Daryl James

This account is compiled from the interviews Daryl James gave between 2021 and 2025. His website is www.daryldjames.com.

1.

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 a computer operator. He has a sister, and half-brothers and half-sisters from his father's first marriage.

His earliest memory is of the couch. He is about three, watching Sesame Street, and his father, sitting next to him, is talking to him without opening his mouth. Do you think you'll be able to do this when you get older? his father asks. Daryl's sister could do it at his age and then forgot, and so did the older children, all but the eldest. Yeah, Dad, Daryl answers, in the same silent way. 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.

His father shows him how that works too. When Daryl is near someone, a swirl appears at the upper right of his vision. If he looks at it, the swirl opens into a tunnel, and he can travel down that person's life, fast through the dull years and slowly through the ones that matter. He is afraid to do it on his own life.

Two other things from those years will matter later. When he is six or seven the police bring a trailer to the school for an anti-drug program, and inside is a gas chamber chair with straps, holes in the seat and a bucket underneath. An officer tells the children that lots of people died in it, and it frightens Daryl badly. And at seven he is molested by a man called Chucky. He comes out of it with a habit that will shape his whole life: when something hurts too much, he tells himself nope, that didn't happen, and it is gone.

His sister's birthday falls on Halloween. The year Daryl is eleven, the party is at the house of her friend Jen, in Pinellas Park. Jen is about fifteen, she can speak mind to mind as Daryl and his father do, and she likes him for it. Her mother is an occultist with a strong belief in bloodlines.

As soon as they arrive, Jen pulls him into her mother's bedroom, where a tall woman sits at the mirror, making herself up for a party of her own. In silence Jen presents him. The woman lifts Daryl's chin and locks eyes with him. The room fills with orange and red light with spots of blue. All he can see is her eyes and, behind her, tall blond people standing and watching. In the next room the girls start to scream. She shakes his chin to bring him back. You're a powerful little boy, she says. You know that, don't you? He says yes, and she sends him off to play. The girls tell him the house looked like it was on fire.

The next day she sits him down alone. She did something to him last night, she says, and she is not sure what, but she can make him stronger. How would he feel about marrying Jen when he is older? Daryl looks down the tunnel. He sees himself marry at fifteen and sit beside Jen's father, a New York gangster, reading the minds of the men he meets. He sees one of them reach for a pistol, and then his own funeral, his father's heart attack, his mother's pills, his sister drinking alone. He tells her he can't marry Jen, because it will destroy his family.

Whatever happened in that bedroom does not fade. For years the world looks wrong at the edges, the colors too strong, shadows moving where nothing is. He simply gets used to it. And at some point in these years, without noticing, he forgets that he could ever speak without words.

In high school he takes up classical guitar, which becomes the thing he loves most. When he is nineteen his father drops dead of what doctors call a widowmaker: a blocked artery in the heart that nobody knew was there. The same year Daryl is charged with possessing marijuana equipment, and he stops playing guitar.

2.

He joins the Navy in January 1999. With the charge on his record he may work only in construction or in the kitchen, so he becomes a Seabee, a member of the Navy's construction force, and spends five years with a battalion. He reaches Iraq a couple of days before the war starts, and comes home not quite the same.

Then he signs on again, and in the spring of 2004, aged twenty-six, he steps off a bus in Cornwall, at the far south-west tip of England. He has been posted for two years to St Mawgan, a small station of the Royal Air Force with an American naval unit on it and an underground base beneath it. The sailor who collects him tells him that this is a weird base, and will not say why.

Daryl works in the garage. In his first week he is sent underground on a small errand, and just inside the quarterdeck, the lobby of the base, an English guard in a green beret makes him walk through something like an airport metal detector. That Friday Daryl is given the watch from midnight to four, the one nobody wants, and finds an old Army colonel reading a file at the desk. He knows the face from the talk shows of his childhood: Michael Aquino, the Satanist, with eyebrows that curl up like horns. His eyes are so dark they look solid black. Daryl finds a reason to leave the room.

The following Friday he has the same watch again. The petty officer of the watch, the sailor in charge that night, a big man with a blond mustache, points to his monitor. On it a small gray figure with large black eyes is looking up at a camera. Daryl asks whether he got that off the internet. No, the man says. Look. Beside the sliding door is a tall window, and the thing from the screen is standing behind the glass.

Do you mind if it comes in here? the petty officer asks.

