Chapter Four

Aaron

The next morning, Aaron finds himself awkwardly sitting across a small table from Arma while everyone else eats breakfast in the mess hall, which is in no way a cafeteria or diner, it a bar that technically has a menu. Being left out at mealtime is something that is going to be a little bit of an adjustment. She’s used to never eating, because she doesn’t remember ever doing it. He doesn’t feel hungry, or crave food anymore, but the habit of it is still nagging at him.

Arma is staring at him with an absolutely pleased smile. Her elbow is on the table and her head is in her hand. She’s still quite elated that he’s been brought back like her and Five. He’s happy too, having cheated death, but things haven’t been going so great with the change. He can’t seem to slow the freight train going through his mind. It’s becoming a real non-stop problem. He doesn’t need to sleep, but he definitely wishes he could right now. Anything to just shut off for a moment.

They’d all been put through their paces pretty hard yesterday and only given a few hours in the early night to settle into their quarters. Valerie wanted him in bed with her, but he got back up as soon as she was hard asleep. The rest of the night, he stood at the edge of the balcony, trying to iron his thoughts out. His thoughts have been nothing but non-stop overload since.

Trying to see if he can focus on only one thing, he listens to Gabriel and Clarice going on about how embarrassed they were with their pitiful attempts at even the small arms training. Having had no experience, Valerie and Alexis actually surprised themselves once they got the hang of it, but the other two simply failed.

Sy wanders in and leans against the upright steel beam next to their table. He hasn’t addressed them yet, and is closely watching Valerie across from Mikel. She is motionless, and glaring at Gabriel. She can’t stand that he’s being all chummy with her sister. Everyone but her seems to have buried the hatchet.

Sy finally looks down at him and Arma and lets out an amused nostril snort. “Well, at least they’re not throwing shit at one another like chimps yet. I’ve certainly seen lesser efforts. They’re not doing too bad really.”

For some reason, both her and Sy’s phones ding at the same time. They look at one another, and then their phones. Valerie exhales a deep breath while Sy appears to be pleasingly impressed. Five’s new body has been completed and is waiting for them at AMF. She stands up, pats the crumbs off her lap, and looks to the door. Sy looks back at him and Arma for a second and then tucks his phone into the front pocket of his suit. “Looks like we’ll be bringing your little charcoal friend back today.” He smiles a big smile towards Valerie and pulls his keys out of his pocket. “Lets take the big truck. C’mon Gabriel, you’re going too.”

The second Valerie and Gabriel leave the room with Sy, Vaun stands up, sets his breakfast plate in the rack, and sucks the grease off his fingers.

“Alright folks, mommy and daddy are gone, you’re asses are mine for the rest of the day.” When most of them look up at him with less enthusiasm than he was he expecting from them, he cocks his head forward like an angry hawk and gives them a worrisome stare. “Get your asses up!”

Clarice is a little startled by the seriousness of his face and shyly holds her hand up. “Um… I’m pregnant.”

Vaun just about blows his stack but turns around for a second, to keep himself from saying something unacceptable right off the bat, and then looks back at her punitively. “Great, actually, that works out, somebody’s got to do these dishes.”

They all look at him as if he’s being a little bit much of a jerk, but he’s actually serious. Mikel almost stands up, but this guy is not exactly the kind of guy to posture at. It definitely settles their wonders about what kind of an outfit the place is. Clarice does her best to cool the room off.

“Shit, I was actually gonna offer to do them, cause it’s like the only thing I could think of, but yeah...”

More than happy to have something to occupy his mind, he gets up and waves for Vaun to lead them all out. As they walk down the concrete corridors, he starts to notice less than subtle looks from everyone they come across. It looks like the rumors of the new deranged killer robot recruits has run its course.

While he follows behind Vaun and Arma down through the lower levels of the massive bunker, he watches people’s faces. They first notice Arma’s technological black skin, how tall she is, then that the front of her red SSS logoe’d jumpsuit is unzipped all the way down the front. He can’t help but shake his head when they always look back, down at her ass. Often enough though, it’s him that gets the pied-eye stare. After his first run on the rifle range yesterday, people have become wary of him. He is not a rumor.

He doesn’t feel all that bad ass though, not after being manhandled by the guards the night they came for them. What he is definitely looking forward to, is any kind of test Vaun can put him through. There’s a lot of built up spite he needs to work off.

Disappointingly, they end up in a completely unexpected place, the armory. As all rooms in the place are, the lights are nice and dim, giving off that comfortable greenish grey glow off the bare concrete walls and ceiling.

