The day started so well. Now, I was behind a glass divider in a quarantined room. A voice crackled over the speaker. “I need you to tell me what happened a hour ago in the barracks. We need to know why you’re the last of your platoon.”
***
The barracks shook with the noise of the victory celebration. The long, hard fought war against the humans had finally been finished, so why shouldn’t we celebrate. Best of all, we no longer had to wear those damnable isolation suits that we needed to traverse the surface of the human planet.
As was tradition in the platoon, a captive was restrained on the other side of a glass wall. Made to watch. After several hours of flowing drinks and loud music, the revelry started to lull. Then, one of the chiefs cried out, “Let’s put the human in the googles. See how long it takes them to get out. I’ll start a bet at one year.”
“Oh come on, one whole year! That’s way too long,” a platoon mate of mine cried out.
“Well then you can take the under,” the chief said. “They certainly can’t be that good at war considering it’s the one behind the glass.” The chief pulled his war googles out of his locker and ran to the adjoining room. We all saw the human try to crawl away before going slack after the googles were placed in its head.
We crowded the glass watching. I don’t know what we expected. The chief had barely left the room before the human exhaled sharply. I think they called it a cough. Either way, a few seconds later, the war goggles undid themselves and crashed to the floor. You know, the way they do when the full training is completed. I didn’t recognize it at the time.
The room erupted in laughter. Louder than it had been all the rest of the night. The chief re-entered the room, and I said, “Chief, it might have been a while since you’ve had to fit a pair of goggles. They fell right off the human.”
Someone else said, “Yeah, I’m not losing 3000 on account of you forgetting which way is the right side up on a pair of goggles.”
The chief looked back through the glass and smiled, “Guess I did put them on wrong. I’ll be right back.” That was the last I heard from the chief.
When the chief re-entered the room with the human, it coughed again. Five minutes later, the chief collapsed in the middle of the barracks. The rest of the platoon followed one after the other, some taking longer than others. The currents of the party took me away from the area the chief was in, so I must have been exposed last to whatever poison that human exhaled.
Even so, I felt myself slipping while giving this report. Whatever you do, do not interact with a human outside of an isolation suit.
Inspired by the following prompt: [WP] Aliens use a special digital simulator game to train for wars and combat, often taking months to complete. When humans find this game, they speedrun it
Words All The Way Down 
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