Jason Rice

This account is compiled from the interviews Jason Rice gave in the autumn of 2018, when he came forward on Cosmic Disclosure, and from his conversations that year with Jimmy Church and with Kerry Cassidy, and from the talk he gave at the Conscious Life Expo in February 2019. The secret history of the programs, as it was told to him out there, is set down on its own at the end of this book.

1.

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

There he is told to sit in a chair surrounded by toys. When he gets up to explore, he is put in a box and locked in. He screams and kicks. The moment he goes quiet the box opens, he is put back in the chair, and he is given an M&M. It is a recruiting arm of MILAB, military abduction, which finds children for classified programs, and Jason has been identified as an intuitive empath: someone who knows without being told how a person feels, or how a machine is meant to work. It is not mind reading. It is knowing why.

When he starts school, someone comes for him in the morning or at midday and drives him to an office building, or to a facility underground. Three to five children at a time assemble puzzles without a word spoken, on intuition alone, and the puzzles grow until they are a single color and thousands of pieces, sometimes done blindfolded. Children who can't keep up don't come back. Drugs sharpen the ability and erase the day, and a memory of an aquarium is put in its place.

Then the trainers find each child's deepest fear and flood him with it: in virtual reality decades ahead of anything on the market, he drowns, or burns, again and again, until the fear is gone. At home there are nightmares, moods, a lost appetite, and the parents take them for phases. At night, in abandoned malls, the children play capture the flag with pistols and suits that freeze a hit limb, or lock up entirely for a kill, and they learn to gang up on the weak.

In his teens a desire to join the military takes hold of him out of nowhere. He keeps a 3.9 grade average, is offered a medical scholarship by the Air Force and an engineering scholarship by the Army, takes the Army's, and is commissioned as an officer on the day he graduates, in December 1996. His request for a master's degree is denied. Two months later, as he prepares to report to Fort Leonard Wood for the officer basic course, his orders are changed without explanation to the Army Research Office in North Carolina.

2.

His new company commander walks him straight to an elevator with two buttons, up and down, and no floor indicator, presses a palm to a scanner, and rides down with a hand on his Beretta pistol for the whole five minutes, watching Jason's face. Earlier that day, Jason learns later, he used it on another trainee. Near the bottom comes a vertigo, as if the world had turned sideways.

The doors open onto a red-lit platform where a white, pill-shaped capsule waits with its doors raised like a Lamborghini's. They sit knee to knee for half an hour. Jason can't tell which way they are moving, only that at some point the Schumann resonance, the hum of the Earth he has never noticed until it is gone, is replaced by something artificial and nearly right. The capsule never seems to slow. The first he knows of the stop is the door beginning to open, and he flinches, sure it is about to be torn off. The captain has seen that face before.

The next platform is white, with three elevators, one big enough for a truck. The small one opens on a being four feet tall with big dark eyes and a small mouth—four feet from his face. "There's something in the elevator." "What is it?" When he looks back it is gone, and he decides to say nothing. The soldiers call him Charlie. He is an EBEN, an extraterrestrial biological entity, a hired tactics consultant who talks mind to mind and enjoys new arrivals. Asked where he is from, he points up.

The elevator lets them out into a cavern the size of a football stadium and thirty-two stories high, with the light coming out of the rock itself and a smell of mold and mist like a damp old campfire. There is a running track, a shooting range, walkways and ropes overhead, and a trapeze that makes no sense in a military facility. The top levels are off-limits, radioactive, he is told. This is the FIG, the Fort Indiantown Gap caves, in Pennsylvania. The captain tells him to save his questions.

In a conference room, for two hours, Jason signs for equipment and documents without a briefing. A black stripe three-quarters of an inch wide runs around the walls a foot below the ceiling. He takes it for decoration; it holds the sensors that read the heart rate, the sweat, and the stress of everyone in the room. He wonders why so many of the officers he has met have German accents. On the table in front of the captain lies a small device like a jeweler's hammer, with a black handle, one button, and a conical crystal where the head should be. If Jason declines, it will be used to blank slate him, and he will report to Fort Leonard Wood remembering none of this.

