The Space Queen

~ 8 ~

"You are the planet's best and brightest. You will be challenged in ways that are unique, even more grueling than that regular recruits go through" says the man. "That means you will be living under strict conditions. We will be undergoing advanced training through different temperatures, emergency situations, lack of sleep, etc. When you all take your first journeys across the cosmos, soldiers will be onboard each ship that will be answering to your calls. You must learn to protect your identity, as keeping your identity private to yourself will keep you safe on board the ship. You will resort to one person, and that is your captain. You will tell your Captain what your soldiers need, and will be responsible for keeping peace among them. Until then, we will learn how to be like common soldiers."

We meet each other - there's Ashley whom has a similar background to me except, she's been purposefully trying to hide her intelligence. One day, her boyfriend got mad at her, discovered her secret notebooks of spaceship design and her textbooks, and complains about being lied to through his social media / and no longer feeling like a man. He now claims that Ashley was a bitch all along, and that she was using him for his money. She is tanned-skinned with long, brown curly hair. She looks back on her time with her boyfriend, and feels as if she had wasted her time in the relationship. Now she doesn't hold herself back from speaking her mind and showing off her talents.

Then there's Eric. He has been doing exit room games and puzzles his whole life. In his younger years, he spent his time working on Rubik cubes and riddles. He wears glasses and is very short, but his lack of immense physical attractiveness doesn't seem to bother him. He's not very social, and is more task-oriented. Too bad his family saw no other purpose than selling him out to the Cloud Fleet.  Nevertheless, Eric has the mind for a leader, and I bet he could get out of any difficult situation.

Then there is Spencer. He is tall, bronzed, has blonde hair, and piercing blue eyes. He has not one, not two, but three degrees in completely unrelated subjects - Astronomy, Management, and Computing. He's spent three years talking about changing the world, and he's used those "inspiring" speeches to sleep with as many women as possible. It's safe to say his parents threw the towel in of paying for him when he decided to go to graduate school, and that is how he ended up here. A lot of times, he will go off talking about things that he's studied in school, and will go into long diatribes about the importance of space exploration, how to affect leadership in various organizations, and why he believes getting artificial intelligence going will help us to make progress in society.

One of our first exercises is to stare at each other without blinking and showing emotion, in order to invoke an emotional response from someone else. This process is much harder than it sounds - it causes one of us to burst out laughing.

The next one is to climb a rock wall in a quick amount of time. There is not enough places to put our hands over that we can all go at once, so one of us has to find ways to lift the other up the wall. Some of us have our heads stepped on, and Spencer goes flying off the wall to the floor because Ashley is done with him. After the exercise, Ashley refuses to look at him, and Spencer instead moves over to me - trying to gauge my interest with him so that he can figure out how much he can trust me.

We are moved onto safety demonstration. We are told the dangers of being careless with the locks of the doors as we move from one compartment to another. We are shown history of Cloud Fleets that have come before us - technical failures due to not checking the wires, pirates on board that disguise themselves as soldiers in order to receive valuable information, how not checking the quality of oxygen can start a fire, and so on. There's already too much information in my head, and I wish that I had a pen and paper to write stuff down with; but I suspect they don't want us to have them because they are going to be testing us on our capability of memory. 

Then, we are let loose into the barracks. We are told to act like a simple soldier, believing that by doing this - we will not be noticed. So far, we are right. It is as if we have been a part of the Cloud Fleet all along, and it really makes me wonder if the soldiers have chips in their brains to keep them from "over-interacting" with other soldiers. The alarm sounds within the ship, blaring and loud, causing me to put my hands over my ears. I realize what I'm doing, grit my teeth, and decide better against it. mAlready, the soldiers around us have been trained even more - forming a single line, repeating commands, and marching to their designated spaces. Apparently, this is a test to get us to lie more. My heart beats wildly in my chest of the fear of doing something wrong. The beeps blare one more time, and the shutters close on the windows.

"Remember this is only a test" says the A.I. on the ship. The soldiers move fast around me to move into their formations. I get in behind them. They start marching, and I imitate the marching behind them. I need to convince my supervisors that I can pretend to be a common soldier. Who knows what is going to happen if they realize that I can't lie well. Perhaps my body will mysteriously disappear in the canyons, and no one will mention me again.