Teens Writing for Teens, the 5th

“Today, we are going to teach you eighteen silent ways to kill a man.”


Of the many things that I could call Selection out on, I could (at the very least) say this one single positive thing: They don’t bullshit about what they’re teaching you. I sat up and paid attention – not that I really had a choice, not in the VR sessions, where your brain wasn’t just required to attend, it was hooked straight in.


Our instructor for this little tween chop seminar was a gray skinned transie that looked like he had come right out of a Shanghai slasher film: Machined lines along his joints and arms made of matte-black carbon composites, molded into the rude shapes of muscle and joints. He summoned a virtual tango and tapped him twice on the shoulder.


The tango – dressed in Loonie yellows and black – half turned to see who was bothering him before our instructor smashed his face in with the mother of all sucker punches. It was fairly silent – nothing more than a soft crunch – and the man fell, his face dutifully simulated with a crumpled nose and scattered teeth.


It seemed silly, but that was the Selection motto: Simplicity breeds success. Why bother with kidney strikes or eye gouging or fancy kung-fu when you have a 1000 PSI harder-than-steel piston for an arm? Course, that was just one of eighteen ‘silent ways’ that our instructor had to show us. By the time he was done, I was feeling a little green around my virtual gills. The Class Two cyberlimb wasn’t just strong and tough, it was also flexible. Joints could bend in ways they never could with a human arm, as demonstrated when the instructor grabbed the tango by the head and spun him three sixty degrees with his articulated wrist.


We got dumped form VR afterward. Total time, subjective, 3 hours. Total time, actual – recorded by clocks in the real world, not by brains hooped up on neurostimulators – was something close to 3 minutes. That’s why they called them ‘tween chop’ seminars, you could hit them up between your meal and your physical training. I slid forward out of the booth, clammy and shivering. An older, leaner, more scarred latino guy gave me the side eye.


“L-L-Look somewhere else, Alvarez,” I muttered, rubbing my shoulders to try and get the post VR-dump shivers out of my system. Being the youngest girl in Selection was its own special kind of hell. “Or I might practice on you.”


Technically impossible, as none of us had been augmented beyond what we had come in with. Alvarez had gotten his left leg ripped off my a land mine during a police action in Brazil or something, so his left leg was all chrome and metal. He, like me, was one of the one in a million combination of decorated combat soldier who also had a delightful immunity to Cybernetic Psychosomatic Rejection Syndrome and it’s many delightful side effects, starting with dissociative personality disorder and going on through intense body dysmorphia, schizophrenia, megalomania, and psychosis.


At least, so far.

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