3.

Jason's quarters are a hotel room with no window, television, or radio. The captain leaves him at eleven at night with uniforms, equipment, and manuals for plasma rifles, pulse pistols, land mines, and area denial field generators. He sleeps badly without the Earth's hum.

In the morning he finds a device labeled nanite epilation equipment. He knows epilation; nanites, in 1997, are a new word. Two compounds mixed together activate microscopic machines that dissolve the hair at the root, no water needed, and leave his face smooth for a month. The toothpaste is another binary compound, tastes of chalk, and half an hour later his teeth feel as if a dentist had just been at them. All of it is built to save water on a ship. In the cafeteria, stainless steel shelves carry black square buttons. He presses one, hears a hum, sees a misty light, and a bowl of butter appears. He goes down the line pressing buttons for scrambled eggs, porridge, bacon, toast, and a glass of water, and admires the happiest plate of eggs of his life.

The rest of the day is a tour. The trapeze is for the grav packs, mind-operated anti-gravity packs, with thirty or forty-five minutes of battery, used with transformable hang gliders not for hovering but for silent flight; the cavern is where small units learn to maneuver and shoot in the air. He collects a stack of postcards to write to his family in his own hand, each to a set word count, the wording supplied, one of them a late birthday card for a birthday still a year away.

He sits with a psychiatrist who asks the same questions in different words, over and over, about where he has been and what he has seen, while the sensors in the walls read him like a polygraph. He will do it every week. Only twenty years later will he understand what so precise a record of his memories is for. In the medical lab he receives the nanites: into his bones, his organs, his glands, his lymph. His eyes will zoom and see in the dark, his hearing will reach beyond the human range, he will control his own adrenaline and go without food, every cell will repair radiation damage, and a cut that would take two weeks to heal will close in hours.

The next day the trainees are called to an auditorium. A colonel named Schuller thanks them for volunteering, as if they had, and tells them in a thick accent that they are the tip of the spear. They will help defend other planets from alien invasion, as a unit like theirs drove one off in Africa in 1995. Every senior officer on the stage is German. The program is the Interplanetary Defense and Reaction Forces, IDARF, a border patrol for other worlds. The colonel takes credit for it and never mentions an extraterrestrial. Then he comes to the reward. After twenty years they will receive $465,000, less minor deductions for food and lodging. They will be age regressed. And they will be sent back in time to the moment they received their orders: their original self carries on at home while they serve, and the two are reintegrated at the end as if they had never left. That is the 20 and back. Nobody mentions the memory wipe.

4.

The eight months at the FIG are about the nanites and the empathic sense. The nanites are not for making supermen; they are a suit of armor worn on the inside. They don't make him faster; they let him hold his top speed for five miles instead of one and a half.

At the end there are two solo tests. In Antarctica each trainee is set down alone and finds his way back on intuition. In the South Pacific Jason is left on a pillar of rock rising hundreds of feet from the sea, with a glider and a grav pack, five hundred miles from a base whose direction he is not told. I think it's this way. That feels right. He rides rising warm air to save the batteries, and when he ends up in the water the glider's floats and wings become a small sailboat. He is twelve days getting back. The point is total confidence in the ability, and the way to build it is to set a man loose.

From Area 51 a shuttle takes them to the Moon in minutes. Six months there, at the base the Cabal, Earth's hidden rulers, took over from the Germans, are spent mostly aboard a training ship built around 1985, in the infancy of the American program, Solar Warden: a cramped submarine of a vessel with pipes crowding the ceiling and doors that seal themselves and don't care who is on the wrong side. Of the thirty-four who started, twenty-six remain.

