James Rink

This account is compiled from Lone Wolf: Alpha Squad Copy Over, the book James Rink publishes in June 2012 about the years in which he goes looking for what was done to a friend and finds his own file. He died on November 30, 2025, at forty-five.

1.

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, and one with a family to care about fights better. His embryo is delayed so it can be mutated many times, over a span of seven years. For a while it is a fish. There is crocodile DNA in it, for strength, and fish DNA, for the senses, and DNA from Hitler's SS race. He is an underwater mutant, made for Project Seagate. None of this is in any family album. He does not learn it until he is thirty.

The childhood he chooses to remember begins in 1980 in Charlotte, North Carolina. His father is a conservative Christian fundamentalist who once worked for the Mellon family in Greenwich, Connecticut. His mother is moody in a way that is not bipolar: if you do everything the way she wants, she loves you. He is punished for playing with the dog too loudly, for asking her a question while she is on the phone. She buys him toys and tells him she loves him, then takes them away because he accidentally touched her. When he gets Mom mad, which is pretty much all the time, she sends his father into a frenzy, and his father beats him. He spends most of his childhood in a submissive, dissociative state. His sister, five years older, runs away over and over. In his ten-year-old mind, running away would make him a bad person, so he stays.

He has no memories of being six, seven, or eight. He thinks everyone is like this.

What is in those years, as it comes back to him later in pieces from other people, is this. A snapshot of him at six, taken at a facility, not by his family, dated July 17, 1986, at the top of a file: Area of attendance: Jacksons. Date of chair: 88. A toddler sitting upright on the floor of a dark empty room with burgundy walls, strapped down with a belt. At eight, once a week, taken from his home to a facility with other children his age who are also being groomed, where electrodes are attached to his testicles and he is electroshocked in an S&M-styled ritual to associate pleasure with pain, so that killing will one day feel good and normal. At eight, a fourteen-year-old named David, hired by his parents as a babysitter and older playmate, who is into Satanism and molests him, and whom his father catches, and tells James to forget about it. At eight, his father comes home from work and finds him shaking in the bed, talking like a different person, and gets the Bible out and does an exorcism. At about ten, an underground holding cell with walls like a parking deck at night, where he and other naked boys are locked behind a chain link kennel and, he thinks, made to have sex, and afterward washed down with cold water from fire hoses.

What he remembers himself is smaller. When he is ten his mother becomes fascinated with the Greys and watches alien abduction videos, and he hides under his bed at night. He never consciously sees a Grey in his room. But he sees images of them in his mind, and they communicate with him on an emotional level, and they tell him that if he ever talks they will kill him on his twelfth birthday. He tells no one for twenty years.

From ten to twenty he has no friends at all. Nobody sits with him at lunch, so he stops eating lunch, and the not-eating becomes anorexia, and his growth is stunted; at twenty he is just under five foot one. At fourteen he decides that if no one is going to help him he will help himself, and confronts his father: You're abusive and a bad person. "You are the child and I am the parent." "Act like a real father and I will." His father lunges, pins him under the weight of his body until he blacks out, and he vaguely hears his sister in the doorway yelling, "Get off of him, he's seizuring." For eighteen months the fights run two or three hours every evening, while his mother is out. He screams so that the neighbors will call the police. No one does. He scorches his vocal cords, and his voice never develops; until he is twenty-five, if he talks for more than five minutes his throat burns and what comes out is a twelve-year-old boy. He is allowed two or three sets of clothes while his mother fills five closets, so he picks one outfit and wears it every day for months, sewing the holes, and no adult says anything. His only escape is Boy Scouts, where everyone wears a uniform. He makes Eagle Scout.

By the end of eighth grade he can barely go out in public. Every few months a military recruiter calls the house. They seem desperate. He goes to college instead.

2.

In August 2000, at twenty, away from home at last, he starts waking every hour with chills and air moving over him in bed and the sense of something in the room watching. Then sleep paralysis: a weird-looking black being with red eyes in his bedroom. Then, one early morning in September, an angel of light at the foot of the bed, three feet high, in white robes, with long brown hair, holding in his left hand a golden torch that burns blood and in his right the sign of the Trinity. Two weeks later, Jesus on the cross, head hanging, who gathers his strength and rolls his head up and looks at him.

