Chapter 1: A New Journey
The holographic ad ripped through the haze of the underground walkway, a violent burst of light and sound in the gloom. It hovered above the grimy heads of the crowd, ten feet tall and pristine.
BE MORE THAN YOU ARE. A digitally perfected EDF soldier, armor gleaming under alien suns, stared with impossible conviction. THE FRONTIER AWAITS. YOUR SOLAR SYSTEM NEEDS DEFENDERS. LEGACY IS BUILT, NOT INHERITED. SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP. ENLIST.
The bassline of the anthem vibrated through the metal decking. Around John Arlington, a clutch of teenagers from the lower arcology schools had stopped to gawk. Their faces, lit by the sterile blue light, were masks of raw hunger. He saw it in their widened eyes, their slightly parted mouths. Marco Suarez punched his friend’s shoulder, pointing at the fighter jet streaking across the hologram’s imaginary sky. “That’s the new ship! Look at the vector thrust! I’m gonna fly one of those.”
“You gotta pass the neural-link first,” the friend shot back, but his tone was pure worship, not doubt.
John stood a little apart, his lanky frame leaning against a corroded support beam. He watched the teens, then the ad, then the greasy drip of condensation from a leaking pipe above the screen. The words Legacy is built, not inherited throbbed in his skull. He’d heard it ten thousand times since primary, chanted it in morning affirmations. It was the bedrock promise, the one piece of gospel that made the cramped quarters and the nutrient-block meals bearable. It was a door. The only door he could see.
The ad snapped off, replaced by a flickering public service announcement about recycling schedules. The spell broke. The teens shuffled away, arguing about specs and kill ratios, their voices echoing in the tunnel. John pushed off the beam and kept walking, the soles of his worn sneakers silent on the perforated metal.
He climbed three rusted staircases, each landing smelling of ozone and stale fried protein. Home was a compartment in Sector 7-G, a single room divided by a frayed curtain. The air recycler wheezed a perpetual B-flat.
His mom was at the fabricator, coaxing a patched uniform shirt from its printer head. “You’re late,” she said, not looking up. “Your father’s on overtime. Again.”
“Saw the new EDF promo in the Tunnels,” John said, dropping his threadbag. “The recruitment quotas are open.”
Her hands stilled for a second. Then the familiar, tight whir of the printer resumed. “I saw it too. Bright colors. Nice music.”
“It’s not just colors, Ma.” He walked to the small sanitizer unit, ran his hands under the spray. “The academic track… it’s a joke. Straight A’s just gets you a nicer seat in a corporate indenturement program. You grind for forty years to maybe, maybe, get a window office in an arcology spire. To look down at all this.” He gestured at the room, the vibrating walls.
“A window office sounds like heaven,” she murmured, her back still to him.
“It’s a cage with a view.”
She finally turned. Her face was tired, the lines around her eyes etched deep by the constant low-grade lumens. “Johnny. Those videos… they don’t show the other parts. They don’t show what comes back, or what doesn’t come back at all.”
“It’s not the frontier wars, Ma. It’s the Defense Force. It’s stability. It’s a path.” He was repeating the talking points, but he believed them. He had to.
His father came in then, smelling of machine oil and fatigue. He listened in silence as John laid it out again, the pitch tumbling out faster now. Citizenship points. Advanced training. A real purpose. A chance to be something the corp-ladders could never offer.
His father wiped his hands on a grey rag. “Calm and calculating. That’s you. So calculate this,” he said, his voice gravelly. “They need bodies, son. They always need bodies. They polish the truth until it shines so bright you can’t see the scratches underneath. Your mother’s right. I’ve got friends who enlisted for ‘adventure.’ One cleans waste re-processors on Ceres. The other… we don’t talk about the other.”
The room felt smaller. The argument was old, circular. Their fear was a solid thing, born from decades of being fodder for systems—corporate or governmental. His hope was an insult to their hard-earned scars.
“So that’s it?” John’s calm fractured, a hairline crack in his voice. “I just accept my slot? Become another cog in the machine down here? While Marco Suarez, who can barely do calculus, gets to fly because he’s bought into the dream without thinking about it?”
“Dreams are for people who can afford the down payment,” his father said softly.
John stared at them, the two most important people in his world, and felt a vast, lonely chasm open up. They loved him. And their love was a prison. “Fine,” he said, the word flat and final.
He pushed past the curtain to his sleeping nook, a space barely larger than the cot itself. He didn’t slam anything. He just lay on the thin mattress, listening to the muted sounds of his parents murmuring on the other side of the fabric.
He didn’t cry. He boiled. The corporate job, the indentured servitude in a crisp suit, it played behind his eyes like a bad transmission. He saw his future self, pale and shriveled, analyzing profit-loss statements for off-world mining operations he’d never visit. His straight A’s, his disciplined mind, all worthless. Marco Suarez would have more life in his little finger, even if he died in a training exercise, than John would have in a lifetime of safe, sanctioned drudgery.
The injustice of it was a cold, sharp stone in his gut.
His personal comm unit, a scratched slab of plastic and glass, vibrated on the ledge beside his cot. An unknown code. A blocked signal. He almost ignored it. Probably another corp headhunter, a reminder of the fate he was raging against.
He thumbed the accept key.
“Hello?"