Let it be first noted that Jack Rawlings was not, is not, and never will be regarded as handsome, beautiful, or even mildly attractive. A former XCOM officer who served with him at Kansai Base, the late Senator Kazutoshi Sakurai once was quoted as saying, "he [Rawlings] could take a dozen heavy plasma bolts and remain standing . . . he could kill his way through four stories of crabs without raising a sweat . . . but he could not pick up a woman to save his life. God, he was ugly." I spent my first two weeks on Mars in and out of surgery, both of the physiological and psychological natures. My foot was an ugly, festering mess when I arrived as only minimal medical attention had been paid to it. If I had been conscious during the three day voyage, I would have been in extreme pain. So the surgeons and the nanotech technicians demolished and regrew that appendage, retracing every vein and tendon and generally making an annoyance of themselves, clicking away on keyboards and psionic interfaces, coming and going at all hours of the long Martian day and occasionally--it was a junior nanotech maintenance engineer, I believe-- scribbling drawings, messages, and the mandatory "smiley face" in the thin layer of condensation that coated my upright nutrient tank, my personal aquarium. If I had been conscious during the procedures, I doubt I would have been amused. The technicians had me rigged with a direct psionic interface, a network of contacts pasted onto my skull, a more refined version than that of those few brave human psis who took on the Cydonia garrison. The entire course of my recovery was thus quite evident to me, though I was not nearly as appreciative of the effort required to resurrect my lamed foot as I should have . . . The reason for that, of course, was that I wasn't conscious. Jack Edward Rawlings was born on January 4, 1980 in a lower-class suburb of Gary, Indiana, United States of America. He was the third of four children--Mary, Jim, and Eric. His parents were Jeff and Summer Rawlings, both employed in the local steel industry. Economic downturns and increased foreign competition in the mid eighties cost his father his job as a plant manager but not before he was ordered to selectively "lay-off" about two-thirds of his employees. The stress and shame of choosing these corporate casualties caused Jeff to take his life in early 1984. My first waking thought was of "Why?" But this was not the "Why did I pointlessly shoot Nat?" but of "Why are these strange memories floating through my head?" They started mildly at first, mixed in with a strong helping of my own childhood. I would dream of some lazy evening long ago, my mother ordering me to my schoolwork. I would, naturally, procrastinate. Later on in the night, she would gripe something about how "Jack Rawlings did his homework" . . . I would immediately reply that no, Rawlings did not graduate from high school (whatever that was--probably American secondary school) and thus it was highly unlikely that Rawlings ever did his homework to completion. And these strangest of thoughts would increase, soon no longer camouflaged as some schoolboy's travails but as a stark, photonegative of my own life projected into the cramped confines of my skull. At an early age, Rawlings was diagnosed as a "slow learner", planting the seeds of an intense distrust in education authorities that sabotaged his academic career. Placed in special education, Rawlings' small physical size and apparent mental retardation made him the butt of his peers' taunts. However, he was not without an implicit sense of pride; this caused an endless string of schoolyard brawls, most ending with a young Rawlings being sent to the principal's office for discipline. It was not until much later that Rawlings learned to control his emotions. It was a movie, a hideous tortured movie, played day-by-day, hour-by- hour, minute-by-minute in my skull. I watched with disinterest as a cast of thousands--all strangers--played out a sure tragedy against the stark backdrop of pre-Inferno America. The hero was me--an ugly little runt with a single mother, damned to the underclass by the remorseless machine-cogs of the economy. It never occurred to me that this could have been corporate propaganda, a foundation of lies upon which to build the great Marsec empire. No, even though I had been told that Jack Rawlings was six feet six inches--old imperial measure--and was Aryan handsome with a chiseled jaw, blond hair and blue eyes, I never doubted a word--a thought. Culled from the archives of a man's life, dust swept off old film reels, the projector broken out of its decaying case, these memories were so distinctly painful--so real--that it never occurred to me that this could be anything but the truth. Following his father's suicide, Jack Rawlings' family moved in with relatives in inner-city Chicago. He continued to attend school; however, the lure of easy money and ever-elusive "respect" on the streets of that once-great American city would prove strong. Summer Rawlings remarried in 1989 to a sergeant on the Chicago force, Carl Clancy. Young Jack, fiercely protective of his mother, did not take to Clancy; he is said to have run away from home after many a vocal argument. Rawlings also ceased attending school; he found the streets much more to his liking. In 1994, Rawlings became a Blood, his chapter a