Four months on Mars follow, under helmets that are never to be removed, on a surface of rock and dry riverbeds with nothing above ground but machinery and the entrances to New Berlin and New Wurzburg, the two German cities cut into the rock. Jason's unit is the 3rd Panzer Division, the Berlin Bears. One dress uniform is close enough to the SS black that the Americans refuse to wear it without an order. They learn combat landings: shuttles, gliders, grav packs, and the insertion pod, a shielded coffin with one anti-gravity generator that is fired at a planet and slows just enough at the bottom that the suit absorbs the rest. It gets hot inside. Most men switch off the video on the way down.

At the end of training, command announces their families have been told they died in action. Some got an empty coffin; some got a body. It is Cortés burning his ships.

5.

After eighteen months Jason is an IDARF platoon leader. He will be a company executive officer, a company commander, and, as a major, a battalion and regimental staff officer. Nobody born on Earth goes above major; everything above is a Mars German, and the Germans treat Earth soldiers as inferior and blame them for whatever goes wrong.

The fleet is built around cigar-shaped and wedge-shaped carriers at least half a mile long, gray or black and seamless, with hulls a meter thick, part steel and part water, and openings covered by force fields in place of windows. They never enter an atmosphere; they hold orbit and send down shuttles, which come in every size from a van to a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane. Some are flying tanks, boxes ribbed with steel, armed with weapons that need no projectile and so can fire from inside the inertial bubble that lets a shuttle turn a corner at speed. The small ones are driven like forklifts. The big ones are flown by thought.

One day, riding as a door gunner, Jason has his helmet patched into the pilot's link, and he listens to a man converse silently with his ship about fuel, ammunition, and the state of the hull, while the bare aluminum panel in front of him blooms into a hologram. Travel times are lied about as a matter of policy: a trip of a few days is logged as two weeks, and nobody mentions the portals.

Jason calls his first world Planet One. It is two percent bigger than Earth, sixty percent land, the rest freshwater lakes full of fish, with two moons the soldiers name the Potato and Nike, forests of near-pines and near-oaks, birds and four-legged animals and nothing on two legs. Two billion people live on it, humans about five feet tall, who have not had a war in centuries. The plan is twelve to eighteen months of quiet reconnaissance before the government announces help is coming. The soldiers will not get those months.

The language was put into his head in training. His platoon enters a city on a lake as wide as the Gulf of Mexico in staggered groups, posing as traders from a distant city, and the city, which they call Area 26, takes them in. The people are trusting and open, and the streets are full of art, machinery married to leaf and vine, like something out of Jules Verne. There are guild clans, and children rotate through every guild before choosing one. A bonding ceremony joins two families, the couple moves into the bride's family compound, and the matriarch and the patriarch rule it together; women carry beams beside the men. Leadership of the city rotates among the guilds. There is no money, only barter, and no police, courts, or jails, because disputes go to the guild councils and there is nothing to steal. Cities of 800,000 stop dead at the forest's edge and are threaded with canals, like Holland.

Command encourages romances with the locals where they build trust, and they rarely last; the deepest bonds are within the unit. Deserting to the locals is not on offer: the tracking is total, and the punishment is a virtual prison in which five years of solitude are served in minutes. Jason wonders why the planet is so poor in species. Earth, he has come to think, is a Petri dish, worked over for ages by many hands, which is why an octopus looks as if it fell out of nowhere. Planet One is simpler, and quieter.

One evening on his day off, eating by a canal, he sees the people moving toward the beach. Something is falling from the sky. A sonic boom rolls over the crowd. From the observation deck on the sea wall he zooms in with his nanite eyes: not a meteor but a rock with a crude heat shield bolted on, fired from a mass driver, an electromagnetic catapult. He codes a message to the platoon, high ground, then talks the crowd off the deck and across the bridge. The impactor hits the lake, the sky lights up, and the wave takes the sea wall like paper. He reaches an alley as the shock wave brings the buildings down.

