Memoirs of a supersoldier

Memoirs of a supersoldier

The main problem that we faced when we were offered our own supersoldier program by those marvellous aliens, the Krestan, was that our poor feeble human brains could not cope with the power that would be flooded into them.  It would seem ridiculous that an alien race would chose to grant us this demigod-like range of abilities but they were fighting a broader war across the galaxy against the Fleck.  They could not afford to leave us as neutral, since the Fleck would never have honoured the spirit of this and would have plundered the resources of the Earth.  The Krestan could not afford the troops to garrison us and the other similar planets, either.  This meant that we, in our relatively weak state, would need augmented to be able to defend ourselves.  They were to make some of our men into supersoldiers.

As you can imagine, the nations of the Earth were simultaneously delighted and fearful at the prospect of this shift of local power.  The Krestan had made contact directly with the United Nations assembly so a number of the smaller member states hoped this meant they would “get” one of the superheroes, as they began to be known.  When the impact of the First Proclamation began to settle down, though, it became rather more urgent for each of the nations that their traditional enemies did not receive such abilities than getting them for themselves.  There were two weeks between the initial manifestation of the Krestan Emissary and his second.  There was no suggestion of doubt over the incident; each delegate present at the UN that day had received clear images directly into his brain to illustrate the menace looming from the Fleck.

Speculation on the future dominated the media for those two weeks.  Church attendances rocketed, which to a casual observer, if such a being could exist, would have seemed strange but religion always does well in times of uncertainty and the appearance of aliens may have been unsettling but every last denomination leapt to its own explanation of God’s Will At Work.  Nobody wanted to condemn the Krestan Proclamation for fear of the very concrete threat of the Fleck, corroborated as it was by every nation.  There was an almost unknown lack of cynicism, likewise.

So, the Second Proclamation came and, this time, it was broadcast to all people of the Earth; again, it went into minds directly and without barriers such as language.  They showed some more images of what was happening in deep space to other planets and peoples.  It would take a matter of a few months before the Fleck sphere of influence would reach the Earth and the Krestan would begin selection immediately of the suitable Wardens who would protect their own planet.  Duty, it was imparted, was the main requirement, but this was not to mean that military people would be either first or last to be considered; the duty was to life itself and this calling was one to be found in all walks of life.  Myself, I was a warehouse worker at the time, yet was judged to have exactly the correct mental framework to ensure that I would protect my planet without any bias towards any world power, so I could not be corrupted.

As it turned out, the cross-section of the world’s people may not have been exactly according to a census breakdown but it was random enough that any apparent trends were discountable.  There was no ceremony to it, really:  at the end of the fifteen minute Second Proclamation, the chosen (32 of us) were empowered.  We felt…. well, a luminescence is the best term any of us have ever come up with for it; personally, I would have gone with a warm scrunching inside but luminescence fits.  The voice in our minds went on to tell us that each of us had been granted a range of powers as guardians of our world; we were to answer to no earthly or otherworldly authority except our own consciences, which was how we had been selected.

So, as I said, how would we cope with the vast power, this luminescence?  In the Krestan, the powers would be more flexible expressions of their will but for humans they had to settle on a framework we could use to focus. What they came up with was chess.  I did know how to play the game but barely; they only wished us to know the way each piece expressed itself and the individual powers were an extension of this.  We would think of a piece and that would trigger the mode within us for the energy to flood through.  I know it sounds crazy but its like symbolism to express greater concepts.  Think of what any word means to you, like media or religion; in this way the name of that piece allowed us to drag elements together inside us.  It was much easier to use something with an overall framework that bound the powers together.  Chess did use each of these totally different pieces within one matrix.

It is amazing how quickly the United Nations mobilized resources to set up an international centre for us to live and train; complete transparency was essential so no country could claim control of us or even appear to do so.  Our base was settled in Switzerland, partly since the place was so traditionally neutral as to be beyond reproach and also since it was financially stable enough to be beyond pressure of the economic Superpowers of the world.  Ha!  There is a term that became more weighed since we gained our own super powers.  Our every need was catered for at the Krestan Institute; we were free to leave, of course, since no power on Earth could have stopped us – more than that, though, each of us was humbled by the sense of responsibility entrusted and happy to be closeted away and not spend our lives being worshipped or feared by the masses of ordinary people.

So, the powers.  I know that these are well documented by now but I should discuss them, since a lot of myth springs up whenever we are mentioned.  If I centre my mind on a mental image of a pawn then the power washes around me and cloaks me not only from vision on all wavelengths of light but from radar and other detection methods.  We call this invisibility meekness, in the group; it fits the pawn well since they are beneath the gaze of the other pieces but it is largely responsible for the fear that some people have for us, since we could be anywhere, unseen.  I should add that we still know where each other is, since we are all linked empathically.  Like a pawn chain, I am told.  We are not properly telepathic but if we concentrate on the bishop in our head then we activate higher brain functions that let us call to each other and calculate rapidly.  Why the bishop?  Well, it opens up lateral thinking and this slant of mind is integral, since solutions to problems are sometimes at a tangent.  In this mode, the power is activating all our neural pathways.

Another mental power is that of the king.  This one did terrify people a little, till we demonstrated it publicly and it was clear how vulnerable it left us while using it and how location-specific it was.  While touching someone, we could go into a trance and take over their mind.  It would let us probe their thoughts and control their actions.  We made it clear that this would not be a covert ability but would let us stop any entity from committing a crime.  In this case, the pulse of directives would stream from our fingertips into the subject; the king representing control and limited range.  His partner on the board, the queen, was much more direct:  concentrating on her icon let us emit a blast of raw energy that could smash a tank apart.  This could be damped down or channelled for less output; this was one of the main things we trained for at the institute – not using a hammer where a feather was needed.

What is fascinating for me is that we would feel the same energy through our body no matter which ability we were activating.  The rook let this flow around us up to a distance of three meters, letting us shield a group of people.  Activated for our own personal protection, it could resist anything we had tested it with but to cover a larger area it got slightly weaker but could still withstand an explosive device.  The last piece, the knight, gave us the ability to think of a location then leap or sidestep to it.  We would draw the power around us then through into another dimension, taking us with it, then on to the target place.  The impression we got in that brief, sightless æther we travelled through was that this was where the Krestan-inspired power was stored when it was not working its magic on us.

So at the institute we spent our time training in switching from mode to mode, which is not easy.  We could only ever have one ability active at a time and changing that focus inside could leave us vulnerable for a second or two.  In theory we could leap to one area as knight, blast someone using the queen power then throw up a defensive rook shield but in practice we would have been staggering after the knight’s displacement and trying to orient ourselves for the next power.  Where possible, the trainers working with us tried to teach us basic hand-to-hand combat skills and dodges then let us move on to incorporating our mental switches into those.

We became an on-call service for fighting terrorism, as much to hone our skills as anything else while being an active deterrent for the Fleck who, to this day, have never appeared on our planet.  I have no doubt of their existence but imagine that if the Krestan merely made it known that a planet like Earth had guardians like us, then nobody would approach it with hostile intentions.  I won’t go into too much detail about my experiences using abilities to keep the world a safer place but I know that I have made a difference.  The really interesting thing is that when one of us dies, whether it be natural causes or miscalculation, the power transfers to another person it judges to be worthy.

I know this all seems impossibly omnipotent but I suspect that the Krestan have more abilities even than these; chess was an available set of metaphors that let them bracket powers together but I can’t help wondering that, were there another type of piece, if we would have a seventh power?