I never thought I was special.  I lived with my father until I was twelve, when he was culled as a part of that year’s Harvest.  I’d like to think what we had was better than the mass teachings most Farm kids were subjected to.  I don’t really know. All I know is that what we had was different. Most kids never got a real name.  Boys were Johns and girls were Janes. The only way to keep us apart were our IDs, tattooed on the back of our neck within a few days of birth.  Officially I was John X-008-NANW, but my father always called me Shiloh. Not in public, and not where anyone else would be able to hear, but he gave me a name.  He always told me it was our secret, that I should never tell anyone else about the name he’d given me. In a time where individuality was feared, standing out with something like a personal name would have drawn attention to us, and that was the last thing my father wanted.

 

We lived so long together, I started to think it would always be that way.  When my father was culled, I didn’t know what to do. I had always been a part of the communal learning crèche, and that didn’t change.  But normally when we had free time in the evenings, after supper and before curfew, I would go spend time with my father learning things that weren’t taught in the crèche.  Without him there, I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. The story being told, the Tale of the Soldier. It glosses over a large portion of my life. The years I spent growing and learning before the cull that took me came through.  Maybe it’s right to. After all, no one wants to hear about skinned knees and stubbornness. No, it skips straight to my Judgment.

 

I was culled, along with several other Johns from the Farm, and taken before the Judges.  They looked at our numbers, and sent the soldiers to be soldiers, the administrators to be trained, and the unacceptable to become food.  I was a part of that group at first, until one of the Judges changed his mind. To this day I don’t know what happened. Only that I was in line to be processed when one of the soldiers pulled me out and dragged me over to another line.  I was sent into the Indoctrinator, and that’s one part I’m glad the tale glosses over.

 

No one really stops to think about what it would be like to have all the life drained out of them, to be forced to reanimate, kicking and screaming the entire way, only to then be subjected to the most intense brainwashing the world has ever known.  The whole process was painful, so painful that even the memory of it is more than I can bear. What I didn’t realize was that the Indoctrinator was powered by confined souls, and that my father was among them. I could feel him with the others, running his fingers through my mind, and the trigger mentioned in the story was implanted.  It was obvious to the rest of the world that something was going on, but to me, it just felt like someone was taking away some of the pain. The process was long and torturous, but when it was over I emerged another blank, uniform soldier in the Lunatic Emperor’s army. The guards had no idea what my father had done, and neither had I.

 

According to the tale, once I was free of the machine, I was immediately ordered to remove my father’s orb and destroy it.  While that did happen, it wasn’t immediate. First, they dragged me off for testing and interrogation, to see if they could discover what had been done.  Only when that failed to provide them with the information they craved did they order me to remove my father’s orb and destroy it. I think they hoped whatever he had done would be made clear by the act of his destruction.  That, or they simply wanted to know if I would be obedient enough to murder my own father.

 

I was a faithful soldier for many years after that.  The indoctrination process is thorough, and no amount of suffering can override it.  At first, they watched me closely, ready and waiting if I so much as twitched out of place, but the indoctrination had been successful and all I could do was obey.  After the first decade, they seemed to have forgotten about me. Or they forgot to watch, I’m not sure which. Everything was normal, average, fine, until I was assigned to cleanse a Farm.  It wasn’t the one I’d grown up in, or even anything like it, really. The last of the remaining stock deemed worthy by the Judges had been culled, and what was left were the ones where bloodlines were too thin, the stock too weak and impure to be of use.

 

According to the tale, this was when the Emperor ordered me to kill children.  It was never so clear cut as that. The Emperor wasn’t there, too busy with tasks he deemed far more important than overseeing the cleansing of a single Farm.  I was ordered to cleanse the Farm, and that was what I did. Or at least, it was until I came across the body of a boy who’d been badly burned. His skin was charred black from the heat of the flames, and when I reached down to touch him his body collapsed into a pile of dust.  For the first time I looked around at what we were doing, and for the first time I realized it was wrong. There was no dramatic moment where everything changed in an instant, no sudden revelation or anything like that. What happened was much quieter than that.

 

I had been sent out to kill, to destroy, and that’s what I did.  The ones left were the weak, the sick, the old and infirm, and the younger children.  They welcomed us at first, and that made killing them easy, but they caught on fairly quickly and put up a fight.  Once the deed was done I crept around and eliminated the last of my patrol group, ensuring their bodies were completely destroyed.  After that I used the body of one of the older children, one who’d been stabbed, to make it look like he’d been responsible for destroying the patrol.  Then, in a final desperate bid, I cloaked my energy signature and ran.

 

The tale says I hunted down the Emperor’s bases and attacked them.  That I would free the children on whatever Farm I came across. If only that were true.  Whenever I had the misfortune to stumble across a patrol, I had to destroy them all or else risk getting destroyed myself.  And I never risked my own existence by freeing children from a Farm. My whole goal was to stay as far under the Emperor’s radar as I could.  Attacking a Farm, destroying a base, ravaging a patrol… All of it would have created far too much attention.