Does it mind if I stare at it?

It doesn't mind. And inside Daryl's head a flat voice, which sounds like his own, repeats the words.

It walks in carrying a silver tool, with the English guard behind it, and the guard's rifle, Daryl notices, is ready for him and not for the visitor. What follows is a demonstration. On the floor is an old government computer, and the creature takes it apart like a machine, never guiding the tool, catching each screw in its other hand. It changes two memory chips and puts every screw back with a flick of the wrist. Then it stands in front of him and lets him look. It is under three feet tall, less than a meter, and light brown with a touch of pink, with a fold of skin running from the inner corner of each eye down the cheek, and no ears, navel or sex. Its fingers are so long that it holds its hands curved to keep them off the floor. He reaches out to touch it, to make it real, and is told not to. Then it walks back underground. They call them drones, the petty officer says, and they have been here as long as we have.

All this time Daryl has been pinching his thigh hard enough to raise a blood blister. The petty officer asks whether he thinks he is dreaming. No, Daryl says. I want a mark, in case you guys wipe my mind.

We're not going to wipe your mind. Not yet.

Then the man explains what the detector really was. It is a scanner, and it has told them everything about him, beginning with an IQ of 190 or 195. Only one person on the base scores higher. The scan shows something else, which looks like somebody living inside him. Was he molested as a child? Daryl says yes. That explains it, the man says. Don't worry, we'll get that out for you. He asks about hobbies, and says they will really like the classical guitar. When Daryl asks who they are, he answers that there are Germans up there, mostly from the thirties and forties, in the Moon and beyond. He never once uses the word space.

By morning Daryl's mind has filed the night under things that did not happen. Only when another sailor asks what he thought of the creepy little thing does he check his thigh, and the blister is there.

3.

On Monday the executive officer of the base, its second in command, comes to the garage in person, which never happens. He is a Navy captain who looks about sixty, white-haired and stern. His first name is Robert, and he is the one person on the base who scores higher than Daryl. He walks Daryl away from the buildings before he speaks.

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, Daryl says, but I think I could figure that one out.

Robert describes what he calls the 20 year and back. A volunteer serves twenty years. Then he is sent back in time twenty years, his body is made twenty years younger, his memory is wiped, and he wakes up in his bed as if nothing had happened. With Daryl's scores, Robert guarantees that he will make commander and pilot a starship four kilometers long. He will be expected to have children up there, and he will never see them again. Mister James, I promise you, Robert says, you won't remember a thing.

What decides Daryl is the scanner. A machine like that would have found the blockage in his father's heart, and he wants to know why the public does not have it. Robert talks about population control. Daryl says there has to be a side that wants to release these things, and when Robert asks whether he means a traitor, he says no, just a side. Robert admits that there is one. If you can get me on that side, Daryl says, I'll do it. Robert walks a few steps and turns. One more thing, Mister James. You're going to be escorted by a reptile. And he's big.

For the rest of the week the men in the barracks prepare him without seeming to. One of them explains what awaits him. We live in the third density and the beings the program works with live in the fifth, much too fast and clever for us, so a density chamber pushes the recruit up to their level: stronger, faster, two hundred points smarter, and more a part of a group mind.

On Friday night the petty officer with the mustache has a pile of paper as thick as the contract for a house, with every place to sign already marked. One line stops Daryl: the consciousness of the first party now belongs to the second party. When he hesitates, the petty officer tells him he is already back there: somewhere under their feet a Daryl who has finished his twenty years is being made young again. Daryl tells himself that this is for his father, and signs. The petty officer picks up the phone and says, Send him in.

What stands behind the glass is nine and a half feet tall, nearly three meters, and dark brown, with ridges running back over its head, gold eyes like an alligator's, a flat face and shoulders like basketballs, in a tight blue suit. Daryl asks whether it is going to eat him, and is told that if it wanted to, it would have by now, and that it can read his mind. Sorry about that, he thinks at it.

The reptile leads him downhill for a long time, through corridors with no lights, to a round watertight door with a wheel on it. Behind the door is a large black chair with holes in the seat and straps. It is the chair from the trailer at his school, and Daryl runs. The reptile throws him into it as if he weighed nothing. When Daryl fights the hand that holds his arm, a blow to the head knocks him out. He wakes half tied, with a palm flat on his chest, and he feels a low rumble in his ribs before he hears it, like the call of an alligator. Don't make me hit you again. The face is right above him, and Daryl pushes his thumb into its eye. A tear runs down. Then it leans its weight on his chest until his ribs bend in against his heart.

