Army 4-1 Chronicle: "Don" From Zero to One

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Have you ever met someone who made you feel like you were the only person in the universe? Someone who could stop your heart for half a second just by smiling at you? Someone who could make you forget your own name, your better judgment, and hand you a ticket to paradise all in the same breath?

Words change meaning over time. Paradise used to mean heaven. Maybe it still does.

But standing here now, shivering in this so-called paradise, I can tell you it also means the last place in the solar system you would ever want to go.

That is how I got here.

I was like you once. Living a simple life on Earth. Probably a lot like yours. I was in a bar called Level Up, which felt fitting at the time. Loud, bright, full of games, booze, neon, and that special kind of false hope people mistake for opportunity. The kind of place where everybody thinks their life is about to begin if they just stay one more hour.

In the middle of all that noise was a sleek little exhibit for Collective Medical, Redemption Division.

That was where I saw her.

Maybe it was the booze. I would like to blame the booze. But honestly, I do not think alcohol deserved all that credit.

She was a voluptuous blonde with a smile that said she already knew the answer to a question I had not asked yet.

“Would you like to go to paradise?” she asked, like she was offering me a drink, a secret, and a second life all at once.

Then she gave me a once-over and smiled wider.

“We believe you may have superpower capacity,” she said. “Imagine that. Superpowers. Paradise. A better life.”

“Wanna see?”

She winked, fully aware I had not looked her in the eyes once, and held up a platinum ticket. On it was a picture of a breathtaking house, the kind of place built for the wildest of HD thoughts.

“We could start here,” she said, tapping the picture.

Every time she pointed, my eyes followed the motion for maybe half a second before drifting right back to the strain on the front of her blouse. She knew exactly what she was doing. The ticket was in her hand, but the sales pitch was happening somewhere much lower.

As she pointed at the photo “The waterfall, The house” she said. 

Hypnotized, I could have sworn I heard her say, Do it and I’ll bounce.

What she probably said was something like, “Take it. It’s your chance.”

What my brain heard was: Do it for the bounce.

That was it. Paradise. Superpowers. Her. My thoughts folded like cheap lawn furniture.

She handed me the ticket, and I was already hooked.

A concerned little look crossed her face, practiced just well enough to feel real.

“I was wondering,” she said, turning slightly, “would you like to check your initial power capacity?”

She picked up a small card and held it out with both hands. She tucked her elbows in as she did it, and I swear I heard a stitch somewhere in that blouse begin negotiations with God.

So of course I reached for the card.

She did this tiny excited bounce on her toes, and the whole world seemed to slow down with her.

And for the bounce, I put my thumb on the card without thinking.

The big print giveth: SUPERPOWER CAPACITY

The small print taketh away: AGREES TO ALL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

She looked down at the result and widened her eyes.

“Oh my,” she said. “That’s… impressive.”

Then she smirked like she had made a joke just for herself.

I should have walked away right then. I did not.

She led me a few steps over to a booth, typed something into a terminal, and spun a wheel.

When it stopped, she froze.

“Oh my,” she said again, softer this time. “All is fair in love and war.”

I laughed nervously. “What does that mean?”

“That means destiny,” she said. “You already have your ticket. You tested unusually high for power capacity. And…”

She reached into a glass display case and pulled out a coin.

A primal coin.

My breath caught.

It fit easily in her palm, but she held it carefully, almost reverently, like it was not metal at all but something living. For a second I did not know what to look at first, the coin or her. She looked down at that faction token like it was a holy relic.

Then she pressed it into my hand.

“You are now a registered agent.”

She leaned in close as she said it. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of her against my arm, close enough to smell perfume over liquor and ozone and the stale electric air of the bar.

I grinned like an idiot. “I could do anything for the bounce.”

She did not answer right away. Just looked at me, breathing slow, steady, controlled, like she had heard that line before and knew exactly what men like me meant when we said it.

Then I took the coin from her hand.

Pop.

We both looked down.

One of her buttons had finally surrendered.

Her face was suddenly very close to mine.

“This is destiny,” she whispered, warm breath against my cheek. “I wouldn’t tell anyone what you seen. No one is going believe you saw paradise.”

It took me months to understand what had really happened.

A few months after that was the day I died.

No one attended my funeral.

Nobody even knew I was gone.

