Read Human Again: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Novel (Cryonemesis Book 1) for Free Online Page A

build inside me the closer we got to Tel Aviv.
    If I only knew how right he was, now that I was revived.
    We got to the pickup point. I could see my army mates arriving with their parents. It looked like a ritual. Boys are going to war, parents are going back home to be worried and get stuck with news reports. I don't know what's worse; watching the news every day repeating the same stressful items, or being in a void until a phone rings.
    He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Keep safe, don't be a hero.”
    I walked toward the bus thinking how weird that is. Let's say if I were in WWII. I would want to be a hero and fight the Nazis. I would have gotten a gold medal for that. But here in Israel, we had a nice little war every two or three years. Suddenly being a hero didn't mean anything because no side lost and the wars didn't end. Heroes can't solve all our problems. It's better to survive and go on with your life. So you could say you did your part and let the soldiers of two years from now deal with that shit again. Hoping they won't call you to army reserves, but they usually do.
    I sat next to one of my unit friends. We didn't talk for the whole two and a half hour drive. We stopped to pick up more soldiers on the way north. Nobody talked. Everyone was stressed. Listening to the news didn't help us either. But it's an addiction; you just had to know what's going on. And when they didn't have anything new to say they interviewed another ex-general/politician who was willing to talk about stuff he used to know but now was irrelevant, just to keep the broadcast alive.
    I arrived at the base and met with all my unit mates. Everybody started to get pumped up in a positive way, I would say. The stress that had built in us had to be released and tunneled into action, and we were highly trained for that action. The Hezbollah was a guerrilla organization, also highly trained. They had hideouts and secret tunnels all over the mountains and between the villages. They had cost us many lives each week before Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Hezbollah soldiers weren't the ones to throw stones and Molotov cocktails at you. They were our Vietcong.
    We had a quick debrief with the commanding officer, and then we went to get equipment. My commander approached me.
    “You could have been an officer-in-training now.”
    “I didn't want to become a stinky asshole like you,” I said with a smile.
    He gave me a strong pat on the back, the kind that hurts. It's called a Chapha; it’s what men do to each other in order to show affection by touching in a manly way.
    We sat down for a quick dinner fully equipped: a protective vest, helmet, ammunition, a few grenades, and a radio I was supposed to carry on my back. Some extra batteries, also. I remember thinking about who would tell Hadar about me if something happened. I imagined us reuniting after an injury. Or that she was the only one I would allow to see me if I was too fully bandaged. It had been a year since I broke up with her, and I wasn't sure if anyone thought I'd cared to let her know if something happened to me. I wished someone would be smart enough to connect the dots. This caused me to burst out into hot, wet, uncontrollable sobs in the simulation. At that moment, everything in the simulation stopped around me like the memory froze in time because I couldn't take it anymore. I was back in the simulation bed. I just couldn’t re-experience the battle that led to my death. I lost all those people: Noam, Dan, my mom and dad, my sister, who I didn't even have a chance to talk to, my army friends, my commander and my ex. I missed Hadar so much. I wondered if she was sad at my funeral, if she even came and whether it stopped her from dating for a while. And if she thought about me at her wedding or wondered what it would’ve been like to have kids with me. I wondered if Noam and Dan had kids and what they grew up to be. I wondered if my sister helped my parents in the last days. I