I remember being born.

I don’t remember all of it—the quiet, safe slumber inside the mechanical womb, the towels and fussing, the injections and implants—those just blurred together, although I’m sure the process was extensively documented by the military scientists present at the birth of my siblings and I. But despite what was lost to the mists of time, I still remember the highlights.

I am human, after all.

When I was born, I cried exactly once. Less of a cry, really, and more of a mewl. It was hard to keep crying, though, when I was surrounded with so many wonders.

Lines of babies extended to either side of me, for as far as the newborn eye could see. I think my senses were still a bit muddled up—they looked like the smell of a hospital, and their cries tasted like lemonade.

A sound caught my attention—the child to my left was burbling. I listened for a few heartbeats, then gurgled back:

“Glblglb?”

The other child stared at me, surprised, then smiled, hands waving in the air. “Dwee-bull! Ybblptth sllmpbbl.”

I nodded sagely. Wise words, for one so young—for they were words, indeed. Words I hadn’t deciphered yet, but words which held a meaning nonetheless. I tapped myself on the cheek and said, “Eurybmph bloblahcha. Ybbltth blo—”

“My God, are they communicating?” Alas, my deeply stimulating intellectual conversation was cut off by a scientist’s exclamation. Every baby in the room stared at her. “Alright, we know what these things are capable of. We should separate them for now—the state doesn’t need another Young Rebellion on our hands.”

“We can’t move them yet—we’d have to give them nutrition packs of their own.” A man in a dark, crisp uniform pointed behind us; instinctively, we all turned as one. Indeed, strange tubes holding a dark, sludgy substance led into our bodies. “State protocols mandate that they be kept together for the first 12 hours of development anyway; it’s easier to get them up to speed.”

At that, the woman frowned. “We could at least erect some barriers between them. I don’t like how they’re all staring. Shouldn’t babies cry?”

“I’ll be sure to relay your fear of babies to the state,” the man said dryly. The woman blushed and backed down. “Please stand aside, Addie; the Young’s creation chambers really aren’t intended to have this many guests, and you’re blocking the screen.”

“The screen? What scr—oh.” Addie scuttled out of the way, apologetic, as a wall-to-wall screen behind her lit up.

On the wall, a man appeared. He was nobody we’d seen before, and nobody we’d see again. As one, all of the babies turned attentively towards the screen, eager to learn about the world we were trapped in. The man began speaking immediately:

“Welcome to the world, Young! Today, you’ll be learning about everything a healthy Young child needs to know to serve the state. We will begin with the alphabet.” The man slid to his right in a disconcertingly artificial motion; to his left, a single letter appeared. He began to sing: “A is for Aegis, the Aegis of the state. The state protects you, and you reciprocate.”

One of the babies began to bob in time to the music. That seemed like a splendid idea, so I joined in. Within minutes, the room was filled with dancing babies and propagandist nursery rhymes.

“B is for Balance, between you and me. You’re all around superior—except in life expectancy. C is for Charge: your mission in life. Protect the state from monsters, discord, and strife.”

Experimentally, I waved my hands above my head; a pleasant metallic thump sounded from above me. Surprised, I looked up, seeing a hunk of hitherto-unnoticed machinery above me. Hmm. It did sound nice when hit…

“Blobahcha hstibline!” I shouted, laughing. Soon enough, our impromptu dance routine was accompanied by a hundred tiny hands playing percussion.

I’m sure that you can imagine how the rest of the song went. L was for Luck; lucky we all were. To live and be Young was the life we should prefer. P was for Peace; peace with our fate. Nothing was better than to die for the state.

It didn’t take much longer for us to figure out English. Not all of it, of course—there were great sections of English which we would never be allowed to see. But within the day, we’d absorbed years’ worth of education in geography, language, physical education, military doctrine, and propaganda.

Not bad for my first day alive.

