Military Orders to Dehumanize the “Natives”

The Military Orders to Dehumanize the “Natives” are the rules and training through which the Retros prepare their forces to treat the people of the past as obstacles to colonization rather than as fellow human beings. They operate through both direct control—numbering workers and restricting their speech—and ideological instruction that recasts those workers as culpable outsiders. The result is a system in which ordinary administrative duties support a plan to replace one population with another, while empathy itself is presented as disloyalty.

Identity and Administrative Control

For the captured workers, dehumanization begins with the removal of names. A woman identifies Tucker Pierce as Zero Three One One; he rejects the designation, but the machine insists that his number defines both his history and his future. When he asks about his mother and friends, it tells him that he no longer has either. The answer does more than deny him information: it declares his former relationships irrelevant to the identity assigned by the camp.

The machine also sets the limits of everyday contact. Workers must not speak to Air Force personnel unless addressed, and may communicate with one another only about their assigned task; disobedience brings severe consequences. These instructions make silence and task-bound cooperation part of the labor system. Tucker’s distress at the machine’s impersonal response shows the human ties that the system is trying to erase, even as he recognizes that asking about them could expose his companions.

The rule against names is not applied evenly. Major Bova announces that names are not used in the camp, then gives the prisoners his own name and rank, explaining that they should know who their host is. His self-presentation as a gracious host sits beside his authority over a work camp: the language of courtesy masks, rather than removes, the imbalance between commander and prisoners.

Training the Colonizers

The orders appear not only in commands to captive workers but also in instruction for the incoming population. Tucker, Tori Sleeper, and Kent Berringer pass lecture rooms where uniformed audiences hear about the practical work of colonization. One speaker describes maintaining water-filtration plants and training settlers to repair them without relying on native expertise; other lectures address waste removal, housing, future dome construction, electrical power, and the administration of Ruby to the people designated as natives. The curriculum treats the past as a place to be made operational and its inhabitants as either labor or a resource to be managed.

The doctrine is stated most starkly in a lecture to Retro soldiers. A heavyset officer instructs them to see the natives as neither friends nor brothers, to regard them as responsible for their own fate, and to avoid emotional bonds or friendships. He presents humane treatment as treason and warns the soldiers not to deviate from the mission. No one in the room raises a question. The lesson does not merely encourage hostility; it attempts to make ordinary sympathy incompatible with military duty.

Kent recognizes that the people being described are the survivors of his own era. Tori concludes that the soldiers are being taught to hate them. As the group hears additional lectures, the scale of the preparation becomes clear: the workers are not being trained for a temporary occupation but for a planned settlement that expects to function without the original population’s consent or support.

The Rule Within a Larger Policy

Olivia Kinsey later explains that the colonization effort has been planned for years by the military and the United States Government in 2324. Its purpose is to replace the population of the twenty-first century with people from the twenty-fourth. She describes Colonel Feit as treating the mission like a game and Major Bova as particularly inclined toward punishment; in her view, Bova’s treatment of the workers impedes completion of the camp. Their differences distinguish individual approaches, but neither changes the purpose of the enterprise that they serve.

The attempt to suppress dissent is also political. Kenny Sokol says that those who oppose the invasion are a minority, that public opinion supports it, and that refusing orders or speaking out would not stop the machinery of the mission. The Sounders emerged because protest by a small group seemed insufficient against an operation that would continue regardless. The dehumanizing rule is therefore more than a soldier’s prejudice: it belongs to an institutional project whose logistics, military discipline, and public approval reinforce one another.

Resistance and the Moral Countertest

The doctrine’s demand that its targets be treated as less than human is challenged both by resistance to the invasion and by the conduct of those fighting it. Tori questions Tucker after he accepts the death of a man who seemed beyond rescue. She points out that the group condemns the Retros for valuing their own survival over human life, yet has also accepted killing when it serves its aims; she recalls that she herself shot people during the destruction of the Retro fleet. Her challenge shifts attention from the enemy’s orders to the moral choices made in opposition to them.

Tucker admits that revenge has helped drive him and that he has shot people he considered threats without feeling guilty. He has understood the conflict as a struggle to save his world, but recognizes that victory would leave an unsettling question: whether humanity would rebuild a better world or repeat the failures that produced the future the Retros sought to escape. When he says that the killing has to stop somewhere, he acts on that judgment by leaving the hatch and running toward Colonel Feit. The moment does not erase the orders or the violence they enable; it marks a refusal to let the enemy’s logic determine every choice made against it.