And if they did know, they probably thought I was in paradise.

That was what my ticket said. That was what I told everyone.

“I’m going to paradise, so if you don’t hear from me for a while…”

I used to smile when I said that. I cannot even fake that kind of warmth now.

One day I was home on Earth.

The next, I was being dragged out of it and strapped into H.E.L.L., the Halo Elevator Launch and Landingpad, like an unwilling monkey shoved into a shuttle.

Before I left, she was there again.

The moment I saw her, a phrase flashed through my mind:

AGREES TO ALL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

She pointed to a sign and smiled.

“To find paradise,” she said, “one must first go through hell.”

She made sure I still had the coin in my inventory. Then she kissed my cheek and whispered, “I’ll see you when you get back. I’ll be waiting.”

Her lipstick shimmered on my skin, then faded.

I do not want to say it seeped into my face.

But that is what it felt like.

Then I passed out.

When I woke up, I was in literal ice paradise.

“It’s the cold season,” the other survivors liked to say, as if that explained anything.

It was so cold it felt like hell had finally stopped pretending.

This is what I imagine hell looks like.

Not fire.

Ice.

Endless, goddamn ice.

A sign greeted me through the blur in my eyes:

WELCOME TO PARADISE. ENJOY YOUR STAY.

“The things I do for the bounce,” I muttered through chattering teeth.

Paradise sat at the edge of the solar system, where the sentence was not the prison.

The whole planet was.

The Collective had learned that extreme conditions produced extreme results. Pressure. Fear. Isolation. Survival. Sometimes all of it squeezed a person hard enough to force out a genetic anomaly.

Agent 4.

A perfect setup for evil. Big corporations. Reanimated dinosaurs. Zombies. Strippers. Take your pick.

Before arriving here, I would have called you a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist for saying any of that out loud.

But Collective Media, one of the proud pillars of the Collective, televised Redemptions, which was just a polished way of saying fights to the death.

The official line was that it was all to determine whether you had a superpower.

The truly twisted part was that you needed Agent 4 contamination to develop one at all. Not just to have it. To use it.

And the only known source was here in Paradise.

They sent you to Paradise when they wanted you buried without the inconvenience of calling it a grave. Greenland and Iceland all over again. Call it paradise, make it sound inviting, and hope nobody asks better questions until it is too late.

The Collective conducted military tests there. Live-fire exercises. Predator trials. Survival runs.

Lab rat does not even cover it.

No, that is wrong.

Lab rats at least get the dignity of being studied.

Here in Paradise, you were prey.

The dinosaurs, the monsters, the enhanced, the things that had adapted to this place, they were the real citizens.

They were the predators.

The irony was that Paradise was also the most technologically advanced world within human reach.

All because of one word.

Redemption.

Everybody loves an underdog story.

Officially, every major world had a H.E.L.L. system. Freight. Personnel. Prisoners. Soldiers. Bureaucracy with airlocks. Infrastructure dressed up like destiny.

But in Paradise, it was different.

In Paradise, H.E.L.L. only worked one way.

“You don’t want to leave,” they say.

Some people have even refused to go when they finally earned a ticket back.

Every year, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pods like mine slammed into the ice. One-way tickets to paradise. My ticket had been punched. I was a registered agent. I had volunteered for this, which I might admit years later, that I agreed to all the terms and conditions, but not then.

Then was the worst possible time to be honest.

Now, though, is the most important time to tell it.

We are approaching the 100th Anniversary of Collective Medical’s Redemption Division. To celebrate, they are sending one hundred redemption coins down to the planet. 

All you have to do. 

As if it is this easy, is get your hands on one, survive long enough to reach the right platform, and pray a transport actually comes for you.

That is the sales pitch.

Here is the fine print.

It is all-out war.

There are factions. Military units. Kill teams. Things with teeth. Things with guns. Things that used to be people. Things that maybe still are all trying to get that coin.

And yes, dinosaurs, zombies, and strippers are all out there on the ice right alongside everything else that wants to kill you.

And everything wants to kill you if you got that coin.

The Collective is sending one hundred transports in. One for each year of Redemption. For a century they gave out one chance a year. Now, for the anniversary, they are giving one hundred people a shot at being redeemed, getting off this frozen graveyard, and maybe finding out whether all that suffering was worth something.