He wakes again as the last strap is tightened. I'm sorry I have to do this to you, the reptile says. It goes out, and the wheel turns shut. What comes is pressure and pain, then cold, then the loss of all weight, and then a peace as if his soul were being drawn out of his body.

When he comes to, he does not know who he is. The reptile is making signs in silence to a man in a black leather coat and high boots, his blond hair oiled back, dressed like an officer of the Gestapo. On the base he passes for an ordinary petty officer. He is one of the off-world Germans, raised by reptiles, and close to the one Daryl has just half blinded. Daryl slides off the chair, asks whether he can go to bed now, and falls to his hands and knees. The boots step up to his face. I should have you executed for what you did to my man.

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

It carries him away under one arm like a sports bag. There is a bright light. Every underground base has a portal of this kind, called a Looking Glass, and the one under St Mawgan opens inside the Moon.

4.

He wakes on a medical bed made for something much bigger than a man. A nurse is fixing heart monitors to his chest. He finds her very pretty, asks to hold her hand, and falls asleep holding it.

The next day she examines him, and when she gets up to go, he takes her hand again. I don't know what to do or what to say, he tells her. All I know is I don't want you to leave me. She likes that, and takes him home.

Home is a court like the inside of an apartment block, five levels high, with women and babies on the walkways. In the nurse's rooms they kiss, and she stops to ask his name. He says he doesn't remember. Everybody remembers their name, she says, and tells him to think. It takes him a moment. Daryl. Afterward he falls asleep sitting up in the bed with her head on his chest. Her name is April. On Earth she repairs computers at St Mawgan, and the Daryl of the garage can't stand her.

He spends three months in the Moon, and they are a punishment. For a human to touch a reptile is a crime that carries death, and for the eye he has been sentenced to hard labor in the mines, for twenty years or even forty.

The mines are cold and white with dust. The men work without shirts in teams of five or six, guiding long drills into the rock, and every man wears a collar that shocks the whole team when one of them slows down. The Germans who run the place call the men meat sacks and the women honey pots. There is no pay except the brothel. Daryl goes there sometimes, though he mostly stays with April, whose scores have made her a nurse. He watches babies taken from their mothers as soon as they no longer need the breast and carried through the portal. Those with high scores are raised off-world. The others go to the caverns under the bases on Earth. Some of those children could be his.

After three months Robert appears in the mine and speaks to a German officer. The German passes a small device in front of Daryl, reads his scores, and shouts in German at the man in the leather coat for wasting them in a hole. Then he tells Daryl to come with him.

It is not a rescue. Two drones tie him naked to a table. A man in a surgical mask holds up a needle as thick as a finger and explains that it will put in his brain implant. It breaks through his skull with a crack. Then the table turns over, and something cold is put into his spine: the black goo, as he calls it, an artificial intelligence. In his free time he will be himself, but when they want something of him, his body will simply get up and go. He was supposed to go to Solar Warden. This is the most Robert could do for him.

5.

The Dark Fleet, which calls itself the Nachtwaffen, belongs to the off-world Germans, and the Germans in turn belong to the Draconian Empire. They chose to serve the reptiles rather than be their slaves. Every ship carries four reptiles of the royal caste, bent and long-nosed, in long robes, something between an alligator and a vulture. The chief one is addressed as Master. Below them come the German officers, and at the very bottom come recruits from Earth like Daryl, whom the Germans call conscripts. His suit and his rifle each hold a captured soul, because the intelligence inside them needs a consciousness to run on. In his cabin a classical guitar is waiting.

In his first week the first officer takes him to the back of the ship, where the reptiles live. In a small room a naked man sits on a table with his hair over his face. Take him, the first officer says. Daryl pushes the hair aside, and the face is his own. It is a clone of him, and there is a bond between them at once, as between twins separated long ago. The clone trusts him and lets itself be led across the hall into the reptiles' dining room. The ceiling there is one long window, and through it Daryl sees space for the first time with his own eyes. It is not black. It is clouds of pink and purple and blue.