He takes these as signs from God that he needs professional help, which he will later wish he had never sought. The psychiatrist diagnoses dissociative amnesia. There is also the pain in his genitals, which no doctor can explain: an erection burns for hours, and an orgasm brings needle-like pains that get worse all day until he sleeps it off. He tries twenty-six medications. Paxil puts him to sleep sixteen hours a day with terrible shakes. In 2003 he does fifteen sessions of biofeedback, and the practitioner tells him he is the only patient who has ever gotten no benefit at all, as if a wall were blocking his recovery. He sleeps in the walk-in closet of his apartment, because there he feels safe. His body turns on itself: allergies to everything he eats, candida, leaky gut, weight below a hundred and ten pounds. In 2003 he throws out the pills and gives himself an ultimatum. He will never again believe what an expert says unless he researches it himself.

3.

It is 2004. He is twenty-four, in college, spending hours a day in Yahoo chat rooms looking for answers about health and God. In a Christian Teens room he meets Nathan Wilder, fourteen, of Des Moines, Iowa. They both had traumatic childhoods and deal with the pain by laughing. Months later Nate instant-messages him out of the blue: I nearly got thrown in juvy. Somebody made fun of his girlfriend, and Nate punched him, and the kid flew across the classroom and out a second-story window and broke his neck. Nate wants James to help him figure out why he is so strong and so violent.

Nate's biological father was an expert marksman in the military with a temper so bad he once almost killed Nate's mother, and he died of a heart attack from rage when Nate was seven. Nate is on lithium and Depakote. He blacks out, he cuts, he claims twenty-three suicide attempts. His IQ tests at 168, and he makes a D-plus average. He has a black belt, a hit speed measured at 650 pounds of force, and a bench press of three hundred, which he puts down to oversized adrenal glands. He has sex several times a day with various girlfriends. He sees angels and demons. He can levitate a pencil across a table. He reads James's aura, green and gold, from Iowa, without ever having met him.

James grew up Southern Baptist, where psychic means possessed. He sees a gentle soul lashing out. His screen name is Bearish, and Nate calls him Bear.

On Halloween 2004 Nate says there is aether in the air, and argues, in a voice that is not his goofball voice, that maybe God doesn't like us and made us for fun. Later that night he messages again, scared shitless: his lights are flickering and the air in his bedroom is freezing. The family got a great deal on the house. That January the previous owners' sixteen-year-old son murdered his social worker and the housesitter and shot himself in the head. Nate says there is a portal to Hell in the basement. Then he tells James about the party where he passed out drunk and Lucifer appeared to him, extremely ugly with a huge dick, who said he hates everyone because God can forgive them and not him. As Nate finishes the story a dog howls outside, a black cloud fills his room, and the air smells of sulfur. James has him say it: In the name of Jesus, you have no control over me any longer. The cloud goes into the computer and types onto James's screen: WHO THE FUCK IS THIS? He gives it his screen name. WHO THE FUCK IS BEARISH? "Leave him alone, you have no authority over him anymore." FUCK YOU. Then it leaves.

At the library the signs of demon possession, heart attacks, overactive adrenals, supernatural strength, levitation, unholy rage, sexual addiction, describe Nate and his father perfectly. James fasts two days and finds a pastor who does exorcisms over the internet. The pastor asks the name of the spirit in Nate's Book of Shadows. Nate types, "The wolf," and logs out. That dude scares me.

Something is seriously wrong, and demon possession does not cover it. James starts reading everything his religion forbids: psychic abilities, UFOs for the first time since the Greys frightened him at ten, the Illuminati. On davidicke.com he finds Andy Pero, programmed as a boy on an Army base in Munich with strobing lights and needles in his ears and genitals, who at seven saw his father murdered in front of him by a handler, whose Nazi handler at the University of Rochester accessed his "Z" alter with the trigger word Rhino and had him jump off a twenty-story building and land on his feet. And he reads how it is done: the child on the gurney, the goggles pulsing red and white, the needle under the fingernail, the electroshock that either splits a personality off from the core or kills the child. Alpha alters for general programming, Beta for sex, Delta for killing, Omega for suicide, which triggers when a Monarch breaks away.

