Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Stewart-Benning Training Center, Earth, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Awwww….coooom,” Coop grunted as the man wrenched his jaw back and forth while peering into his mouth.

The dental tech didn’t pay him any mind as he went about his business, and as far as Coop could tell, the slight man’s business was being a pain in the ass. Or in this particular instance… mouth. Coop hadn’t thought there would be this much fuss in the recruiting corps. He was used to inspections on his LACS armor by GYSGT Cunningham and the SGM, but wasn’t used to such close inspections of him. As long as he was good to go, ready to fight, and didn’t have medical flags that was all that mattered. Now, these recruiters were taking things to a whole new level.

The dental tech pulled what looked like a pistol from his table of torture devices and smiled sweetly as Coop. “You’re going to feel a slight pinch,” was the only warning before pain flared across Coop’s upper gums.

“Awwww…son of a…” the restrains holding his jaw in place were sturdy, and all attempts to bite down against the fire spreading through his mouth was futile.

“You’re not the worst I’ve seen today,” the tech slid his chair back and removed his sterile gloves. “I keep telling your infantry bosses that it would be better to get this out of the way during Basic, but no,” he waved his hands around as he tossed the gloves into a bin where nanites broke them down to a molecular level for eventual recycling. “They complain about costs and wanting to make you fighters rather than consider proper dental hygiene.”

Coop remembered the two minutes he’d spent in the dentist’s chair during Basic. The people running the training school were only concerned with a soldier’s dental health as far as it not being an impediment to performing their duties. As long as they could fight and kill the enemy, CAPTs and ADMs didn’t care if a grunt had a jacked-up set of chompers. Unlike the commanders of fighting men, the recruiting corps desperately cared about the appearance of their recruiters, and step one of that was a perfect, white smile.

Coop’s smile wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t perfect either. He had a small gap between his upper two teeth and a slight overbite. Those were deficiencies that needed correcting.

As the burning started to subside, he relaxed. The tech slid back over and sprayed another round of nanites into his mouth. Coop didn’t know if these were to set any changes or help with the whitening process. He was just glad the pain had ebbed.

“No solids for the next twenty-four hours. I’ve put a medical profile in the systems so you can’t trick the food fabricators. If you mess this up before it sets you’ll be back here tomorrow. If you’re back here tomorrow then you don’t get anesthetic. Believe me, you don’t want that. Next!” He prodded Coop in the shoulder to get him out of the chair and pointed toward a curtain leading to the next station.

A MSG stood just outside the curtain. He had to stand on his tiptoes to grab Coop by the chin and get a look at his teeth. “Good enough. Proceed.” The man waved Coop forward and into the next partitioned section where a barber was waiting for him.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Coop mumbled, but did as he was told and took a seat.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything but a high and tight. As a Rat you didn’t have a lot of water to wash your hair, and in a fight, long hair was a liability. Getting yanked to the ground by the back of the head and stomped was the only lesson anyone needed on that subject. He’d worn it short for so long it was like looking in the mirror at a stranger as the barber coaxed the hair to life and grew it to shoulder length in a few minutes.

“Hold still,” the man had a hard edge to his voice as the mirror Coop was looking into blinked and scanners activated.

They mapped his face and ran it against multiple databases. It took into account where he would be recruiting, fashion trends in that section of the Commonwealth, and any local celebrities or icons that would have the best chance of influencing young men and women to join the Commonwealth’s armed forces. The recruiters wanted Coop to look like them as much as possible, because hundreds of years of human history told them that people would always do what beautiful, famous people said. Even if those people didn’t know what they were talking about. The search took a few seconds and ended with a beep.

“Hold still,” the barber repeated as he brought over what looked like a combat helmet. Once it was in place, Coop felt bussing and a tingling sensation as the machine went to work on his skull.

It was finished in under a minute, and the barber popped it off. After a close examination, and a few snips of old-school scissors, Coop was finished. The whole process, start-to-finish, had taken under three minutes. With over a hundred future recruiters to get through in this class alone, the cadre knew how to manage their time.

“Hubba hubba,” Camila gave a whistle as Coop stepped through the curtain separating the barber and an open space filled with chairs. “Lookin’ fine, Cooper.”