Give me that, says the Master. He takes the clone by the neck and orders it to look at Daryl. While it looks, he bites off its arm and lifts his head to swallow, as an alligator does. The clone screams. Daryl runs at them, and the first officer catches his head under one arm and holds it, saying into his ear, Don't fight it. Don't fight it. When the clone goes weak, the Master slaps it awake and makes it look again. Then he bites out its throat. Through all of it his eyes stay on Daryl, because he is feeding on the fear more than on the meat. Back in his cabin, Daryl sits with his head in his hands and thinks that he was better off in the mines.

The guitar gives him a place among the Germans, who pull their tables closer when he plays in their beer hall. As the ship's musician he has all the music of Earth on his glass pad, and he plays the songs of the sixties and seventies again and again, wondering whether his mother listened to this. If he could remember his childhood, he thinks, he could remember himself.

Then the Germans read in his file that he served in Iraq, and they make him a sergeant of infantry on Mars. On his third day the position is overrun by the reptiles native to that planet. A mouth closes over his face and everything goes black. He wakes on the ship, in a tube standing against a wall. His consciousness has been saved and placed in a clone exactly like the original. The body his mother gave birth to is bones on Mars.

His work is to capture mantises, the insect people of Mars, who are masters of genetics, so that a machine can read their minds. Daryl finds them the most human beings he ever meets. They offer a visitor a seat, and they cover their mouths when they laugh. The first soldier who takes him out kicks the doors in and beats them. Daryl knocks, and promises that no harm will come to those who follow him now, and most of them follow him.

He pays for every refusal. When he will not destroy a village, the reptiles tie him to a rack and cut pieces from him until he obeys. Once, for answering the Master mind to mind as an equal would, they eat his legs. Each time a healing tank makes him whole again. He knows that on Earth he will be tortured to death for the reptile's eye, so he takes risks, preferring to die out here.

After about two years an admiral visits the ship. In front of him the Master promises to ask the ones on Earth to go easy on Daryl. Afterward the admiral takes Daryl aside and tells him that the Master is lying, and that the Germans would like him to join the Dark Fleet for good. Daryl asks whether there are horses on the admiral's world. The admiral owns two. Then I want what you have, sir, Daryl says. I want to be a German. I want land, a German wife, German children. Two days later he has papers to visit the German world, a city like the Berlin of the 1940s, and within a week he is engaged to a woman he meets there, named Helen.

His next mission takes the ship to a trading station that hangs in space like a glass tower. Everything carved on the walls of the Egyptian temples is walking around inside it: people with the heads of dogs, cats and birds.

A blond man and woman in blue uniforms come up to the Master, and the woman speaks first. The cargo belongs to us. You took it without permission. The Master answers that since his side has invested so much time and training in the cargo, it now belongs to them. Then the man steps forward with a glass pad listing the articles that have been broken, and says that if the cargo is not returned at once, it will be considered an act of war. The Master reads the pad 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. He is allowed to fetch his things and finds that he owns a guitar and nothing else. He asks the first officer to tell Helen he is sorry.

6.

Their craft is a polished disc. Daryl sits on a bench while the two of them talk about him in silence. He looks disturbed, the woman says. Wouldn't you be, if you had to live with them? says the man. Daryl looks up at that, and both heads turn to him at once. The man kneels in front of him and asks, without speaking, whether Daryl can hear what he is saying. They had not known that he could.

Robert calls these people Nordics. They call themselves Taygeteans, after their star in the Pleiades. They live three thousand years, and there are thirty women for every man. The ship they take him to is the one Robert promised: the USSS Nimitz, four kilometers long and almost black, built with Taygetean technology out of titanium from Earth. A Navy captain commands it, but a Taygetean of the warrior caste, whom everyone calls Leader, can take it over at any moment. His wife holds the same title.

Daryl lives with the pair from the disc, because living together builds the link between telepaths. The man is the ship's navigator. The woman is its science officer, and her name is Swaru. By the third day Daryl can lay his hands on two black panels, empty his mind, and hear a woman's voice wish him good morning. The mind of the ship is a Taygetean woman who volunteered for the task, because these people do not trap souls in machines. The pilot has the right to name her, and Daryl calls her Mama Bear.

On that third evening, at dinner, Swaru tells him that her people always knew where he was. They left him with the reptiles on purpose, so that he would learn from them. Daryl picks up his guitar in a rage and plays. When he looks up, the two of them have pulled their chairs in front of him and are staring with their mouths open. Their own music has no melody and no harmony, and they ask how he did that. That wasn't for you, he says. That was for me. He throws the guitar on the bed and walks out. Whenever he complains of what he has suffered, their answer is that he needed the experience. In the end he forgives them.