small cell in a nationwide network. Former "brothers" of his state that here his true genius flourished-- killing. Legend attributes a triple homicide of rival narcotics dealers to Rawlings--though official charges were never brought, on account of a lack of evidence. Narrowly missing being charged with accessory to auto theft and also seeking to "get out of town" due to a violent power struggle within the Blood ranks, Rawlings made a critical decision: to join the United States Army. The specifics of his enlistment are extremely murky; without a high school diploma and with strong gang affiliations, Rawlings would not normally have been given a chance. However, his stepfather, then a lieutenant, was extremely pleased at this sudden improvement in his stepson's attitude and may have influenced Rawlings' recruiter--a former comrade-in-arms--into accepting the young man. Repairing my foot, hah. The bastards are at work elsewhere, too, rewiring my nerves and working on my retinas. They won't speak to me--they can't speak to me--of their reasons, but their mere secretive nature tells me volumes. This psionic crown of thorns enables a slight bleed of nearby minds. Background static, but I can excise a glimmer of meaning here and there. Cast off as cognitively challenged by two school systems and over three dozen school psychologists, Rawlings' Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), one of the few remaining physical documents of his early life, tells a distinctly different story. The young man scored a near perfect exam and was thus granted the chance to serve in nearly any branch of the Army. Rawlings chose the infantry. Footsoldiers, that is the first real word I catch, and it is difficult, as my mind must simultaneously follow the film noir history of Rawlings while discretely eavesdropping on the hushed conversations of the guys running the popcorn machine in the lobby. Footsoldiers. The word meshes so seamlessly with the footage of this segment of Rawlings' life that at first I mistake it as just another figment of these force-fed memories. Footsoldiers against the aliens. Vigilantes with guns blasting their way into the reeking holds of alien ships, the righteous avatars of a wrathful Earth-God. Footsoldiers. Except that it was the wrong word, incorrect and absent from Rawlings' vocabulary. He was not Flannery, he did not view the overall struggle of the First Alien War as a purge of evil from mankind; he was not even Patterson, who, while utterly atheistic, utilized religious terminology with all its heavy connotations. Rawlings, from Rawlings' viewpoint, was just a man with a gun who did his job with enough competence to survive the war. He did not see himself as any lesser than any other man in the chain of command; everyone was his equal and he was theirs. "Footsoldiers" implied officers, implied a pyramidal military hierarchy. But in XCOM even the officers carried weapons. Though his progression through the ranks of what could only later be assumed was the Rangers and then the vaunted Delta Force remained classified to the day that T' Eleth's nuclear bombardment forever erased the United States Army mainframes in Cheyenne Mountain, the few surviving documentations of his life, including the infamous Diary of an XCOM Commander's Mistress (which, though liberally sprinkled with shameless pornography, is the most reliable source document on the background operations of that organization, including its candidate selection and training mechanisms) point to a distinguished, if not particularly eventful, career in the Special Forces branch of the US military. However, it was from his work in XCOM that Jack Rawlings is best known. Kamikaze, the massive combined memoirs of Rawlings and the late Senator Kazutoshi Sakurai, is the definitive work on Kansai Base, the ill-fated Japanese branch of the eXtraterrestrial COMbat unit of the United Nations--no relation to the United States. Though regarded as everything from a terroristic manifesto to a cartoonish, over-simplified account of the First Alien War in Asia, Kamikaze is a must read for anyone remotely interested in the world today. Through author Jeff Patterson's transcription of Rawlings' very own narration, it becomes evident that Rawlings, a recluse, was essentially changed by the war. "After Sergeant Davis died on that . . . mission, it was all downhill from there. I learned to only trust myself to finish any mission. I couldn't work with the rest of the men. I was going to wash out, and everybody knew it. Then the boss man put me back together." I now know what this sick melodrama is. No mere documentary brewed up by Lifetree history majors, this is, to the best of my reasoning, a narration by Jack Rawlings himself. Recorded prior to his incineration over T' Eleth or reconstructed from his diaries, psi scans, and a superintelligent AI, I cannot tell, but this is no mere objective account of his life. I am convinced that this is how Jack Rawlings would wish his life to be "objectively" relayed, his most painful memories mixed with a stoic, remote pride in his overall fairly honest adult life . . . This realization erodes my certainty as to whether Mister Rawlings burned up over the Caribbean. The name Commander Ralph Schancer is synonymous with the spectre of global nuclear holocaust; in fact, the imagery was so potent that when the Inferno