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attracted me, believe it or not, and stoked the competitor in me, the part of myself that wanted to prove I was the best. Meanwhile the slacker in me wanted to take the path of least resistance and just cruise through the military.
    I hated that slacker. I really did. He's the one who caused me to stay where I was for so long, in a dead-end city and country, too afraid to move on and change things and strive for something more.
    I stoked the competitor. I could handle the hardest training. I would.
    At that moment a tall, gray-haired man dressed in camouflage gear entered at the front of the room. The theater hushed as he walked to the podium. "Your aReals, please."
    There was an aReal visor connected to my seat by a thin cord. I grabbed the visor and put it on. My vision wasn't obscured, but the lenses were slightly dark, making the background of the real world diminish.
    "Welcome to the New San Antonio MEP Station, recruits." He ran his gaze across the room. "I'm Gustav Reyjuk. A retired officer. A civilian. And no, I didn't invent the Carl Gustav." He got a few laughs at that. "The military hires me to come in and give this speech once a week. I'll probably be the last friendly face you see here on out. Other than your fellow recruits of course." The aReal had apparently scanned my embedded Id to determine my ethnic origin, because it was translating every word into New Spanish and displaying subtitles at the bottom of my vision. I navigated through the menus and turned that feature off.
    "The friendly robotic attendant you met on the way inside installed a short, fifteen-hundred page document on your embedded Ids," Gustav said. "You can go over it in detail later, using one of the aReal terminals installed in the mess hall. In the meantime, I suggest you follow along."
    Using the visor, I navigated to my private offline folder, and found the document, labeled MEPS Guide . I opened it. I noted that the military had bypassed the usual security protocol—as soon as I turned the aReal on I should have gotten a prompt asking me if I wanted to accept the document download request. They'd rammed this guide down the throat of my embedded Id, using one of those undocumented backdoors no doubt. Guess I'd have to get used to the military messing with my private data.
    "I'm going to go over the most important points in the guide," Gustav continued. "You eat lunch from 1100 to 1200. You eat supper from 1730 to 1830. If you don't go to the mess hall during those times, you don't eat. The food is a buffet. Not exactly high class. If you like all-you-can-eat pancakes and gruel, then you're in the right place. As for your movements, you're restricted to the main lobby, the mess hall, this room, the brain scan hall, the medical examination hall, and the job selection hall. We're aware of your individual locations at all times, and the second you step outside any of the allowed areas, accidental or not, a PPA will escort you all friendly-like from the building and you'll be required to find your own way home. If you're an alien whose residency was granted temporarily on the basis of your draft, you'll be picked up by an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement van and booked for deportation."
    He proceeded to go over everything we weren't allowed to do. No smoking. No slouching. No sleeping. No cussing. No looking an officer in the eyes. No disrespecting your fellow recruits. And so on. After a while I began to wonder what we were allowed to do. From the sound of it we'd be ejected from MEPS just for holding our breath.
    He showed different slides and finally a vid. I heard acronyms and more acronyms. OCS. PT. PST. DOR. LCPO. OIC. XO. BSD/M. Funny thing was, it seemed like we were expected to know what all those acronyms meant. I kept having to jump to the glossary in the guide. I'm sure there was a free app I could download that would subtitle those acronyms for me as they were spoken in realtime while I had an aReal on. I made a quick detour