Everyone in This War Is Already Dead

Chapter 3

The silence that followed the soldier’s accusation was not empty; it was a physical weight, a suffocating shroud that seemed to pull the oxygen from the room. Aderic stood motionless, the ambient hum of the command console’s cooling fans sounding like a death knell in his ears. Around him, the other soldiers shifted, their armor clanking with the sound of hollow metal. They were waiting. They were expectant, as if Aderic possessed some divine ledger that could reconcile their impossible lives.

Commander Morcant broke the spell. She stepped between Aderic and the soldier who had approached him. "Back to your stations," she ordered, her voice sharp as a razor. "This is a command deck, not a morgue. Dismissed."

The soldiers retreated, their movements sluggish and disjointed, like puppets whose strings were fraying. The man who had spoken, however—the one who had claimed to have buried Aderic—lingered. He looked at the Commander, then at Aderic, his eyes glistening with a haunting, glassy moisture.

"I’m sorry, sir," the man whispered, catching Aderic’s gaze for a fleeting, terrifying second. "I didn't mean to crowd you. It’s just been a long time since we saw someone... someone who still had the color of life in his eyes."

Aderic forced his throat to swallow. "What’s your name?"

"Tomas Rell, Lieutenant," the man replied, standing at a rigid, archaic attention.

"Rell," Aderic said, his voice barely audible. "We’ll talk later. Go."

As the last of the soldiers filtered out into the gloom of the barracks, Aderic turned back to the terminal. His hands were shaking so violently he had to grip the edge of the metal desk to steady them. He wasn't a soldier; he was a clerk. He was a man of cold, binary certainties. He needed to find the logic in this insanity before the adrenaline caused his heart to shatter.

"He’s right about one thing," Morcant said, moving to the periphery of the console. She didn't look at him; she was staring at the flickering display of a map that showed only static and dead zones. "They remember their deaths. All of them. Most of them try to talk about it for the first week. Then, they stop. They realize that talking doesn't bring the heat back to their blood."

Aderic didn't respond. He had already bypassed the local encryption. He was diving into the deepest layer of the sub-server, the one labeled 17th Battalion: Post-Mortem Manifests. If he was going to be here, he needed to know what the machine considered them to be.

"You’re searching for your own file again, aren't you?" Morcant asked, her voice devoid of judgment.

"I’m searching for the truth, Commander," Aderic snapped, his focus narrowing until the rest of the room blurred out of existence.

He accessed a sub-directory, a hidden archive protected by a biometric handshake. He used his thumb, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The system shivered, a cascade of green text flooding the holographic display. He pulled up the personal history of Tomas Rell.

There was no birth date. No childhood residence. No enlistment record from the capital. The file began on the 14th of September—the same day Aderic’s death certificate was dated. It recorded the casualty at the Orvain Bridge.

Aderic scrolled down, his eyes widening. The file was a real-time transcript of an interrogation, or perhaps a psychological audit. He opened the audio log.

“State your status,” the voice of an unseen interviewer commanded.

“I’m cold,” Rell’s voice sounded on the recording, young and terrified. “I can’t feel my legs. I was crossing the bridge, there was a blast, and then... nothing. I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“You are currently transitioning, Rell. The Ministry provides. You will be re-integrated into the 17th. You are not dead. You are a resource.”

Aderic pulled his hand back as if the interface had burned him. He looked toward the barracks, where the shadows seemed to pulse with a life that shouldn't have been there. They were resources. They weren't soldiers serving a cause; they were a logistics anomaly that the Ministry had decided was cheaper to reanimate than to replace.

"They just... wake up?" Aderic whispered.

"They wake up in the mud," Morcant said, her eyes fixed on the distant, frozen horizon. "Sometimes it takes hours. Sometimes weeks. They think they’re waiting for orders to fall back, but the orders never come. They just wait. They guard a wall that stopped mattering ninety years ago because the system forgot to send the termination signal."

Aderic felt a surge of cold, sharp anger. It was the anger of a bureaucrat whose files had been tampered with. It was an affront to the sanctity of the record. He wasn't just investigating a ghost story anymore; he was investigating a crime of massive, structural proportions.

He moved to the next file, digging deeper, ignoring the warning sirens flashing in the periphery of his vision. He needed to know who was running this. Who was authorized to keep an army of the dead in a loop?

He opened the master ledger, the most restricted file in the sector. It wasn't a digital document; it was a scanned image of a physical, leather-bound book, updated through an automated scanning rig.

His eyes scanned the entries—the rations, the ammunition, the fuel. Everything was logged with perfect, terrifying accuracy. Then, his eyes caught a bolded, underlined entry at the bottom of the current page.

ADVISORY NOTICE: ALL RE-INTEGRATED PERSONNEL ARE TO BE KEPT IN A STATE OF ONGOING OPERATIONS.

Aderic scrolled down. His breath hitched.

NOTE: THE DEAD MUST NEVER BE INFORMED THAT THEY ARE DEAD. THE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE RESULTING FROM THE REVELATION OF NON-EXISTENCE LEADS TO SYSTEMIC COLLAPSE OF THE UNIT. IF AN INDIVIDUAL DISCOVERS THEIR STATUS, THEY ARE TO BE IMMEDIATELY RE-CATEGORIZED AS ‘SCRAP’ AND DISPOSED OF THROUGH THE INCINERATOR PIPES.

Aderic’s fingers hovered over the terminal. Below that, in a fresh, digital ink that looked suspiciously like his own handwriting, was a final order.

‘Audit Officer 88-492-V: If target attempts to access, terminate observation and initiate standard purge.’

The room suddenly felt very small. The hum of the terminal seemed to grow, turning into a high-pitched whine that resonated in his teeth.

"Aderic?" Morcant asked, stepping closer. "What is it? What did you find?"

Aderic looked at her. He saw the flicker of hope in her eyes—the hope that he, as the man who signed the papers, could sign their release. But he knew now that the release was the incinerator.

He slowly reached out and closed the file, his movements fluid and rehearsed. He projected a calm, detached expression, hiding the terror that threatened to rupture his composure. If he let them know he knew, he wouldn't make it out of the room. He had to be the clerk. He had to be the machine.

"Nothing, Commander," Aderic said, his voice eerily steady. "Just a routing error. A ghost in the ledger. It’s exactly as Miller said back at the office. Just a glitch in the software."

He stood up, his joints popping. He grabbed his gear, his movements crisp and professional. He didn't look at the barracks, didn't look at the soldiers waiting for a word of salvation. He looked only at the exit.

"I’m going to need to head back to the capital," Aderic continued, keeping his gaze neutral. "I have to report this discrepancy in person. It’s deeper than I thought."

Morcant stared at him for a long moment, her hand resting on her hip. For a second, he thought she could see the truth written in his sweat, the way his pulse was fluttering at his throat. Then, she gave a stiff, tired nod.

"Safe travels, Clerk," she said. "If you find the people responsible... tell them the 17th is still holding the line. That’s all they need to know."

Aderic didn't look back. He walked out of the command deck, his boots ringing against the cold steel floor, leaving the dead to their unending, duty-bound vigil. He had the truth in his mind, but it was a truth that had already marked him for the incinerator. And as he stepped out into the freezing, soot-stained air of the Northern Front, he knew one thing for certain: he would never be allowed to go back to the office.

The ghost wasn't just

in the ledger anymore. The ghost was walking, and it was running out of time.