Unbecoming Humans

Chapter 1

Content warning: if you choose to read the full story, please note that it contains:
- mild sexual scenes
- violence
- abuse
- depression

***

Boom. An explosion rent the air, resounded through the trees and the earth, reverberated through Aria’s bones, echoing in her chest. She felt as if she and the world around her were vibrating as one, and adrenaline flooded her veins. War games were never complete without the sound of real war being waged on the other side of Eden’s walls. 

“Aria,” a voice - Blake’s - whispered to her left. “What’s the plan?” Aria sneered at the moonless night, knowing it was just another tool she could turn against her foes.

“Ambush” Aria whispered back, loud enough for the rest of her team to hear. “Vybran up top, Predoc are the bait.”

“Wow. Sacrificing your pawns. So original,” another voice griped from further down the line of armed commandos, one of the 'bait' in question.

“Just do it,” Aria fired back. “Save your us-versus-them arguments for off the battlefield.”

“Whatever. Come on, unmods. Let’s go do their dirty work so the gene-ies can hide safe in the trees like the cowards they are.” Half a dozen commandos to Aria’s left trudged ahead into the forest, while the other half of her team quietly ascended into the canopy above.

The peaceful smell of pine and earth as the sun drooped in the sky was the antithesis of the human violence playing out on both sides of Eden’s formidable outer wall. Distant explosions and live gunfire still echoed from over the wall, but Aria was listening for the telltale popping of air rifles as she perched on a branch overlooking her ground team maneuvering through the forest underbrush.

“Isn’t this a little obvious?” Blake whispered to Aria from his perch several trees over.

“That’s why it’s going to work. Justine’s ego will be expecting some grand tactics to thwart her superior genius.”

Blake made sure his sigh was loud enough for Aria to hear.

“Speak of the devil,” Aria purred as she caught sight of Justine’s team. Except they weren’t where they were supposed to be. Her team was coming in behind Aria's ground team’s blind spot. The two teams were on a collision course and Aria realized her team hadn’t spotted the trouble just as Blake spoke again.

“Are you going to do something about that?”

“Hey, Justine! You forgot your ammo,” Aria shouted. The distraction landed, and not a moment too soon. 

Justine’s team sent a barrage of bb’s whizzing aimlessly into the forest canopy, while Aria’s ground team regrouped and countered with their own, not-so-aimless volley. Aria cackled as several of Justine’s commandos grunted at the sting of being shot, and hurried away from the battlefield before they could be hit again. At this rate, the ground team was going to clean up before Justine’s team were even in range of Aria’s canopy team.

“Too easy,” Aria said to herself. Then she caught sight of Justine trying to sneak around behind the ground team. “Oh no you don’t.”

Aria leveled her rifle at Justine, and Justine let out a yelp as Aria shot her square in the chest. The rest of Justine’s team were finished off in a matter of moments.

“A present for you princess,” Aria shouted down to Justine, and blew her an air kiss.

“Fuck you, Aria!”

“Enough,” a joyless voice echoed through the forest through unseen loudspeakers. “Return to the armory for debriefing.” 

Aria rolled her eyes and climbed down from her perch, joining the rest of the commandos as they wound their way through the underbrush back into the sterile Eden armory shrouded in the center of the forest.

“Are you trying to piss off every single person around you,” Blake hissed at Aria as they walked.

“Hey, we won didn’t we? What does it matter?”

“Are you two talking about how you sacrificed my people for your own amusement?” Perrin, the leader of Aria’s Predoc crew, had caught up to them.

“Holy shit, it’s just a gam-”

“Maybe to you, Aria, but my people are going to be on the other side of that wall someday soon, and for us this is a matter of life and death.” Perrin paused to let the sound of distant gunfire permeate their conversation. His nostrils flared.
“Wow. If it’s so important to you, maybe I shouldn’t be leading you at all,” Aria said in a mocking tone.

Perrin took a deep breath and the anger melted from his body. “You’re right. You shouldn’t. Either get your head out of your ass, or get out of our way. Next time, you might find yourself at the other end of our rifles.”

It wasn’t a threat. It was just a fact. The coolness of Perrin’s words sent a chill down Aria’s spine.

“Aria!” another voice barked the moment they walked through the large, automatic doorway into the armory. This one belonged to Jesson, the Rotar guard in charge of their war game skirmishes. 

Aria scowled in the direction of the voice instinctively.

“Excellent use of diversionary tactics. You didn’t lose a single commando. You and your team are dismissed.”

The tension between Perrin and Aria kept the praise from landing and the team stowed their weapons in the lockers and filed out of the armory without another word, the Vybran through the door that led further into the Eden compound, and the Predoc back out into the forest towards the outskirts village.

Blake walked with Aria through Eden's sterile hallways. "Do you wanna go play a game or something?"

"No," Aria replied flatly. 

Blake’s expression flashed from hopeful, to crestfallen, to annoyed in a heartbeat. Aria wished he would stop playing at her parents’ machinations, as if their betrothal weren’t a forced arrangement that neither of them wanted.

"Umm, okay then. You know where to find me if you change your mind." 

Blake walked away towards his room, leaving Aria alone to brood, just how she liked it. When she reached the central hub that branched into several living quarter corridors, she found the Rotar station empty. Aria grinned to herself. The station was supposed to be manned at all times. Undoubtedly someone new to the ranks of the Rotar who hadn’t fully learned the ropes yet. She’d be doing whoever was supposed to be on duty a favor if they learned that lesson from her, rather than from her mother.

She plopped down at the computer, which the absent guard had failed to lock. Not that it mattered. Aria could’ve hacked her way in just as easily. She programmed a few lines of code to spruce up the computer’s operating system and hurried away with no one the wiser.

“Aria? What are you doing?”

Or so she thought. She turned to find Ophelia, one of the younger Vybran, studying her skeptically.

“Nothing.”

“It didn’t look like ‘nothing’. It looked like you were messing with the Rotar computer.”

“I was just locking it so no one else would mess with it. Have a good night, Ophelia.” Aria hurried away down the hall before Ophelia could get in another word, and closed the door to her quarters just in time to hear a blaring siren emanating from the Rotar computer, followed by a symphony of airhorns. She grinned at her own ingenuity.