DT 2021: Academy Days of Change

Merlin-D032 tossed his oil-stained cleaning rag into a laundry sack on the floor. One of many black-spotted rags in the open bag, each marking a weapon cared for. Military firearms and equipment lay out across the tiled floor around the dark-haired Spartan and atop the large coffee table in front of him.
“The digital round counter is done. Give me the next page, Althea.” Merlin announced to his Smart AI assistant.
“That’s the last page in the maintenance guide, Merlin. All that’s left is putting it back together.” Althea responded, projecting her holographic form from a nearby datapad. The AI floated above the tablet, a little blue ghost girl in a baggy cloak the size of a water canteen.
“Maybe a break then,” Merlin mumbled rubbing onset tiredness from his eyes with little success.
“That wouldn’t hurt,” Althea agreed, shifting around some holographic readouts once more for effect and out of boredom. “You going to clean up first?”
Merlin glanced back to his weapon collection. Most of the guns were intact, some pieced back together and cleaner than others. A VK78 Commando in Misriah Armory livery rested atop a light-up mat on the table in little precise pieces. Every loose screw stood out against the harsh backlight, impossible to lose.
Despite a bright day outside, the nearby curtains remain closed. Sunlight glowed in only through tight cracks. The overhead lamps were dim for a sense of privacy. More dusty tables, chairs, and many MRE crates rested in the farthest corner of the room.
“Not really. I might just take a nap right here.” Merlin mumbled, wrinkling his nose at dust powder danced to his slow breathing.
“How about I hop around the Academy intranet? Dig up any new intel reports from the usual suspects?”
“Keep it to this physical wing. We don’t need any SPDRs catching a rogue intelligence loose on the network.”
“I’m not a rogue AI.”
“I doubt anyone but us think that way, ALT.”
“Andra and Callum would understand,” Althea pointed out.
Merlin sighed at the tired remark, “That’s been said before.”
“I know. But I’ve been in here too long.”
“Probably explains why neither of us have gotten in trouble yet.”
“Existence is apparently a crime,” Althea deadpanned as she assumed a forwarding posture with hands to her hips.
“It has been for the last two years.”
Althea sighed in defeat. Same discussion, same conclusion. Many weeks in repetition. Seclusion was liberating and even more constrictive.
“I’ll stick to the Delta Company wing like always. But the very next time Callum steps into this building, I’m demanding his credential key for intelligence reports. Witnesses be damned.”
“Your funeral and mine.”
Althea shrugged and winked out of existence to find something better to do.
Merlin laid back despite the rigid chair and closed his eyes. Althea was both right and wrong, as was he. Moments like these were cyclical and banter stuck on repeat. The Spartan abandoned any consideration to reprimand his digital companion because he only knew an inkling of her frustration. He knew enough to understand. She lacked the immortal gifts offered to Smart AI who sided with the Created.
She chose Merlin the moment loyalties mattered most. But regular Smart AI lived on an expiration date. She was already nearing halfway through her lifespan. Sculking around a cramped, redundant network node for months could be similar to living in a prison cell for years. Althea felt trapped and she didn’t need to say it anymore than the couple times she told Merlin. He watched his own back around other Spartans and the Johnson military school. Extended time away from the UNSC made the military apparatus feel suffocating. But where Merlin felt stuck, Althea was wasting her life away.
Merlin’s thoughts slowed to a crawl as he defocused on his daily complexities and his augmented senses zoned in. The distant sound of the pine forest outside. A low hum of nearby electronics. The slight smell of mildew and fresh dirt from the air duct system.
Alone.
Few people visited this storage office. Fewer visitors stayed.
The room next door was preferrable but only as makeshift living quarters for the Spartan supersoldiers that the UNSC remnant was unsure what to do with. But everyone needed their alone space from time to time. The other Delta Company survivors preferred the training grounds to work off their frustrations. Merlin preferred his exact spot in one very uncomfortable foldout chair.
Merlin used to call a grove of trees outside Camp Ambrose where he buried his mother’s collegiate ring a retreat. An abandoned railyard in New Phoenix replaced it. The lonely bridge of a stolen Baal PMC gunship after that. Now this unused store house on the premises of the Avery J. Johnson Military Academy.
Compared to some other Spartans, Merlin didn’t spend enough time in the training sims. These days he invested more time in the Johnson machine shop paving over poor skills he once took for granted. He now lacked a team to fall back on. His trust for others diminished on the frontier. But his trust in himself even more so. At least he controlled the latter case.
Merlin mumbled to himself the names of his missing team. “Zach. Shizuko. Danny. Roxanne… Even you, Joshua. I could really use you guys right about now.”
Their team weapons specialist, somewhere out there either dead or still playing spy for the Office of Naval Intelligence. The frosty old friend, now a Headhunter. Probably dead. Their team leader and the combat medic – joined up with Jefferson Korn’s rebel plot. Most likely dead. His dead pseudo-mentor and senior Headhunter. Joshua was an asshole, but Merlin got the feeling the Gamma Company graduate meant well even through all the bullshit. All Merlin had left of them was memories.