decimated the planet's population, many survivors claimed that the Commander appeared in a television broadcast moments before T' Eleth's missiles vaporized Japan and Europe. Legend then says that he boasted of a new age upon mankind before revealing his true identity as an alien "grey". However, these claims are tenuous at best, most likely derived from the massive destruction wrought upon a remote corner of Southern China by XCOM forces demolishing a large alien base. Commander Schancer also cut ties with the United Nations, the original backer of the XCOM organization; rumors of a madman armed with an immense nuclear arsenal probably resulted from this. There is Jack Rawlings and then there is Ralph Schancer. Two sides of the same coin, that nasty shard of cydonium with an angel's wings and halo versus a devil's horns and pitchfork. If Rawlings was the mythical white angel of death, then Schancer was the very real dark angel of lifelust. Rawlings slew the aliens, laying down his body to pound them back into the sea; Schancer cowardly escaped death in the first war, his passage ensured by blackmail to the cities of the world, and returned with the Second Alien War, only to steal away again in a ship full of beautiful women and laughing his twisted visage off as Tokyo, Hamburg, Kyoto, and Berlin all sublimed into radioactive vapor. And this is the man that Rawlings worshiped? "To Rawlings, Commander Schancer was God," stated the late Senator Kazutoshi Sakurai. "Rawlings was a samurai in the most romantic of senses; he would sooner fall on his own sword than disappoint the Commander." By all accounts, Jack Rawlings was resurrected from the dead by Schancer. Suffering from a severe case of combat-induced depression, Rawlings spent two weeks in the psych ward of XCOM's Bluegrass Base. Schancer mistakenly assigned him to the routine cleanup of a grey scoutship presumed destroyed over the Appalachian Mountains; the XCOM recovery team was lightly armed and consisted of soldiers of the "secondary" grade--as in, rookies and those still in recovery from wounds. They were utterly unprepared for the full compliment of alien "snakes" that had managed to land in one piece. The sudden alien ambush worked miracles on the withdrawn Rawlings, snapping him out of the deep, introverted melancholy he had fallen into. As the aliens opened up with their plasmas, squadmates reportedly noticed a decisive change in Rawlings' demeanor. Mumbling quietly, doing only what he was ordered moments before, the squaddie reportedly "awoke with a reddish glint in his eyes" and grabbed the team's Captain's weapon. However, there was a method to his madness. Rawlings, armed with a standard issue M-249 light machine gun, drew the snakes away from the landing zone so his team could return to their ship and dust off. "I knew I was dead as soon as I ran out of ammunition, but I couldn't stop firing until I heard the 'Ranger's jumpjets kick in," he is quoted as saying in Kamikaze, Patterson's book on Kansai Base. Through most of one hour, Rawlings circled the alien vessel, picking off three snakes and keeping the aliens from repairing their ship. "I was down to firing single shots with that thing [the M-249]. They didn't build the SAW for sniper action--that's a fire support weapon from the stock up--but the funny thing is . . . I tagged the last two aliens that way." The Sixth Bluegrass finally arrived and finished off the scout and the remaining snakes, but Colonel Schancer, leader of that assault team, gave full credit for the victory to Rawlings. The result was a fanatically loyal bodyguard, who, on numerous occasions, selflessly risked his life for the Commander's. "It was almost annoying," related Captain Carrie Unger from her Diaries, "how Jack would routinely save Ralph's life in an operation. I began to suspect that they staged them just to give me heart attacks . . ." So you are not dead after all. No longer is this just the detached rehashing of a story many times told . . . no, this is something new. This is told from the mouth of Jack Rawlings, spoken as clearly as if he is sitting next to me in this darkened theater, narrating and controlling the pace of the film. "Here is Bluegrass Base, before we left. Here is Kansai base, before we left that, too. I called these places home. Now, they're just holes in the ground, one so laced with radiation that only the grass grows there now." Jack Rawlings, you are not dead. You speak to me this story of your life. "I kicked him in the back and fell on top of him here," he is saying, nudging a spot on the pavement. "I saved his ass right here." There are people around us, walking and bicycling and driving old internal combustion engine automobiles. Idle chat in a not-so-foreign tongue, multiplied by the crush and heat of the city. The people wear a rich yellow skin; I am just a pale shadow of them, three pints Caucasian blood for every one Japanese. "The helicopter's gunner was hit first; all that nonsense about 'grey snipers' is just that--bullshit. They could see a little better than us at night and they did have better all-around eyesight, but they still couldn't aim plasmas any better than the crew in Delta Force." Rawlings smiles. I cannot see his face; he is but a presence, an emotion leeched into the back of my mind. His body is always barely out sight--only from the very corner of my eye