0600?Wake up.
0603?Ignore Yonabaru.
0610?Steal silicon chip from armory.
0630?Eat breakfast.
0730?Practice basic body movement.
0900?Visualize training during fucking PT.
1030?Borrow battle axe from Shasta.
1130?Eat lunch.
1300?Train with emphasis on correcting mistakes of previous battle. (In Jacket.)
1500?Meet Ferrell for live battle training. (In Jacket.)
1745?Eat dinner.
1830?Attend platoon meeting.
1900?Go to Yonabaru’s party.
2000?Check Jacket.
2200?Go to bed.
0112?Help Yonabaru into his bunk.
This was more or less how I spent my day.
Outside of training, everything had become routine. I’d snuck past those sentries so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. I was starting to worry that I’d become a master thief before I made it as a professional soldier. Not that the ability to steal anything in a world that resets itself at the end of every other day would do much good.
The daily grind didn’t change much from one pass through the loop to the next. If I strayed really far from the routine, I could force something different to happen, but if I didn’t do anything it would play out the same as always. It was like everyone kept reading from the same script they’d been given the day before and ad-libbing was frowned upon.
It was 1136 and I was eating lunch in Cafeteria No. 2. The lunch lady served me the same amount of onion soup at the same time in the same bowl. I moved my arm to avoid the same splash as it traced the same arc through the air. Dodging calls from friends throughout the cafeteria, I sat in the same seat.
Rita was sitting three rows in front of me, her back to me as she ate. I hadn’t chosen this time to eat because it coincided with her lunch; it just worked out that way. For no particular reason, I’d gotten used to watching her eat from this same angle each day.
Cafeteria No. 2 wasn’t the sort of place a sergeant major like Rita would normally be expected to dine. It’s not that the food was bad. It was pretty good, actually. But it didn’t seem likely to impress someone who woke up in an officer’s private sky lounge each morning and had half the base at her beck and call. I’d even heard that U.S. Special Forces had brought along their own cook, which only deepened the mystery of her presence. She could have swallowed a live rat and wouldn’t have seemed more a snake in our midst. And so our savior ate alone. No one tried to talk to her, and the seats around her were always conspicuously empty.
For all her prowess in battle, Rita Vrataski ate like a child. She licked the soup from the corners of her mouth and drew pictures in her food with the tips of her chopsticks. Apparently chopsticks were something new to her. At 1143 she dropped a bean on her plate. It rolled, picking up speed, bouncing first to her tray, and then to the table. The bean flew through the air with a clockwise spin, careening toward the concrete floor. Every time, with lightning reflexes, Rita would extend her left hand, pluck the bean out of the air, and cram it into her mouth. All in under 0.11 seconds. If she’d lived back in the Old West, I imagine she’d have outdrawn Billy the Kid. If she’d been a samurai, she could have read every flash of Kojiro Sasaki’s katana. Even when she was eating, the Full Metal Bitch was the Full Metal Bitch.
Today, like every day, she was trying to eat an umeboshi pickled plum. She must have confused it for an ordinary piece of dried fruit. After two or three attempts to pick it up with her chopsticks, she put the whole thing in her mouth.
Down the hatch.
Rita doubled over as though she’d taken a 57mm round right in the gut. Her back twitched. Her rust-colored hair looked like it was about to stand on end. But she didn’t cough it back up. Tough as nails. She had swallowed the whole thing, pit and all. Rita gulped down a glass of water with a vengeance.
She must have been at least twenty-two years old, but you’d never guess it watching her. The sand-colored military uniforms didn’t flatter her, but if you dressed her up in one of those frilly numbers the girls in town were wearing, she’d be pretty cute. At least I liked to imagine so.
What’s wrong with this food? It tastes like paper.
“You enjoyin’ yourself?” The voice came from above my head.
Holding my chopsticks without moving a muscle, I looked out the corner of my eye. A prehistoric face looked down at me from beneath a flattop haircut that leveled off about two meters above sea level. His features were more dinosaur than human. Definitely some velociraptor lurking in that family tree. My spirits fell when I saw the tattoo on his shoulder: a wolf wearing a crown. He was from the 4th, the company holding a grudge against us over that rugby game. I went back to lifting food to my mouth with machinelike regularity.
He raised his eyebrows, two plump bushes that would have been the envy of the caterpillar world. “I asked if you were enjoyin’ yourself.”