On November 20, 2004, Nate announces he has joined Mensa. What the hell is wrong with me? I'm a freak. James, trying not to laugh, asks whether he is sure he isn't a project of government gene manipulation. Was his father in the military? Yes, and his uncle and his brother. Was he ever taken to government bases as a child? Sometimes, for vaccinations and physicals; they had him run and monitored his heartbeat. I could almost swear I'm being watched. James tells him about Andy Pero: the bases, the torture, the father killed in front of the boy at seven.

Oh my God... I just realized something.

Nate logs off. Ten minutes later he is back and remembers none of it. I never said that. James repeats it all. Was his mother ever in Rochester? Born and raised there until he was five. James repeats it a third time, and Nate says, What the fuck are you talking about? Who is this?, and logs off again, and the person who comes back asks, "Who are you?"

"Stay away from Nate. He's a very special project, so to say." If everyone had free will, terror would run amok. Nate is serving others; he is serving us. "Nate has taken several wounds, which we have repaired. We need him for several more missions, and then we will dispose of him." It might not be you we'll hurt.

Then the voice changes. I am another aware version of Nate. I am here to keep him from fucking up. He was created in a moment, the moment a thirteen-year-old named Sean pushed Nate to the ground on a playground and held him down while the other kids whipped him with belts. Nate was seven. His name is Max. Nate doesn't know he exists. Nate's mind is a horrible place, dark and shadowy, and the more distraught it is, the longer Max gets to live there. "I would like to not exist. I hate life and humans. The only thing I love is Nate."

The next night Nate has no memory of any of it. "Who the fuck is Max?" Then he zones out for ten minutes, and Max is back: James, do not mention me, not to Nate. Nate is a new project. One of the agents used to control him is another personality, ZZ, violent and angry, created by the officers at the bases. The password is Wolf. Alaskan Wolf. Nate's body is controlled by several buttons and computers; when he tried to leave, they shut it down. They can kill him. He doesn't want to be deprogrammed. "A lone wolf is a dangerous wolf." Dante wants to fight, but Dante will kill. "Start calling me Dante, because that's who you are talking to." There are five: Dante, ZZ, Max, Mike, Jeremy.

Two days later James tries to deprogram him himself, with the Greenbaum speech as his guide, since no professional he can reach knows anything about MKULTRA. Is there any part inside that still has contact with the government? My eyes. Nate was put in a treatment facility for trying to scratch his eyes out. How many backup programs? 310,102,310. The core was created when Nate was five minutes old, a quick procedure, electroshock, pulsing goggles. The 310 is a small explosive device at the motor and sensory cortex and both temporal lobes; the 102 blows out his hearing and telekinesis. The only way to destroy them is killing Nate. An alter that calls itself Memory says goodnight and, asked when Nate dies, answers 2025.

On the twenty-seventh Dante says Nate can't sleep, so Dante takes over, because that is when he can do things. Missions. Can't tell you, we'd both die. Nate sleeps thirty minutes a night. Then: "Sorry James, I think I better go. Someone is taking control. Bye."

A week of silence. James tells his mother, who tells him to forget about Nate. He tells his roommate about the eye camera, and the roommate laughs. On December 5 Nate comes back. "I just met you." He doesn't even know his name; he found some papers that say Nate Wilder. He just appeared here, from a white place, completely barren, as if something was there once. Max surfaces for a moment: Nate's memories and alters are being deleted. I'm lucky they didn't kill him. By Christmas Nate is cold and distant. "I'm not in the U.S. anymore. I'm not on Earth anymore. I'm not alive anymore. They can't stop me." They made his mind too powerful. "They blew up my head."

4.

Six days later James can't sleep. Something is trying to hack into his mind, and he can feel that it is a Grey. At five in the morning the words come: Join us. Join us. Because you're special. We've been watching you, we need your help. "Kiss my ass."

Then Nate is jubilant. So, did you notice me? I was in your mind. In the last week of December James, who normally has no sex drive, is suddenly so horny he goes to the mall to buy underwear. On New Year's Day Nate says he did some stuff with James's DNA. You might be happy with the results and growth. And the pheromones. Over the next couple of months James's penis grows nicely. James lists his fears: the dark, Grey aliens, needles, maybe his mom. He gets dizzy and falls out of his chair, and after that the OCD and the anxiety are much reduced. The ones who made Nate were Greys, and as soon as they killed him he burned their monetary supply and destroyed most of their race.