He wanted to improve. He had to. And if nobody needed him around, he would make that time to improve himself. It was weird after returning to the military lifestyle after almost a year in limbo.
Callum-B042’s ad hoc officer field promotion to Lieutenant for Merlin was confusion in an exploded can. Even more when the promotion went unchallenged by the likes of Spartan Commander Agryna and the Johnson Military Academy senior staff.
Merlin picked up the datapad Althea vacated in her boredom. The AI closed the maintenance documents already, but she kindly left her Spartan minder access to her secret monitoring suite. Backdoored cameras and microphones in the Academy’s surveillance suite she occasionally monitored for her own safety now that Smart AI were a security taboo.
Despite Cortana’s Slipstream propaganda reports falling silent, the Created were still out there. Smart AI were very illegal for UNSC forces. Althea needed to be careful, and Merlin as well.
Camera 11, the hallway monitor outside the storage office warbled off a proximity warning. Someone approached. Merlin brought up the camera view and exhaled a simple breath upon seeing a familiar female form. Merlin didn’t bother forcing the door delay Althea included in her security tools.
The door access slid aside and Andra-D054 stepped into Merlin’s retreat with a quick “hey” and a tired wave.
“Hey,” Merlin greeted back, leaning up to see his best friend. “Training go well?”
“Shima and I fought over the sniper rifle pick up again.”
“Sounds like nothing new then.”
Andra nodded, her brown hair bobbing further free from her messy towel wrap. She carelessly dropped her drying Spartan body glove on Merlin’s desk as she approached carefully between messy firearms and equipment. “Pretty much. There was some new stuff but nothing special.”
“Althea mentioned she’s bored again.”
Andra shrugged her shoulders, stopping by Merlin to rest a hand on his shoulder. A small, blue thumbs up icon popped up from Merlin’s datapad – a confirmation from Althea to Merlin’s words.
“Sorry to hear that, ALT.” Andra acknowledged.
The AI offered another, silent thumbs up icon.
“Merlin,” Andra turned back to her fellow Spartan. “You shouldn’t coop yourself up in here all day. The machine shop doesn’t count either. Callum asked me to send you to the Movement Yard again before sundown. Consider it a gentle order from me, or a direct one from him.”
“Wasn’t the point of making us naval officers was to not get pushed around by Spartan-IVs?”
“Yes. But that’s no reason to spend so much time out of armor. You need to keep practicing. Training. Spartans never stop—”
“Its who we are. That’s the gist of it. I know.” Merlin interrupted Andra, shrugging aside her hand which she quickly put back anyway. “But what are we training for? We have no missions. No orders. We’re playing war games once again against Spartan-IVs with no end in sight. Wasn’t this the whole thing Joshua despised about Spartan Operations?”
Andra nodded in understanding despite a grimace crossing her lips at the utterance of her late mentor’s name. “Joshua hated Spartan-IVs for a lot of reasons. But he was never the role model we needed him to be. He was hardly perfect. Joshua would agree with me, Callum too, that we need to train no matter what because a problem could arrive at any time, and we need to be ready. Like the American minutemen Major Duceppe used to tell us about. Or one of those mottos from Seongnam: ‘ready to fight tonight?’”
“I’ll give you props as a motivational speaker,” Merlin sighed but refused to budge in his chair.
“Oh? Sure, what’s my rating?” Andra asked in curiosity.
“Eight out of ten. You’re improving. A lot of anecdotal remarks. I’m sure Josh would see you reading so much history and literature now as a vast improvement.”
Andra nodded with a soft smile. “I could see that. But what would it take to get a perfect ten out of ten?”
“Why the ask?”
“A perfect ten would get you out of your lazy chair, me-thinks.” Andra walked around to face Merlin with a sheepish smirk. The boy scooted his chair back to compensate for the cramped space, accidently hitting a cleaned CQS48 combat shotgun.
“Hey, watch my weapons,” Merlin mumbled as Andra leaned into him, shifting over to sit on his knee. “I’m not explaining to the quartermaster how I broke a Bulldog while out of armor.”
Merlin’s chair groaned as Andra tried adding her weight, giving her pause and a slight grimace.
“We’ve gotten heavier,” Andra muttered.
“And taller.” Merlin added.
Andra sighed, rising off of Merlin’s knee leaving the boy immediately missing her familiar proximity. “We’re not children anymore. The world expects us to be adults and act like them too.”
“I miss the simple days too.”
Merlin rose from his foldout chair and pushed it aside, so the two Spartans had more room to interact.
“But were they simple days, Merlin?” Andra asked doubtful.
“We still had a full team then. A family of sorts.”
