Secrets in Warfare

Start Off Strong

The walls were clean and white. So were the workers. Their scrubs were blinding, their shoes, squeaking on the floor. They moved around with inhuman swiftness, almost ignoring the twin lines of people stretching out the doors of the newly erected clinic. They murmured brief, unintelligible words to one another, passed manilla folders between their surgical gloved hands.

"It's 2050 for Christ's sake," my father muttered to me. "You'd think by now we'd have figured out how to keep a damn line moving."

I grunted in agreement, but then rolled my eyes. "You're the one who wanted to come here. We could've just done it the old fashioned way."

Dad scratched at his goatee and scowled in a way that only fathers can. "And what's the old fashioned way, Ainsley?"

"Live our lives 'til we get somethin' that makes it so we can't."

The city of Mount Pleasant had just recently built a clinic that contained a technology that was currently sweeping the nation. The Apparatus of Chronic and Blood-Borne Illness Detection, colloquially known as the Akbid, had dominated all news platforms and social media. Despite the staggering, yet inevitable, amount of memes created by the youth, it's revolutionary status had not been diminished. Wherever an Akbid clinic was set up, people flocked to get nearly instant, day-of results to a scan designed to locate a number of illness that once took weeks to test for.

"Jaded little thing, aren't ya?" Dad chuckled.

"Get it from you."

Dad smiled briefly, then rolled his eyes as the line finally inched forward an entire pace. He raised his head to catch the eye of a nurse passing us to the left.

"Do I get to cut in line since I served my country?" Dad asked. He was only half joking.
The nurse he had spoken to stopped, her face pensive.

Her expression fell stern, just like her voice. "No. You'll have to wait your turn. Just like everyone else."

"Yes ma'am, thank you," said Dad, crossing his arms again. The worker hurried away, only to be stopped by one of her comrades. She received more folders, then promptly disappeared into one of the doors on either side of the check in kiosk at the back of the lobby.

"Maybe we should have waited for all the hype to die down," I suggested, toying with the strings on my hoodie. It's what we did with everything else, from clothing trends to movies to even new restaurants.

"I was curious."

"I'm not that curious," I retorted. "I have homework to do."

The father-daughter bickering went back and forth for almost forty five minutes more, before we were finally next in line at the check-in. An extremely bored looking woman gazed up at us, over the red rims of her cat-eye glasses. "Is your daughter sixteen or older, sir?" she asked.

"Yes ma'am."

"I'll take your IDs," she said.

My father and I withdrew our IDs from our wallets, handing them to the lady through a cut-out in the glass wall she sat behind. One by one she placed them into the card reader, where it would get a fully correct rundown of who we were as people. At least what we looked like in words.

My mind wandered to when we used to still have to fill out paperwork by hand. I was around ten whenever ID readers were implemented into everyday life. It made going to state-run places, like the DMV, and doctor's offices and hospitals, a lot quicker.

'Still,' I thought, 'it'd be nice to write more.' There was just something so satisfying about looking at the flow of a pen onto a sheet of paper.

"Please enter the door to your left, make sure to go as quickly as possible. There will be two Akbid apparatuses set up in the room, please follow the prompts on the digital screen above you. Please take other people into consideration; you all want to know if you're healthy, so please try and move as quickly as possible." Her words droned, she sounded like a broken record. Well, at least what I imagined a broken record would sound like; I'd never heard one.