On January 11, 2005: James, keep looking up. Keep watching the sky. Is he sending a meteor? A smiley. Four days later a power surge fries James's new computer with no lightning anywhere. Late one night papers rustle in the kitchen downstairs, a cold breeze crosses his shoulder, and a voice says, We need you, we want your assistance. When he goes down he sees a green LED light moving in the dark. It switches off when it sees him, and he slams the door and runs.

On February 12 Nate comes online and says he has figured something out. Your God does not exist. It's a universe of anarchy. They killed him, twelve times, and his soul found a new body and a new place in time. "I am Nate's darkened soul. I am Godless, ruthless, and more powerful than your Satan." He destroyed all 3,400 planets that had to do with it. He is the leader of the genetically engineered soldiers who will turn on their captors; he is the Antichrist; he hears every prayer on the planet and needs to end them. For a moment he says he is Lucifer, and then: I am not Lucifer. I am. I am the screaming voice in the back of your head, the scared child in your soul, the one you ignore because it tells you to do bad things. He and James have fought every couple of centuries. James killed him with poison, as an assassin, when he was a king, and killed him as a bear when he was the wolf, and was cut at the neck for it, which is where James's birthmark is. James represents order and law; he represents freedom. You are God, or maybe I should just stop at You Are. He first discovered his powers the first time he jacked off, at nine: the house bent, and the grass outside melted. He thinks he might have been Hitler. Then he is gone.

James's dreams in these weeks: a twelve-year-old boy in a cell in an underground lab, and an officer with a needle saying "I don't want to do this," and the boy taking the gun, shooting him, running to a barricaded door, and, surrounded, when the head doctor says calmly, "Nate, put the gun down," yelling Fuck you and shooting himself in the head. James does numerology on the name Nate Wilder, base six, and gets 666.

Two days later he takes a two-hour nap in a sleeping bag and wakes dizzy and exhausted with three scratch marks on each shoulder and the inside of his ear red and hurting. On March 6, driving home from his sister's, his right ear itches, and dried blood flakes off, and in the mirror a chunk of flesh is missing from the lobe, a gash that should have needed stitches. A splinter-sized object is under the nail of his right pinky. There is no missing time. Based on the sloppy job, it is a MILAB. From now on it never stops: needle marks at first every two days, then twice a day, in the lips and the roof of the mouth, two-prong and three-prong, under the fingernails; triangular scabs in the nose and on the leg; laser burns; rod-shaped things under the skin. He wakes with the covers pulled off and his body in positions he could never fall asleep in. Once he wakes hearing someone say, "Turn around." Pages go missing from the journal in which he logs the marks; a pillow goes missing from under his head.

On March 13 Nate says, "Bear Bear, I'm bleeding." In a couple of minutes his matter will be wiped out of existence. They have sub-atomic energy keeping his matter inside a cell. Every atom will be disassembled and reassembled into something new that will not look human. I'm not one for drama. Later. And Nate disappears. In the weeks after, channeled material on the internet begins to say that Lucifer has judged himself and chosen to be no more.

On March 31 James wakes with the insides of his eyelids inflamed and a small incision in each corner, as if a device had held them open. Around the same time he dreams of an interrogation room in an underground base where officers demand, Tell us what you know, and he says I don't know anything, I don't know anything, until a tall Grey walks in and demands it telepathically. Some of what happens to him now is help: his speech comes back, the autoimmune problems ease, he has a growth spurt.

5.

In the spring of 2005 the National Institutes of Health starts phoning him with surveys about his drinking. He answers everything backward. A friend, from an Illuminati family that owns a hotel chain most people would recognize, gives him codes, "079461790 6 9er," that make him dizzy and set his heart racing, and tells him that his parents are the ones making the needle marks, that they are poisoning him, and that he should kill them, and, since James does not believe in violence, that binge drinking will neutralize the toxins. His roommate walks in on him hysterical, gulping cans of beer, crying, "The government is trying to poison me. I don't want to die."

