Izurich
Zoie Hart
NovellaAddict
AHeartlessNobody
Deadlyrose9641
Blade17
Tlstiffl
Tim the YetiTin Men
Chapter One: A day in the life of your everyday Super Soldier.
Palo Alto, California
10:00 PM
10:00 PM
Swatting at a square block of black plastic blaring obnoxious pop music, Duncan slowly opened his eyes as he entered some for of wakefulness. He looked over to his left and saw his wife peacefully sleeping in the bed next to him. Pushing himself up to a sitting position he grabbed at his phone and flipped through it for a few moments as his body began to wake up, the glaringly bright screen causing him to squint as the contrast hurt his eyes. A happy little comic character bounced around the top of his screen, blurting out text bubbles that read "Good morning!". With a huff, Duncan pulled himself out of bed and fell into the wheelchair he left at the side of his bed.
When he first started with the RIC, waking up at 10, essentially being nocturnal was no small bit of hell. It was hard for him and his wife to spend time together, he had to wake up without sunlight, he had to get into his wheelchair on his own, it was all fairly disorienting. Though now, 11 months later, he was finally getting into the swing of things. He wheeled himself over to his closet, threw on a plain shirt and a hoodie and rolled into the living room/kitchen area of their little apartment. Sitting on the counter was a cup of lukewarm coffee and a bagged lunch, alongside a plate of eggs and bacon under steam covered plastic wrap. He ate in relative silence by himself, downing his coffee and watching some late night TV before 10:35 rolled around and one of his squadmates texted him.
5 minutes later he was on the ground floor and his squadmate helped him into the car and they were off to work.
"The Hump"
Some half hour later, they were pulling into the heart of the Remote Infantry Corps headquarters. A closely guarded secret, this facility, better known by the members of the RIC as "The Hump" was essentially a sprawling facility deep underground. No one really knew how big it was though, all the RI-1 Operators only ever saw small portions of the base. As Duncan wheeled his way down the halls of the base, he saw the medical center off to his left, with Johnathan Tyres clutching at trash bin in the detox room visible window-walls with a bright red horizontal stripe reading "MEDICAL". Someone had been drinking too much before work. The rest of the facility were grey-white metal walls and floor, with bright white fluorescent lights. Its not like there was any point in having windows in an underground facility, unless the windows were looking into some other portion of the facility.
In the RIC Barracks/Locker room, there were already several individuals changing into their uniforms- fatigues, boots and T-shirts, less rigorous or formal than most military branches. Duncan opted to change while he was still at home- no need for the rest of the platoon to see him fumbling around in his wheelchair. Currently in the barracks were the members of the Bravo Company's second platoon, either preparing for their shift. For security, RIC operators regularly changed shifts in staggered transitions from the company level down to the squad level. The members of Duncan's squad were scheduled to switch in at midnight on the dot.
The noise in the barracks was a dull roar, with guffaws of laughter and the banging of shutting locker doors punctuating much of the chatter that permeated the room. Most members of the platoon were fairly familiar with one another, and much like highschool cliques, groups of friends all had different places they liked to hang around and chat with each other before shift. Some stayed in the locker room until the last minute, others- like Duncan, made their conversation in the 'Cryo Room'.
The 'Cryo Room', wasn't actually a room in which people were cryogenically frozen, but if you ever watched a sci-fi movie, it sure as hell looked like one. What was called the Cyro Room by the RIC operators was actually the transfer bays from which the operators controlled their RI-1 shells. Similar to a virtual reality lounger, operators would climb into these pods- or coffins, depending on how morbid their sense of humor was- from which their sense of consciousness would leave their bodies and be projected to their respective RI-1 shells in whatever hotspot they were currently deployed to. When asked about specifics to how they worked, the eggheads would either start spouting enough technobabble to make one's brain hurt, or just tell them that its above their pay-grade.
Each Company got its own Cyro Room, which meant that there were plenty of banks of coffins for you and your clique to get privacy in and chat up about their fantasy league or listen to the radio. All the while, an equal number of technicians went about the pods either preparing a row to be boarded, or preparing a row to be exited. Duncan himself preferred to hang around his squad's bay- it made it easier for him to get help getting into a pod- his first day on the job he was the last one to the cryo bay, and there was no one to help him when he fell off his wheelchair and onto the floor. He spent a half hour there before the squad realized that one of their shells weren't responding to calls or moving.
Duncan wheeled himself into the middle of the bay, reaching back and pressing the power button on the radio he had tied to the back of his chair. He was, surprisingly, one of the first to the bay.