Period : Post Land War. Year : 2023 AD second. Time : 05:30 Place : Police Station

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I check myself at the entrance of the police-station right on time.

My first entrance through the front door rather than through the back.

It should feel better yet it doesn't. On the streets or here, it's all the same. The sideway glances, the weird gestures and whispers.

I ignore all of that as I walk to my desk, waving at everyone with my hand. The one with the shiny new bracelet.

I'd been the first and only cop without an implanted bracelet. Well, not anymore, but I'm not kidding myself, it won't make me any closer to the others.

My past bothers them.

Scares them.

They're always tensing up when political subjects, or the war per se, are brought in a conversation and I happen to be around. They're wary of my reaction. Wary of their words.

If anything they're wary of me.

I am a liability. A ticking bomb maybe. They've seen what happens when an ex-soldier looses his shit, it was all over the news a few weeks ago : eight victims and a suicide, and of course now they can't help but think about what would the numbers be if it had happened to ME.

If I ever lost my temper on them.

Or on a suspect.

Or worse : on a victim.

I'd already been strapped on the surgery table a few weeks ago when the ex-soldier, Jonas Ribaud, had "gone rampage" as the media later stated it. Had I been available, I think I might have been sent on site. Who better than an ex soldier to take down a fellow one ? Or maybe not. Maybe they'd have have felt like I could have lost my temper too like it was a freaking transmissive virus or a disease. I don't know.

By the time I'd been walking out of the clinic, throwing up bile and contorted by the pain, the situation had ended, images being broadcasted on every screen. Right then I had known it would change people's behavior toward me.

Next morning, dizzy and throbbing with pain, I'd walked in the station under the hostile stares and avoiding glances of my colleagues with the distinct feeling some of them wanted nothing more than to tie me down like a dangerous beast.

That had somehow decided me to look at the case, even if it had already been branded "closed".

Jonas Ribaud, twenty eight, beloved husband and father of two, had served a year and six months before coming home, taking back his old job in a small facility. Loved, respected, no record. Described as easy-going, calm, attentive and careful. One morning he'd snapped though, and he had left eight victims in his wake, unfortunately using in very creative ways everything his facility could offer in means of lethality before meeting face to face with two police officers. Jonas had stolen the gun from one of them and pulled a bullet into each of their heads before blowing his own skull.

All of that without any kind of explanation.

And entirely under the facility's cameras.

Three workers had made it out alive by locking themselves in a closet when they'd heard the screams. They were all the facility had left now.

I couldn't imagine what it was like for them.

Or for the families.

I hadn't found it in me to look at the footage, unlike my colleagues and the vast majority of the population who seemingly got high looking up and commenting that kind of things on the live-feed of their bracelets.

The medias had thrived with that case, arguing about the dangerosity of leaving ex-soldiers "free to roam the streets".

The investigation had concluded on a psychosis episode but couldn't determine any particular trigger.

As far as the investigation team was concerned it could be summed up as « Shit sometimes happens ». They didn't want to dwell on a case where everything was so clear and where the culprit had already been executed, even if it was by his own hand.

Case closed, they said.

Until the next one, the media's retorted.

Now everyone at the station thinks I'm gonna be the next in line because, as far as I know, there's no other ex soldier in the area to be worried about.

And the worst is this : there's nothing I can say or do to appease them. Nothing will ever prove that I won't, one day, snap, because that can precisely happen to anybody. Even to them.

Soldier or not, every human being can snap under pressure one day.

Except none of them ever spent spent five years abroad learning one hundred ways to kill. That's what they think I did.

Jonas hadn't served for two years and only as a supplies transport driver. That tended to sound a lot less dangerous than special force foot soldier trained in recon and close combat I guess. I'd been serving in what the medias here called "the marching killers" and the "death squads".

Of course they'd think the numbers would be worse with me loosing my mind.

I can almost hear my colleagues wondering "what kind of a man signs up for a military career in a soldier-less country?" War was far away then and it didn't even involve our own nation so why? I had to be "a kind of psycho who got his kicks only from violence".

That's literally a quote I'd heard around the corner of the station.

I can't forget it.

I try to stop thinking about all of that as I reach my desk and pull my jacket onto my chair, trying not to put a face onto that voice I heard then. My computer's screen turns on automatically at my approach, showing up a report demand sent by the system concerning a case I had worked on yesterday. That's new to me. Something I owe to the bracelet. Until now, I had a special derogation allowing me to fill all of my case files on a small typing device that had been handed to me.

I guess that was the end of it.

I took the device and my paper files out of my backpack, reading all of it again to get the details back in my head. I'd been called on a robbery involving guns that had turned out to be a shoot-out between rival gangs. There had been a few exchange upon my arrival, mostly hits, and I had arrested four people, sent three to urgent medical care and one inside a body bag.

Reading it, I can't help but pull the file on the desk and lift my head to look around, thinking about that fucking sentence again.

One of my colleagues, a young brunette, catches my eyes and quickly looks away, calling out to her partner, a muscled man who, in turn, looks at me but stares hard.

I guess they already know about that case too. At the station, no one need the reports to know anything. Rumors spread fast. I break eye contact and look at my file again, my cheeks flushing with emotions.

Yes, I know violence.

From very up close.

I am at ease with it thanks to a complicated childhood I wish I never had. I can deal with violence eye to eye without blinking. Yeah. But that doesn't mean I like to. That doesn't mean I ever wanted to.

What was I supposed to do ? Let the wanna-be gangsters kill each other in the middle of the neighbourhood and pick up the bodies and the casualties once everything was over ? Waiting for reinforcement and sleeping gas would probably have lowered the casualty number on the station's side, but it would have exposed everyone else in that street for longer, thus growing the casualty number on their side instead. I had to move fast and I'd done it. Even if it meant breaking bones, increasing the percentage of violent arrest for the station, it still felt better than to let the percentage of street violence growing, aka : pick up handful of bodies after the fight.

Can't they understand that ?

I didn't have much say in any of this.

Years ago the choice for me had been as follow : be a burden to the people who took me in as family or set sails far away while trying to be of use in another country.

All I had asked was "Where do I sign ?"

It hadn't mattered to me at the time that I could have been injured or killed. What had mattered was to put as much distance as I could between me and the Macgowells so that I would never ever bring them into trouble again. I know it was me running away from everything, from my past, from myself, afraid that I could fail.

Afraid that I could BE a failure.

I just hadn't seen any other way to redeem myself then.

Dying would only have been proof that I didn't deserve living.

I shudder at the thought.

« Quit staring, we haven't built telepathic-controlled computer yet. It's useless to try. »

I snap my head up. Donal, a 6'5 ft tall man for something like 250 pounds of muscle and bones stands beside me, sling bag over his barrel chest, looking at my screen with his warm brown eyes, where my report still waits to be filled in.

« That report won't fill itself, boss. »

He smiles despite his reprobative tone and I find myself smiling back.

I do have at least one friend in this.

And it really helps.