In the morning he makes his daily fruit smoothie, and the friend tells him his father broke in during the night and poisoned his food. His legs go numb and he collapses. Poison control tells him to call 911. At the hospital they leave him in an evaluation room for eight hours. A family member arrives and says the doctors found no poison and they are going to have him hospitalized. His mother, who thinks the government has fucked with his head because of Nate, tells him to go out there and apologize and say he was drinking too much. He is about to, but he hasn't eaten in fourteen hours, and his parents bring him a meal from the cafeteria, and halfway through it his arms and legs are paralyzed worse than before, and he lies on a gurney with a raging headache while doctors walk past and his parents stare. Eighteen hours in, a social worker brings papers for voluntary hospitalization, and he signs, and he is trucked to a separate facility for nearly four weeks. He was supposed to graduate that month.

At a thousand dollars a day nobody shows him a test result or a diagnosis. When James says he may be a victim of government mind control, the doctor says, "Your story is too bizarre to be believable." When he complains of his sensitivity to medication they raise the dose, until his will to fight is gone. The first night he is handed an unmarked pill in place of the stamped 200 milligrams of Seroquel, and the paralysis and racing heart come back ten times worse, with shooting pain all over his body all night, and no one comes when he asks; he spends the night reciting Saint Germain's Violet Flame. In the morning the doctor leans to the nurse and says, "He's psychosomatic." The next night's pill is stamped and does what Seroquel does. So he cooperates. The meds are making him feel so much better now.

Before discharge there is a family meeting, and he asks his father whether he noticed anything unusual about him as a child. "When you were eight, I came home from work and found you shaking in the bed, and you were talking like a different person. I got my Bible out and did an exorcism." His father will not discuss it further. Later a psychic medium gives him the rest, the babysitter David, dead soon after and hanging around in the astral all these years trying to apologize; when James asks, his parents laugh and say they never knew any David. His medical file says Psychosis NOS. No poison was found. His blood potassium was high, and no one could say why.

The hospital sends him home with twenty-five thousand dollars in bills and a bottle of pills, which goes in the dumpster. He has been med-free since. He confronts the friend. "You're chicken shit. You believe people online." The needle marks? "They are stretch marks, all weightlifters get them." James cuts him off. His family does not want to hear any more crazy talk about Nathan, aliens, needle marks, or David.

6.

A friend who talks to the Council of Light, one of the ruling councils of the Intergalactic Federation of Light, passes on the explanation. The Men in Black were injecting him with hallucinogens so that he would appear crazy. Nate was an android from Planet X, the first of his kind to have a soul, a Type A genetically enhanced person, designed for combat with espionage capabilities, fitted with a Control Link. He will see Nathan again one day, but not for a very long time. Around this time he makes contact with James Casbolt, who channels the Pleiadians for him in capital letters: YOU HAVE NOT FULLY OCCUPIED YOUR BODY. YOU HAVE LIVED OUTSIDE OF IT. NATE, YOUR BROTHER.

In January 2007 he finds Nate on a poetry website, posting short stories about murdering women and about suicide. Nate has no memory of him. James posts a story called The Lone Wolf, about a black wolf chained behind a cabin in Alaska, paws cut open from trying to escape, and a homeless man who gives it his last bread and unties the collar. The answer comes from Nate's girlfriend, Jessabelle, who has seen James's MySpace page, where Nate's photo is captioned "Victim of government mind control," and thinks it is a sick joke, until James tells her things only a close friend would know. On February 8 an email arrives from greywilder: Your interest in this particular person has raised concern. Telekinesis and government brainwashing does not exist and has never existed. We're watching you, James. Mr. Grey. When Casbolt writes to Nate, Nate replies that Mr. Rink is suffering from a shared psychotic disorder and that Bear is lonely and looking for a friend. In none of the emails does Nate write as Nate.

James dreams of a woodland behind barbed wire, and opens the gate, and a black wolf runs out at full speed without looking at him; Jessabelle was praying for Nate at that hour. Then she wakes with cuts on her back, surrounded by broken glass and dirt. They are living in Rochester, New York. She goes through Nate's things and finds, in the basement, five bottles of embryos labeled Nathan Wilder. His poems now say: I am the anti-christ and the new messiah. I am death. I am Da Puka. He has started a cult, the Chosen Ones, more than a hundred followers, all telekinetic, to bring about the New World Order and make war on the Council of Light. Her last message, on April 2, 2007: I believe that I am being controlled now. I am so scared! He never hears from her again.