can I glimpse him. What I do see is no Aryan giant . . . "They concentrated on what they could hit; that was the chopper. The pilot had the good graces to lift off and crash a hundred meters to our rear; I got clipped by some of the debris--it put a nasty rip in my right side, but it didn't bother me much." I look up at the four buildings at each corner of this anonymous intersection. Walls of glass, layered over with kanji exhorting customers to enter and purchase ridiculously low-priced high-quality consumer electronics . . . "Those two--the greys were up on the second story in those two. Just standing there and blasting the chopper. I pulled my grenade gun and killed the two on the right, easy as you please. A kid could've hit them, they were in a small room with a nice, big, busted window to put the grenade in." A medium-sized truck blares its horn and roars by us, missing my nose by two centimeters. "The other grey saw me right about then. I had a hell of a time reloading; he just emptied his charge into the ground around my feet. Nearly hit Schancer, so I went down on my belly to make sure I'd take the shot before him." Rawlings chuckles. "Oh, you're probably wondering what the hell he was doing, eh? Didn't move a damn muscle; I suppose he went for his sidearm, but he was so slow of a draw I must've taken that third grey before he cleared his belt. Anyhow, he stayed put, which was good, considering that that grey could hit anything but that patch of asphalt we were camped out on. Worst shot I'd ever seen." The soldier looks up into the midday sun over that Japanese city, his face grim. White light glares off the building where the grey stood, pelting him with fire. "He gave me plenty of time to aim." Fast forward a year. August 14, 2007. The day Race of Man assassinated the Secretary of the Treasury and two Supreme Court Justices. The Chancellor of Germany coughs up his spleen at a charity luncheon. Hundreds of United Kingdom military officers are found dead, strangled or knifed to death. Aum Supreme Truth gasses Yokohama. But we're not on Earth, watching the quickening slide towards anarchy that is only checked years later by the iron fist of a graying Japanese Prime Minister. We're here, on Mars. The stink of ozone. Smeared organic liquids, still steaming where a fiery bolt of plasma clawed its way through the massive biomechanical god/computer that orchestrated the First Alien War. An amphitheater of sorts surrounds the murdered Elohim child, hundreds of seats for willing servants. But they go empty today, for today is August 14, 2007. Rumpled heaps of silken robes where they were felled, four of the fiendish monsters lay, corpseless, an eternal honor guard for the dearly departed alien brain. Blasted flecks of armor littered the floor, small hard perfect spheres of cydonium, roasted to melting and then cooled again, the whole process over in fractions of a second, the low Martian gravity suspending them a moment too long . . . A battle has been fought here. There is the hero, his face gaunt and haunted, his blond hair going white with pain. On his chest rests a scraped and chipped heavy plasma, its bore immense, the tiny chrome letters on its side: F-A-I-T. Fait. Fate. I look over at Rawlings; he, like me, wears a suit of Marsec Flight Armor. "Using retrieved memories from my own mind, I have worked and reworked this scenario over and over again. From the placement of the four surviving guards to my deployment out of the lift, every shred of evidence points to only one outcome. I should not have taken five plasma shots and remained standing. Schancer should not have been hit. The laws of physics decreed only one outcome." "I should have died here." His face is undiscernable behind his heavy thermoplastic faceplate. "It was always this way. I should have died, I should not have survived. I was wounded more than any other surviving XCOM personnel. I have taken more psionic strikes to my mind than any other sane man. The boss man, he, he should have gone home in one piece." So is this where your faith died, Jack Rawlings? Where you should have died whole, you survived a broken man? "Why?" It is the first time I have spoken in all our conversations. Perhaps it is scripted; my voice sounds strange to my ears, false and too low in timbre. But even if I, myself, do not vocalize the question, I still wonder it in my mind. Why did you keep on going, Jack Rawlings? Why bother? Why not pull the curtains on the bitter tragedy of your life? Did you? Did you rocket down into the Caribbean because you didn't have any other reason to live? "The physical fact remains, however, that this was NOT the end of my life. I kept on going because of inertia; because to stop it all would require too much effort." "Why?" I ask again, this time in my real voice. Rawlings raises a finger. "I returned home, destined to spend the twilight of my life in and out of VA hospitals. I was already old, ancient beyond my time. We all were. But I wouldn't be granted a battlefield burial; no, it would be me, the unjustly lucky, saluting the flag and crying over my Sapporo every Memorial Day. My mind and my body were too scarred, to lamed to continue for long." Rawlings sucks in a breath from his respirator, the gory Martian tomb fading into darkness. "But then I learned of Jacob." 6/2/98
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