Daryl James

This account is compiled from the public interviews Daryl James has given since 2021. His website is here.

1.

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, only the eldest, Larry, still remembers. Yeah, Dad, I'll remember. His father gets up to find something to eat, and turns around in the kitchen doorway. If you can remember how to do this, you'll be able to see your future, and the future of others.

It is a blue-collar house. His father came down to Florida in the mid-fifties, a mechanic who raced cars, with thick glasses and a pack of Camels rolled in his shirt sleeve; now he works for the city as a garbage man. His mother is a computer operator. She can do it a little, almost subconsciously. They don't go to church. When Daryl is four, playing in the rain-filled ditch in the front yard, two Jehovah's Witness ladies stop to ask whether he wants to be thrown into the lake of fire. He has never heard of hell. That night, in a dream, a man with long blond hair and blue eyes stands in front of him. Daryl is crying. Am I going to hell? The man smiles. No. You're not going to hell.

When he is six or seven the police bring a trailer to the school for the anti-drug program, and inside it is a gas chamber chair, with straps and holes and a bucket underneath. The kids ask whether anybody ever died in it. Lots of people, the officer says. It scares him really badly.

At seven he is molested, by a man called Chucky. He comes out of it with an ability he keeps for life: when something is too painful, he can simply say nope, that didn't happen, and it is gone.

He can look down timelines. A swirl appears in the upper right corner of his vision, the swirl becomes a tunnel, and he goes in. He can speed past the mundane parts of a person's life and slow down for the important ones. He is frightened to do it on himself.

His sister's birthday falls on Halloween. The year he is eleven, the slumber party is at her friend Jen's house in Pinellas Park. Jen is fifteen and a telepath, and she likes him. Her father is high up in the New York mob. Her mother is a cabalist with a strong belief in bloodlines. As the girls file in, Jen grabs his hand and pulls him into her mother's bedroom, where a tall woman sits at the dresser mirror making herself up for a party of her own, a mix between Elvira and Vampira.

Mom, this is him.

And you say the father can do it? Yes. What about the mother? Not as much. And the sister? No.

She takes his chin, lifts his head, and locks eyes with him. The whole room is engulfed in orange and red with flecks of blue. All he can see is her eyes, and behind her, tall Nordic people standing in the background. In the TV room the girls are screaming. She shakes his chin to snap him out of it. "You're a powerful little boy. You know that, don't you?" "Yes." "Good. Now go play." The girls say it looked like the house was on fire.

The next day she sends the girls out back. She did something to him, she says, and she isn't sure what—but she can make him stronger. How would he feel about marrying Jen? He looks down the tunnel. He sees himself drop out of school and marry at fifteen. He sees himself sitting beside Jen's father in warehouse meetings, reading whether the other man is lying, whether he is armed, and passing it through the wall to an earpiece. He sees the man with the gun above his right ankle, the shot in the chest, his own funeral, his father's heart attack, his mother's pills, his sister drinking alone. "No. I can't marry Jen. It will destroy my family."

After that night it feels like he is hallucinating for years—shadow beings, colors turned up too high. He never gets rid of it. He just gets used to it. And somewhere along the way he forgets that he could ever speak without words.

He reads comics, makes Eagle Scout, learns classical guitar in high school. When he is nineteen his father drops dead of a widowmaker, a clot nobody knew was there. The same year he picks up a marijuana paraphernalia charge, and he stops playing guitar.

2.

He joins the Navy in January 1999. With the charge on his record he can do construction or be a cook, so he becomes a Seabee, and spends five years in a battalion. He gets to Iraq a couple of days before the war starts.

Then he reenlists, and in the spring of 2004 he steps off a bus in Cornwall. He is twenty-six. The first class petty officer who collects him stops at McDonald's. "This is a weird base, man." "How?" "I don't know. It's just a really weird base."

RAF St Mawgan is a dinky base with an underground base beneath it, said to track Russian submarines. Daryl works in the garage, with only a Secret clearance. So it is strange when, in his first week, he is told to escort three Siemens workers underground to fix a pump. Just inside the quarterdeck, the lobby of the base, stands something like an airport metal detector. "I'm not walking through that bloody thing," says the first Siemens man, and walks around it. An English guard in a green beret, rifle on his shoulder, says, "No. You walk through." He does.