If anyone made it back out, it was because they had fought their way to the heart of the system, held onto a redemption coin, and earned a one-way ticket to anywhere in the solar system other than Paradise.

Earned redemption.

Each level got harder. First Compys. Then worse.

Much worse.

Last Redemption, nobody made it past the first level. Now they claim they have “adjusted conditions” so that at least three thousand registered members will make it to level two this year.

That was the promise.

The moment I stepped out into that frozen wasteland, I knew my odds of survival were next to zero.

I stumbled across the ice until I found an outpost marked with a Compsognathus.

My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the coin trying to fit it into the slot.

It did not match.

The coin in my inventory was T-Rex.

I was fumbling for it as her voice slid through my mind again.

“This is destiny,” she whispered, warm breath against my cheek. “I wouldn’t tell anyone what you saw. No one is going to believe you saw paradise.”

The door opened anyway, just wide enough to let me through.

The second I stepped inside, hands grabbed me.

I figured that was it.

The end.

I was surprised when I did not die.

Instead, a grizzled old man stood over me, half man and half rock, like the planet itself had tried to grow a soldier. He looked down at me with tired eyes and said, “Don’t get too comfortable. Agent 4 anomalies can happen at any time, in any way.”

He glanced at his own hand almost wistfully, like he was remembering when it used to feel like flesh.

A commotion broke out behind him.

He barely looked.

“Someone just turned into slime.”

Then he looked back at me.

He pulled my by my neck into the room, 

Casually slamming the door, as several animals? Crashed into it? 

Showing me to everyone like i was a kitten who was picked up by his scruff. 

He was showing everyone that is why he opened the outer door. 

“You’re up.”

Here ya go, he said as another of his hands, from somewhere, pressed my thumb onto a card almost identical to the one the brunette had used on Earth. Whatever he saw made him pause. Then he gave me a look that was not cruel.

It was worse.

He let go of me, and sat me down gently, and waved, 

I thought, “i disappointed everyone and dont know why?”

It was pity.

“Zero,” he said.

Then he handed me a uniform and a hat.

“You’ve got zero chance.” he said again

That was how I joined the army.

Capacity Zero, you are less than nothing. No power. No destiny. No chosen one. Just tricked, processed, and neatly filed into disposable labor for people who did not know you from Adam.

But the old man had a name for us.

He called us Zeroes. Any stray that needed a home, any reject the system did not know what else to do with. A zero.

“There are only two ways to become One,” he told us, pointing at the wall of Compi heroes. Human. Almost human. Not human at all. A museum of survivors, killers, and weapons. “You can be smart, which means you’re already out of luck. Or you can be strong.”

He flexed, and the muscles in his stone arm bulged like shifting bedrock.

I was not smart.

He was right about that.

But I would have done several hundred sit-ups just to be on the floor if she walked by.

I did not have superpower capacity, and I paid for it.

I said what everyone else was thinking and took the punishment for it.

Eventually I learned something useful: once death stopped being final, fear got lazy.

They could kill you. They could bring you back. They could break your body and call it training.

Once I understood that, life got easier.

Even if you died and went to hell, it might take a week before you noticed anything had changed.

And I got stronger.

They told me to do more push-ups, and I was dreaming of boobs.

As the months passed, I became one of the best generalist soldiers in my unit. Not heroic. Not noble. Average.

I was not some Medal of Honor saint.

I was angry. I had been tricked into being here. I was hungry to prove I was more than a Zero.

And if strength was the only way out, then fine.

So be it.

I was doing it for the bounce.

Whenever I thought about boobs, her lipstick would shimmer and fade in my memory, and I could swear I still felt the warmth of her kiss.

Then came the day of the raid.

The grizzled old man called it a real test.

We were told a high-capacity user had gone off-grid. A dangerous anomaly. Nightmare fuel. They showed us surveillance images, gore photos, body fragments, after-action reports. The man in the pictures did not look like a monster to me.

He looked like somebody who had been cornered too many times.

What bothered me more was the coin in my pocket.

It looked exactly like his.

The briefing officer paced in front of us.

“We are going to find him and bring him in. He agreed, same as you agreed. Some people forget that part. That is why we train.”

But this mission felt different from the beginning.

