Grunt Life Read Online Free PDF

interactions with it. We will also assess you for positions within the brigade we will be forming during Phase II. You will be expected to work, read and listen during these weeks and to conform to the schedule provided by your tablet.
    “While we understand that many of you have been through more than your fair share of combat, we ask you to give just a little more. Each and every one of you has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Many of you were eager to commit suicide. Still more of you had mentally checked out, reliving what had gone on before, until reality had no meaning. We offer you a new choice. We offer you new memories, a reality that has meaning, and for those of you still eager to kill yourself, a chance to do it for the greater good of humankind.
    “But that’s the worst-case scenario. We at Task Force OMBRA are working every day to learn more about the Cray, what they want with Earth, and how we can best defeat them. While the nations of our planet will fight them, you will be the world’s special brigade. Task Force OMBRA. Saviors of Earth.”
    The voice faded and the words WOULD YOU LIKE TO REPLAY OR CONTINUE? flashed on the screen.
    I stared at the screen for a moment. It was right out of a science fiction novel. We were being attacked and a rag tag group of men and women were Earth’s only hope. Only this wasn’t a novel, this was reality; and I was starring as a Star Trek redshirt at the end of humanity’s existence.
    I became aware of cursing and yelling from the neighbouring cells. I listened for a moment, then tried my best to tune them out. While there were dozens of voices of protest, most of us—me included—were too curious about why we’d been brought here and how we were supposed to help Earth.
    I contemplated how we were to be trained to use the top secret advanced weaponry necessary to help us defeat the aliens, then I paused. What led me to believe that an alien species might have military superiority just because it had interstellar travel? In Starship Troopers , the aliens were crude creatures who could hurl organic bombs from deep space. The romance of Star Wars had pre-loaded the idea that most space enemies would be humanoid in nature. For all I knew, the Cray were the shapes of dandelion cotton balls and could disintegrate anything they came in contact with.
    I looked at the bars separating me from the great room on the other side and shuddered. Jesus on a pogo stick. That was about the scariest fucking thing I’d ever thought of in my life—a scene of children playing in a field only to be blown apart when the wind picked up.
    I shook the image from my head and returned to the tablet. I’d been sitting on the edge of the bed. Now, I arranged the pillow and leaned against the wall, balancing the tablet on my knees. I was once again faced with the screen which read WOULD YOU LIKE TO REPLAY OR CONTINUE?
    “Continue.”
    It switched to a list of links. At the top of the page, it read WHAT WE THOUGHT WE KNEW with a subheading which read PRE-CRAY HYPOTHESES . Under these were several links. I tried them. Each had pages and pages of information, but I stayed only long enough to get the gist of each one. I’d never been terrific at science. My majors in high school had been football and track, so I soon found my head hurting with the presentation of advanced equations and ideas.
    There were the ZOO HYPOTHESES which posed the idea that an interstellar species would wait until a planet had discovered space travel for first contact.
    Also present was the FERMI PARADOX , which basically argued that if a space-faring species had the superior technology to cross great distances, Earth would have already been colonized.
    I read with interest the PALEOCONTACT HYPOTHESIS , also known as the ANCIENT ASTRONAUT HYPOTHESIS , which purported that Earth had been visited by intelligent beings in the past, pointing at ancient religious reliefs and such wonders as the Nazca Plains