This post has the following content warnings:
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Fiadh Cuiligh was born just after the nuclear exchange and his earliest childhood memories are ones of eating tasteless chalk bricks that technically qualify as food, as well as sorting scrap metal in order to be recycled. He was forced to move several times due to the pervasive hypercanes which wiped villages cleanly off the map, but at least things were vaguely semi-peaceful for much of his youth. There was always work, of course, and intense learning to be done, sciences and engineering and mathematics. He would be beaten when he falls behind, for shaming his parents and as motivation to do better.
He grew up, as children do. His scores were mostly average, relegating him to menial-type jobs such as delivery driving and warehousing, which pay enough to rent a 5x5x12 honeycomb in one of the hardened towers of Siach. Of course, society is not a kind place to layabouts or slackers who do less than a 15 hour work day. He was reminded by every authority figure that he will amount to nothing even if, in his biological immortality, he lasts hundreds of years. With good but not amazing test scores, he could never get scholarships, and while there is an industry of 250-year amortized student loans, he was disgusted by the prospect and saw little hope or joy in it as his motivation flagged and he spent much of his non-working time in his concrete box making and sharing memes and sinking into increasingly toxic internet culture.
When the end of the world came, again, as horrors from another dimension invaded and another round of nuclear warfare commenced, he was almost glad because it was a chance to not be a useless leech on society's back. He signed up to fight, got shipped off to training, got screamed at and beaten by the veterans who had been soldiers for decades. He got a slugthrower and a plate carrier and a helmet and got thrown into the meat grinder. The enemies assaulting the planet were terrifying and nonsensical. The Bugs, the Fleshbeasts, the Banshees, the Sallies, the Bots... It seemed like all these incomprehensible threats from nowhere were fighting each other as much as the SDA, not that that really helped. Every one of the friends he made in those first days died, save one. She became an officer and could not afford having anything to do with him anymore.
The soldiers quickly received new equipment and 'upgrades' to improve combat effectiveness, intense cyber-augmentations rushed out in a bid for survival. Neural links to the squad and to your weapon and vehicle. A module placed next to the heart to regulate blood flow and dispense helpful combat drugs automatically. Armor that plugs deep into the muscles and bones to help you move faster, surer, swifter, to feel your gun and use it intuitively, never mind the pain. The combat was was lengthy and brutal, and he became addicted to Glitterdust at one point- The drug making it so he could simply not care for a while, driving away the constant sick fear under a pallor of floaty feeling. Worth it despite the nightmares, the shakes and despair when it is gone. At first.
After a particularly gruesome battle defending an apartment building in a secondary city, stepping over the fallen to take up a machine gun and suffering direct exposure to nuclear flashes due to final protective fire from nuclear artillery shells, somehow making it out alive, he was rotated to the rear after that incident for recuperation, his limbs have mostly regrown now and any day now he will be sent forward again, as a "Veteran" for having failed to die so far. He cannot stand any more combat, and has nightmares about the prospect of being sent back to a front.
The way the others deal with it is to crow about how they are 'strong' and take ever more aggressive drug regimens about it- There is even a genetic treatment available that alters the way memories are accessed, causing you to lose most of them from before the treatment and considered an effective treatment for trauma. The thing is that society has no place for washed-up soldiers who cannot cope with the stress. Those are weak, fragile, worthless, and ought to disappear for the benefit of the society, especially because there is no demand for unskilled labor due to rampant automation and an ever increasing wealth gap, and because everything must be fed into the war of existential survival.
The world is a concrete bunker, the borders of sanity ever retreating across the planet to defend ever-smaller safe zones, his neural implant singing about how his duty is to fight and kill even as his mind slowly crumbles.
NEW ORDERS 113th Combined Army Command: Report IMMEDIATELY to reorganized unit.
1st Platoon 3rd Company 2nd Battalion 1st Regiment 1334th Light Infantry Division
For urgent combat operations to reinforce tertiary defensive line against Bug threat
--------> 657m
The orders come with a dose of dopamine and hexafinide, the wakeup drug he's developed a strong tolerance to. Fiadh Cuiligh tries to stand, his gun integrated into his armor integrated into his body, and follow the objective marker.
...No. He cannot. His hands shake as he remembers the laser striking the soldier in front of him, transforming them to a fine red mist, and then himself stepping forward and taking up the machine gun and firing firing firing.
His legs refuse to move. His mind refuses to cooperate. So be it. He will sleep. Just sleep. Let the Bugs break through the defensive line and find him here and eat his head. Anywhere but another trench, another bunker, another delaying action.
