Tracer 2025

WARNING INFECTION DETECTED! HEALTH AUTHORITIES WERE CONTACTED!

I'm not a hero and I liked it that way. 

"Your mission? Your unit? Your enlistment contract never existed," said Colonel Bill Butcher. 

His lips tightened revealing weather-beaten cracks at the edge of his mouth. The colonel's furrowed crow's feet at each corner of his eye sockets revealed a face burnt crispy by the relentless desert sun. 

The colonel said, "I am relieved of my command." 

Before returning to the Imperium, I was assigned to the "First of the First" known as Odin's Spear. We were a special unit built to fight a new war. Mercenaries and warlords formed private armies inside disintegrating nation-states of North Africa. We fought in the deep desert after the collapse of fossil fuel. 

Nation after nation imploded into political turmoil. It was our mission to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Humpty fucking Dumpty never goes back together again, no matter what the suits said in the Capitol.

Back then, I was a true believer until that tragic day in late August, when I felt my ideas were shredded by a smart bomb. What remained of me was a naked, fearful man with his numb feelings and a bewildering array of emotions. My naivete burned down to ashes exposing my fragile, wounded psyche against the fierce winds of hypocritical life. 

I stood at attention with the rest of my platoon. My back was straight and stiff as a steel girder. I pumped a few extra breaths of desert-heated air into my lungs. I wanted to expand my chest, and look as tough as the next soldier. My knees relaxed preventing me from passing out and falling on my face. The poor bastard next to me forgot. His nose was broken, and blood pooled around his lips, but no one dared moved to help. Not now. Not with Colonel Butcher ceremoniously addressing his beloved unit.  

My cupped hands held a roll of imaginary coins while standing at attention. The colonel focused our concentration using his cigarette-diseased voice. The sound was a deep bass coming from his chest mixed with a strain at each word. I felt anxious. My breathing hastened. Sweat filled my clenched hands. My feelings connected to his shining silver eagles with their claws holding a branch. Lightning bolts burst from each. His body language was sparse leaving room for one's wild interpretation. Questioning eyes moved back and forth. 

I was stunned when our first sergeant shouted, "Dismissed!" 

A few kilometers away forward operating base - Liberty13 was blackened ash. I heard a familiar rush of engine exhaust when an Osprey touched down not far from Colonel Butcher and his civilian entourage. I'll never forget the look of Jacqueline Buren. Her smirking smile lingers ever to this day. The gangway into the cargo bay waited for the colonel when he turned to look at all of us one more time when he surrendered his final salute.    

We heard whispers about lethal tools of war maintained in temporary weapons storage bunkers on our forward operating base -- Liberty13. How the hell did one thermonuclear device get here? It was against Conventions of War to possess such catastrophic armaments on foreign soil, yet rumors persisted.

My platoon and I were on a long-range patrol with our prototype combat-syndroid. His name was A.I. Centaurus, a first of his species delivered by Corpus of L.A.X. straight from the dark factory. Part-machine, part-human with thin titanium legs, a chest with armored plating protecting micropumps, and his wetware brain balanced inside his pseudo-human-like skull. 

A.I. Centaurus was terrifying and beautiful at the same time.    

My commanding officer received an encrypted message that a company-sized guerrilla force of about one hundred personnel was staging for battle near the Atlas mountains. She transmitted a text message across our vid-screens. Our unit was ordered to hold its ground and bed down for the night. That was when 'it' happened.