Through a friend on Facebook Nate calls himself a lab catastrophe gone right, one of the Children of Rochester. There's more of us, you know. I record everything and transmit it to my superiors. I try to stop myself, but my alter is very strong. A remote viewer sees him grabbed in the woods by two men and a woman in a black blazer; the person James spoke to in 2007 was not Nate. Nate's mother writes back that he never kept any files and was probably telling stories. Another friend hears Nate screaming: Let me out. Oh God the blood. My nails. The other one is an impostor. They have killed me more than once only to keep reanimating me. I am in a box, it's dark, I am scared and I am so hungry. They are going to kill me again soon.

In 2008 Sanni Ceto, who was one of the Greys who died at Roswell, writes to him. The triangle scabs are not from Greys; they are reptoids disguised as Greys, doing genetic research on him for the covert government, because he has reptoid DNA. He is of the benevolent species. She has seen him on the ship: eight or nine feet tall, strong and muscular, not sickly, his clothes transforming into a uniform when he shapeshifts. His star name is Travik. Then she cuts off contact, because part of him is still being used for black ops, and she is frightened of Super Soldiers. He has never seen his eyes go to slits. He does have strange claw-like toenails.

7.

From 2008 on he assembles the timeline. On Facebook he meets Carolyn, a remote viewer the government has chased since she posted the nuclear silo activation codes, who recognizes his face and asks if he is military. She sees him in fatigues with a gun, going into an opponent's mind and making him want to stand down, the unit leader, the one they depend on for intuition. She sees two men in uniform dragging him struggling into a hangar and forging his signature when he refuses to sign. She sees a page in his file on which he lies under a large glass green pyramid resting on his head, green electrodes on his skull, while a technician types code words to upload combat capabilities. While he is gone a clone lives his life; when he comes back the clone's memories go into him under the pyramid and the combat is deleted, and he is put back in bed. They cranked up their use of him around January 2006, the month he bought a backpack stamped RECON.

What he remembers on his own comes in glimpses. Standing outside the White House while George W. Bush waves at him. A submarine going down toward a city underwater, where he is stripped naked and forced into an orgy with men and women while a Grey nearby controls them and takes pleasure in it. Kicking in the door of a latrine on a desert road in Iraq and shooting an Iraqi in the head. A tarmac inside a mountain with a saucer levitating out of gigantic pod bay doors; black BDUs in a pitch-dark warehouse flooded six inches deep, which another MILAB remembers as a time jump from the Jupiter station into a future where the mantoids have taken everything over. A white atrium under a glass pyramid roof through which the sky is black and full of stars.

Other MILABs fill in what he cannot: they plug us into avatars and hand us to the madam of an elite sex ring, and to keep us traumatized they put us into cloned avatars of our own child bodies and use them for pedophilia, to let us know there is no escape. James has vague, spinning memories of ritual sex with other Super Soldiers, and he understands the pain in his genitals now: his DNA was designed with a signaling defect so that an erection or an orgasm fires pain instead of pleasure, so that he can love no one outside his unit, because someone who loved him unconditionally would make the programming fall apart.

He starts making video blogs of what he remembers, hoping other MILABs will recognize him. It becomes Super Soldier Talk, and it opens doors, to a team who can remote view, read akashic records, and mind-hack behind walls, and eventually to his file. He records himself saying "Am I a Super Soldier?" and plays it backward and hears, That's not real, I am not supposed to talk about it. A friend scans him and finds an implant behind his left eye, marked PVS 1-22002, made by Braun, with a vein that should not be there pumping a drug into his pineal gland, which is why in alter he can lift a tank and as James he is docile and weak. His file says: A.K.A. Agent Sabertooth. Silver Class Cosmic Clearance. Used for searches and exterminations. Alters activated using a code word and technology. Alters activated using trauma. He is a fifth-generation Super Soldier with metal bones and enough telekinesis to lift an elephant, and his alter is programmed like an attack dog. He is on the cleanup crew. You are Jekyll, and he is your Hyde. Under Detroit and under Atlanta there are clones of him in cages and vaults, and staff in white pinch their skin off and drill screws into them to see how durable they are. His handler, another viewer sees, is an eight-foot reptilian with a crocodile snout in a white lab coat, sitting on his tail at a computer among clones of James, who is willing to take the sexual pain away if James promises never to procreate.