“You look like…what’s that guy’s name?” Bill scratched his head. His hair was just a bit longer and combed over to one side. It made him look better, which was the whole point. “He always plays a cop.”

The comment sent an institutionalized shiver up Coop’s spine. Being compared with a pig, even a fictional one, didn’t sit well with him.

“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” he turned the attention away from himself and onto the big woman.

They’d grown out her hair and braided it. It looked like an effort to make her look more feminine which was only mildly successful. She still looked like she’d ground a regular guy’s bones to powder and use it to make bread. Bill said something to that effect and the gentle ribbing continued. Coop’s eyes swept the room of future recruiters and locked on the entrance. A familiar face entered that sent his heart racing.

Eve walked into the room with her same predatory grace, but her hair was longer than the buzzed head, or pixie cut, he was used to seeing. She had a short bob going on that had her golden hair spilling all the way down to her shoulders. It didn’t stay that was for long. A hair tie appeared in her hand and started to pull it back into a tight bun that highlighted her high cheek bones and sharp features. It was like a before and after picture for Coop. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but having her hair just a tad longer transformed her look enough that she practically glowed in his eyes.

he left it at that as she approached.

“You clean up pretty good,” she smiled at him. “You look like…”

“I know,” Coop waved off her commentary, and just in time.

A hurried looking LCDR burst into the room and headed directly for the small lectern at the front. The room snapped to attention but he waved them off. “We’re eight minutes behind schedule,” the man had a whiny voice that made Coop want to crush his windpipe to avoid hearing the man speak, “so I need to make this quick. Today we’ll be doing a practical exercise to familiarize yourself with the new IOR software.”

Coop groaned at the news. That had been most of their training recently. The IOR’s were linked into the recruiting corps’ central database that pulled data on potential recruits to help recruiters draw them in. The first time he saw it at work he was a little frightened about the Commonwealth’s information gathering abilities. When a recruiter looked at a potential recruit the facial analysis software went to work if they didn’t get an immediate view of the person’s GIC. Once their identity was confirmed, the information on the subject was downloaded to the IOR. It contained everything you would and wouldn’t want to know about an eighteen year old kid: academic profile, social media presence, streaming likes, unprotected medical data, favorite sports teams, and everything they ever searched on a search engine sorted and labeled by frequency. Hell, it even listed the porn sites they liked to visit if you dug deep enough in the data. Everything in the digital age was logged and categorized, and a recruiter had access to all of it. It made Coop cringe at what the HI recruiter had looked at when he saw Coop’s ragged ass sitting in his office.

he grunted. Their class was the guinea pig for the new data transfer system, and it wasn’t perfect yet.

“Each of you have an assignment waiting for you. These are sure things, people, so you can’t screw this up. Everything is going to be laid out for you. Just follow the script, lock them down for their contract, and move on. This is a pass-fail exercise, but we’ll also be grading you on speed. When you end up at bigger events and fairs, speed will be key to meeting your quotas.” The LCDR looked around expectantly. “Get to it!”

“Good luck,” Eve gave his had a quick squeeze and headed back toward the other NCOs.

The Officers and NCOs went first, but it wasn’t a long wait until Coop was stepping forward. “Room twenty-six,” the MSG who was overseeing all of this pointed to the right. Coop walked up to the door and looked in.

It was a two-way door. Coop could see in, but the recruit couldn’t see out. As Coop laid eyes on the kid, he felt a slight pressure and then data started to stream into his vision. He followed his training and went to the kid’s basic profile first.

Coop shook his head as he looked the kid over.

Stark was broad shouldered like most high school athletes from the burbs. He’d been born with a good genetic profile, had the proper training throughout his youth, and unlike Coop, had plenty to eat. A quick check of his family data said his mom was a school psychiatrist and dad worked as a defense contractor for Gold Technologies. This was a kid who’d grown up with everything Coop never had, and if he gave two shits about Ryan Stark, Coop would have let that influence his decision. He ultimately didn’t, because he had something Stark didn’t…experience.

he shook his head and pushed the door open.

“Sir,” Stark jumped to his feet and offered a shitty salute.

Coop cursed all the holo-movies that filled kids’ heads with bullshit. “Sit down. I’m not an officer. You don’t salute me or call me, sir.” He pointed to the two chevrons on his shoulder.

