1.05 Uncle Sam Wants You

Chapter 5

The first week in which we all underwent “The Change”, as we all ended up calling it, was about as smooth as the back of a hedgehog. You don’t need me to remind you how fucking prickly those days were.

Riots, fires, entire governments crumbled and rose as things had to be settled into. I’d seen frat houses that were better managed, and those are always handled by drunken child morons with no sense of reality or a concept of the future at all. So yes, it was a clusterfuck of enormous proportions.

For myself—and I would come to learn later, many more—it was a hellscape of boiling blood that needed to be waded through with nothing more than yellow, child-arm floaties.

When the notification had popped up, I was as confused as everyone else was. I stood inside the doorway to my parent’s house, reeling with the knowledge of my brother’s death and suddenly the world itself was telling me that it was changing.

I thought a true psychotic break was currently transpiring in my mind. That having lost someone I had literally grown up with my entire life, had simply been too much for me. But that was quickly reconciled, swept away entirely, as my parents reacted to the same notification that I was seeing.

“Honey, are you seeing this?” My mother blurted out a second after the words appeared in front of my eyes.

“Yes, what the hell is happening?” My dad dropped the picture frame, the glass splintering out of its housing and across the tiled floor, forgotten.

“Adam, what’s going on?” My mother again.

“I… I don’t know.” I managed to get out. I reached out a hand, attempting to touch the floating screen. It reacted by closing shut and vanishing. Which was just as disturbing as it having appeared so suddenly. “What the fuck?”

There was no precedent for something like this, but it wasn’t at all alien to me. I was young still, and had played more than my fair share of video games with my brother when we were children. I knew what a UI screen was, and that certainly was what I saw, what we all saw.

Furthermore, I read a nice collective sum of fantasy novels, and an Isekai event wasn’t foreign to me. On top of that, just like many avid gamers, I had day-dreamed of such things as living in a video game, what that life would be like.

Such wanton imaginative sessions I had were not all close to the shitstorm we had found ourselves in. But again, I didn’t know that quite yet.

I didn’t have all the pieces to put the full picture together. Not at that time anyway.

But that didn’t stop me from knowing, just like so many others, that the world was going to be a spherical crap ball hurdling 30,000 miles an hour into a cosmic spinning fanblade. We had to be ready, somehow.

“Mom, Dad, grab what you can and get in the car, we need to—” My phone rang in my pocket. I ignored it at first. “We need to leave, now. Grab only what you can’t live without. Whatever this is—” My phone rang again. “Shit.”

I brought the device to my ear without even looking at the number on the screen. “Look, not now.”

“Adam, it’s Dr. Branderton, there’s—”

There was a movement on the line, hushed tones muffled by the scrape of friction. The phone being handed off to someone else.

“Mr. Pierce, this is Colonel Nieve, New States Armed Services. We need you immediately.” The Colonel, a man that I would later learn to both respect and despise, spoke with an urgency and confidence that showed he didn’t expect me to object, which made my next line all the more cathartic.

“Colonel, all due respect, I don’t give a fuck what you need.”

The line went quiet for a moment. I could only guess the man, who no doubt had never been spoken to in such a way, was trying to process what I had said.

“I just lost my brother, and whatever the hell is happening, it’s not a Sunday festival announcement. So whatever shit you got going on, I have my own stuff. Like getting my parents to safety, so unless you can help me with that, I’m going to hang up now.”

“I’m going to ignore that, and remind you of the New States Federal Article 12,” The Colonel continued, having regained his brain function. “You are being conscripted to the needs of your nation Mr. Pierce.”

I cursed in my head and looked at my mother. She was looking at me like she was a deer on the street and I was a speeding car. My father, thankfully, had the wherewithal to already have begun moving, his hands frantically tapping at the screen of the safe that hung on the wall beside the fireplace. I knew that inside was a go-bag, something my father smartly kept there in case of emergencies.

Leaving my parents was not an option, but the Colonel’s words were not an idle threat. Article twelve of the nation’s constitution allowed the government to conscript any citizen between the age of 18 and 30 in time of dire need, and I had no delusions that even the most brain-dead internet forum goers were able to wrap their heads around the fact that this was a dire-need case. It was why I was so set on getting my parents out of the house, out of the suburbs as soon as possible.

“You’re putting me in a tight fucking spot here, Colonel,” I said into the phone loudly. My mom’s eyes, somehow, widened even further at this and my dad’s hands stopped their flurry of movement for a fraction of a second.

“No fucking shit. But as I am sure you understand, this is important ass stuff that’s going on,” the Colonel said. I could hear irritation rising back in his voice at this point, he was losing his patience.

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I took a deep breath, closing my eyes to think of a way to handle the situation that didn’t end up with me being marked as a deserter, but also not deserting the only family I had left alive.

“Tell me where I need to go. Colonel.”

It was easy enough for me to know what the government wanted from me.

My work on Dr. Branderton’s team was unique, as we were the only ones in the country working on neutrino radiation manipulation. If the screen I saw was anything to go by, they wanted to know what was going on just as much as I did, and they needed experts to find that out.

Was I an expert? Well no, not really. But I was the best thing they had with Dr. Branderton’s work. Branderton, the pudgy fucker, was brilliant maybe five years ago, but now he mostly had undergrads like me handling everything he did. The guy knew less about the recent developments in his field than even Michael-the-goldfish, and I was sure they had figured his less-than-actual worth while talking to him during the time I had been driving to my parent’s place.

So they wanted me and the rest of the team. They needed us. And that need meant I had some leverage to pull on.

“But, I need transport to a secure area for my parents,” I added at the end.

Once more there was a pause on the line.

“For the Pierce family, we can do that. Send your location to this phone and I will make sure transport is arranged.” The line went dead before I could respond. A power move, the damn asshole.