My muses are unkind

Sorta shit-swamped work-wise. But in-between work and play, sketched out a rough draft of something interesting :

3rd Mechanised Infantry battalion, 4th Platoon of the Malaysian Army, RMAF.

2209pm 17th Feb 2048

Border patrol sucks. You sit in the jungle, guarding some patch of nowhere with no name except a GPS point, waiting for some smuggler just stupid enough to stumble into your piquets. Or some Thai separatist para-military gun runner. In which case you hope they start shooting, if only to relieve the sheer bone-crushing boredom.

There's noone else around for at least 10 km. Well, noone else apart from your squadmates, but they're a bunch of <expletive>.

Flies, leeches, mosquitoes, other assorted invertabrates, an antsy sergeant just waiting to crawl up your ass at the slightest provocation. And has anyone mentioned the rain? Its the height of the monsoon season. Sure, teflon-kevlar web-vests and full body suits reduce bullet penetration, but it gets hot and itchy and damp in <12 cubic centimetres> of effing rain!

Its not helping that the ethernet 'ceiver is down, and the squad mech-head is 'still' fiddling with the MBP.

Join the Army, they said. See the world, pick up some skills, get some creds.

Sigh. A kingdom for a working 'Net 'ceiver. The jungle was 'really' spooky.

The small clearing they've appropiated as Home Base was silent, save for the hiss-crackle of static from the vidscreen and the near-inaudible cursing of Corporal Chen, seated by it.

Across the clearing, Sergeant Azman, face lit by the harsh actinic glow of the LLED clipboard display in his large hands, sat conversing with Pvt Raf, the squad's mech-junkie, in tones too low to carry. Her hands, what he could see of them in the twilight gloom, were elbow-deep in the rear nerve bundles of the MBP.

Soft snapping sounds signalled the return of Private's Jason and Ariff from piquet duty, the former's dusky skin tone making him near invisible in the low light. Hands moving animatedly, talking shit like usual.

Tending the fire, silent commentary done, Private First Class Keong.

Finally, taking up the whole north corner of the clearing, the dappled green bulk of MBP 43-117, twin NN engines idling gently, shifting weight slightly from foot to foot to maintain zero equilibrium.

Welcome to the 4th. And all of the enlisted here were no older than 21.

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. . .The food and fuel crisis of the early years of the century changed the world. Yes, it checked the rampant usage of fossil fuels and caused an influx of capital into agriculture. On a global level, humanity was learning to be a sustainable species.

But on a more human level, the destabilisation of the global economy left millions hungry. And the high price of oil excarbated the situation; thousands of companies either consolidated, liquidated, or merely disappeared. The world unemployment rate was at a never-before seen high.

Every major city in the world was rocked with riots; Bangladesh, Jakarta, New York. And Kuala Lumpur was no exception. So severe were the riots that the Malaysian Territorial Army had to be moved in and a state of martial law was imposed, the first time since the Communist Emergency. . .

-excerpt from Tun Daim Zainuddin's opening speech ,University Malaya, 12th June 2010-

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