That Friday he draws the balls-to-four, the midnight watch nobody wants. At the quarterdeck an Army lieutenant colonel is leafing through a file. Daryl knows him: Michael Aquino, the Satanist from Oprah, with the curled-up eyebrows like horns. He is grey now, with eyes so dark they look solid black. He gives Daryl the creeps. "Excuse me, sir, I'm going to go for another round."

The next Friday he has the same watch again. The petty officer of the watch, a heavyset first class with a blond mustache, points at his monitor. "What do you think about that?" On the screen is your stereotypical grey, looking up at a camera. "Did you get that off the internet?" "No. Look." Beside the sliding door is a big window, and the thing is standing behind the glass. "Do you mind if it comes in here?" "Does it mind if I stare at it?" "It doesn't mind." And inside his head, in his own voice: I don't mind.

It walks out with the green-beret guard behind it, carrying something like a silver pistol. Daryl, a few months out of Iraq, is on his feet. "Gun! Gun! Gun!" It's not a gun, everyone says, the thing included. The guard's rifle has come off his shoulder, and Daryl understands that the weapon is for him, not for it. He sits down.

It is a drill. On the floor is a junky government-issue Dell, and the thing takes it apart like a machine—never guiding the bit, catching each screw in its other hand—swaps two sticks of RAM, and flicks its wrist to set each screw back between its fingers. Boom, boom, boom. Then it stands and lets him look. It is under three feet tall, light khaki brown with a hue of pink, a fold of skin running from the tear duct down the cheekbone. No navel, no nipples, no genitals. Its fingers are so long it holds its hands in C-shapes to keep them from dragging. It gives him that really-big-spider feeling. He leans in to touch it—he wants to make this real. "Don't touch it." After a while he just gets kind of bored with it, and it walks back underground.

The whole time, he has been pinching his thigh hard enough to raise a blood blister. "Do you think you're dreaming?" "No. I want a mark, in case you guys wipe my mind." "We're not going to wipe your mind. Not yet." They call them drones, the petty officer says. They've been here as long as we have.

Then: "You're smart. Like, really smart." Daryl guesses 140, 150. "More like 190, 195." That machine he walked through was a scanner. He is the second smartest man on base. The scan shows something else. "Looks like you have somebody else living in there with you. Were you molested as a kid?" "Yes." "That explains it. Don't worry, we'll get that out for you."

Any tattoos? No. "Good. The Germans don't like tattoos." Hobbies? He used to play classical guitar. "Oh, they'll really like that." "Who's they?" "There's Germans up there. Mostly from the thirties and forties. In the Moon, and beyond." He never once says space.

By morning his mind has filed it under that didn't happen. Then Lando, the base gossip, stops him in the hall. "So what did you think? Kind of creepy looking?" Daryl checks his thigh. The blister is there. "How did I forget?" "I don't know. Some people do."

3.

On Monday the executive officer comes to the garage in person. This never happens. He is a Navy captain, early sixties, white hair, a permanent scowl. His first name is Robert. He walks Daryl away from the buildings.

"How does it feel to have a 195 IQ, Mister James?" Only officers call each other mister. "Have you ever heard of Project Solar Warden? The United States Navy secret space program?"

"No, sir, but I think I could figure that one out."

"There's something called the twenty-year-and-back. You do twenty years. We send you back in time twenty years, age-regress you twenty years, wipe your memory, and you wake up in bed like nothing happened." With his scores, Robert guarantees he will make commander and pilot a four-kilometer starship.

Will he be able to have children? "With your scores you'll be expected to." Will he ever see them again? "No. Mr. James, I promise you, you won't remember a thing."

Then Daryl brings up the scanner. A machine like that would have found his father's clot. Why doesn't the public have it? Robert talks about population control. "There has to be a side that wants to release this," Daryl says. "You mean like a traitor?" "No, sir. A side." "Well. There is." "If you can get me on that side, I'll do it." Robert walks off, then turns. "One more thing, Mr. James. You're going to be escorted by a reptile. And he's big."

