Twenty years of service off the Earth, then home to the night you left, twenty years younger, remembering none of it. This is called a 20 and back. It is not supposed to be remembered. That part does not always work.
Some remember Mars and the Moon and worlds without names, Greys and reptilians, and the Germans who never lost the war. They remember what was done to them as children to make them useful, and what it cost when the memories came back.
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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.…
Randy Cramer is born on May 25, 1970, and he is not conceived the ordinary way. Somebody takes a sample from each of his parents, opens the nucleus, picks out the codons they want to change, puts in extraterrestrial DNA where they want enhancements, rolls it back up, and implants it in his mother. He is born nine months later.…
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 strangers so often his parents make him wear dog tags with their phone number. After the same officer returns him one time too many, they are warned the state could take him, and they enroll him in a behavioral program…
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,…
Before there is a David Rousseau, there is a decision. He remembers it from the far side: a consciousness that is not human, weighing whether to go down into a world dense with fear, where beings are cut off from each other and from what they are. He knows the price. Most of his memory will be taken at the…
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 James is born on June 6, 1977, in St. Petersburg, Florida, into a working family. His father came down to Florida in the mid-fifties, a mechanic who raced cars, with thick glasses and a pack of cigarettes rolled into his shirt sleeve, and by the time Daryl arrives he drives a garbage truck for the city. His mother is…
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…
There is not one secret space program. There are dozens, and they are compartmentalized so strictly that even the people at the top of one program do not know of the others. A person may spend a career assembling one component of a spacecraft without ever learning what it is for; such a person is a member of a program…
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