-the-Infirmary room and back to the barracks for her punishment. Or Isolation. In this place that thought wasn't frightening.
"Sixteen kilograms," the woman said. She breathed out, hard. She looked at a table of Infirmary things, and she took something small and round out of a paper cup. "Have you ever swallowed medicine like this before?"
"No, ma'am," said X6-452.
"That's all right. We'll just do this the easy way."
The woman took a little plastic cup from the table. It was full of something squishy and yellow that X6-452 didn't recognize. She broke the medicine into little bits and put the crumbs in a spoonful of the yellow stuff. "Open your mouth," she ordered.
X6-452 obeyed. The yellow stuff was sweet and wet and it tasted a little like medicine and a lot like fruit. There was a lot of yellow stuff left in the cup. She wished that when the PsyOps part was over they would let her eat the rest of it.
The woman patted the seat of the chair. "Now I want you to come sit up here," the woman said.
X6-452 felt a little dizzy, the way she had when she fell off the wall in the obstacle course and hit her head. Her feet wobbled. She climbed up in the chair the way they told her. Her head just reached the back of it, where a grownup's shoulders were supposed to go. There was a framework of metal things just above her head. This was definitely Unfamiliar Territory. She didn't like it.
The tall man shook his head. "Does anyone know where the phone books are? That's what we need."
"That's not funny," the fuzzy-shirted woman said. "Hop down," she said.
X6-452 obeyed instantly. She was glad to be away from the chair.
Somebody put a tall hard cushion on the seat of the chair, the way they did when they clipped your hair off. "And come back up now," the woman said.
X6-452 tried to climb up but her feet slipped and her head spun. She was going to fall. She tried to catch herself. She didn't mean to disobey. The tall man caught her under the armpits and lifted her up. He smiled. "Good girl."
She didn't know why he said good girl when he was making her sit in the PsyOps chair. Backwards again. They pulled straps over her shoulders and around her chest. They had trouble pulling them tight enough. One man took her arm and taped it down. That much was like the Infirmary, at least. That was for needles.
One of the metal things overhead had a shiny red light. She saw her reflection in the edge of a glass cabinet; the red light made a dot on her forehead. She knew red dots. It made no sense. He'd called her good girl. She couldn't move. They could kill her fast with a needle. Instead they were going to shoot her. She didn't need to be in a chair for that. It didn't make sense at all. Everything was crooked and backwards and it would never line up straight again.
Her eyes felt hot and her mouth shook. That was called losing military bearing and you were never supposed to do it. Maybe that wouldn't matter in the PsyOps chair. Now she was absolutely certain that she needed to go to the latrine. A needle bit deep into her arm.
The fuzzy-shirt woman was standing over her. She brushed a hand across X6-452's cheek where her eyes burned. She made a sort of hissing noise. "Shh," she said. "You'll be all right. It'll be over soon." She looked away to talk to someone else. "Bring the imager down a little."
"That's as far as it goes. I'll try raising her head," said the tall man. Cool hands put a wadded towel under her neck. For some reason the hands moved gently over the fuzz of her hair. "Try it now."
X6-452 squeezed her eyes shut.
"Eyes open," the fuzzy-shirt woman said. "That's it." She lowered the metal framework until something cold touched X6-452's cheek, right under where the bright red light shone into her eye.
"Open your mouth," she said. But it wasn't more of the yellow stuff. It was something squishy for biting on, like when the X6s sparred and actually hit each other. She tried to raise her arm to block but neither arm moved because of the tape. But she didn't need to. The woman only patted her shoulder gently and moved away.
"Well," she said, and she breathed out hard. "I suppose we're ready."
X6-452 heard a door open. There was a clack of shoes and a yellow-haired woman came in. She stood close to the chair. Her eyes were very large and edged with something black. She smiled, but it was different from the other people's smiles.
"Listen carefully and obey orders and this won't hurt much," she said. Maybe, thought X6-452, this was the Enemy. In Unfamiliar Territory, how could you tell?
The woman stepped back then. "Go ahead," she said to the man. "Let's find out whether this little apple fell far enough from the rotten tree."
So Unfamiliar Territory did have something to do with trees. That was good to know.