“How could I not enjoy myself in such fine company?”
“So how come you’re gulpin’ down your chow like it was something you found stuck on the end of a toilet brush?”
There were only a handful of soldiers sitting at the oversized tables in the cafeteria. The smell of something sweet wafted from the kitchen. Artificial light from the fluorescents in the ceiling washed over the fried shrimp heaped onto our heavy-duty plates.
If you had to categorize the food prepared in the UDF as good or bad, it was definitely good. There were only three things a soldier in the UDF did, after all: eat, sleep, and fight. If the food wasn’t good you’d have a morale problem on your hands. And according to Yonabaru, the food on Flower Line Base was better than most.
The first time I tasted it, I thought it was delicious. That was about five subjective months ago now, maybe more. About a month into the loop, I started heavily seasoning my food. The intentionally mismatched condiments created a taste just horrible enough to remind me the food was there. And now, even that had stopped working. I don’t care if you’re eating food prepared by a four-star chef, after eighty days of the same thing, it all tastes alike. Probably because it is. By that point, it was hard for me to think of food as anything other than a source of energy.
“If the look on my face put you off your lunch, I apologize.” No use trying to start a fight.
“Hold it. You tryin’ to say this is my fault?”
“I don’t have time for this.”
I started shoveling the rest of the food on my plate into my mouth. He slammed a palm the size of a baseball glove down on the table. Onion soup splashed on my shirt, leaving a stain where the lunch lady’s best efforts had failed. I didn’t really mind. No matter how tough the stain was, it would be gone by tomorrow, and I wouldn’t even have to wash it.
“Fourth Company grunts not worth the time of the mighty 17th, that it?”
I realized I’d unwittingly set a very annoying flag. This loop had been cursed from the get-go, really. I had accidentally killed Ferrell at the end of the last loop, and that had thrown everything out of whack this time around. From where I was, it hadn’t even been five hours since he’d died vomiting blood. Of course I’d been KIA too, but that was to be expected. Ferrell had died trying to protect a fucking new recruit. It had been just the spur my migraine needed to kick into a gallop.
I’d planned to ease my mind by staring at Rita the way I always did, but my foul mood must have been more obvious than I realized. Clearly, it was bad enough to trigger something that hadn’t happened in any of the previous loops.
I picked up my tray and stood.
The man’s body was a wall of meat blocking my way. People started to gather, eager for a fight. It was 1148. If I lost time here, it would knock off my whole schedule. Just because I had all the time in the world didn’t mean I had time to waste. Every hour lost meant I was an hour weaker, and it would catch up with me on the battlefield.
“You runnin’, chickenshit?” His voice rang through the cafeteria.
Rita turned and glared at me. It was obvious she had just realized that the recruit who’d been staring at her during PT was eating in the same cafeteria. Something told me that if I returned her gaze, she’d help me the way she’d helped during PT-the way she’d helped in my first battle. Rita wasn’t the type who could turn her back on someone in trouble. Her humanity was starting to show through. I wondered what her play would be. Maybe she’d start talking about green tea to cool this guy off. I laughed under my breath at the thought.
“What’s so funny?”
Oops. “Nothing to do with you.”
My eyes left Rita. The Keiji Kiriya standing in the cafeteria that day was no green recruit. My outward appearance may have been the same, but inside I was a hardened veteran of seventy-nine battles. I could deal with my own problems. I’d imposed on Rita once during PT and once more, indirectly, by smooth-talking my way into one of her spare battle axes. I didn’t need to involve her a third time just to make it through lunch.
“You fuckin’ with me?” He wasn’t going to let this go.
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t have time to waste screwing around.”
“Whaddayou have hangin’ between your legs? A pair of ping pong balls?”
“I never opened my sack to look. You?”
“Motherfucker!”
“That’s enough!” A sultry voice cut short our argument. It wasn’t Rita.
Salvation had come from an unexpected quarter. I turned to see a bronze-skinned woman standing beside the table. Her apron-bound breasts intruded rudely on a good 60 percent of my field of view. She stood between us holding a steaming fried shrimp with a pair of long cooking chopsticks. It was Rachel Kisaragi.
“I don’t want any fighting in here. This is a dining room, not a boxing ring.”
“Just tryin’ to teach this recruit some manners.”
“Well, school’s over.”
“Hey, you were the one complaining about how miserable he looked eating your food.”
“Even so.”