Nothing can be hidden from a telepath, and Swaru knows that he wants her. For a week he tells her plainly that he would like to have a child with her, and she only listens. Then one day she agrees. She lies above him, stretches her neck to look up, then looks down into his eyes, and the two of them change places. He is looking out of her eyes at his own face. He takes fright, and is back in himself. The second time he leaves the ship altogether and is one with the universe, for minutes or for days. When it is over he asks whether she is pregnant, and she is.

The midwife is a woman everyone calls Mother, who is more than two thousand years old. At that age her people begin to grow again, and she is seven feet tall, over two meters, with silver hair and great cheekbones under skin stretched almost clear. Daryl names his son David, after his father.

After the birth Swaru does nothing but look into the child's eyes. After four months Daryl reaches out to take his son, and she knocks him to the floor and screams, among a people who never raise their voices. The navigator sends him to Elder, Mother's husband and the judge of the ship, fourteen and a half feet tall, over four meters, with a white beard, and always seated because the ship is too small for him. He tells Daryl he was lucky she did not bite his face. A Taygetean mother bonds with her child for ten months, and during that time nobody may come between them. Meanwhile, Elder adds, another woman has just arrived, and she is free. Daryl's first daughter is born to this second woman, and when the ten months are over, Mother tells him he may see his son.

Years later Robert will explain why the Taygeteans wanted him. 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. They are an honest people and easy to deceive, and they want his knowledge of the street in their bloodline. They were using you, Robert will say, but you didn't mind.

One night the ship herself wakes him. Someone has switched off the alarms, and mantis soldiers, fighting for pay, are on board. Daryl gets the children from the nursery into an escape craft. There his son and his daughter look up at him with the same expression on both faces and tell him that he has to get Mother. It is she who is calling through them.

He finds her sitting beside Elder, frightened. She cannot run. Take her! Elder says, aloud, and Daryl lifts her onto his shoulder. Behind him Elder stands up, for the first time Daryl has seen, bends low to pass through the door, shouts, and is shot down in the corridor. At the escape craft Daryl hands Mother across to the navigator. There is a flash. Something knocks against his leg, and he looks down at his own forearm hanging in the sleeve, burned off at the elbow. Through the hole in his chest he can see something shining and moving, and he understands that it is his heart.

He comes back to life floating in a healing tank, with a cable in his spine that persuades his soul the body is still alive. Every death takes a piece of a man, he is told, like a copy made from a copy. The traitor who let the enemy in is the German in the leather coat, and the warrior caste cut off his head with a sword.

Some time later the reptiles ask for peace, and Leader asks the opinion of the one man who has lived among them. Daryl says that they want peace only because they are weak, and that the moment to attack is now. Leader agrees, and gives him a command of his own people: the miners of the Moon, which the Taygeteans have freed by then. The cargo of the ship they capture is containers of souls, the money of the universe, and many of them are souls from Earth.

7.

The victory is followed by years of leave on the Taygeteans' home world. It is a country of pines and granite, lakes and rivers, where the weather is controlled and it is always spring. At the top of a long flight of steps, in a tower of glass, sits a very old king. Daryl plays classical guitar for him, bows, and gives him the guitar. He becomes the king's musician, and he lives on that world for nearly ten years without growing a day older.

Here there is nothing to fly, so he teaches. The Taygeteans watch their children play with their arms folded, and Daryl brings them the habits of Earth. He teaches the boys to fish. He carries children on his shoulders until the other fathers begin to do it. He builds a baseball field, and in the evening tells stories to the whole city around a fire. His own children are everywhere, more than he can count, because the king has given him a princess and other wives have followed. In the end there will be dozens of sons and hundreds of daughters.

Mother comes to him as well, and he has a son with her. Afterward she becomes obsessed with Daryl. When Daryl asks for Leader's wife as his queen, the first among his wives, Mother attacks him in public, screaming, and the crowd only stands and stares.

He takes the matter to the king. This, he says, is what is wrong with their people: they stand and stare. If two men watch a woman being raped and do nothing, are they not as guilty as the man who does it? His world is being raped, and now that the Taygeteans know it, the guilt is on them and on their children. Just get the boot off our neck and help us stand up, he says. There are others like me. We'll do the rest. The old king says that Daryl is right, and that they will help.

