The silence was the loudest damn thing. It screamed in Eli's ears, a terrifying emptiness after a lifetime of explosions, shouts, and always being on guard. The facility's soft hum, the quiet footsteps of the staff, their gentle-sounding chimes – it was all just too quiet, too clean, too… peaceful.
Over the next few days, the answers came. They gave them with a calm, detached empathy that only made Eli more confused. He found out the year: 2525. He learned about the Great Peace, a worldwide stop to all fighting that started centuries ago. "Humanity just… got it," Aris Thorne, the calm woman with hair like moonlight, explained. Her voice had zero judgment. "We figured out that fighting all the time wasn't going to work. So we chose to move past it".
Eli scoffed. It was a rough, jarring sound in the quiet room. "Move past it? You just… stopped fighting?" He tried to sit up, his muscles still complaining. "What about the enemy? What about the… the war?"
Aris blinked, her pale blue eyes still calm. "There isn't an 'enemy,' Sergeant Stone. Not anymore. There haven't been any 'wars.' Not for over three hundred years".
Disbelief fought with a weird relief in Eli's gut. Three hundred years? His whole world, his battles, his reason for being, wiped clean. Replaced by this impossible quiet. He looked at his own scarred hands, the calluses, the faint web of old shrapnel marks. They were a soldier's hands, a survivor's. Here, they just felt wrong, totally out of place.
He was in this huge, high-tech place, part hospital, part living museum. He learned he was the only one who'd woken up successfully from a deep cryo-vault found under an old battlefield. "You're a first," one of the staff said, their voice soft. "A living record of a time humanity consciously decided to leave behind".
A living record. A relic. The words bounced around his head. He wasn't a hero, wasn't a soldier. He was a specimen, a ghost from a barbaric time. He tried to ask about his unit, his family, how the war ended. They gave him data, not comfort. Clean, cold data: casualty numbers, how countries shifted, resource reallocations. Just statistics. No mention of the dust, the fear, the screaming.
The more they explained, the more alone he felt. This place, with its spotless surfaces and its quiet, gentle people, felt more hostile than any battlefield. Because here, there was no fight left for him. Just the unbearable, roaring silence.