The room is filled with steel racks, all loaded with various guns and gear. Ahead of them, a man and a woman are talking quietly in the front of the room as they methodically work at their ammunition loading presses. To the far side of the room, another man is diligently inspecting and coating items in that trippy black finish they use. The guy looks like he’s being incredibly careful with the stuff, shining a bright flashlight over his work, making sure there are absolutely no blemishes anywhere. When the light is waved over the black surface, it somehow completely disappears, just as well as if it were being turned off. They might as well be shining the light into a bottomless well shaft.

In the back of the long room are a few heavy plate steel benches with different rifles laid flat across them. There are mats and a few small tools lying alongside each of them. He was hoping to do something a little more physical, but weapons training is not the worst thing he could think of. Maybe he needs to focus on something simple to calm down, instead of letting himself get worked up.

He would’ve expected hours of breaking down and rebuilding firearms to only be slightly better than hell, but Vaun has turned out to be a damn good instructor. Not only does he tell better stories than Sy does, but he never lets their minds wander from what they’re doing either. Every little thing he teaches them is of dire importance, and he always has a story to back up what he’s saying. Making sure their guns are in perfect order often determines whether they live or die.

There are usually second changes for most things in life, but in their new line of work, they have to get everything right the fort time, every time. It’s intimidating, especially compared to his mediocre previous life.

With the utmost sincerity, Vaun covers everything between knowing the sound of a squib load during automatic fire, to making sure to not leave things like shell casings behind in orbit during combat. The responsibilities and constant worry of collateral damage in space makes him completely doubt his own resolve. It feels like he might qualify to push a broom in the place, if he really trains for it.

Before any of them realize it, the day is well into the afternoon. There’s no way to tell underground. The time of day doesn’t really matter there anyway, but it still feels good to be done with a shift. It makes him wonder how he’ll be able to ever handle having a job the rest of his life. It’s not like he’ll ever retire now. Even if he had generational wealth, he can’t see himself being retired forever either. The thought of measuring his life in terms of people he has lost, rather than years, crosses his mind. He puts his hands in his lap and slumps a little, thinking about it.

When Vaun gets a call on his wrist battle com, he calls the end of the session. “Alright folks, I think we’ve seen enough. I’ve certainly seen enough. I guess haven’t had to hit any of you yet, so that’s pretty good. I suppose I won’t have to toss any of you out on your asses today.”

Marek and Alexis completely miss that Vaun was being sarcastic and are visibly relieved they’ve made it this far. It’s their first real jobs, and they truly have no clue what the norms are. They hang on Mikel like baby possums, but he’s always more than happy to help them along.

Vaun looks back down at his com and then taps the screen. “Sounds like Five is back. They’re kind of getting her oriented again and setting her up in the same little apartment with you Arma. Some of the crew is getting together upstairs for kind of little welcome party, now that you’re all here. Don’t forget to put on nice happy faces, even if they’re fake.” He points at him and Arma, who do have less than welcoming resting-faces and swishes his hand in jest.

When they meet up with everyone back in the tavern, which they have named “The Bullet-Hole”, there are at least sixty of the guards and techs all packed into the place. The rest of the crew is still on duty, though some pop in once in a while. It’s nice to see everyone bonding so well, and so quickly. He’d been a little worried after Reese, the black guy with the deep voice and flat-top, whose nose he broke, was being a poor-sport about it.

Five is very relieved to have her body back. It had really been hard on her being left the way she was. She said it was like she had been trapped in a body made of thumbtacks. That’s not even including being so weak that she could hardly move, and the more she did, the more she would fall apart. Not being able to see was the owrs though. She hates not being able to see.

After basically being exiled from Werker, They had all thought that it might be the end for her. She looks really good, but she is a bit bummed about losing her original body. What should be an exact copy of Evan’s work, somehow still falls a little short of the real deal. When she gives him a long tight hug, he makes sure to tell her that she looks as absolutely beautiful as the day he first saw her. It makes her squeeze him even tighter, and smile.

The main curiosity form all of the guards, is what it was like for them to have died. He can only describe it as having been made into nothing, where everything was taken from him without a single care. It was the final point where the last of everything he was or could ever be, was stripped away. He remembers struggling to breath, then simply coming to on the floor at Advanced Machine Forms, where Valerie used to work. It took him a moment to figure out he had literally been remade though. After what Ray and the others had done to him, he was already expecting things to be… off.

Neither Five nor Arma have any original memories, so Five instead stories the others with what it was like being burned alive while trying to save Valerie from the rioters. No one expected they were able to feel everything just as well as if they were still flesh and blood. Luckily, no one asks them what else they can feel. The crew is playing nice during their welcome party, but it’s not going to last forever.

