Chapter 4 #2
Drafted.
My brother had been drafted? Vann, who was in a hospital bed, only alive because of a thousand tubes? Vann, who felt guilty for harming the blades of grass beneath his feet. Vann, who still had dreams and ambitions and hope, none of which involved being a soldier.
In the span of a few weeks, how had we both been handed our worst nightmares?
Could he just ignore it? Pretend it never showed up?
It wasn’t possible for him to respond in the state he was in.
If I explained the situation and filed a note from the doctor, he couldn’t be penalized.
They would still expect him to report once he woke up and received his prosthetic, but that could be a long time.
But then, even if he got an exemption until he was better—a week, a month, a year from now—they would still expect him to report upon discharge.
They didn’t care who could survive and who couldn’t.
If he went to war with a new prosthetic leg he barely knew how to operate, how long would he make it?
I could bear with a lot of things in this life, but the very real threat of losing Vann wasn’t one of those things.
I made it sound noble in my head, but it wasn’t just fear for his well-being that was plunging my mind into this dark hole.
It was my own selfishness that hit me the hardest. Because the moment he reported to Astaroth, he would be gone.
I’d be truly alone through everything I was about to endure, as the need to rebuild the population would now be even more dire and urgent.
I was used to living in my personal hell with him to fall back on—with our training sessions to keep me sane, his hugs to pull my pieces back together, and his terrible jokes to brighten up my worst days.
I would take arguing with him about our conflicting beliefs any day of the week because it still meant he was here for everything else.
I’d already been dreading the day he would graduate without me, but that was when I knew I’d be able to call him every day, and that he’d be working towards his aspirations and wasn’t in danger.
This…This was more evil than anything I’d conjured in even the bleakest depths of my imagination. The thought made me sick.
While in many ways, we owed Mictlan our lives, considering we were both reliant on government funding to afford food and shelter right now, I hadn’t expected we’d have to pay them back in blood.
I pounded a closed fist into the wall, then recoiled at the pain of the impact. I rubbed the side of my hand to sooth the sting as a million thoughts raced through my mind, none of them safe or sane.
I can’t tell Vann.
Once he woke up, we’d cross that bridge, but for now, I didn’t want to tell the nurses he’d been summoned. I wouldn’t do anything that might cause them to rush his care.
Even if I kept it from everyone though, eventually someone would come to collect him. That’s how the Territories functioned. It would be impossible to keep him out of the military eye forever.
It should have been me, I shouted the thought into the void of my mind, as filled with jealousy as it was anger. I could have handled this. I would have volunteered. I would have dedicated every minute of my life to being the best pilot to ever live to keep my brother safe.
But no. They only wanted men, even if that man was injured and refused to fight.
I let my vision fall out of focus. I closed my eyes, inhaled, exhaled, then I lifted my chin. When I opened my eyes again, my reflection in the mirror stared back at me.
We both had mom’s eyes and dad’s playful grin.
My face was a touch more round, but the structure reflected clear, obvious relation between my brother and me.
I pressed a hand to my cheek and dragged it upwards to my long platinum hair.
I threaded my fingers through the strands, then I pulled back, until my hair was tight around my crown.
What if it could be me?
An idea entered my mind faster than logic, sanity, or reason could chase it away.
But it wasn’t that crazy, was it? The military wanted Vann Callan off a list of names, not even knowing if he was alive or dead.
They knew nothing about him beyond what was listed on his registered citizenship form, which included little more than his gender and basic physical stats that we provided ourselves.
I could easily pass for the headshot in his file.
If I reported in his place, there would be no reason for them to dig deeper into my identity, and the nurses wouldn’t know to discharge their comatose, one-legged patient straight into the draft office without being prompted to do so.
As long as Mictlan got a warm body with the name Vann Callan, then the draft was satisfied.
The death tolls hadn’t been finalized yet either, so I could anonymously report Fianna Callan as an unfortunate casualty, so the matchmaker wouldn’t come looking for me.
Was this completely insane? Or was this the most clearly I’d ever thought through anything?
I found myself sitting on my brother’s bed, searching the message servers for a long banned app that had been developed by a Resistance Programmer about five years ago.
It was a simple Appearance Alteration Module that, when downloaded, would show you what you looked like as the opposite gender.
It was all fun and games, until people realized they could use it semi-permanently, and immediately the program was shut down and removed from public availability for fear of alleged “misuse.”
If I could get my hands on the code, it would be easy to impersonate my brother.
Sure the appearance change would be an illusion, and my physical shape would still be what it is, so I would still have to be careful about physical contact, but so long as I kept my CHRONO on my wrist, I could keep up the mask.
I froze as my finger hovered over a link to a not-so-legal message board known as Axis-Cipher, that I’d mostly used to secure extra cake rations in the past, realizing my CHRONO could be monitored to assure I wasn’t breaking any rules.
Right now, the Territories would be watching everyone’s devices like hawks to weed out potential spies.
It was too risky to go down this road on a government issued CHRONO.
But an old one…
Digging through Vann’s drawers, I came up with his retired, pre-war CHRONO that our parents had gifted him before they were killed in the Star Crossed Conflict.
The old design was a touch larger than the new, sleek bracelet sized models, but the thin metal bracer fit better on my adult sized wrist than it ever had on Vann’s child sized one.
I snapped it onto my wrist and let the device start to charge, using my body heat as its energy source. New CHRONOs were less efficient, needing external power to remain online, and I didn’t realize how much I missed Zircon’s pre-acquisition ‘inferior’ tech.
Once it booted, a screen on the bracer lit up with a pale green booting sequence.
The display was primitive but functional, imbedded into the cuff instead of projecting a holographic screen.
I opened the privacy menu to set up a data transmission blocker first and foremost, then logged it into the slow Universal Network that had been established to provide communication and access to all people throughout the galaxy as a part of the treaty.
The Mictlan satellites were much faster, but I needed more anonymity than I could get from being on our network.
It was unlikely that they would be able to monitor such an old model’s base actions anyway, but if they did, I couldn’t leave any traces that would link the search to me.
They’d destroyed most of this tech when we were given our government issued replacements, even offering money for turning in old devices, but we’d hid Vann’s CHRONO when the soldiers came to the door.
We’d needed that money to eat, so I sold mine and let him keep his, because I was the practical one, while he couldn’t bear to give up the last gift Mom and Dad had given him. That sentimentality was about to save us both.
The Axis-Cipher was a well-protected place, rumored to have been built by a member of Axis Mundi, a terrorist group that actively opposed both the Empire and the Territories.
Little was known about them, and I was personally undecided on whether I agreed with or condemned their brand of activism.
There ideas of freedom and anarchy appealed to me, but innocent civilians had, more than once, been caught in the crossfire during their strikes, and they had little to show for it.
They didn’t have the strength or resources to make any real change in the solar system, but right now they did have the audacity to offer real change in my day-to-day life.
Deep in the boards, I found a hub full of the old code.
It was simple enough, and I could have easily replicated it in an afternoon of testing and checking, but there were a few lines I might not have thought of on my own.
Coding of this level was something covered in elementary schools in the Protectorates, and it took very little for me to copy over the source and start building my own A2.
I’d made my share of custom modules over the years, and it wasn’t any harder than designing an A2 to hide bruises and injuries from our teachers so they wouldn’t pry into my living situation.