"When I look down at the men and women before me, I see heroes." The President's voice was filled with pride, as he gazed out over our assembled ranks as we stood at crisp attention. Our navy-blue uniforms were creased to a dangerous edge, our heads were shaved a shining bald, and our faces were solemn and reverent, despite the glare of the setting sun in our faces. It was a beautiful moment, one crafted and shaped for the cameras, and broadcast to all the people of the Pan-American Dominion. The moment said "Hope" to them. It said, "Triumph" to them. To the President, it was the crowning moment of his career, the point where he had finished dragging the people of the American continents, back from the brink of destruction and showed the rest of the world, which was still putting itself back together, that the PAD would lead humanity into a bright new future. "In years past, we used the word ‘hero' to refer solely to the soldadesca. And though our brave soldiers were always, and continue to be heroes, today we have the opportunity to honor a new form of bravery." From beneath my uniform cap, I found the President's face with my eyes. He was everything people needed in a leader, a tall, charismatic leader, young enough to be handsome, but old enough to be wise. He wore the legacy of his extensive war experience in the burn scar that marred the left side of his honey-bronzed face, and, if you looked closely, twisted the skin of his hands. "Today, we send our bravest, our brightest, out into the stars, to make a way for humankind to follow. People of Pan-America, I give you the new frontiersmen, our especuladores, who will boldly go where no man or woman has gone before. May I be the first to offer a solemn salute to our heroes, the Formers!" The President snapped to attention behind his podium, and his right fist slammed over his heart. After a moment, in which the snapping and clicking cameras captured that moment of perfect patriotism, my classmates and I returned the salute, fists thumping into our chests in a dramatic echo of the President's gesture. The gathered, ethnically diverse crowd of P.A.D. citizens burst into applause at the exact right instant. It was the perfect moment of Pan-American pride, of patriotism, of victory in the face of the last decade of war. It would be plastered all over the news homepages, it would be written into the history books, it would be spoken of in hushed tones for the next hundred years… and it was all bullshit.

The ceremony ended as the sun lost its own bitter war with the horizon, and we filed back into the Foundation's open gymnasium, where, away from the cameras and reporters, we stripped out of our uniforms and hung them on the waiting racks, which had been wheeled in for this purpose. Beneath the uniforms, we were all wearing matching gray skintight jumpsuits, the elastic fabric of the clothes woven with nearly invisible wires and fabric circuits. A bored looking intern took inventory of the uniforms, which would undoubtedly be reused for the next class of Formers. She completely ignored the guileless attempts of several of my classmates to hit on her. I followed her lead when the attention of my horny classmates turned to me. We were going to be shot into space tonight, never to return to Earth. There wasn't a hell of a lot of a point in giving up the goods for any boy when he and I would both know there would be no tomorrow. Though, as I thought about it, maybe that was why a lot of the others were trying so hard. As the uniforms were carted away to storage, we were herded by even more aloof interns through the tunnels that connected the Foundation complex to the launch pad. We didn't need to stop to pick up our belongings because we weren't permitted to bring any. That would have just meant more weight, and where we were going, every gram was at a premium.

At the launch pad, we were packed like sardines into little, boxy, windowless shuttles, fifty at a time- an inglorious way of reaching the stars. Of course, contrary to the president's glowing words, nothing about the Foundation or the Formers was glorious. It wasn't intended to be. My classmates and I weren't the cream of the crop. Shit, we weren't even part of the usual crop. We were the chaff. Wards of the state, the young indebted, disgraced soldiers, even a few young criminals who had taken a Former contract instead of the short drop and sudden stop. We didn't have families, we didn't have lovers and we didn't have kids. The whole point was that we weren't going to be missed. The shuttle bucked beneath us and began climbing cables that stretched miles into the sky, slow at first, then faster and faster. I felt my stomach drop down into my toes, but I didn't get sick. Our bodies had been stuck full of all kinds of cybernetic hardware, and I was pretty sure I couldn't have gotten motion sickness even if I wanted to. After all, the Bullet would be worse. The ride lasted maybe an hour. We chatted about nothing, made gallows-jokes, and most of us didn't talk or think about what was coming. I joined in with the jokes, mostly for something to do, but I didn't have friends in the shuttle with me. Actually, I didn't have any friends among the Formers at all. At least to me, it seemed that there was less point in us making friends than there was in trying to seduce an intern on the way out the door. We were literally never going to see each other again. When the shuttle finally drew to a halt, the joking stopped. It was time. We filed out of the shuttle into Exodus Station, where Foundation personnel were waiting to receive us. I might have liked to look down at the Earth from the station's perch in orbit, but the floor was solid and opaque, so instead I looked across the station at the Gun.