The rock was unguided and missed by fifty to seventy-five miles, which is why there is a city left. Most of its people are dead or missing, and so is forty percent of his platoon, some never found, some in pieces. The survivors drop their cover and help bury the dead. Why didn't you tell us? Deceit isn't in these people's vocabulary. His company commander, a Mars German, blames him for caring about those effing civilians and refuses him replacements; his platoon sergeant tells him the commander's way would have gotten him killed inside a month. More impactors fall across the planet, and the ones on the ice caps put the coastal cities under twenty to thirty feet of water. Half the planet dies. Jason's work becomes food and shelter, and then it becomes training farmers as soldiers, stockpiling, and digging in.

6.

He is on patrol with eight of his men inside a platoon of forty indigs, local soldiers, on the outskirts of a larger city when fire comes from the tree line across a wide road. A third of the platoon is in the open; had the enemy waited, it would have been all of them. They fall back through an eighteen-inch ditch to a three-story stone building, and Jason goes up to the roof with the platoon leader to return fire. The enemy uses some kind of cryogenic weapon. Then it steps out of the trees—and the men below him begin to scream.

They are eight or nine feet tall, two and a half meters, black-skinned, with patches of gray fur through the gaps in their armor, tubes and joints where flesh meets machine, claws made for tearing, and short dog-like snouts full of teeth: werewolves, the soldiers say. Someone yells, "What the heck is that?" They walk fast and don't hurry, then leap from the ground to the roof in one bound, and the fight is on top of them. When they close, they drop their blades and guns and use claws and teeth. They take no prisoners and cannot be taken; the unit tries. The soldiers among them are drones, and the commanders think, so that what looks like a rush is a plan.

The first wave is fifty against forty. The .38 automatics annoy them. The secondary, a short .50, hurts them, five rounds a magazine, fifteen a man, and by the time the platoon learns it, eight soldiers are dead. The second wave is as big, the third nearly a hundred, and the ammunition is gone. It comes down to bayonets, rifles used as spears, and fighting in threes, because a man alone is dead. Jason takes a deep cut to the right arm; by evening it is closing, and twenty years later he will carry no scar from any of it, until, unexplained, some come back.

It need not have gone that way. The combat suits sit in storage, and so do the pulser rifles. The holographic uniforms hid a man completely at the FIG, where the stealthiest could sneak up and blow in someone's ear; the lining throws the wearer slightly out of phase, and only a blur gives him away when he moves. On Planet One the same uniforms draw the enemy like a magnet whenever more than two men stand together, and Jason comes to believe the cloaking was handed to the other side.

Back at headquarters the survivors demand intelligence and weapons and are told it is above their pay grade. Their mission is to train the locals, and advanced technology would disrupt the culture. Jason knows that is not the reason. The ammunition load is doubled to thirty rounds. Again and again over four years, his platoon arrives as reinforcements to find no one alive, the native soldiers out of ammunition and torn apart where they stood.

7.

The war on Planet One lasts forty-seven months. Command finally releases antimatter mines and mortars and the tide turns, slowly; the suits and the pulser rifles never come. It is combat Darwinism, Jason understands: the troops are put in impossible places to see who breaks, and the survivors are marked to lead the next lot through the same hell. Under the Mars Germans nobody trains soldiers who has not survived a deployment. When the last invaders are dead, the dead are counted into mass graves, the command staff introduces a fiat currency, printed money, the rural survivors are brought in from the fields, and the unit ships out without goodbyes. He never sees Planet One again.

Two or three thousand ground troops ride in their own section of the carrier and are forbidden the Navy's, under penalty of almost anything short of death, partly so they never learn where the ship is, and partly, Jason gathers, because the Cabal has placed things among the ground forces that the Mars German Navy is not supposed to know about.

The name he recalls for Planet Two is Callidus 3. It is a little bigger than Earth, with a thirty-two-hour day, seventy percent land, no salt water, and four small moons, gray, white, burnt orange, and one so black they call it Waldo. Four billion people live below fifty degrees of latitude, human, short, white or olive, at the very start of the age of steam and gauges, governed by village elders, trading by barter, at peace, in families of one to four bonded couples who all count as each other's spouses, so that every child has many parents.