“Yes, sergeant,” Stark answered, and Coop bit his tongue to avoid ripping into the kid.

“Corporal,” he corrected calmly, and took the seat across from the kid. “So you want to be infantry?”

“Yes, ser…corporal,” Stark quickly corrected. “I want to serve my country, get my citizenship, and teach those murderous Blockies and backstabbing Windsor’s that…”

Coop held up his hand to stop the kid. He didn’t need the all the ra-ra from a kid who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Thankfully, Stark shut up while Coop continued to peruse his file. The problem was things didn’t add up.

The kid’s preferences were for a Core or Mid-World post, which wasn’t in keeping with all the boasts about taking it to the enemy. Even more important, there was no way the kid was going to get it. What Coop should have done was give the kid a pat on the back, have him sign the papers, and then give him a swift kick in the ass and let Basic sort him out and crush his dreams.

Looking at a kid who’d been given everything he never had was almost enough reason to do it. Coop gave a sigh and mentally swiped all the kid’s data out of his vision. “You’re saying here you want a premium post and a shot at selection for one of the R&S services.”

“Yes, Corproal.” Coop caught how the kid’s eyes drifted to his SRRT badge and fought back a smile before bringing down the hammer.

“Stark, we’re currently in a two-front war. Sure, all is quiet on the eastern front for now, but sooner or later the Blockies and Windsor’s are gonna find their dicks again and come back swinging. There is zero chance you are going to get a Core Worlds post. You might get a Mid-World station, but you’ll probably need an additional service oblication to even be considered. That means eight instead of four years of service, and the bean counters at some HQ somewhere can always turn you down for needs of the service. You won’t owe the eight years, but you’ll be stuck in the ass end of nowhere for the four.” Stark’s face fell with every word that come out of Coop’s mouth. “Selection is a carrot they’re dangling in front of you. Only a small percentage are chosen for selection, almost none of that just out of Basic. You might get your chance most of the way into your contract after you’ve lived through some shit, but by that time you might want out.” The kid looked like Coop had taken a steaming dump on his life plan. “My advice for you, young Stark, is to go for a navy contract with the selection rider. This way you’ll get some time in uniform to see if you like it. Ships are like floating cities, and with the new state-of-the-art ones coming off the line you’ll be living large and able to move through Commonwealth space. If you’re a grunt, you’ll be stuck on a dust ball and that’s that. If you like fleet, you can do selection for SAS, SEALs, or SRRT if that option is open to you.” Coop opened his hands as he finished the educational lesson on how the military bureaucracy worked. “What’ll it be,” he added a perfectly white smile to the end of his spiel.

He walked out of the room a few minutes later with a signed navy contract for Ryan Stark with a selection rider before his term of service was up. He hadn’t made it five meters before the MSG was on him like stank on shit.

“What the hell was that, Cooper?” the MSG tried to get up in his face like a drill sergeant, but the intimidation factor was lost when he barely reached Coop’s pecs.

“I got my contract, Master Sergeant,” he replied innocently.

“You turned an infantry sure things into a fleet contract, Cooper. How did you fuck that up? We lobbed you an easy one and you whiffed.”

“I got the contract, Master Sergeant,” Coop repeated.

“You fucked up our quota is what you did. Why did you go filling that kid’s head with your bullshit?”

“I simply laid out the most likely situation for how his contract would play out. Are you suggesting I should lie to the recruit, Master Sergeant?” There were some times that Coop loved the IORs and how they made nothing private anymore.

The smaller NCO’s face went beet red and a vein pulsed dangerously in his head. “Sometimes the information we possess is need to know and what we need to do is execute what is in the best interest of the service.” The NCO chose his words carefully.

“Quality over quantity, Master Sergeant,” Coop gave the NCO a smile.

“Get out of my face, Cooper!” the MSG roared, and Coop beat a hasty retreat.

The smile stayed with him as he returned to the room with the other recruiters. He’d thought this whole recruiter gig was going to be nothing but a pain in the ass. Now, he saw a way he might actually do some good while stuck here.

The worst they could do was give him a sub-par evaluation.

He could live with that if he got the right people in the right places. He didn’t want someone unworthy fighting beside him. That was a good way to get good people killed. That was what the MSG’s quotas were overlooking. One man in the right place at the right time was better than a dozen who didn’t belong there.