Title: The Story Always Comes Back To Sandeman

Note: I need a Beta, so if anyonyone's interested e-mail me or something (email-
theTVgirl252@hotmail.com). I've reposted this, cause I didn't like the one
before. It still has the same basic idea as the original chapter 1 though. This
story was originally called 'Peacemaking With The Past', but I changed it too.


*******


Episode 1: Story Of The XX5
Chapter 1: The Eyes



July 25, 2021
Sarren Island, Alaska
Supply Room



The boy couldn't sleep. Every time his eyes would close, there was a new set of
eyes in front of him. Like his nose and forehead were pressed against someone
else's, and the only thing he saw were the person's eyes.

He shook his head to keep the image away.

He knew those eyes. They had stared at him before, a few weeks ago. Before the
person they belonged to died. They were pretty. Brown, kinda big. But they were
hard and sad. That was one thing everyone at Manticore had in common. No matter
how old you were, your eyes always had this hard and sad look in them. It meant
the place had gotten to you.

Those eyes followed him everywhere. Usually, when it was daytime, and there were
other people around, he wasn't too bothered by them. They were just like a song
stuck in your head. Made you a little annoyed, but you could still function
normally. But at night, when there was nothing to keep them away, it was like
being stuck in a dream. Or a nightmare. Filled with images of children who
weren't around anymore.

The boy crawled to a corner, scrunched himself into a ball, and rocked back and
forth. After staying like that for a bit, he grabbed nearby boxes and put them
around him, as if he was making a wall to separate himself from something. He
resumed his previous rocking position. There were many boxes he could use for
his 'wall'. The room he was in had boxes of textbooks on one side, and office
supplies on the other. No one had put a security camera there. He had guessed
that Manticore was not worried about someone taking their office supplies. The
only light in the room came from the guard towers outside on the fence and the
moon. The lights were faint, so it put the room in an eerie bluish half-light.

A soft knocking sound came from the vent in the ceiling. The boy didn't even try
to see who it was. Only one other person came up there during the night.

The vent opened slowly and silently. Half a second later, someone dropped from
the ceiling. It was a little girl, about five years old. For some reason, he
couldn't remember her stats. He had gotten into the habit of automatically
remembering his soldiers' statistics, but recently, he had been blanking out on
them.

The little girl, XX-5/210-493, landed without a sound on the cement. Her
shoulder length brown-blond hair fell over charming green eyes that sometimes
even got the Colonel to give in. In the half-light her pale skin seemed to glow,
so the dark blue Manticore pajamas she wore stood out. It was clear that she
would grow up to be a very attractive woman.

"Hello Commander. I knew you would be here. Would you like some company?" she
asked out to the room. She had picked out his scent. He couldn't see her, but he
heard her feet come towards his 'wall'. He stopped rocking and sat up while she
moved boxes to get to him. The boxes were almost immediately cleared. She
saluted him then sat down on the floor next to him, not really giving him a
chance to answer her previous question. "What are you doing here? Your DNA
allows you to sleep normally," she whispered. She ignored the 'wall' she'd had
to put down in order to get to him.

"I was not doing anything. I am not sleepy," the boy, XX-5/656-599 whispered
back. The conversations they had in this room were always spoken in low voices,
even though no one else but XX5s came around.

"You should take advantage of your need for sleep, Commander. I would like to
sleep as much as you can. It is very tiresome to keep myself occupied when there
is nothing to do or anyone to discuss things with."

"I can not sleep either. The doctors say I have insomnia. They said I should
relax and not stress over things."

"Commander, your stress is from you not wanting to relax."

"I do not believe that 210-493."

She sighed. 656-599 was too stubborn and too sure that he was right all the
time. "You should let yourself rest for training tomorrow. The physical trainers
are making us do harder exercises now."

"It will be okay. Tomorrow the physical trainers have a 'dayoff'. Colonel
Travers told me. We will be doing a computer class instead."

"Computers are good. Some XX5s in our unit need to improve their computer
skills," 210-493 stated thoughtfully.