All week the barracks acclimatize him. Between games of Halo: "Did you see that reptile today?" "Yeah, he was big. Talked funny, too." Another night a knucklehead says he's been to the Moon, dog. Mines, shock collars, brothels. It was great. When they put you back in the chair, he says, just fight it, and you'll remember.

Feedback squeals through the room. "Now hear this. You are now in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If you do not stop right now you will face up to ten years in prison. That will be all." There is no speaker in the room. It's something experimental called 5G, Lando explains: a beam they can put into any room, to look, listen and talk. On Thursday a man across the hall talks loudly through his open door. They'll strap you into a chair in a density chamber. We're third density and the ETs are fifth, much too fast for us. It pushes you up: stronger, faster, two hundred points smarter, and more of a collective.

On Friday night the mustached petty officer has a stack of paper like a mortgage, the X's already marked. One line reads: the consciousness of the first party now belongs to the second party. Daryl gets cold feet. "If you read this we'll be here all night. You're already back there, so just sign the damn papers." He is in a time loop: somewhere underneath him, a Daryl who has finished his twenty years is already being regressed. This is for Dad. He signs. The petty officer picks up the phone. "Send him in."

What stands behind the glass is nine and a half feet tall. Dark brown, ridges down its head like mohawks, gold alligator eyes, a flat face, a mouth that runs straight across and then straight up, shoulders like basketballs in a skin-tight blue suit.

"Jesus Christ. He's not going to eat me, is he?"

"He's much stronger and faster than you. If he wanted to eat you he would have done it by now."

The reptile sighs, three seconds in, three seconds out, like it's a nine-to-five to him. "He can't read my mind, can he?" "Yes. He can read your mind." Sorry about that.

The reptile takes an unlit corridor, and Daryl stays close, because these things can see in the dark. Behind him a skinny kid guard keeps butt-stroking him between the shoulder blades with a rifle. On the next blow Daryl grabs the weapon, hooks the kid's leg, and puts him flat on the concrete. "If you hit me with this thing one more time, I'm going to shove it up your ass sideways."

"Leave us." The voice is deeper than any man's. The kid takes his rifle back and runs. When Daryl turns around there is nothing in front of him but blue. The reptile is peering down over its chest muscles, flexing, its eyes narrowed to slits, the only place anger shows on them. "I'm sorry for what I said before. You're much more civilized than him." The eyes open. "Follow me."

Behind a watertight door with a wheel is an oversized chair with holes and straps. It is the chair from the trailer. He runs. The reptile throws him into it like he weighs nothing. He pries at the thumb pinning his arm—the nails are black, rolled in on themselves into needles—and gets hit so hard he blacks out. A palm flattens his chest. He feels a rumble in his ribs before he hears it, an alligator's mating call. "Don't make me hit you again." He jams his thumb in its eye and watches a tear run down. It leans on him until his chest caves in against his heart.

He wakes with the last strap going on. "I'm sorry I have to do this to you." It works a panel, leaves, and the wheel spins shut. There is pressure and pain, then cold, weightlessness, and peace, like his soul is being pulled out of his body.

When he comes to, the reptile is gesturing in silence with a first class petty officer Daryl knows from the base, who is now wearing a black leather trench coat, boots and a slicked undercut: a regular old Gestapo. Daryl slides off the chair. He doesn't know who he is. "Can I go to bed now?" He drops to his hands and knees. Boots step into view. "I should have you executed for what you did to my man. Do you hear me?"

"It doesn't matter," the reptile says. "He doesn't remember."

It carries him like a duffel bag under its arm, all his weight on his bladder. "Put me down, man. I'm going to pee on you." There is a bright light. It is a portal called the Looking Glass. Every underground base has one, and this one opens into the Moon.

4.

He is laid on a medical bed built for something much bigger. A woman sticks monitors to his chest. "He has to urinate," the reptile says. A catheter goes in. His mind is wiped clean. He thinks she is really pretty and asks to hold her hand, and falls asleep holding it.

Next day she examines him with a smart glass pad, pulling a hologram of his body out of it. When she gets up to leave he takes her hand. "I don't know what to do or what to say. All I know is I don't want you to leave me." She likes that.

Outside is something like the courtyard of a condominium, five levels high, with no railings. On the top level a woman with a baby stands at the open edge. Isn't she afraid she'll fall? "He's new here, huh? You can't fall off." She steps out onto nothing. A field runs all the way to the far wall.