Each MILAB has about twenty avatars, one for each stage of his life, kept in underwater tubes along a corridor a third of a mile long. They are called Sibeus, and later Arbeus. In them he is six foot five, with metal bones, a glass helmet, and a heat-seeking red left eye. Under Compound C, made from bioluminescent plants that grow only in Inner Earth, the bones morph into Pri metal, like gold and hard as diamond. For the past five years James has felt something stuck on his left eye, a tiny black speck when he focuses a certain way.

From other people's sessions: a snow-covered city in Russia where a team in white ski masks lies under white blankets beside a drawbridge and puts knives to the throats of the soldiers dragging a captured sniper, Operation Cyanide; a jungle mission with Casbolt so booby-trapped that most of the Super Soldiers sent in died. Then the file itself, remote viewed under a wooden hatch in the Capitol building: James Michael Rink, July 17, 1986, the snapshot of him at six; a profile for 1999 with clone serial number 1654432897766, the first year he gets an avatar body and the first year of real missions; and the last entry, Cloned Arbeus. Field compromised: MG64IT Gunnery, K.I.A. Revived attempt failed. Final revive failed. Under investigation and repair. March 14, 2006. Under Main Project: Project Name Recovery, Project Surrogate. Operations: Live On, Ravensky, Pink Mist, Cyanide, Torpedo, Stargate, and Operation You are not supposed to be here you are supposed to leave. A few weeks later the computers are gone. A friend inside the NSA looks him up at umbra-8 and finds one page: a modification candidate for Project Bleak, Project Abandon, and Project Equalize, a short subject, used for several months, genetically modified. His program failed in 2008 and he was released from the system.

His clone, another survivor sees, was recently terminated, his nerve endings disintegrated like a billion needles, because he was about to go rogue, as James is. James was designed with a shelf life of forty-five to fifty years and programmed to become bipolar at thirty so that the flood of memories would make him self-terminate. The suicide alters are not activating. Because of his star-seed genetics he is incapable of killing himself, and they know it, and it has them scared to death.

8.

In 2010 a seventeen-year-old named Adam Zupancic, whose friend has seen the videos, gets in touch. He has the same middle name, Michael, and could pass for James's blood relative. His memory before eleven is nearly blank, except that a black limo used to pick up his roofer father late at night. Adam dreams of missions every night as a deadly assassin, and wakes sore with needle marks. A clairvoyant sees him as Agent Dreadnaught, sixth-generation, sniper and explosives, mostly cyborg.

One night in September James jokes that the government wants to give him an upgrade, and Adam's room gets brighter and his ears ring, and James sees a code in his head and types it, Alpha omicron typing unit 99753, and someone else takes Adam's fingers. It is Tiyan, a twelve-foot reptilian scientist on a ship that has circled the Earth since Adam was placed here. Tiyan made Adam, gave him emotions so he would have something to lose, and traded him to the government, which only borrows him; it is law. James's designation is 54363. James and Adam are brothers, made differently, with almost the same DNA; James's true father is half reptilian and half Pleiadian. Tiyan pulled James out of a mission with Alpha Squad 45 firing team when everyone else was killed. Nathan is on the moon, in a base called Forty Five Niner 86457, almost done with the Trip Chair; James will have to rescue him. When James mentions that the Greys threatened to kill him at twelve, Tiyan says, "What greys?", and James says, "Oh shit, I did talk."

A few weeks later Adam blanks out during a meditation and types a firefight, 5 alpha squad put down suppressing fire now, 5th Gen get your ass in there, and then Tiyan being taken by his handlers: Told you to stay away from the boy, old man. He's military, that's it, nothing else. The chip is in Iowa, your files, go there now. Stay back here and make sure he dies. Adam texts James later: This is sub unit Adam denied access pass code needed. James types 54363. James Rink Access. Unit memory access. On October 16 James's pillow is gone from under his head, and Tiyan, alive again after being killed multiple times, says it went into a time-freezing zone. Nathan is gone now, so far into it he will never remember James.