Rachel glanced at me. She hadn’t shown the slightest hint of anger when I’d knocked over her cart of potatoes, so for this to have gotten to her, I must’ve been making quite the impression. A part of her probably wanted to embarrass anyone associated with Jin Yonabaru, widely regarded as the most annoying person on base. Not that I blamed her. I’d tripped the spilled potato flag, and now I’d tripped this one. The aftermath was my responsibility.
In a base dyed in coffee-stain splotches of desert earth tones, a woman like Rachel was bound to attract an admirer or two, but I’d never realized just how popular she was. This man hadn’t picked a fight with me over some company rivalry. He was showing off.
“It’s all right. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Rachel turned to face the looming giant and shooed me away with a gesture from behind her back. “Here. Have a shrimp. On the house.”
“Save it for the penguins.”
Rachel frowned.
“Doesn’t this runt have anything to say for himself?” He reached one big, meaty arm over Rachel’s shoulder and threw a jab.
I reacted instinctively. Subjective months in a Jacket had conditioned me to always keep my feet planted firmly on the ground. My right leg pivoted clockwise, my left counterclockwise, bringing me down into a battle stance. I parried his lunge with my left arm and raised the lunch tray in my right hand to keep the plates from falling, my center of gravity never leaving the middle of my body. Rachel dropped the fried shrimp. I snatched it from its graceful swim through the air before its tail could touch the ground.
The parry had thrown the guy off balance. He took two tottering steps forward, then a third, before tumbling into the lunch of the soldier sitting in front of him. Food and plates went flying with a spectacular crash. I stood, balancing my tray in one hand.
“You dropped this.” I handed Rachel the fried shrimp. The onlookers broke into applause.
“Fucking piece of shit!” The guy was up already, his fist flying toward me. He was stubborn. I had a few moments to consider whether I should dodge his punch, launch a counterattack of my own, or turn tail and run.
Speaking from experience, a straight right from a man who’d been trained to pilot a Jacket definitely had some bite, but it didn’t register compared to what a Mimic could do. This loser’s punch would be strong enough to inflict pain, but not a mortal wound, unless he got extremely lucky. I watched as he put every ounce of his strength into the swing. His fist went sailing right past the tip of my nose. He was neglecting his footwork, leaving an opening. I didn’t take it.
There went my first chance to kill you.
He recovered from the missed punch, his breath roaring in his nose. He started hopping around like a boxer. “Stop duckin’ and fight like a man, bitch!”
Still haven’t had enough?
The gap between our levels of skill was deeper than the Mariana Trench, but I guess that demonstration hadn’t been enough for it to sink in. Poor bastard.
He came with a left hook. I moved back half a step.
Whoosh.
Another jab. I stepped back. I could have killed him twice now. There, my third chance. Now a fourth. He was leaving too many openings to count. I could have laid him out on the floor ten times over in a single minute. Lucky for him my job wasn’t sending able-bodied Jacket jockeys to the infirmary, no matter how hotheaded they were. My job was sending Mimics to their own private part of Hell.
With each punch he threw and missed, the crowd cried out.
“Come on, you haven’t even scratched ’im!”
“Stop prancin’ around and take a hit already!”
“Punch him! Punch him! Punch him!”
“Watch the doors, don’t want nobody breakin’ this up! I got ten bucks on the big one!” Followed immediately by, “Twenty on the scrawny guy!” Hey, that’s me! I thought as I dodged another punch. Then someone else cried out, “Where’s my fried shrimp? I lost my fried shrimp!”
The wilder the crowd grew, the more effort he put behind his punches and the easier they were to avoid.
Ferrell had a saying: “Break down every second.” The first time I heard it, I didn’t understand what it meant. A second was a second. There wasn’t anything to stretch or break down.
But it turns out that you can carve the perception of time into finer and finer pieces. If you flipped a switch in the back of your brain, you could watch a second go by like frames in a movie. Once you figure out what would be happening ten frames later, you could take whatever steps you needed to turn the situation to your advantage. All at a subconscious level. In battle, you couldn’t count on anyone who didn’t understand how to break down time.
Evading his attacks was easy. But I didn’t want to trip any more unnecessary flags than I already had. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to shift my schedule, but if I kept this up the 17th would be in the cafeteria soon. I needed to bring this diversion to a close before they showed up.