It’s fun to see how many of the guys are vying for Alexis’s attention too, and how much of a strain it is on Marek. He’s tall, but scrawny next to everyone else. With her muscular body, she fits in with the group as if she’s always been one of them. He’s never seen a bar with an arm wrestling table before, but it looks like fun. Alexis has already placed well on the leaderboard.

Another guard, still in all of their armor, is pointing out all of the different shell casings on display to Mikel. They are lined up overhead on top of a shelf below just below the ceiling that wraps all the way around the room. The ceiling is covered in various old flags of all the governments that predated the continental empires. When he looks at a few of the spent shell casings too, he finds they all have names, dates, and places written on them. Nearly everything in the place has some kind of significance to it. It’s full of a lot of memories.

He chuckles when he sees that even the paneling on the walls has bullet holes in it. Each little hole has an LED light inside some of it, so it looks like daylight is coming through them from the other side. It has a cool effect in the smoky air of the bar. Even the foot railing is made entirely from gun barrels, while the bar top is a deep epoxied mosaic of various caliber gun shells with their primers facing up.

Everyone in the group, Even Valerie and Clarice, have started to become excited about staying at SSS. Even though she doesn’t trust Sy one damn bit, she feels better about being there to oversee the Five-Series project, regardless of who owns it. It will at least make it harder for Gabriel to pull any shit over on any of them too.

After Sy has made it around to most everyone and handed off countless shots, he comes over to stick around with him and Marek. He holds a finger up, remembering that he had forgotten something.

“Ah, before I forget, that runner of yours, I did send someone back out to that farm with the wrecker to get it. It’s parked down in the machine shop. Some of the guys wanted to look it over, after they saw some footage of it tearing people’s limbs off n shit.”

Having spaced it before, Marek remembers that the centipede from the machine fights at the arena had been entered by SSS. The logo was the same too. “Hey, I recognize you now, from the arena! That centipede was yours, right? I bet everything I had on that thing! Made the most money I ever had in my life that night.”

Sy has probably not grinned this big in all his life. “Yes, that is one of our little pride and joys here. Well, more like pride and worries. The thing can be quite a damn handful sometimes.”

He’s a little lost on what they’re talking about himself. He never saw any centipede, but he remembers the machine shop. “That was a nice shop. I recognized some of the equipment in there. What all you got down there? Your guys probably need me to boot the runner up for them. You need Five, Arma, or myself for voice activation. That’s got a brand new Werker controller in it. Good luck cracking it.”

Sy looks around the room, seeing that everyone is having a good time. “Yeah, lets head on down there tomorrow. I’m not gonna wake that damn centipede up by myself for you guys anyway, no one will. It’s a wild animal… no but really. It actually has the simulated brain of a real centipede in it, kind of like how you guys were done. We sponsored a university class to do it. They didn’t know what we were gonna do with it tho.” He and Marek both snicker.

After Sy moves on, Marek leaves to wedge his way back in at Alexis’s side again, while he heads on over to join Valerie. She’s been eyeing him for a bit and wants him back near her. He kind of felt that she was mad at him after this morning, but she seems to be over it. Maybe all the whiskey has helped. She was pretty upset when she woke up and he wasn’t there. She had screamed in her sleep. She was having a nightmare that when he rolled over in bed, it was Paul staring at her, and not him. When she woke up, he wasn’t there. He was gone, like the morning he had been killed. She’s still struggling with what had happened, even more than himself.

Lately, she’s been pretty quiet around him. She looks at him a lot, but pretends to not. It’s nice to see her in a better mood. She squeezes an arm around his waist and smiles up at him lovingly. It makes him feel like everything’s going to be alright.

“You know…” She looks over at Sy across the room. “I wonder if I might’ve been wrong about him. He might not be that much of a bastard.”

He looks over at the man, his suit, and the way he hovers his drink around as he talks with others. The rest of the guards seem to really cherish him. The stories of his past are hard to believe, especially given his sunny disposition. When he thinks about it, their He, Valerie, and the others seem to have a great deal in common with everyone at SSS. It could be more than just a coincidence that they were all brought together like this. Even though he would never consider themselves to be the kinds of brutes the rest of the guards are, it doesn’t mean they aren’t.

By the time he and Valerie look in one another’s eyes again, Sy has poured a line of shots going all the way down the bar again. As all the stout brass alcohol filled bullet shells get snatched up, he raises his glass for a toast. “To robots in space.” There are mugs and glasses in the air all the way around as most everyone in the room cheers “robots in space!”