What A Body Is For by Zero

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: Hey everyone, Zero here. This one is experimental. Very. At least for me. Had to get it out of my system. As always, feel more than free to let me know what you think! This one was made while listening to My Honest Face, by Inhaler.


What A Body Is For.



He’s here. The cadet.

Not a minute late or a minute early. He can see his name in the map of the complex, right outside his door, his record card in the hologram.

His face in the image completely devoid of emotion. Twenty-one. Honeyed eyes, like a pair of stone-cold ambers. Thick eyebrows and eyelashes, an almost pubescent lack of facial hair, even at twenty-one like his birthdate shows. A jaw like an inverted triangle, cheekbones that catch both light and shadow, a perfect symmetry to his densely populated hairline, a geometry to his entire face like every single of his proportions was calculated to the millimeter. His hair pulled back tightly, shimmering even in the ID photograph.

His academic record, medical history, psychological profile, genotype, grade averages, position in rank and distinctions listed beside his name, throughout all his life. Transcripts of his messages and conversations through all available channels, voice recordings, videos, photographs, everything.

He has read all those files before. Studied them. He knows what he wants out of him and how he will get it.

"Come in" he calls him, as he slides his record off the hologram.

He watches him come in. He is wearing the pitch-black uniform of the Academy. It’s pressed to perfection; the boots are black mirrors reflecting the light back at them. The visor, a pitch-black void, ever since the leak scandal half a decade ago and the targeted killings and the 10:10 facial recognition attained by their enemies, faceless to-be soldiers roam the hallways.

The cadet stands tall, back in a perfect, straight angle in relation to the floor.

His younger colleagues would be checking the screen to see what the monitor shows about the cadet in real-time. All the data about his heart rate, his breathing, his body temperature, which of his muscles contract and dilate.

But he doesn’t need any of that information. He doesn’t want it when he can just give him a single order to know all of that:

"Take off your helmet".

The visor slides off his face as he holds the helmet with both hands. He pulls the helmet off his head and in the blink of an eye, he can see the same distant gaze from the record.

He’s as gorgeous in flesh and bone as he is in screens. His perfection is uncanny, like that of most of his generation and the ones that have come after him. He is gorgeous. Was he even born male? Was it gene-editing? He isn’t sure if he looks superhuman o inhuman. He is looking at the past and the future all at once as he stands before him, at everything generations before his dreamed of and obsessed over, at the promises.

A product of the best minds of the century and the technological advances they had to offer to the elites. A trophy child. A light bringer, if he must be, if that is what is expected of him. Not once has he known failure.

He half-wonders what traits were bred out of his generation to achieve this. If the future and the promises will truly be kind to him as the present and the past has been.

Perhaps he isn’t entirely human after all. Maybe he doesn’t have a heart inside his chest but a machine pumping out data underneath his sternum.

Then, he sees the cadet’s mane. He wears it with the upper half gathered into a bun, the lower half loose, touching his breastbones. It’s beautiful, to be honest, either a dark blond or a light golden brown, he doesn’t know, but his hair is a sight to be admired. The cadet himself must know it is. Must be why he chooses to wear it long.

He won’t deny it amuses him. It was unthinkable for him to have even bangs back when he was a cadet. His instructors would measure the length of his hair with a bobby pin, sliding the metal back and forth through the bristles, checking it new grew a millimeter above it. An electric razor buzzing menacingly inside their free hand as they did it.

Lots of things have changed and lots have stayed the same.

He would know. He saw the rise of artificial intelligence. The first wars the drones fought. The algorithms, the prediction machines, the oracles they’ve built out of rare metals and statistics. The speakers from the tech sector turned into advisors and turned into policy-makers.

And he also saw the way things used to be. He fought the last wars that ran on manpower and mobilized troops. For his generation, military science was still at large a science centered of the human body, their bodies, and their distress and how they coped with it.

For the cadet standing in front of him, it’s no longer about the body. Other things take primacy.

No need for grueling physical regimes when the same or better results can be achieved by other means.

He sees the device around the cadet’s wrist. At first, it was introduced to aid combat medics and first responders, for them to monitor vitals in real-time at a distance. Some models were even equipped with mechanisms to deliver medicines through the bloodstream if needed.

In time, it became something else entirely.

"Take it off".
The cadet’s eyes drift briefly towards his wrists, he notices he isn’t wearing the device, it rests on top of his desk "It’s against policy, sir".
"I decide what’s against policy".

Not the AI. Not the technocrats. He is still his superior and he will remind the cadet of it.

"Yes, sir" the cadet moves his hand to his wrist slowly, as if he was afraid he will break the device with the wrong movement, as if he would set off an international incident just by doing so.

He knows hesitation when he sees it, from seeing it so often in himself.