I decided that taking one of his punches would waste the least amount of time. What I didn’t count on was Rachel stepping in to try to stop him. She altered the course of his right punch just enough to change the hit that was supposed to glance off my cheek into one that landed square on my chin. A wave of heat spread from my teeth to the back of my nose. The dishes on my tray danced through the air. And there was Rita at the edge of my field of vision, leaving the cafeteria. I would make this pain a lesson for next time. I lost consciousness and wandered through muddy sleep…
When I came to, I found myself laid out across several pipe chairs pushed together into a makeshift bed. Something damp was on my head-a woman’s handkerchief. A faint citrus smell hung in the air.
“Are you awake?”
I was in the kitchen. Above me an industrial ventilator hummed, siphoning steam from the room. Nearby, an olive green liquid simmered in an enormous pot like the cauldrons angry natives were supposed to use for boiling explorers up to their pith hats, except much larger. Next week’s menu hung on the wall. Above the handwritten menu was the head of a man torn from a poster.
After staring at his bleached white teeth for what seemed an eternity, I finally recognized it. It was the head of the body builder from the poster in our barracks. I wondered how he had made it all the way from the men’s barracks to his new wall, where he could spend his days smiling knowingly over the women who worked in the kitchen.
Rachel was peeling potatoes, tossing each spiral skin into an oversized basket that matched the scale of the pot. These were the same potatoes that had come raining down on my head my fourth time through the loop. I’d eaten the goddamned mashed potatoes she was making seventy-nine times now. There weren’t any other workers in the kitchen aside from Rachel. She must have prepared the meals for all these men on her own.
Sitting up, I bit down on the air a few times to test my jaw. That punch had caught me at just the right angle. Things didn’t seem to be lining up the way they should. Rachel caught sight of me.
“Sorry about that. He’s really not such a bad guy.”
“I know.”
She smiled. “You’re more mature than you look.”
“Not mature enough to stay out of trouble, apparently,” I replied with a shrug.
People were always a little high-strung the day before a battle.
And guys were always looking for an opportunity to look good in front of a knockout like Rachel. The deck was definitely stacked against me, though I’m sure the face I’d been making hadn’t helped the situation any.
“What are you, a pacifist? Rare breed in these parts.”
“I like to save it for the battlefield.”
“That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you were holding back. You’re obviously the better fighter.” Rachel’s eyes stared down at me intently. She was tall for a woman. Flower Line Base had been built three years ago. If she’d come to the base immediately after getting her nutritionist’s license, that would make her at least four years older than me. But she sure didn’t look it. And it wasn’t that she went out of her way to make herself look young. The glow of her bronze skin and her warm smile were as natural as they came. She reminded me of the librarian I’d fallen for in high school. The same smile that had stolen my heart and sent me happily to work airing out the library that hot summer so long ago.
“Our lives should be written in stone. Paper is too temporary- too easy to rewrite.” Thoughts like that had been on my mind a lot lately.
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
“Maybe.”
“You seeing anyone?”
I looked at her. Green eyes. “No.”
“I’m free tonight.” Then she added hastily, “Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t say that sort of thing to just anyone.”
That much I knew. She’d brushed Yonabaru aside readily enough. For an entire week I’d heard complaint after complaint about the hottest woman whose knees were locked together with the biggest padlock. “It’s a travesty in this day and age,” he’d tell me. And I had a feeling it wasn’t special treatment just because Yonabaru was who he was.
“What time is it?” I still had a schedule to keep.
“Almost three o’clock. You were out for about three hours.”
1500. I was supposed to be training with Ferrell. I had to make right what I’d done in the last loop-the move that had killed Ferrell and the lieutenant. They’d died protecting me because I was showboating. I could still see the charred, smoldering family pictures Ferrell had decorated the inside of his Jacket with fluttering in the wind. A shot of him smiling under a bright Brazilian sun surrounded by brothers and sisters burned into my mind.
I didn’t possess any extraordinary talents that set me apart from my peers. I was just a soldier. There were things I could do, and things I couldn’t. If I practiced, in time I could change some of those things I couldn’t do into things I could. I wouldn’t let my overconfidence kill the people who’d saved my life time and time again.
Under other circumstances I might have accepted her invitation.
“Sorry, but I’m not the guy you’re looking for.”
I turned and started running toward the training field where Sergeant Ferrell was waiting, reeking of sweat and pumped with adrenaline.
“Asshole!”
I didn’t stop to return the compliment.