The jolt had disconnected me from the robot body. I now sat in my wheelchair, nowhere near the death-training warehouse or the robot body that had just been delivering information to my brain. The bot-pack was still plugged in to my spine. What I saw was another windowless room, filled with large, clear cylinders that contained a dark jelly. Two of these 23 cylinders were empty except for the dark jelly. But each of the other cylinders held one kid about my age, with the dark jelly holding them in place. Wires and tubes ran from the ceiling down into the jelly cylinders, connecting to the skulls and arms of each kid. Other tubes removed their body wastes. Only their heads appeared above the jelly. Although their eyes and ears were covered with contoured wax, these kids weren’t dead. Only unconscious to the activities around them in this room. All of them were trapped. Permanently. In 24-hour-a-day life-support systems. These were the kids running the soldier robots. The kids who had been ordered to kill, kill, kill!
