The Man Who Would Be Nyder

Chapter 1: Birth

He looked like any other newborn baby, red and wrinkled. He bawled at the touch of cold air, and again at the touch of gloved hands. The doctor in attendance clamped and cut the umbilicus, counted to make sure he had the correct number of toes and eyes and limbs, and then bitterly thought to himself that the kindest thing to do would be to dash the baby's brains out against the wall.

Instead, he handed the baby off to be cleaned and wrapped, and then turned to the unconscious body of the mother to monitor the expulsion of the afterbirth. Her heartbeat was strong: she'd survived the delivery, and could be taken back to the Kaled Infant Production Room, to let the drugs wear off. And then be drugged again, to prepare her for re-impregnation.

As was traditional, the baby boy would be nameless for three days: if he survived, the computer would choose a name for him. If the child was not physically perfect, it would not be fed or watered, which made it much more likely that it would not survive; then it or its body would be expelled from the Dome.

The baby survived to receive a name. There were thousands more names than there were baby boys to give them to, and tens of thousands of unused female names. If the baby had been female, that would have been special and notable - but another baby boy was routine.

After cross-checking the records of a thousand years' worth of war dead, the machine gave a name and number. Nyder 42018861.

After his naming, the next important thing that happened was his Testing. A silver metal cap was cupped over his bald head, and his infant body and brain were analysed. The machine tested DNA conformation, neuron potential, reflex speeds, and overall IQ: and it gave a surprising but welcome answer. Nyder was going to grow up to be a very intelligent man. Elite level, in fact; and his genes were pure. These facts were put onto his Birth record, along with his weight and name and number, and the record was properly filed. Nyder was moved into the Infant Elite Maintenance Room, given a full ration of liquid calories every day, and even touched on occasion.

Then disaster came. It came in the shape of a man, broad and ominous in Security Elite black. He went to the records room, and carefully looked for the records of six Elite boys: Eisel, Lett, Nyder, Marb, Borr, and Nettek. He substituted new paperwork for those six infants. The new papers were identical to the old, except instead of saying Elite, the babies' classifications were marked Standard.

Once that was done, the man in black had to physically move the six infants from the Elite room to one of the Standard rooms. He did this, and nobody lifted a hand to stop him. Nobody dared. One of the baby-tenders later muttered to a fellow worker that at least he hadn't taken the babies to the Bunker - and was shushed.

In the Standard room, Nyder and the other five babies cried and cried, their stomachs feeling real hunger for the first time in their lives. And instead of words and soft hands and a tube of warm wonderful food, they got a cold slap across their chests from a wet cloth.

They quickly learned not to cry. They would learn many things in the months and years to come. Even a Standard child had to learn some things.

* * *

He was taught to walk, and they immediately started teaching him to run. He learned to grasp: the first thing he ever held and picked up was a tiny replica of a gun.

They taught him speech. He learned to shout "Kill!" whenever he heard the word "Thal!" It wasn't his first word, but it was certainly one of the first. He learned to shout out his name and number on command:

"Nyder, 42018861!"

Nyder's world was the Children's Barracks, a world of black and white. White tile floors that he scrubbed a thousand times on hands and knees. Black bunks and black blankets and grey sheets that might have been white once - or black. The bunks were huge, twice as long as he was tall; adult-sized bunks. Metal boxes hanging from rods on the ceiling scanned constantly during the day: those were cameras, and the teachers could see through them somehow.

He grew up thin, all cheekbones and dark brows and bony wrists, and he grew up hungry. Not just for food: for answers. Always his mind watched and analysed and questioned everything around him. Why do we have to run all the time? Why isn't there enough clean water this week, and none of us can bathe? Who taught the teachers? Why are the Thals so bad, and why do we have to kill them?