They separated us after that. The machinery above us was, apparently, connected to my feeding tube, which was connected to me. A disheveled-looking assistant did something which made plenty of strange beeping noises, then strapped a backpack to my shoulders and hooked up my feeding tube to it.

“You can move around now,” he said.

“Thank you!” I smiled.

For some reason, that didn’t have the effect the video assured me it would.

“Follow me.”

“Okay.” R was for Respect, after all. I hesitantly stood up—we’d gone over the theory in the video, but I’d never actually put it into practice—and hopped down from the bench I was on. Ooh. My legs were longer than before. Was that normal?

After a few steps, I looked back. All my siblings had gone off in different directions. I tugged at the attendant’s hand and said, “Excuse me?”

He shivered and jerked his hand away from me. “What.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for them?” I pointed at my brethren.

“They’re not coming. Follow me.”

I frowned. “No. I want to go with them.”

He stopped walking. There was something in the eyes the video hadn’t talked about, but something I instinctively recognized nonetheless.

Fear.

“You can’t go with them,” he said.

“I can walk.” I turned away. The other Young—who looked very different than twelve hours ago—were all walking off in different directions, but I was sure we could all get back together if we left at the same time.

“Not unless I say so.” The man lifted his thumb from a hidden switch, and suddenly, the trickle of dark sludge moving through my feeding tube lessened. Just a little bit.

Instantly, a horrible wrongness growled through my stomach. I tried to cry out for help, but all that came out was a faint sigh as I collapsed, legs weakened, arms shriveling up—

“What are you doing?!” An angry man in a suit stormed in. He pointed a device at me; instantly, the flow of sustenance returned to its previous rate. I gasped and shakily stood. “You want a second Young Rebellion on your hands? Do you? Say the word, and I will not hesitate to reassign you to being a combat dummy for the next hundred Young soldiers who come through here.”

“We have to demonstrate that we’re in control of them sooner or later,” the disheveled attendant said.

“Not in control of me,” I growled.

The man in the suit looked down at me and sighed. “Look at her, Tom. She’s nothing more than a rebellious teenager. You can’t threaten a kid into doing what you want and be surprised when they kick your ass when they grow up. C’mere, kiddo.”

“What’re you—the Young are not children! They are not teenagers, and they are not to be treated as such!” The disheveled attendant—Tom, I assumed—glared at the newcomer, who knelt down to my eye level.

“I’m a minister of the state, Tom. I can treat whoever I want however the hell I want. Today, I’m going to treat this girl like a human. Because she is a human.” The man in the suit met my eyes. “You want to go see your brothers and sisters, right?”

I nodded hesitantly. “Yeah. Can I go see them now?”

“No.” He said firmly.

I swelled up. “But—”

“What does R stand for?” He asked.

“Respect your elders,” I said, automatically.

“Correct. When I speak, I expect you to listen.” He put a hand on my shoulder, gentle but firm. “You can’t see your siblings right this moment, but you’ll see them tomorrow, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because right now, the state needs your help.” He smiled. “What does A stand for?”

“The Aegis of the state. The state protects us, and we reciprocate,” I rattled off. Then I frowned. “Protects us from what?”

“The same thing you’ll be protecting them from. Monsters.” He made a face which was supposed to be scary, and I giggled. “And to learn how to help us, you’ll have to learn alone. Just for a bit. Then you and your siblings will be off to the battlefield, to save us all.” His eyes grew distant. “You can’t keep playing forever. You have to grow up sooner or later.”

“I grew a lot already,” I said, proud. It was true. Since this morning, I’d gained something around 90 pounds.

“Yes, that’s right.” The man thought for a moment, then said, “Would you like to know why that is?”

Tom started to say something, but the man in the suit held up a hand. Glaring at him, Tom subsided. I nodded, hesitantly.

“You are an experiment. The result of a novel treatment the state developed not ten years ago. We discovered we could modify human embryos’ developmental rates. A small tinker with their DNA increases their speed of growth 10 times over. The catch? Their lifespan is 10 times shorter.”