So Daryl goes back for the children. Four of them step through a captured portal in the Moon, back in time, into the clay caverns under St Mawgan: Daryl, two warriors, and his queen, who wears only her blue suit because armor would frighten the children. A man and a woman in robes come down the passage, discussing which child to take next. Daryl rolls a grenade that knocks them down without killing them, and turns the man onto his back with his foot. The man is laughing. You'd do this to my children, wouldn't you? Daryl asks. The man says he would, and to their children as well. Daryl shoots him. The woman says that these are not his children, and asks why he cares. They are his children, he answers, because he slept with the women of the Moon. He shoots her too. Then the queen opens the cages and holds out her arms. The children have never once been held, and by rights they should bite her. They come out and hold on to her legs.

Once the king asks him what he wants in return for his music. I want to see my children have children of their own, Daryl says. I want to hold my grandchildren. I want to grow old here, and I want to die here. The king says that they can do that, and Daryl falls to his knees. Then the king says that he must go back first. A contract is a contract.

His first daughter marries Leader's son, and when she lets him hold his grandson she says one word to him: Remember. Swaru tells him what to expect on Earth. They will put him in a chair. The first time he will have no choice. The second time he will, and he must not go in.

He teaches the warriors American football. At the end of their first game Robert walks up and says it is time to go home. Daryl answers that he was given two more years and has one left. Robert says they have to go now. On the ship Daryl hits the wall until he breaks his hand, begging them not to take his babies from him.

8.

They pass through the portal in the Moon, down into the base, and twenty-one years back in time. His hair and beard are cut off with electric clippers. If I had ten men like him, Robert tells the others, this war would be over by now. Then Daryl is put in the chair and brought down to the third density, and once more he does not know his own name.

Nobody has forgotten the eye. A man and a woman in robes pull him naked through the clay tunnels, the tops of his feet dragging on the ground. They are the two he shot, and for them it has not happened yet. They pass the cages, piled five high, where a small girl with wide black pupils throws herself against the bars. The two of them are waiting to see what Aquino wants.

They tie him to a rack. A reptile as black as polished stone leans into his face, under a red hood, and asks whether Daryl remembers him. Then two images slide together, and Colonel Aquino is standing there instead. But Daryl has seen the black creature step back into the shadow, and he speaks past the man's shoulder. Nice trick, he says. It steps forward again and admits that the trick works on most people. It is thousands of years old and was worshipped in Egypt as a god. The colonel's own soul was taken out of him when he was a boy, and this is what has lived in him since.

The torture lasts two days. A large Englishman with a shaved head, whom Daryl calls the Goon, breaks his toes with a hammer. They burn him, pull out his eyes, and strangle him with his own intestines, and after each death they put him in the healing tank and begin again.

Then it spends eight hours walking down his timeline, from the age of seven onward, pushing people who already wanted to do harm. That, it lets him know, is how Chucky happened. In despair he asks what, in the name of Christ, it wants. It tells him to stop saying that. So he says it again, with intention: in the name of Jesus Christ, he commands it to undo his straps. Its hands actually begin to move toward the buckles, until the Goon knocks Daryl out with his fist.

At some point in those two days everything comes back, and he knows who he is. He tells the room that he is the king of the Taygeteans, a title he held for four months, and that they have committed an act of war. The creature looks down his timeline and sees that it is true. It hands a dagger to the commanding officer of the base, a thin man Daryl has nicknamed Stick, who cuts him open and asks whether he feels so high and mighty now. Then it hands the dagger to Robert and shows him where to cut. Robert refuses. He is told a second time, and he does it. Before it lets Daryl go, the creature touches the middle of his hairline. It has lost control of him, it says, but it is going to leave its mark.

He wakes in his room in the barracks on Sunday morning. Saturday is missing. His last memory is of falling asleep against the head of a bed with a woman on his chest, and he cannot think who she was. There is clay on the tops of his feet. His hair has been cut as if by a child and is burned at the ends. The man in the mirror has the body of an athlete. In the hall, a sailor leaning on the wall tells him that he made it. Twenty years is a long time, the sailor says. A lot of people don't make it back.

9.

Daryl has almost two more years to serve at St Mawgan, and they are the worst of his life. A depression settles on him that he has never known before. He drinks until he passes out and has nightmares.