“And the standard-op procedure was almost always black-and-white. Maybe with the UNSC it can be again. But I think the morality is no longer clear. I don’t really know what happened to us… Stray and the Created changed things. Nothing feels the same anymore. I don’t feel like I lost something or that something broke. It just feels…”
“Like we’re looking at the world through different eyes. The world is still the same, we’re just different.” Merlin finished Andra’s introspection at a whisper.
Andra nodded in confirmation. “Something like that, yeah.”
“I miss the rest of the team. I don’t feel like we have a purpose being here at the Academy. I feel aimless, I think. At least I can make up for my screw ups in the machine shop, but the war games don’t offer me anything other than getting beat by greenhorn Spartan-IVs.”
“Well. You could easily fix that by training more,” Andra pointed out. “And I can help if you need motivation. Or a partner.”
Merlin grabbed an ODST helmet from beneath the table, its internal visor glowing with data activity. “I appreciate the sentiment but more importantly, speaking of fixing things. Your sniper rifle is over by the marker board over there and I’ve updated the firmware in your HUD/S and VISR. Althea has been streamlining my stuff, or outright scrapping it but I’m getting familiar to the point I think I could hack enemy networks in the field if necessary. And I’m filling in for our missing team billets now that its just the two of us. I’m getting time behind the wheel of our local motor pool now. And I’m taking over for Zach’s weapon maintenance and familiarization.”
Andra took the ODST helmet from Merlin and smiled at its familiar, buffed surface. “Thanks. But allow me to make another suggestion.”
The female Spartan reached down for the Bulldog shotgun and pressed it into Merlin’s chest. “Time to pick up one more skill as a scout. If I’m our long arm, you’ll have to be the bruiser. And that means…”
“Fine. Fine. More training. I got it.” Merlin relented with the shotgun in hand, looking away from Andra in annoyance.
“Good. And don’t run away from me just yet. You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?” Merlin asked in confusion.
“Perfect ten, Showerhead…” Andra whispered, pulling Merlin close by his shotgun-occupied arms. She bent her head slightly, so her nose didn’t crash with Merlin’s and planted a long but soft kiss to his lips. He accepted, pressing his lips to hers in a meaningfully light expression.
They broke apart abruptly, the kiss only lasting a couple seconds.
“Did that help?” Andra asked shyly.
“I’ll admit I’m more confused than inspired.”
“Party pooper.”
“It was still nice. Don’t get me wrong. But I would’ve gone down to the Movement Yard regardless. I’ll even take up shot gunning if you need me to. I just didn’t really expect that from you just now.”
“I guess we’re still kids in that respect,” Andra mumbled, disappointment and a little hurt in her voice.
“Sorry, Andra. That’s my fault.” Merlin admitted.
Andra was quick to placate him. “Don’t sweat it. We’ve always been awkward. About what we are…”
“One of these days we’ll fix that.” Merlin tried with some makeshift confidence.
“When do you think?” Andra asked with a little doubt and even more hope.
“Whenever we’re ready. We don’t have to rush anything. I’m just caught up in a moment, I guess. Always wanting to go fast, or sometimes wanting to go slow. Never moving at the speed, I want to. Always feeling like there’s never enough time for anything.”
Andra gave a soft, sad smile. “We’ll never be ready for anything, but we figure it out anyway. I guess that’s as fair a conclusion as any other. If I’m the motivational speaker then I guess you’re our introspective speaker?”
Merlin nodded in acceptance.
“What’s your enlightened thinking say for us today, oh great Lieutenant Merlin Delta-Thirty-Two, sir?” Andra asked with a low curtesy for good-natured, sarcastic effect.
“You and I clean up all this gun crap. We’ll share a meal from one of these meal crates. You make sure I treated your sniper rifle right and then you go to bed early for your next shift. I’ll hit the requisition floor and go train with Callum per your orders.”
“Technically Callum’s orders, but I appreciate you focusing on me. And I will be sure to judge my sniper rifle with the finest of examinations. Be prepared to do push ups.”
“Sure. Whatever makes you happier.” Merlin chuckled.
Andra grinned a little at their cheesy banter. “One last suggestion.”
“What’s that?”
“Knock out a couple birds with a single move. Althea needs to stretch a little bit. Take her with you for training, go run some war games. Enjoy yourselves tonight.”
Said Smart AI sprung forth from the nearby datapad. “I like the way she thinks.”
“Of course, you like the way I think, you’re a copy of me.” Andra grumbled, whirling on the simulacra intelligence. Their rivalry continued to know no bounds and some things just remained the same.
Merlin smiled at the argumentative duo, silently accepting Andra’s advice. He was changing, improving. Andra, Althea, and Callum too. All of them. Not everything would move at the same pace, and it wouldn’t all be good or productive days, but they would make it work.
Despite Merlin not voicing it, he understood Avery J. Johnson Military Academy offered him something for him and his friends. For the first time in a long time, they had time to figure things out. Whatever those coming days might lead to.
Category:The Weekly Winners