In her rooms they kiss. "Wait. What's your name?" "I don't remember." "Come on, think. Everybody remembers their name." "…Daryl." Afterward he dozes against the headboard with her asleep on his chest. Her name is April. On Earth she fixes computers at St Mawgan, and he can't stand her.

Touching a reptile is punishable by death, and what he has earned for the eye is hard labor in the mines of the Moon—twenty years, maybe forty, the special punishment where they send you home with your memories and you almost always kill yourself. Shirtless crews drive sectional bits into the rock like roughnecks, wearing collars that shock the whole crew when one man slacks. The men are called meat sacks. The women are honey pots, and the brothel is the only pay there is. He stays mostly with April; he goes there sometimes too. He watches Germans herd a group of crying women—get those honey pots up there—and watches babies, once weaned, taken from their mothers and walked through the portal. The ones whose scores aren't high enough go to the caverns under the bases on Earth. Some of those could be his.

After three months Robert turns up and has a word with a German, who waves a box over Daryl, reads his scores, and chews out the trench coat in German. "Come with me." It is not a rescue. Drones strip him and strap him down, head and chest, while a seven-foot chalk-white being watches from the corner. A man in a surgical mask shows him a needle like a turkey baster. "I'm going to use this to put your brain implant in." It cracks through his skull. The table flips, and something cool goes into his spine: the black goo, an AI. In his free time he will be himself, but when they want something, his body will simply get up and go. They hose him down and hand him a duffel bag of black uniforms. He was supposed to go to Solar Warden. This is the most Robert could do.

5.

The Dark Fleet—Nachtwaffen—belongs to the off-world Germans, and the Germans belong to the Draconian Empire: a vassal state, because they preferred that to slavery. Every ship carries four reptiles of the royal caste, hunched and beaky in trailing robes, like the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal. The head one is addressed as Master. Earth recruits are conscripts, mongrels, pets. They take his name away. His suit and his rifle each have a soul trapped inside, because their AI needs a consciousness to run. His classical guitar is waiting in his cabin.

In his first week the first officer walks him aft, where the air turns hot and humid and smells of old feces. A naked man sits on a table with hair over his face. "Take him." Daryl brushes the hair aside, and it is him—an exact clone of him. There is an instant bond, like meeting a long-lost twin. The clone trusts him and lets itself be led across the hall, into a dining room whose vaulted ceiling is one long window. It is his first sight of space, and it is clouds of pink and purple and blue.

"Give me that," says the Master. He takes the clone by the neck. "Look at him." The clone looks at Daryl, and the reptile bites its arm off and tips its head back to swallow, like an alligator. The clone screams. Daryl lunges, and the first officer, augmented in the womb, locks his head. Don't fight it. Don't fight it. The clone sags. The Master slaps it awake—"Look at him"—and bites out its throat, and the whole time his eyes stay on Daryl. He is feeding on the fear more than the meat. He throws the body over his shoulder, and the other three tear it apart. Back in his cabin Daryl sits with his head in his hands. I was better off in the mines of the Moon.

The Germans keep a little bar like the Hofbräuhaus. When he plays there, they pull their tables closer, speak English out of respect, and buy him beer. Because he is the musician he gets all of Earth's music on his glass pad. He plays the sixties and seventies over and over, staring at the album covers. Did my mom listen to this? If I could remember my childhood, I could remember me.

Then the Germans read that he served in the Middle East—like Rommel—and make him something like a sergeant of infantry on Mars. On his third day they are overrun by native reptiles. A mouth closes over his face, and everything goes black. He wakes on the ship in a tube propped against the wall. They have salvaged his consciousness and put it in a clone like his original in every way. The Daryl his mother gave birth to is bones rotting somewhere on Mars.

The job is capturing mantises, the masters of DNA, so a machine can scan their minds. They turn out to be the most human beings he ever meets. They offer you a seat, food and drink, and they cover their mandibles when they laugh. The first man to take him out kicks the door in and beats them. Daryl adopts a castle doctrine. He knocks. If you don't let me in, I'll be waiting, and then I will hurt you. Come with me now and no harm will come to you. Most come. When Daryl balks at wiping out a village, the reptiles strap him to a rack and cut pieces off him until he does whatever they tell him. Once, for answering the Master telepathically like an equal, they break his back, so he won't go into shock, and eat his legs. The healing tank puts him back together.