"The XX5s in our unit are not computer specialists like you are, 210-493. Their
computer skills are adequate to the Colonel."

"The Colonel always thinks we are good enough. He has too much faith in us. That
is why he sent us on the mission. But we-"

"We were not good enough," he finished. He knew where this was going already.
Everything always came back to the mission. "Talk about something else 210-493,"
he warned.

"Why? No one here talks about what happened, like no one remembers. I remember.
I remember seeing the XX5 you partnered me with get two FN P-90 bullets in his
head. Can you see it too? Imagine. His brains were-" she kept talking angrily,
but 656-599 didn't want to listen to her anymore.

If this had been a different soldier talking to him like this, he would have
shut them up a long time before. But this was his trusty 2nd in command, the one
person he could trust in this hell. He let her talk.

She talked for a few more minutes. He didn't interrupt her; it seemed like a
good idea to let her drive out all of the bad feelings she had kept inside for a
few months. To him, it seemed like she was getting calmer and calmer with each
thing she said out loud. But after a few more minutes, she stopped. Really
stopped. She didn't talk anymore, and she didn't move either. She stayed frozen
in her place like one of the transgenics locked up because of mental problems.
656-599 stared at her for a long time. He wondered what she was thinking about.

When it was only two hours until the XX5s would have to get up and start the
day, he left. She still hadn't moved or talked. He contemplated waking her up
from her catatonic state, but decided against it. She could sometimes react
violently if someone woke her up.

***

656-599 crawled quietly through the vent. He used a different route than before,
because someone had turned on the heat in the other vent.

He heard a sound below him and froze. He could not be discovered; the
consequences could be painful or deadly. He listened intently to the room below
him. It was quiet again. He peered through the slits of the vent to see what it
was.

It was a baby.

It couldn't have been more than a day old. It fascinated him, because he had
never seen a real baby before. He studied it. Its skin color was right in the
middle of white and light brown. There was hardly any hair on its head, but the
hair it did have was a beautiful golden brown. He couldn't see what color its
eyes were because it was asleep.

After he stared at it for a while, 656-599 looked around the room to see if
there was any information on it. He saw its stat card on a table nearby. He used
his binocular vision to read the tiny print from the vent. It read:



Designation: UX-5/452
Sex: Female
DOB: 7-24-21
Weight: 7.5 lb
DNA History: DNA from X5-452 and unaltered human DNA



Unaltered DNA? 656-599 reread it to make sure. But he was right the first time.
Manticore was doing experiments with regular human DNA. The effects of
transgenic DNA mixing with regular human DNA was unknown, to him anyway.
Something in the paper was making him uneasy, but he couldn't remember what. He
shook his head and dismissed it. He had been forgetting a lot of things lately,
so it was nothing to worry about. He would probably remember later. He read the
rest of the papers on the table. There was an experiment report by the scientist
in charge of making UX-5/452:



Experiment #2234

Experiment successful so far. DNA tests show that subject has retained all 452's
traits, including the fact that 452 has no junk DNA. Subject's serotonin levels
are normal, indicating that subject will have little or none of the seizures the
X series suffer with. The unaltered human DNA was...



The report went on to talk about the DNA of 452 and the ordinary. This report
had such interesting information, it made his head hurt. How could someone not
have any junk DNA? That was impossible, wasn't it?

He looked at the baby again. UX-5/452. She didn't deserve to grow up in this
crazy place. Suddenly, she woke up. Her face scrunched up and she started to
cry. Her eyes looked eerily familiar. He started to get the feeling that he was
forgetting something again. 656-599 decided he should leave before people got
there. "Bye UX-5/452," he whispered, and he started to crawl back to the
barracks.

But before he could leave, he remembered the thing that was bugging him. He
remembered where he had seen those eyes before and what was weird about her
designation. 452-599 had died on their last mission. The eyes and designation
that haunted him belonged to her. They also belonged to the baby in the room
below him.