20 and back

It starts before Michael Relfe is born. His father serves in the United States Air Force, stationed in Las Vegas, and while he is there something is done to him—modifications he never knows about. Michael is the result of what they did. He arrives two months premature. He grows up in south Florida. His mother is sweet and loving. His…

It starts in a laboratory. James Rink is Patient 320 of 720 in Project Surrogate, the program in which the covert government grows batches of test-tube embryos for the Super Soldier projects and implants them into the wombs of women in ordinary families, because a soldier raised under lock and key in an underground base comes out weak and sickly,…

Randy Cramer is born on May 25, 1970, and he is not conceived the ordinary way. Somebody takes a sample from his mother and a sample from his father, opens the nucleus, plucks out the codons they want to change, puts in extraterrestrial DNA where they want enhancements, wads it back up, and implants it in his mother. He is…

Corey Goode comes from a really big Navy family in Texas, and all he ever wants is to go into the Navy like the rest of them. He is born directly on the 33rd parallel, and for some reason he never understands, he is drawn to live on or around it for the rest of his life. His father is…

Michael Anthony Rodrigues is born in 1972 and grows up in an old farmhouse on thirteen acres outside Detroit, half a mile from the nearest neighbor. His father is from Hawaii, a Navy man turned autoworker, a cowboy, more into horses and cars than the sky. His mother is the science fiction fan. She and Tony watch Star Trek together.…

As a small boy Jason Rice is an escape artist. He wanders off and is brought home by police or by strangers so often that his parents make him wear dog tags with their phone number. After the same officer returns him one time too many, they are warned that the state could take him, and they enroll him in…

Before she is Rebecca, she is a field of consciousness that traces itself back to the Andromeda galaxy, and she lives aboard a Sirian light ship. The ship is not a hulk of metal. It is alive, polymorphous, all curves and pastel light, forested inside, with water running through it. The crew is a ragtag mix of Sirians, Procyon beings,…

David Rousseau remembers the moment before his life on Earth, when he exists as a non-human consciousness weighing the decision to incarnate. He understands that coming to Earth means entering a dense world of fear, separation, and limited awareness. He chooses to go anyway, drawn by the challenge and by the desire to help humanity evolve. He is told that…

Jean-Charles Moyen is born on July 7, 1969, in the Paris region, and a storm sits over the hospital while his mother is in labor, lightning right above the room where she gives birth. She nicknames him Capitaine Tempête. Before he leaves for Canada, decades later, his grandfather will tell him something he has never told anyone: as a boy…

Daryl is about three, on the couch in St. Petersburg, Florida, watching Sesame Street, when his father speaks to him without opening his mouth. Do you think you'll be able to do this when you get older? Your sister used to know how, but as she got older she forgot. Of the half-brothers and half-sisters from his father's first marriage,…

Morgan Rae Johnson, before she has that name, is a light being guarding a space between lives, and she hears a call from Earth itself. On the other side there is a girl who is going to be taken into a program, and it is plain from there that she will not get through it alone. Morgan makes a soul…

In the 1930s, Germany is a nation consumed by esoteric mysticism, and its researchers search the planet for hidden powers and ancient wisdom. The fascination is not new; its roots go back to the late 1800s. After World War I, the German state begins integrating various secret societies into its research and development efforts. Among them is the Vril Society,…