Before every drop the first officer says the same thing: when you get back to Earth they are going to torture you to death for that eye. So he takes risks. I'd rather die out there. In front of a visiting admiral the Master promises to ask the ones on Earth to go easy on him. Afterward the admiral takes him aside. "He's lying to you. They're going to eat you alive, and it'll take days. We want you to join the Dark Fleet full time."

"Permission to speak freely, sir? Are there horses on your world?"

"I own two horses."

"Then I want what you have, sir. I want to be a German. I want land, a German wife, German children."

"You know you could be punished for saying that."

"You asked, sir."

Two days later he has something like a visa. The city is like the 1940s, men in fedoras, women in pillbox hats, except that the sidewalks move at fifty miles an hour. At a beach café he tries his broken German on a woman sitting alone. "Do you speak English? Oh, thank God." Her name is Helen. At dinner the first officer's wife says she can't stand those dreadful creatures. "It's all right," says the first officer. "None of us like them." Within the week they are engaged, to be married after the next deployment.

The next deployment is to a trading station hanging in space like a glass skyscraper. Everything carved on the Egyptian pyramids is walking around in here: dog people, cat people, bird people. Little robed beings a foot and a half tall scurry between the legs of the tall ones. He keeps telling himself you have to remember this.

A blond man and woman in blue uniforms approach the Master. The woman goes first. "The cargo belongs to us. You took it without permission." "Since we have invested so much time and training in the cargo, it now rightfully belongs to us." The man steps up with a glass pad listing the articles violated. If the cargo is not returned immediately, it will be considered an act of war. The Master reads for a long time. Then he throws his hands in the air and walks away.

The woman turns to Daryl. "You're coming with us now." He is the cargo. The first officer nods. "Can I get my things?" "Yes. Hurry." All he owns is a guitar. He asks the first officer to tell Helen he's sorry.

6.

Their craft is a polished saucer, seamless inside, like poured metal. He looks disturbed, the woman says. Wouldn't you be, if you had to live with them? Daryl glances up. Both heads snap toward him and cock at the same angle, eyes huge, a white light coming off them until their eyes are all he can see. The man kneels in front of him. Can you hear what I'm saying to you? He asks it twice, until Daryl nods. They had not known he could.

Robert calls them Nordics. They call themselves Taygeteans, after their star in the Pleiades. They are mostly blond, the eyes a fifth larger than ours; they live three thousand years, and there are thirty women to every man. Their home, for now, is the USSS Nimitz—the starship he was promised after all, four kilometers of near-black hull. Taygetean tech, Earth titanium, a Navy captain in the chair, and a Taygetean warrior called Leader who can commandeer it whenever he wants.

He rooms with the pair from the saucer, to build the bond: the navigator, and the science officer, whose name is Swaru. By the third day he lays his hands on two black panels, closes his eyes and clears his thoughts. Good morning, Daryl. The mind of the ship is a Taygetean woman who volunteered; positive beings don't trap souls in machines. As pilot he gets to name her. Good morning, Mama Bear.

That third evening, at dinner, Swaru says, "We knew you were there. We wanted you to learn from them." "You knew the whole time and did nothing?" "Yes." He picks up his guitar in a fury and plays. When he looks up they have dragged their chairs right in front of him, wide-eyed, mouths open. Their music has no harmony or melody. "How did you do that?" "That wasn't for you. That was for me." He throws the guitar on the bed and walks out. Their answer to everything is you need the experience.

You can't keep secrets from a telepath, and he wants her. For a week he tells Swaru he'd like a child with her, and she only listens. Then: "All right." She lies above him, stretches her neck to look up, then looks down and locks eyes, and they switch. He is looking out of her eyes at himself. He sees breasts and panics, and it snaps back. The second time he is out of the ship altogether, one with the universe, for minutes or for days. "I think I finished." "Yeah. You finished." "Are you pregnant?" "Yes."