Kosol Ouch, a Cambodian American on YouTube making meditation cubes that look alien, tells James to build one to integrate, reads his file from the akashic records the way the others did, Agent Sabertooth, fifth generation, activated by trauma, clean-up crew, and says Nathan's file is red hot and never to mention him again. The cube, copper cones and cores with layers of human hair laid out in sacred geometry, lifts James's depression. It also, Kosol says, disrupts the Trip Chair's transfer of memory into his avatars, so all his clones are going rogue and being terminated; James was an obsolete model the Cabal meant to let self-destruct. James is on food stamps. With the last of his money he founds Neo Lab Technologies, named after the lab where they brainwash MILABs, as a joke on the Cabal, until white-hat friends at the NSA tell him to tone it down, and it becomes Neological. In June 2011 voicemails tell Kosol, Your technology will be ours, and in July his personality flips and he sets up a rival company whose units are called Baal. In December a soft-spoken Kosol calls with no memories. He was interrogated underground and told to look into the white light every time he said James Rink is a Super Soldier, he is Agent Sabertooth, and rescued by blond Pleiadians dressed as black-ops soldiers, and returned to Texas with James's phone number on a piece of paper. By January he has shifted again and tweets that he has become a demon, and James cuts him off. James is still James.

In November 2011 Duncan O'Finioan, who was an Omega unit and despises the words Super Soldier, posts a rant about the little jackwagons on the internet claiming to be Generation 5, 6, and 7, and tells James never to use his name again. Adam confronts him, and Duncan's partner Miranda does a ritual, and Adam sleeps seventeen hours and wakes at 96 degrees with a lime green cord in his back. Then the Alpha Squad Council speaks through Adam. Alpha member XXX was violated to the sixth degree, which is murder. Omega are rebels who branched off from Alpha, and Omega has been putting fake memories into James to make him think he was abducted by them. The Council walks him through cutting thirty-eight cords, three thick orange ones connected to the AI, and thirteen blue ones that feed him the fatigue. Then a squad member named Ashley: Don't you ever ever ever go missing again, you fucking hear me? We have been looking for you for years. You did well, Sabertooth. Afterward James asks Adam whether Alpha are the good guys, and Adam says he doesn't know; anyone can say anything to them; a piece is missing. They both feel like shit.

Alex Diaz, Blood Streak, 54631, an ex-gang member from Los Angeles living with his family for schizophrenia, asks first whether it is safe to talk to James. Under James's regression he sees them both in Trip Chairs in a dirty warehouse under Arizona, poked in the spine and shocked while a handler runs them through a Roman-orgy virtual reality to extract Alex's hormones as an aphrodisiac. A benevolent reptilian there speaks to him in Zion: James Rink, you are a great one. On a 1995-era computer Alex types 54363 and reads: James Rink, alter mode activated in extreme pain, extreme emotions, and extreme mental breakdowns. Don't need to be tortured, just need to go through something that will hurt you emotionally. Once you get to this point you get a phone call with a random number and a code. And he sees Mars: the four of them, Sabertooth with a sniper rifle, Dreadnaught with an MP5, Bloodstreak, and Victor with a .45, six foot five in their suits, landing on orange sand and going down glow-lit tunnels to a base where the reptilians working with the human scientists are no longer obedient. A seven-foot reptilian in armor hisses that humans are foul and cannot be trusted, and wants them off Mars. The general orders the extermination. Alex says he doesn't want to; James says, "We shall see about that." The reptilians meet them at a base with red lights and glyphs on titanium walls, and offer them a mission complete: they blow up the human base, all hundred or so inside, and the team will be allowed to escape to Planet Sedan. Back on the ship, naked and exhausted, they stand in a ten-foot tube and their bones loosen and they shrink back to themselves. It hurts a little.

On April 10, 2012, he wakes on the white couch with needle marks in his lip and cuts on his arm. A friend under regression sees a woman with a black ponytail and a clipboard shining a white flashing light into his eyes, an attorney in New York in her civilian life, who monitors MILABs and calls them pets and shapeshifts into a Queen Draco when angry. On the clipboard James's name is in black bold letters and his date of birth is blocked out. The drug is green goo; the mutations aren't taking hold and are making him sick. He is teleported into a cold room where five hundred cryogenic tubes stand in rows like soldiers at thirty below, and in every window she looks into is his face, until after eight or ten she will not look anymore. Then he lies three hours unconscious under a white sheet.

The book comes out in June. He doesn't know what the future holds: a false-flag reptilian invasion, three days of darkness on December 21, nuclear war, ascension, Nate rescued. But the Dracos who run the MILABs will not escape what is coming. We were their ultimate weapon, and now we are getting our minds back and destroying them. They don't want to kill us if we break free. They need us to save them from a race they fear more than themselves.