 

It was pure chance I managed to learn about the Emperor’s time travel experiments.  I had fled from one patrol group and ended up neatly trapped between them and another.  I had to hide somewhere my energy trail would be unremarkable, and so I followed the river back into the hills, looking for a place that was more dead than alive.  I stumbled across a path that was marked with numerous energy trails. I chose to follow the path upwards, towards where the trails were freshest, on the assumption that the patrol wouldn’t follow me.  And that was when I saw it.

 

A massive gray concrete block built upon a cliff, and guarded so well that they knew I was coming before I knew they were there.  Thankfully they assumed I had been sent up as an assistant for one of the scientists, and with two patrol groups hot on my tail I wasn’t about to disabuse them of the notion.  I was taken inside and escorted to the man I would be helping.

 

The story says I attacked the place and destroyed it.  Again, wrong. I stayed there for three months learning at the side of the scientist I was meant to be helping.  I learned the truth about the experiments they were doing, the attempts they were making to create a bridge in time.  I learned about the way they had developed a method of absorbing knowledge from others, and how they would have the most promising of Johns and Janes brought to them for study.  I learned they were a group of men with no conscience, with no qualms and no morals. All they had was loyalty. Loyalty to the man to whom they’d brokered their souls.

 

Once I realized what it was they were researching, I realized I had my chance to put an end to the Emperor.  My father had told me stories, stories about a man from before his time, a powerful man called the Lunatic Slayer, who had been killed before the Emperor’s rise to power.  He was considered the most powerful man who’d ever lived, more powerful even than the Emperor himself. If I could travel in time, stop that man from being killed, he would be alive to face the Emperor, and could destroy him.  It took me another three months, months of planning, of hiding what I was thinking, of helping in their horrid research, planning for every possible outcome. I knew the only way to succeed would be to make it look like the research was too dangerous.  That no matter what anyone tried, it would be doomed to failure. And that one person’s ambition pushed them to lie to the Emperor about the feasibility of time travel. I had to create a year’s worth of notes, tying the blame to the man I’d been helping.  I had to quietly requisition what I’d need to destroy the majority of the building, and then I had to find a way to keep the guards away while I did what needed to be done.

 

In the end, everything worked as I’d planned.  The arrival of a patrol group delivering fresh material provided all the distraction I needed.  I disguised myself as one of the guards, and purposefully left the gate on the kennel unlatched.  The prisoners kept there were able to flee the compound, their escape providing me with a much needed distraction.  While the guards were all busy trying to chase down and round up the scattered, fleeing test subjects, I was able to draw and confine the scientists I had spent the last six months working for.  Everyone I thought might have the slightest idea of how time travel was done I absorbed, and when it was over scattered the notes I’d spent months writing all over the place and blew up the lab.

 

The guards returned, confused when they came back to find the building a flaming ruin.  I had befriended a couple of the other aides during my time there, and the three of us stumbled together out of the wreckage.  I had been careful over the last six months to gradually adjust my appearance, so that I would not resemble the young soldier who’d been a part of that destroyed patrol group all those months ago.  The guards gathered us up, no longer interested in the stock that had been sent to us, and their leader questioned us on what had been going on. I stuck to my story: that the man I had been helping had been acting strangely, distant and uncommunicative whenever questioned on his actions, and that he’d disappeared right before everything went wrong.  The others didn’t have enough information to be able to contradict me, and when the other guards returned from the ruined labs with a few of the notes I’d laboriously created, all three of us were able to confirm the handwriting matched that of the scientist I was blaming this all on.

 

When the Emperor’s soldiers arrived they separated all of us, and I spent the next month undergoing the most intense questioning I’ve ever experienced in my life.  After a month of being asked repeatedly what had happened, and my only ever giving the same answer, it was finally decided to accept the version of events that had been presented.  The Emperor’s right hand, a man everyone called Scourge, came to see me the last day I was there. He kicked everyone out of the room I was being kept in, and began to question me about the research.  He wanted to know what I knew, how much, and if I knew why the research was being done. I played dumb. I knew only what the scientist had told me, that the research being done was important and ground-breaking, and that it would lead him to glory.  I don’t know if he believed me or not, but they released me later that day, with orders to report to a Judge for reassignment.

 

I know they were watching me.  They had to have been. But I had planned too well, and I knew how I would make my escape.  When one enters the audience chamber of a Judge, there is a tiny anteroom, almost like a passageway, between the outside and the chamber within.  Usually only a few feet, it was meant as a waiting room, but it wasn’t designed to fit more than two people at a time. I knew that passageway was my only chance to escape, and I took the knowledge I’d gleaned from the scientists I’d absorbed and I used it to open a gateway to travel back in time.

 

The rest, as they say, is history.