When the labor starts, every woman on the ship stands up at once—I'm going to witness. Mother is the midwife. She is over two thousand years old and seven feet tall, with silver hair, huge cheekbones and skin stretched near-transparent. He names his son David, after his father. Swaru had said, once, "I'm going to change when I have the baby." Now she does nothing but gaze into the baby's eyes. After four months he reaches for his son, and she knocks him to the floor and screams at the top of her lungs. The navigator sends him to Elder.

Elder is Mother's husband and the judge, fourteen and a half feet tall, white-bearded, always seated. "You were lucky she didn't bite your face." The bonding lasts ten months. Another woman has just arrived, Elder adds, and she's free. "But I love Swaru." "That's just the way it is." He has his first daughter with the second woman. When the ten months are up, Swaru says, "Come and see your son."

On family days he answers the little ones in their own babble, the emotional pig Latin they speak until they're six and that no adult can follow, and the adults stare. How do you do that? Why can't you? It is why he was wanted. He is an empathic telepath, one of four or five in the universe, and one of the few Earth humans whose genes mix with theirs. Fifth-density people are naive. They want his streetwise nature in the bloodline.

One night the ship herself wakes him: the alarms are disabled and mantis mercenaries are aboard. He gets the nursery to the escape craft, and his son and daughter look up with one expression. Dad, you have to get Mother. She is sitting beside Elder, frightened. "Can you run?" "No." "Take her!" Elder says, out loud. Daryl throws her over his shoulder. Behind him Elder stands, for the first time Daryl has seen, stoops through the doorway like a man on stilts, bellows, and is shot down. At the pod Daryl hands Mother across. There is a flash. Something taps his shin, and it is his own forearm swinging from the sleeve, the bone cooked like a pork chop. Through the hole in his chest something is glistening and moving. He realizes it is his heart.

He floats in a healing tank with a cable in his spine to convince his soul the body is alive. Every death takes a piece of you, like a copy of a copy. The traitor who dropped the shields is the blond German from the chamber. The warrior caste behead him with a sword.

When the reptiles sue for peace, the two fleets drift side by side with shields down, and Leader asks the one man who has lived with them. "They want peace because they're weak. We should attack right now with everything we've got." Leader agrees, and offers him a command of his own people. So Daryl goes back into the Moon, liberated by now, and most of the miners join him. The pods clamp on and blow the hull in. The humans advance in armor that stops plasma and railguns, the warriors crouched behind them with swords. "Fix bayonets!"—Daryl's own phrase. Blades spring from their fists, and Leader vaults over him; he feels the foot touch his shoulder. The cargo is canisters of souls, the silver of the universe, and a lot of them are our people.

7.

The R&R lasts years. Their world is pines and granite, lakes and rivers, the weather controlled to a permanent spring. He climbs the long steps of a glass tower shaped like the World Series trophy, plays classical guitar for a very old king, bows, and gives him the guitar. He becomes the king's musician.

They watch their children play with folded arms, so he brings them Earth. He teaches Leader and the boys to fish. He carries kids on his shoulders until the other fathers start doing it. He builds a ball field. He lights bonfires and tells stories to the whole city. There are children everywhere, more than he can keep track of. It will come to dozens of sons and hundreds of daughters.

Mother comes to him, and he has a son with her. Then she becomes obsessed, and when he is matched instead with the female Leader, who is to be his queen, she goes for him in public, screaming. He pins her while the crowd stands with their mouths agape. "Is someone going to help me?" Two warriors finally pull her off. That night she comes at him with a knife. She has been age-regressed too many times.

He takes it to the throne room. "This is what's wrong with your people. You just stand and stare. If two men watch a woman raped and do nothing, aren't they just as guilty? My world is being raped, and now that you know, it's upon you and your children. Just get the boot off our neck and help us stand up. There are others like me. We'll do the rest." The old king is quiet. "You're right. We'll help you."

So he goes back for the children. Through captured Moon portals, back in time, four of them step into the clay caverns under St Mawgan: Daryl, two warriors, and the queen, who wears only her blue suit because armor would scare the kids. A robed man and woman walk in discussing which child to harvest. He rolls a concussion grenade and kicks the man onto his back. The man is laughing. "You'd do this to my children, wouldn't you?" "I would." "And their children?" "Yes." He shoots him. They aren't your children, the woman says. Why do you care? They are my children. I slept with the honey pots. He shoots her too. The queen holds out her arms, and the feral children, who have never once been held, come out of the cages and cling to her legs.