Fear was in the air. Not panic. Something colder. Professional fear. The kind you only smelled when the people giving orders were no longer sure those orders would keep them alive.

We traveled across Paradise’s frozen dark to a site that looked too ordinary to be dangerous. A little neighborhood. A home. The kind of place that could have been on Earth if you ignored the black sky and the murderous cold.

And somewhere in that cold, I thought of her.

I’ll do it for the bounce.

Do it for the bounce.

The memory of her sent warmth through me like contraband. I pictured us in a bed that did not exist, laughing, singing, her fingers in my hair, teasing me for surviving all this just to crawl back into her lap.

A tear formed in my eye.

I looked up through my issued glasses and found the moon hanging over Paradise like the coin she had given me.

I was searching for hope.

For a sign.

A tap on my shoulder snapped me back.

The soldier beside me did not speak. He just pointed at me, then at his own eyes, then at the door.

You. Look. Door.

He reminded me of the grim reaper.

I tried to look at the moon one last time, but it had vanished behind a wall of cloud.

Just darkness.

That should have been my warning.

Not God. Not Allah. Not Buddha. Not even her, I guess. Nobody wanted to watch what was about to happen.

My sadness curdled into rage.

Fine, I thought. Let’s get this over with.

I nodded to the soldier in front of me. He nodded back. I leaned into the two men behind me, coiling myself like a spring. We had practiced this exact movement over and over.

There was a phrase for it.

Violence of action.

Do something so fast and so brutal nobody gets a chance to stop you.

What nobody mentioned was the price.

The weak went first.

The Zeroes always did.

I did.

The man in front of me kicked the door open.

The two soldiers behind me launched me through it.

Time slowed.

That was how it always lived in my head now. Not as a blur, but as a terrible kind of clarity. Every detail polished bright by horror.

What was supposed to happen was simple. Enter. Secure the target. Minimal struggle. Minimal noise. Leave as if we had never been there.

What actually happened started with one bad surprise.

The man inside was awake.

And he had a P-2 plasma assault rifle at his side.

My stomach dropped.

Oh shit, I thought. He was waiting for us.

Before my brain could fully understand what I was seeing, I felt a tingle in my hand. A bright pulse flashed between us, hot and sudden, like an engine revving to life.

Then came a bang.

Something golden flipped through the air between us.

For one stupid, frozen second, all of us stared at it.

A shell casing.

Then another bang.

Another golden shape spun through the room.

Then came the whine of a bullet punching into the floor.

Another deafening crack.

My shoulder jerked.

We both looked down.

The next shell casing was ejecting from my weapon.

That was when we understood at the same time.

My body had already decided to fire.

Another bang.

Another casing spun through the air.

My shoulder kicked, relaxed, kicked again.

Neither of us was really in control anymore. If my rounds reached him before his reached me, he died. If his found me first, maybe all of us die.

We were both hostages to the next fraction of a second.

My weapon could spit out more than eight hundred rounds a minute, but in that room each shot felt stretched into eternity.

Whiz.

Bang.

Whiz.

Bang.

The recoil walked the fire up his body.

The first round clipped his left hip with the sound of tearing cloth.

Then the next hit.

Then the next.

I watched disbelief turn into pain in his face.

Then pain turned into certainty.

He knew.

He was not getting out of this room alive.

I had never seen a man cry like that. Not from fear alone. It was grief too. Grief arriving early, before the body had even finished dying.

Round after round ripped through him.

Behind me, my team heard the first shell casings striking the floor.

That was when they knew the room had gone bad.

Blood burst against the wall behind him in wet red smears, like somebody hurling balloons full of meat and memory. The men behind me stopped pushing. Then they pulled back.

A small round object bounced between us.

Grenade.

The others retreated out the doorway just before fire and pressure swallowed the entrance.

I was the only friendly left in the room.

My rounds kept cutting.

They climbed from his hip to his shoulder, splitting flesh, shattering bone, taking the man apart in front of me. No human being should ever have to hear the sound a body makes when it stops being whole.

In his eyes I read only one thing.

I’ll see you in hell.

Then he was gone.

And somehow I felt stronger.

That was what confused me most.

The tingling in my hand vanished. Heat flooded through me. It felt like every shot that took something from him gave something to me in return. Rage, strength, momentum, life, whatever it was, I could feel it rising through my body as his poured out of him.