"Do you know why have I called you into my office?".
"No, sir".

He walks up to him. It doesn’t take the cadet too long to realize how much taller than him he is.

He had grown taller and stronger than his father at fourteen. Barely. But it sufficed. It kept him alive and that was what mattered.

He is a species in the brink of extinction. He is a product of chance.

The same chance that has him caged in this base, in this timeline. Born too late and too early. At the same time. Too late to live through the best of the past and too early to enjoy the promises of the future that didn’t come soon enough.

He knows his reputation among the cadets. Archaic. Bull-headed. Cavalier.

He knows the cadet in front of him thinks the same.

"You didn’t show up for the mandatory medical evaluation this morning. Are you hiding something from the military, cadet?" he looks him in the eye.
His face doesn’t change, but his throat contracts "I can explain, sir".
"I mean, you had gene-editing done while it was still in early developments, if something is showing up as a sequel of that…" he turns the hologram back on from the ceiling and pretends to go around his files.
"No, sir. I’m perfectly fine" the cadet answers back, almost biting "I just had a schedule conflict, I was ordered to report for guard duty at the same time. I guess something must have malfunctioned in the algorithm, sir. But it won’t happen again, sir".
He snaps his fingers and turns off the hologram to look back at him "Are you blaming on the algorithm your own shortcomings, cadet?".
"No, sir. I’m not, sir" the cadet gulps "I’ll get it rescheduled".
"If I asked the algorithm whether or not to expel you, based on your decision to avoid medical evaluation, what do you think it would say?".

The cadet’s face pales.

"I don’t know, sir".

As it should.

"Well, we had cases of cadets with early gene-editing done who ended up developing strange, terrible disorders. They all hid it…".
"I swear I am not hiding anything, sir" the cadet looks like he wants to take a step forward, to lunge at him.

Liar. A good one at it.

"What would you do to stay here?" he gets his face closer to the cadet’s "If the answer is anything, I guess that means you’re willing to lie to the medical officers. You know how dangerous that is, right? How serious we take medical issues after the pandemics, right?".

There is a pause. He leaves him space to answer, to justify himself.

"Sir, if you think I’m lying, you can look at my stats and see if I’m lying or not".

The cadet hugs his helmet closer to his side, presses it underneath his ribs. His knuckles pale around it.

"I don’t need to".
"Then, what is it that you want from me, sir?" the young man’s chest moves softly as he inhales.
"Quiet" he orders him.
"My deepest apologies, sir".

He places a single hand on the cadet’s shoulder. The cadet makes eye contact with him once more.

He doesn’t need to see the stats of the visor of his helmet to know how many times he has sneaked a glance at him.

They have kept sharp eyes on each other for weeks now.

"I’ll have you understand why medical procedures matter. And how much easier and gentler disease prevention has become, cadet" he gets his mouth closer to the cadet’s ear, close enough that his tongue could caress his skin "I’m giving you a taste of how things were back then".

The cadet is smart enough to know when to shut up. Or so it seems.

"That’s not necessary, sir" the cadet takes a half, a quarter of a step backwards, away from him.
"I’m not giving you a choice, cadet" he sentences him.

He goes to his desk, he doesn’t rummage through the drawers, he knows exactly what he is looking for and where he will find it. Upper right drawer, inside a case. He takes it out and opens it.

"You know, back when I was a cadet like you, it was unthinkable for any of us to have hair past our collar or our ears" he tells him.

He lifts the hair clippers to the level of the cadet’s eyes. He sees the stone face crack, just for a second for what it’s worth, before it petrifies again, but he knows what he saw.

"I’ll teach you a quick history lesson, and we’ll put this incident behind us" he moves towards the cadet "That’s my offer to you".
"I don’t need a history lesson, sir. I am very familiar with contemporary history of the armed forces" the cadet replies, a hint of arrogance and defiance in him.

He decides he likes that arrogance. It’s sincere.

"Is that so?" he asks him "Then I guess I’m reporting this incident and asking the disciplinary council to handle your insubordination. I’m sure they’ll be happy to invite medical officers to run all kinds of tests on you until we find out what you’re hiding from the military".
"I said I am not hiding anything".
He crosses his arms and lays back against his desk "If you’re not hiding anything, why do you seem so afraid of what we’ll find, cadet?"

The cadet’s grip tightens around his helmet one last time and he can almost see the young man slamming it against his face inside his mind.

He’s been bred for combat, if he was bred right by the genetics laboratories that oversaw his existence before he ever had a body.

"I am not afraid, sir".
"Prove it" he raises the cordless hair clippers to his eye level and flicks on the switch.

He will take him by ambush if he has to.

He will watch his defenses crack, his beauty and his perfection surrendered to him.