His hunger for food was unfed; he got the same white food pills and chemical-tasting water as everyone else, but it was always barely enough to fill him. His hunger for knowledge got him only blows and humiliation when he dared to speak, to ask, to question. The teachers would make a game of it, mocking him in front of the other boys, giving false information mixed with true. And when he desperately tried to give the answer they wanted, they would snap, "If you're so clever, you can work it out for yourself." And then they would punish him, whether his answer was right or wrong, while the class jeered.

In time he learned to be silent, to swallow his questions, and to never let his feelings show. He sat obedient and quiet as the teachers explained about the war.

For a thousand years, the Kaleds and the Thals had been at war on the planet Skaro. The war had poisoned the earth and the water and the air; that's why the Kaleds lived in buildings sealed off by a great Dome. Without the Dome, the Thals would have slaughtered them all. But this generation of Kaleds would become soldiers so strong, so merciless and so skilled that they would destroy the Thals forever, once and for all, and win the war!

Nyder cheered when the teachers paused there, just like the other boys cheered. But inside, a part of his mind asked if the teacher hadn't repeated this before, many times. He had no real idea of how old the teachers were. He had never seen anything but children, and men with tired eyes and lines on their faces like across the palm of a hand. Were the teachers forty years old? A hundred? Who knew? Nyder wasn't even quite sure of how long a year was.

They taught him words, but not letters: any attempt to sound out the different squiggles that were a part of the Approved Words would earn him a cuff on the back of the head or worse. He spent an entire class session kneeling motionless with pens under his knees, the sharp plastic ridges grinding into his skin, for daring to try to write his own name before that lesson was on the schedule. The schedule was everything.

They taught him math, how to count to fifty and a hundred, but any numbers above that were sketchily described if at all. Nyder had to work out for himself how to count higher. He made up his own words for the greater numbers: ten-hundreds, ten-ten-hundreds. And he found himself completely fascinated by numbers that could not be divided by other numbers. Special numbers, numbers that stood alone and refused to be split.

Sometimes he would count the special numbers out to himself in his head, while enduring some endurance training session: two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, and on and on, as far as his mind could handle them. He once got as high as three hundred and eleven before a well-placed slap interrupted him.

He memorised endless orders, commands, rules, hand signals, radio signals, smoke signals, and listened to the sounds of a thousand explosions to be able to identify them: microwave cannon, muzzleloader, grenade, plasma grenade, plague grenade, land mine, leaping land mine, water detonation, mortar round, airbursts.

The children fought as part of their lessons. Sometimes it was in on the training floor, and the teachers would set one boy to fight another, or two others, or five, and stand there shouting and criticising until all the boys collapsed of exhaustion or injuries. Nyder learned how to fight when he was dizzy from lack of sleep, when he was parched with thirst, when he had broken ribs from a vicious kick to the side when he was down (the boy who delivered that kick got extra rations that night), when he was blindfolded, when he was woken from sound sleep.

Sometimes the children fought when there were no teachers. They fought over food, or bunk space, or insults and slights and misinterpreted glances: fought silent and fast, throwing each other down between the bunks in the sleeping areas. They had figured out that the cameras only started to move and to watch when someone stood up: so entire battles and wars were fought under the bunks, on the boys' knees.

Nyder fought, perhaps somewhat more than the others. He was a small boy, and small meant weakness, small meant being constantly pressured to give up things that Nyder wasn't strong enough to defend: his food, his blankets. So he fought, and he often lost. But he kept fighting.

No matter what, in any situation, he had to keep fighting. That was all.

* * *

There were guards at the Children's Barracks, great looming men cradling real guns that any of the boys would have given three meals to be able to touch. One day, a guard came for Nyder, and took him into a small room. In the room there was a plump man, not a teacher, someone Nyder had never seen before.

"Here's one, Administrator Nenno," the guard said.

"Thank you, you may go," said Nenno, gesturing as though brushing the guard away. He leaned forward in his chair, staring at Nyder.