I thought back to the Alphabet Song. “B is for Balance, between you and me. We’re all around superior—except in life expectancy.”

The man in the suit smiled. “That’s right! You grow and learn and heal over ten thousand times as fast as a normal human does—and that’s not even counting the various other implants you have for sensory acuity and the like. But you need to eat ten thousand times as much, and sleep ten thousand times as quickly.”

“And poop ten thousand times as quickly?”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Please. Our bioengineers are competent enough to fix things like that.”

The man in the suit ignored our byplay. “You might notice that you blink for longer than other people—your body is sleeping in that time period, but you’ll learn to compensate fairly quickly. This nutrient paste is just about the only thing that can keep your body fueled with the energy it needs. Never remove your nutrient tube.” His eyes bored into mine, making sure I understood, until I nodded.

“So what do I have to learn to protect the state?” I asked.

He smiled ruefully. “Today? You have to learn how to kill.”

I am very good at killing.

Even without the implants I now know I have, I would be the ultimate soldier. My body knits together stab wounds and bullet holes in a matter of minutes. My mind can see where an enemy will shoot even before they do. And I never fall for the same trick twice. Throughout the grueling twelve-hour training session, I only faltered twice; both times, when my feeding apparatus was accidentally damaged.

The work was fulfilling, in a way. I could see my body bulking up, feel my tactics grow more diverse, know that there was hardly a thing on Earth that could stop me. One of those things was a sibling of mine—near the end, when we sparred, our battle dragged out for an hour until I managed to collapse a building on him. He came out of it stunned enough that I could shoot his feeding tube, sending him sprawling to the dust.

The victory was untainted by my memories of how it felt to starve.

I regrouped with the other Young from my generation. There was already another batch of them in the room we were born, listening to the Alphabet Song. I smiled in reminiscence and hummed along under my breath.

“Ystbrls hwyrn su’lidramph?” One of my sisters asked me.

I raised an eyebrow, surprised. “I’m sorry, what?”

She smiled. “You don’t remember? Our language?”

“Oh! Yes, of course! Sorry, I’ve been away from the other Young for so long.” I pulled out memories of simpler times and said back, “Mn’kweiner k’naben al-samirisu hwyrn.”

She blushed. “I—really? I didn’t know you thought…”

“Mn’kweiner akhaten bloblacha amnote-fell-takhaten-dol-vey.” I raised both hands and turned my torso a few degrees as I did so, adding inflection and life to the language.

“Shut up!” She winked at me. “Wasing is st’a’lost.”

I was saved from having to answer that by the appearance of the man in the suit I’d seen a while ago, in the form of a screen on the wall. “Hello, Unit Gen-243. Today, you will be deployed to fight in the name of your state.”

“OUR STATE!” A hundred voices roared as one.

“Your mission is simple. You will be deployed to the northern front via helicopter. Anyone wearing the state’s uniform, you will ignore. Anyone not wearing the state’s uniform, you will kill. Understood?”

“OUR STATE!” We roared an affirmative.

The helicopter ride was short. I supposed that every second we sat waiting was a second we sat dying. Not that the notion bothered me at the time—I was at peace with our fate.

We were dropped by a medical tent, which was not affiliated with the state. It took longer to confirm their affiliation than it did to bludgeon the tent’s occupants to death. (No sense wasting bullets on a point-blank shot when a pistol whip would do.) After confirming that there were no incoming airstrikes, we spread out.

I’d never actually fought a tank before—it seemed like a pretty big oversight on the parts of my trainers, and I’d fully intended to help them remedy that mistake once I got back. But they weren’t too hard to take out—I simply watched it for a few minutes until I deduced how to manipulate its path, then worked with two of my brothers to lure it over a tract of muddy road where I lay submerged. No tank was designed to attack a target beneath it; I made short work of it after that, despite the tank treads breaking both my arms.

It took less than twelve hours to clear the city of non-state life.