He carves a dipped candle for the old queen. She comes to his cottage that night. The king is tired. Would he be king? "Yes. King. I will do that." It is a play on his ego: he would never have left his two women for two hundred princesses otherwise, and harming a king is an act of war. They were using you, Robert says, but you didn't mind. After four months the queen says in bed, "Tomorrow you won't be king anymore. You know that, don't you?" In the morning the head of the warrior caste says, "It's time to go, Daryl." He is crushed. He lives alone in the woods and grows a long red beard.

"What do you want?" the king asks him once.

"I want to see my children have children of their own. I want to hold my grandchildren. I want to grow old here, and I want to die here."

"We can do that." Daryl sinks to his knees. "But you have to go back." A contract is a contract.

His first daughter marries Leader's son. She lets him hold his grandson. "Remember." "I'll remember." Swaru tells him what is coming. "They'll put you in a chair. The first time you have no choice. The second time you will. Don't go in."

He teaches the warriors football. At the end of the first game Robert walks up. "Daryl. Time to go home." "I have another year." "We have to go now." He has been here nearly ten years without aging a day. On the ship he punches the wall—please don't take my babies from me—and breaks his hand.

8.

They go through the Moon portal, down into the base, and back twenty-one years. A mustached German runs clippers over his hair and beard. "Oh, look at that. You broke your hand." "Leave him alone," Robert says. "If I had ten men like him, this war would be over by now." Then comes the chair, down to third density, and he doesn't know his own name.

He is dragged naked through smooth clay tunnels, a robed man on his left, a robed woman on his right, the tops of his feet scraping. "I'm tired, he's heavy. Let's take a break." She drops him. There are dog kennels stacked five high and five wide, with children huddled at the back, white as sheets. A girl with matted hair and eyes dilated black scurries forward and slams the bars. The woman punches the cage. "Get the fuck back." In a barred alcove stands a thing with a spider's body and a man's torso, wiry hair from the elbows down, two black prongs for hands, eyes running up the sides of its head. It stares at the wall the way a spider does. "Let's just feed him to Max." "No. We wait and see what Aquino wants."

They tie him to a rack. A reptile black as onyx leans into his face, fanged and gold-eyed under a red hood. "Don't you remember me, Daryl?" Two images blend, and Michael Aquino is standing there. But Daryl has watched the black thing scurry back into the shadows. He looks past the meat puppet's shoulder. "Nice trick." It steps out again. "Yes, well. It works on most." It is thousands of years old and was worshipped as a god in Egypt. The man's soul was taken out of him with a machine when he was nine or ten, and this is what lives in him now.

It goes on for two days, all for an eye he doesn't remember poking. A big shaved-head Englishman, the Goon, smashes his toes with a hammer. They burn him over a cauldron. They gouge out his eyes, strangle him with his own intestines, and put him in the healing tank each time and start over. Nobody comes back from a fourth death, they say. On the fourth he watches from outside his body until Aquino murmurs over a medallion and pulls him back in. For eight hours it walks down his timeline from the age of seven, nudging people who already wanted to do something bad. He can feel his life getting heavier. This is how Chucky happened. "What in the name of Christ do you want?" "Stop saying that." So he says it. "In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to undo my straps." Its hands actually begin to move, until the Goon punches him out.

Then it all comes back. Oh, right. This is who I am. He tells the robed pair he killed them with a concussion grenade. "I'm the king of the Taygeteans. You have committed an act of war." Aquino looks down his timeline and sees that it is true. He hands an SS dagger to the base's commanding officer, a man Daryl nicknamed Stick, who opens him up—"Not so high and mighty now, are you?" Then he hands it to Robert. "Cut him from here to here." Robert refuses. He is told again, and he does it. Aquino reaches into the cut and scratches the inside of Daryl's stomach with his nails. "That was a good feast."

