Fratricide

5: Entitled

Daniel sometimes wished he could go back. To the comforting thrill of battle; he returned to it out of fondness and not contempt. He still couldn't decide if that made him a bad person. The combat would always beckon to him as long as he continued to live without feeling the same power he'd experienced at the helm of a rig. It was something godly, to end lives with a trivial thought, a minuscule movement. It was something most prints did not live long enough to master or fully appreciate.

The tortures of his mind weren't in wanton commissions of violence, no. They weighed heavily with the emptiness of his memories. When he was abducted by order of the committee and placed in an informational quarantine his memory was a liability of a sort. He suspected the mere existence of the facility he was being kept in was a human rights violation, even for a print. There would be a shit storm if this got out. Nothing changed the fact that his contract had ended, paid in full by his fifteen years of service. No one should have ever been able to enslave him again. He thought no one could take more time from him.

That is, so he thought. After being discharged he had gotten his degree promptly after years of study in between tours and rotations. He was mocked by so many others, prints who saw themselves either staying enlisted until they aged out or working in manual labor sectors for the rest of their lives. Most opted for security or mercenary work. For the unenlisted print, the system wasn't designed to give them the civilian lifestyle they always dreamed of having. Their sterility ensured that.

It seemed so unfair to Daniel when he was a boy, learning for the first time in school that he was different. He grew up in a small town on Yule, a heavily forested and cold planet with barely any population to speak of near the equator. His community was so small he didn't realize he was a print because none of the others were close enough to him in age for him to easily recognize their identicality. It wasn't until his class studied the founding of the CCC and he was used as a visual aid to guide the discussion did he become acutely aware of his distinguishing characteristics.

He was larger than most for his age, something that didn't stop being true until he was conscripted. He went through puberty the same as everyone else but his experience involved a strict intake of pills, a tightly supervised process that took place weekly at the local hospital. That and a notable lack of awkward behavior. His physical gains were marked while sexual convictions remained obsolete. He wished so desperately he could feel drawn to women the way is peers were, for he longed for their company.

He would see couples kissing and holding hands in hallways and he would curse himself silently for not being compelled to caress and fawn over someone the way everyone else did so unabashedly. The thought of ever taking part in that behavior was so hubristic in retrospect, the idea of a girl being drawn to him was laughable. Girls and boys alike were hesitant to interact with him. He wasn't shunned perse, it was the unwillingness to invest in someone who simply wouldn't be there after they graduated. For others, there was a chance of a future encounter that justified the intrinsic risks of intimacy. It was social survival to do so, but for a boy with no future, there were few willing to pretend there was one.

It was hard to let it get to him, with parents who loved him so. Many families looked at the mandatory print rearing as something they had to undergo, proud civil service or not. Some people just viewed it as an eighteen-year jury term and nothing ever altered their mindset. For Daniel's parents, the fact that Daniel would only ever be their one child instantly made him different. He was their kid, and it didn't matter there were others out there who looked just like him. He was the only Daniel Ciresi who mattered to them.

It wasn't until one day when he was walking home in the bitter cold, did he understand how different his life was from the others. As he walked alone, he saw an older print slink to the back of his house quietly and step into the room he stayed in separate from the family he lived with. He still remembered the look of shame on that boy's face. Many families opted for their prints to stay in a separate building from their house as soon as they were old enough to be alone before they were drafted. Sometimes, city families would even pay for their print to rent in a different part of town if they could afford it.