Like I was being fed by the damage.

Like violence itself had become currency.

His upper body slumped away from the rest of him, and I dove over what was left, using him for cover as the blast rolled through the room.

My team screamed from outside.

The dead man’s body shielded me from the worst of it.

It also bought me just enough time to reset before the zombie dogs came in.

There were more men inside the house. One tried to return fire from behind a couch. Another scrambled behind furniture. Somebody screamed in a language I did not know. My rounds kept flipping gold through the air.

The couch did not help him.

One of the zombie dogs lunged for my machine gun and got its back blown out for the effort.

Then, in one desperate move, another man raised a rocket launcher over the cushions and fired.

It screamed past me and exploded behind me.

Outside, the men running for the transport caught fresh shrapnel in their backs from the blast. I heard the troop carrier powering up. Heard engines whining. Heard survival choosing itself over loyalty.

I had been hit too.

But the fight was not over.

My machine gun drank some of my blood, and I felt more power.

Gritting my teeth, I whispered, “Do it for the bounce.”

So I kept clearing the house.

The man with the rocket launcher toppled into his own blood.

I looked down at myself and felt the weight settle in again, another invisible chain fastening around my body. Every person I killed was another link.

Place the mission first.

The man with the coin was escaping.

And my comrades were going the opposite way.

That was what they had taught us.

So while my comrades fled, I moved room to room, bleeding and killing and looking for anything that might want to kill me.

I cleared the first floor.

By then I was exhausted. I could not tell whether it was blood loss, the weight of my gear, or the demonic possession of my gun, which seemed happy to soak up even my own blood.

Probably all three.

Then I saw the stairs.

At the top of the stairs stood a mother and her little girl, barely reaching her thigh.

They stood side by side, tears running down both their faces, staring at me in their own house like I was the devil in uniform.

Maybe I was.

I looked into their eyes and saw something I recognized.

Rage.

Hurt.

Shock.

Loss.

Their dead looked like my dead.

I lowered my weapon.

It was not mercy exactly. More like surrender. A peace offering from someone too ruined to believe in peace.

Then I heard it.

Clunk.

Something hard and round struck the top stair.

Clunk.

Clunk.

The sound picked up speed as it bounced toward me.

Grenade.

I do not know why we kept looking at each other.

Maybe because fate likes an audience.

Then I heard her voice again inside my head.

All is fair in love and war.

And in that same instant, I understood what was coming.

So did the mother.

My body reacted before my soul could stop it.

More gold flashed through the air.

My weapon was already drawing a line of bullets up the stairwell.

The mother yanked the little girl in front of her and covered the child’s eyes, maybe to shield her from the sight of my death, maybe from what she knew was about to happen instead.

I had never heard a woman scream like that before.

The child screamed too, but that was no ordinary child. That was an Agent 4 monstrosity in the shape of one.

Then the grenade went off.

Everything vanished into white noise and impact.

When I woke, I thought for a second I saw her.

The brunette.

The woman from Earth.

The one who had smiled and lied and kissed my cheek.

In my haze, she crawled toward me singing, and I tried to sing with her, but no words came out.

Then the ringing in my ears thinned, and reality came back ugly.

I was still in the house.

I was on the floor.

I was bleeding out.

And the little girl was lying beside me, riddled with bullets and shrapnel.

Panic hit me all at once.

Maybe she felt it. Maybe dying gives you strange kindness.

Her tiny hand moved through my blood-soaked hair, and in a fading voice she whispered, “Shhh. It’s okay. She’s counting on you. I understand. All is fair in love and war.”

Then her head settled against my shoulder.

I wanted to tell her I was sorry.

I wanted to help her.

I wanted to do anything except lie there and feel her life leaving.

But it was too late.

I felt the surge again.

The transfer.

The same awful exchange.

Power for life.

Strength for death.

Essence moving out of her and into me like some vile arithmetic.

Then men in black robes entered the house.

I heard them shouting in a language I did not know. Saw muzzle flashes cut through the dark.

That was when I knew I would be joining the others in hell.

The husband.

The wife.

The child.

Maybe heaven had another angel.

I just hoped hell served beer.

Because I was going to need something strong enough to numb the sound of that house.

Static rattled in my headset, but I could still make out what the AI said.

“That’s one.”

Then I passed out.