He wakes on Sunday morning in his barracks room. Saturday is gone. He has just dozed off against a headboard with a woman on his chest. I was with a woman. What happened? There is clay on the tops of his feet. His hair has been buzzed like a kid did it, and burnt stubble comes off on his fingers. The man in the mirror is toned and muscular. In the hall a guy is leaning on the wall. "Congratulations, you made it. Twenty years is a long time. A lot of people don't make it back."

9.

He has two more years at this command. A depression comes down that he has never known. He drinks until he passes out. In the base bar the Goon stands up. "Hey, it's the king of the Taygeteans! Aquino really messed you up. He had me smashing your toes." Daryl keeps going back and waiting for him to get drunk, fascinated by a life he didn't know he had. "You said you killed me with a concussion grenade." "What's a concussion grenade?" "I was hoping you'd tell me." "Remember Chucky? Aquino did that. He wanted you to know." One night they are all manic. Coke? "No, man, we're on chrome. It's a drug you get from kids."

At the end of 2005 he checks out of the Navy. In the XO's office Robert rises slowly, looking sad, and then he is simply at the end of his desk, and then a foot from Daryl's face. Can you hear what I'm saying to you? What do you remember?

A tall seated woman with silver hair, a boy on her lap. He kisses the boy's head, then her.

That was Mother. You had a son with her. I have a son? You have dozens of sons and hundreds of daughters. But the one you loved the most was named Swaru. It comes wave after wave: three months in the mines of the Moon, two years in the Dark Fleet, the rest with them. I knew you, didn't I? You were like a son to me. Daryl scrabbles across the desk for a pencil and writes the names on a Post-it.

Something went wrong, Robert says. The chair couldn't push him all the way down, because he has been partly in fifth density since a Halloween night when he was eleven. He has to go back in. People who remember usually kill themselves within six months. "Don't you ever think about it?" "Every night." "How?" "Forty-five in the mouth."

Robert is about four hundred years old. He was bred in the year 2580, on a timeline where America lost a nuclear war, to come back and change it. The mission worked. "My mother's gone, my father's gone, all my friends." "Then what are you still doing here?" He looks frightened. "I don't know."

Daryl keeps asking what the kids were for, until Robert breaks. Has he seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? The cages are electrified, and the children are shocked unconscious for the adrenaline, strapped down, and tapped at the base of the skull for a pint or two. That kills the little ones. They go through something like a wood chipper and are fed to the others, and at puberty the rest have their throats slit. They are raised like veal. Everyone who gets his eagles knows. "Why do you work with these things?" "We have a contract." "You're going to hell for this." "There is no hell. If there is a hell, we're in it." And they should stop talking about Aquino. He is fourth density, the astral. Say his name enough and you can conjure him. He could be in this room right now.

The torture was five days ago for Robert. They would have hurt his daughter, he says. He looks down Daryl's timeline. "Well. You make it. It's difficult, but you make it. You'll remember in real time. You're up there right now."

"I don't trust you. I'm not going back in the chair."

On his last Friday night, feedback squeals in his room. "Daryl. Come right now, in the clothes you're in." "I remember what you did now. You gutted me." Robert is crying. Daryl sits up in the dark. "May God let you die with blood in your mouth." "Daryl, please don't say that." He says it again, and the voice fades out.

In Norfolk, processing out, he reads the Post-it every morning and every night. I have a family I don't know. After five weeks he understands this will kill him, and throws it away. Nope. That didn't happen.

10.

It goes the way Robert saw it: odd jobs, couch-surfing, drinking. One night a woman waves him into a house on the south side of St. Petersburg, and he wakes with a worm working into his eye and a small scaled thing with eyestalks watching from the coffee table. Pull it out, says the navigator in his head, and he rips it out. It is Aquino's last try.

Around 2019 he finally owns a home, feels safe, and it comes back in order: the childhood abuses, then Robert's office, then the rest, in real time, as the other Daryl lives it. In 2021 he goes public. He calls it a confession. In December 2024 his hairline tingles for five days, and he remembers the black reptile striking him there—before I lose control of you, I'm going to leave my mark—and the name Robert was afraid to say: Sobek. It was with him from seven to forty-seven. He prays his way out, and goes back to Christianity.

Some nights he lies on his roof in Florida and feels someone thinking of him, and can't tell whether it's them or him. Where there's life there's hope, he says. You can't abandon your post.