The cadet stays quiet. He sees his frustration, his thrill at his inability to have predicted this outcome, his rage and his aliveness. Only the growl of the hair clippers can be heard.

Then, he nods.

"Take off your shirt. You don’t want hair all over your clean and pressed uniform, do you?" he smirks.

His smugness doesn’t go unnoticed, the cadet glares at him as he places the helmet on the desk and starts undressing.

The cadet stands straight in front of him, his eyes fixed in the space behind him, unwavering.

He grabs a hold of the hair at the forelock, at the very front of the cadet’s hairline and wraps it around his hand, pulling it slightly.

He lands the clipper in the center of the cadet’s forehead. He sees a flinch in his eyes. Never been shaved. Born in a time when it was a thing of the past.

He drives the blades into the cadet’s hairline, it’s a blade with triple zeros. Not unlike the electric razor that went all over his head when he was a young cadet himself during inspections.

The locks surrender to the metallic teeth and the pale, naked scalp starts to show.

He grabs the first handful of hair in his opposite hand and releases it, he lets it fall on the floor. Then, he wipes the freshly shorn path, relishing in the roughness of the bare stubble left.

"You know, back when I was a cadet like you, they used to shave our heads for lots of reasons, one of them was so the headgear would seal and fit better" he tells the young man as his hair begins to pool underneath both their boots "Another was to prevent lice".

The cadet remains quiet. His breathing barely hitches at the touch of the clippers. His skull is perfect, as if drawn with a compass. The clippers slide across the surface of his head with easy, without strange angles or bumps in the way.

As he denudes the cadet’s temples, and folds his ears to shave around them, he thinks he has a head that was made to be shaven bare.

"Now, I’m not shaving you with a razor, I don’t want the medical officers finding razor burns when they examine you next week" he moves behind him, shaking the loose locks off his naked shoulders "But you’ll have a nice, clean shave for them, free of lice. You’ll be ready for inspection".

The cadet grits his teeth.

He nudges the cadet’s head forward, there is only left the locks at the back of his head.

He runs the clippers along the curve of his head once more, he presses the blades tightly, making clean passes, hardly leaving patches of longer stubble at each end.

He watches the last of his beautiful hair disappear in the clippers’ wake. It’s a useless heap on the floor. The hair that the experts on genetics that carefully selected and prided themselves in giving him lies on the floor.

He makes a pass, then another, until all that’s left is the soft trails of hair that grow down the back of the cadet’s neck.

He angles the clippers and erases all trace of them with quick, back and forth movements against his skin.

Then, he rubs his hand against the bare scalp. He smirks in satisfaction, and catches a glimpse of the cadet closing his eyes, when he thinks he can't see him. His expression softening like his breathing, a light, quiet sound of pleasure barely escaping the cadet's lips.

That’s when he finds it. Just as he expected to.

And there it is. At the base of his nape, just underneath his hairline.

The scar of the surgery in which they inserted the implant, the one that is connected to their databases, to their medical devices, the one that monitors him since he was a teenaged boy.

He grazes the pale line with his ring finger, a slow, downwards movement, he feels the pressure on the skin from both halves of the skin being pulled back into place by the thin sunken slash across the vertical.

He approaches his mouth to it, his tongue runs over the length of his cervical, the tip of his tongue slithers further down, towards the space between his shoulder blades.

He feels the cadet shiver in response.

"I’ll show you what a body is for" he lets his breath graze the cadet’s neck, he lets the bare skin at the back of his neck raise "You’ll beg me to make you my apprentice, to show you you’re still flesh and bone, despite everything".

The cadet’s trembling hands hover over his body, his fingers searching for his face with hesitation and hunger, both, he refuses to meet his gaze.

"Don’t deny yourself, boy" he hisses at him, he takes his hands, his face, all of him "Just surrender, you don’t have to be afraid".
"I’m not" the young man’s voice quivers.
"Prove it".

He dares him once more.

His mouth moves into the cadet’s mouth, their bodies press against each other and he finally knows that he has a heart underneath his ribcages after all.






The clock moves.

They both should be somewhere else by now.

But he doesn’t care. He will decide where they will both be, he will decide where he wants the cadet from now on.

And at this moment, that is here, within the reach of his hand, panting and shuddering underneath his touch.

But he can enjoy the thrill of not having him, the push and the pull of it.

"From now on, I’ll train you the way I was trained" he tells the cadet as he watches him get ready to put the helmet back on "And you’ll be grateful for it".
"Yes, sir" he sees the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of the cadet’s mouth as he secures the medical device on his wrist again.

The cadet steals a glance at him, it's a gaze filled with rawness and arrogance and life.

He’s flesh and bone after all.

And he will remind him of that.

He was not born too late to do that.

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