The people who know what happened to him drink in the bar on the base. The first time he walks in, the Goon stands up and greets him as the king of the Taygeteans. Daryl remembers none of it, and he keeps coming back, waiting for the man to get drunk and hand him another piece of a life he did not know he had.

At the end of 2005 he leaves the Navy, and goes to say goodbye in the executive officer's office. Robert rises slowly from behind his desk, looking sad. Then, with no movement between, he is a foot from Daryl's face. Can you hear what I'm saying to you? he asks, without moving his lips, and asks it a second time until Daryl nods. What do you remember?

Daryl remembers a tall woman, seated, with long silver hair, and a boy on her knees. He kisses the boy's head, and then he kisses her.

That was Mother, Robert says. 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 in wave after wave as Robert talks: three months in the mines of the Moon, two years in the Dark Fleet, and all the rest with the Taygeteans. Daryl asks whether they knew each other up there, and Robert says that Daryl was like a son to him. Daryl takes a pencil from the desk and writes the names on a small yellow note.

Something went wrong with the chair, Robert explains. It could not push Daryl all the way down, because a part of him has been in the fifth density since a Halloween night when he was eleven. That is why he remembers, and he has to go back into the chair to be wiped properly. People who keep their memories usually kill themselves within six months. Daryl asks whether Robert ever thinks of it himself. Every night, Robert says.

Robert is about four hundred years old. He was bred in the year 2580, on a timeline where America had lost a nuclear war, and sent back to change it. The mission succeeded, and so the world he came from, with everyone he knew, no longer exists. When Daryl asks what he is still doing here, he looks frightened and says he does not know.

Daryl keeps asking what the children in the cages were for, until Robert gives in. The children are shocked for the adrenaline it produces, and their blood is drawn at the base of the skull and made into a drug. The small ones die of it, and the rest are killed when they reach puberty. Every officer promoted to captain knows about it. Daryl asks why he works with these creatures. Robert says there is a contract. Daryl tells him he will go to hell for this. There is no hell, Robert says. If there is a hell, we're in it.

Robert says he cut Daryl on the rack only because they threatened his own daughter. He looks down Daryl's timeline and tells him what he sees. It will be difficult, but Daryl will survive, and he will remember everything in real time, as the other Daryl lives it, because at this moment he is still up there.

I don't trust you, Daryl says. I'm not going back in the chair.

On his last Friday night in Cornwall a voice fills his room, though there is no speaker in it. It is Robert, asking him to come at once. Daryl answers that they have taken everything from him, and now they want his memories of his family as well. Robert is crying. Daryl sits up in the dark and wishes him a death with blood in his mouth. Robert begs him not to say that. He says it again, and the voice fades away.

He is discharged at Norfolk, Virginia. Every morning and every night he reads the names on the yellow note, thinking that he has a family he does not know. Then he understands that the note will kill him, and he throws it away. Nope, he tells himself. That didn't happen. Five weeks later it is gone.

10.

For the next thirteen years it goes the way Robert saw it. Daryl works at odd jobs, sleeps on friends' couches and is homeless for a while. He drinks. At night he walks drunk through the worst streets of St. Petersburg, not quite wanting to die but waiting for something to decide it for him.

Around 2019 he finally owns a home and feels safe, and that is when the memories return, in the order in which he lived them. First come the hidden things of his childhood, one after another. Then one day he is standing at his bedroom window, looking out at the yard, and he is in the office with Robert again. The twenty years follow slowly, as if they were happening now. A therapist at the veterans' hospital, a former soldier, listens to all of it. A part of me thinks this is how you're dealing with your trauma, the man says. But a larger part of me believes you.

In 2021 Daryl begins to give interviews. He calls it a confession. What he signed no longer binds him. The following year, at a conference in Illinois, he meets Tony Rodrigues and Rebecca Rose, who remember their own twenty years, and for the first time he is among people with whom he is neither mad nor alone.

In December 2024 the middle of his hairline tingles for five days, at the spot the creature touched, and the last memory returns: the rack, the red hood, and the name the creature went by in Egypt. It is Sobek, the crocodile god. It was with him from the age of seven to the age of forty-seven. Daryl prays his way out of it and returns to the Christian faith.

He lives in Florida, where he fishes, walks his dog and writes his book. Some nights he lies on his roof and feels that someone is thinking of him, and he cannot tell whether it is one of them or the other Daryl, who is still up there, near the end of his time. Where there is life there is hope, he says. You can't abandon your post.