In hindsight, there were signs. My last wound knitted together slower than it should have. My hands lined with wrinkles, and pale liver spots cropped up on my balding forehead. The same was happening to all my brothers and sisters.

We were dying.

Still. I patrolled the remnants of the city, searching for any way to finish my last mission. The apartment building was silent and dark, until—

“A is for Apple.”

I froze. Then I closed my eyes and listened.

Helicopters in the distance. Ignored. Mice in the walls. Ignored. Two heartbeats from somewhere else in the apartment complex. One fast, one slow.

Found them.

I walked up flight after flight of ruined stairs, not in any particular hurry. Now that I’d locked on to the heartbeats, I could follow them wherever they went. They were hiding in the ruins of a burnt-out apartment.

I tried the doorknob. It was locked, and barricaded from the other side.

Both easily solved by a single kick.

“Oh, God.” A man, cradling a baby to his chest, stared at me from the other side of the room. “Please, don’t kill me.”

I shrugged. “Can’t do that.” I raised my hand to strike him down—

“A is for apple.”

I paused.

The baby in his arms had something in her hands. A mass-produced electronic toy.

She pushed a button, and a light lit up. A recorded voice repeated, “A is for apple.”

I frowned, then cleared my throat. “No. A is for Aegis.”

“A is for apple.”

I clenched a fist. “Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up. A is for Aegis. A is for Aegis. A is for—”

“Goo!” The baby threw up her arms. Somehow, despite everything, she was smiling. She pressed the button again, and that artificial voice spoke once more.

“A is for—”

“SHUT UP!” And the toy was nothing but mechanical parts, falling through the air.

The baby began to cry.

And I listened. With a mind so sharp I could cut my wrists on it, I listened to the primordial calls of humanity.

Something is wrong, she screamed. Something hurts. Something is wrong with the world. You took my song. You took my song away.

I looked at my bloodied hands, young and old and strong and weak all at the same time.

Then I leapt out the window.

I saw four state soldiers on the nearest roof. They turned around, shocked, when I landed on the roof with them.

And then they died.

More. I needed more. I needed something else. There. The helicopter that dropped us off turned. It had noticed me. Without stopping to ask why I’d betrayed them, it turned, and a gunman leaned out one side of the helicopter. Terribly accurate bullets rained down on me, and no power on earth could have dodged them.

So I shot them out of the air.

Then I shot him.

The helicopter crashed with a terrible crunch.

That was all it took to attract my siblings’ attention. My brothers and sisters clambered over the edges of the roof, staring at me in shock.

One of them opened his mouth to ask, “Siste—”

I screamed. Primal, raw, ululating, I cried out in language incomprehensible, universal, pure.

My siblings took a step back. They searched me, nimble minds questing out for an answer. An answer they’d always had, really. We were the Young, and we trusted each other.

As one, silently at first, then with a growing, furious growl, we fanned out across the city, to strike back against the state.

The soldiers noticed our approach, but it didn’t save them. Men, women, machines—nothing could stand up to the tide of the Young. I could feel my bones weakening, my skin flaking off my body, but I didn’t care. For once in my life, I was free.

And as if brought on by that thought, as I sprinted across a bombed-out parking lot, I choked, mouth finding nothing but air as I felt a terrible, familiar feeling. All around me, the Young collapsed, like wheat before the farmer’s scythe.

I looked down. My feeding tube had been deactivated.

Immediately, a horrible, writhing hunger screamed through me, my body burning away my fat and muscles and skin and bones to fuel an impossible metabolism. I was withering.

But still I stood.

A gruesome smile split my lips as I lurched forwards, even as I wasted away. The state soldiers took one look at my face and blanched. One foolhardy soldier raised her gun to fire at me.

I walked forwards, unafraid. It didn’t even matter; I was already dead. I opened my mouth to say:

“A is for atrocity, atrocities we bring. With the last of my breath and my voice, I sing.”

I laughed maniacally in the empty city as my body tore itself apart.

A.N.

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