Nyder stared back; he was used to being afraid of the teachers and the guards, but with this stranger he didn't know what to do. The man was wearing long white robes instead of the Teacher's blue coveralls; they swung a little when he stood up and stepped closer to Nyder. His arms were actually fat, and the skin under his chin bulged out when he tilted his face down and smiled.

"My, what a beautiful boy," he said.

"Really?" Nyder responded, and his eyebrows rose. Nobody had ever called him beautiful before. His eyes wandered openly over the man in front of him, too naïve to be afraid, and he completely misinterpreted the wider smile that this look called forth.

"Really," said Nenno, kicking Nyder as hard as he could between the legs. His fat hand clamped down on the boy's scream, and he began.

When the man was done, he knocked at the door and the guard opened it. Nyder watched, helpless on the floor, as a little glass bottle was handed to the guard.

"Clean him up," Nenno said to the guard, and then he turned back to the naked boy cringing on the floor, whose hands vainly tried to shield all his body from those terrible, merciless eyes surrounded by pink flushed skin.

"I'll be back," Nenno promised, and he was.

* * *

The training went on, and the fights, and the lessons. And the other thing. Nenno came at irregular intervals, so there was no telling when Nyder would feel the guard's hand on his shoulder that meant he had to go.

Nyder tried to think of something he could do, but there was nothing. He had never thought that there something wrong with children being struck by adults: after all, the teachers hit him all the time. Somehow though, what Nenno did was much worse. He thought of getting a weapon somehow, of fighting back: imagined pumping the man's fat rippling flesh full of bullets, or ramming a great sword right through him. But he had only play weapons, not real ones.

He couldn't ask anyone for help. He was all alone. And no matter what he did to try and make it easier, Nenno made it worse. He taught Nyder to do things that he didn't want to do, and no matter how hard he tried to do it right, Nenno always insisted that it was wrong, all wrong, too wet, too tight, not enough, filthy worthless rag of a boy, filthy, filthy! And then he hurt Nyder all the worse.

Nenno found that his preferred victim was a fastidious boy: it amused him to dirty him, rub his face in his own waste, soil him completely. Nyder was too humiliated to go to the doctor, so he would wash his body and his tainted wounds with the chemical mouthwash that sat in a big bottle in the washroom, and bandage himself with a spare shirt. The bite marks and scratches were deep and red and they hurt, across his shoulders, under his arms, between his legs.

The other children saw the marks of course, in the showers. They taught him the name 'boy-hunter', and told him that if he wasn't the target, one of them would be. Better him than them. They even suggested that he deserved to be hunted, somehow. If any of the teachers saw the marks, saw the way that Nyder would sit or slump or hold his arms out, trying to keep raw flesh from hurting more, they ignored it.

But the day came when Nenno stripped the shuddering boy before him- and frowned, rather than leered. He stared at the faint shadow of hair just starting to sprout across Nyder's upper lip and chest, at the slight broadening of his shoulders.

"Filthy," he hissed. "Filthy, hairy animal!" Then there were no more words; there was only punishment, screams of rage, blows and kicks. And teeth, tearing teeth, meeting in the boy's flesh, tearing and pulling away.

That wound could not be tended by Nyder; it wouldn't stop bleeding, no matter how hard he pressed on it. He did go to the doctor at last, but when he was asked "Who did this?" the muscles knotted in his jaw, and he went silent. Nenno had held him down with suffocating force and told him, blood dripping from his lips into his victim's face, exactly what he would do if Nyder told anyone.

The doctor looked at the bruised boy in front of him with emotionless eyes, and then went back to packing the wound where a nipple had been. The marks were too large to be from another child; and if it was an adult, then it was better not to get involved. He used scar minimising solution on the fresh wound; it was too late to use it on the other marks. Nyder would carry those curved bite scars on his shoulders and underarms for the rest of his life, barring some miracle of medicine.

And the next day, they took a blood sample from Nyder's arm, read the hormone results, and took him away from everything he had ever known.