The Gun was enormous. Its barrel composed of three great electromagnetic rails, arranged in a triangular pattern, surrounding the pipe through which the Bullets would pass- through which we would pass. Even as I watched, the vast ammunition chamber sealed shut, and a heavy, bass thrumming vibrated the floor beneath my slippers. It was the grand turret moving, swiveling to take aim along a carefully calculated track which would carry its cargo to the correct destination. There was a bright flash from the mouth of the Gun, and a moment later, the sound reached us as a gigantic whip crack. And one of us was gone. Flung out into space at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. I stood and stared through the windows into the starry expanse, and wondered if the occupant of that Bullet would make it to his planet. Would I? But the line was moving, and I was jolted into movement. There was no point in thinking about it now. I would make it or I would not. My turn was not so far off. We filed into an orderly column, and waited for our names to be called, and all the while, the Gun barked out behind us, and another Former left the Earth forever.

My name was called. Joanna Angeles. I wondered how many other wards of the state up here were named with some variant of John. Or Jane. I broke from the gathered ranks and followed the Foundation technician down a short flight of stairs set into the floor, around a corner, and into a small room, where a man in a white lab coat manned a machine which looked like nothing so much as an airport security scanner. He had me stand in the archway while he worked at the control pad. There was a loud beep from the archway, and a tingling sensation rushed over my body as if a thin layer of alcohol had been poured over my skin. They told me to step out of my slippers and proceed through the door on the other side of the room. I followed their instructions, the tiled floor cool beneath my bare feet. I was now wearing my jumpsuit and nothing else. I crossed through the indicated door and found another technician waiting for me. She led me through another short, featureless hallway and yet another door. And there it was, standing open to receive me- the Bullet. My Bullet.

It was a thick, silvery shell, maybe two-feet thick, made of a metallic substance that didn't quite look like steel. It was smaller than I had thought it would be, perhaps forty feet high, and no more than twenty feet around. The Formers were hardly scientists, but we had all been drilled in how everything we were taking with us worked, and I knew the size of the projectile was absolutely necessary. Basically, the Bullet was the cheapest way to get a single human to another planet, with the equipment he would need to survive in an extraterrestrial environment. It was too expensive, in both money and lives, to send a whole colony ship to an unchanged planet or moon. Each person they sent would have to be accompanied by enough food, water, and air to keep them alive until the planet was made fully habitable, and on top of that, they would need to bring their own living spaces, terraforming equipment, and all their worldly possessions. So the Foundation had come up with a better solution. Fire one Former into space in a craft that wasn't designed to maneuver or do anything other than hitting an alien planet. Encase that Former in a suit that would be both armor and enclosed environment, complete with waste reclamation and oxygen recycling. Send them with just one piece of durable, nigh unbreakable equipment- a fabricator. The pod would be made of raw materials, a dense, compressed mixture of several essential metals and minerals. The machine itself would contain enough samples of chemicals and reagents to make almost anything. The Former would climb out of her pod, start up the fabricator, and make everything she needed on the planet, even synthesizing food. Cheap and easy. The machine was as idiot-proof as possible, and just in case, the Former's suit was equipped with instruction programs. The actual human sent out to the planet was interchangeable. She just had to follow instructions. The real colony ship would be sent out later, arriving five to ten years after the Former, at a planet that had already been changed into a habitable environment. I approached the open pod cautiously, a little smirk on my face as I thought about that last part. I was literally the only hope for a ship that would be filled with ten thousand refugees. No pressure. Either I would be their hero, their world-maker when they arrived, or they would all die, with a bare minimum of supplies and no way back to Earth. No pressure at all.

My suit was already waiting for me, standing open. As I got inside, a technician helped me hook up the systems to all the awkward places. One advantage to being a Former, I would never have to see the guy that hooked up a bunch of tubes and tech up to my delicate bits ever again. Silver linings. Take them where you can get them. The suit closed itself around me, and I saw the tech nod to me through the thick quartz of my faceplate. Then he stepped away, and the shell of the Bullet swung shut, leaving me in darkness. I felt something cold entering my body from one of the ports they had put into my neck, and within moments I began to feel sleepy. The chill spread all through me, dragging me backward into blackness, and I was only dimly aware of the Bullet moving around me, taking its place within the chamber of the Gun. Numbness began to take me, even as I felt the crackling tension of the railgun mounting higher with every passing second. I was completely numb, buried beneath miles of lethargy and icy cold, and I was okay with it. I was just going to sleep. Just a little nap and I would wake up on a new planet. If I was lucky, my planet would be an entire world of beaches, sun, and green-skinned alien underwear models with eight-packs and five-o'clock shadows. The Gun fired, distant thunder sweeping away the electric tension of the rails as they discharged, sweeping my mind away with it. Just before I succumbed to stasis, I thought I heard a man whispering in my ear. "Joanna?" Then there was nothing.