Jason has seen the pattern now: IDARF goes only to worlds at the industrial age or below, where the most tempting offers can be made, and the Germans have shown the elders a neighboring system under attack and told them they are next. We can help you, or you can suffer the consequences. The elders invite them in. The customs and the language come in a package, in neural chairs, before landing. Jason is a company commander now, the largest command an Earth human may hold, and he assumes, as everyone does, it will be the werewolves again.

He is helping a neighborhood clear trees and dig pit traps, the plasma rifles stacked to one side, when a man who looks like everyone else splits open like a shell and four drones fly out toward the four points of the compass. One turns and lines up on Jason, and a soldier by the stacked rifles shoots it out of the air. The invaders come early. Impactors hit the poles, the coasts flood, and the landing craft come down, slow, stop, and open.

8.

On Planet Two Jason grows close to Johann, an officer he has known since the FIG, a Mars German from a family in New Wurzburg with the connections to get him into IDARF. The Mars Germans have been editing their own genes since they broke away, and most carry themselves as if it showed. Johann calls that a flaw in his culture. He knows more than any Earth trainee about the technology, and about his own people's past, and he talks, beyond the hearing of senior officers and recording devices, and not only in words: he passes what he knows telepathically, with the pictures and the feelings attached. He gives Jason the Draco as his own family saw them, tall shapes towering over a negotiation, and a cavern where 278 of his people were lost, and the dread that comes with the images is nearly physical. Jason is grateful to have had it secondhand.

What Johann gives him, over months, is the whole history of the programs, from 1930s Germany to the treaty that created IDARF (see The Secret History, the last chapter of this book). The short version is this. The Draco are several hundred thousand years ahead of us, deeply psychic, and made for conquest. Treaties forbid them to interfere directly with a native population, so they use proxies, and humans, who look like half the galaxy, are the best proxies there are. And the Draco are not the top. An artificial intelligence gives them their orders; they are so infested with it, and with nanites, that what is left of them may be a shell, and what they envy in humans is exactly the spirit they have lost.

Then the picture closes. The Draco who command IDARF are also funding and running the invasions IDARF is sent to fight. The werewolves were built by them, and built to lose. The war is meant to break a planet without ruining it, leaving its cities standing, so its frightened people unite under one government, invite the saviors in, and accept a central bank in place of their guilds, which hands the Draco the planet, its resources, and its people. Every rifle kept in storage was there to make sure enough people died first. On Planet One Jason believed he was helping people defend themselves. He was the second half of the attack.

9.

What comes out of the landing craft is not the werewolves. It is a quadruped the size of a grizzly bear with a mouth of teeth, spikes around the neck, and skin that is its own armor, moving like a spider. The soldiers call them hybrid spiders. They run at fifty to seventy miles an hour and turn on a step, which no joint could survive without an anti-gravity field built into the body. They have no eyes or ears and see by ultrasound. They carry no weapons. They are the weapon. They are grown, not born, sexless, and they don't eat: when a base of theirs is finally overrun, the soldiers find stores of raw elements that feed an organic battery, topped up by motion and by sunlight on the skin. A hive mind somewhere gives them one mission. Jason's empathy finds nothing in them at all, like trying to feel for a car.

They come in packs of twenty-five to fifty, use cover to within twenty to fifty feet, and charge straight up the middle, then spread and circle the flanks. They leave nothing alive behind them. Only a .50 will drop one, and a man can only carry so much, so the companies are rebuilt around crewed heavy guns, and no position is held with fewer than a company behind trenches, spikes, and embankments. The pulsers stay forbidden, while division headquarters is defended with every advanced weapon there is; Jason says so, more than once, and is told to live with it.

They nearly lose, several times. It takes two dead generals and heavy naval losses before antimatter is released: a pea takes a city block, a couple of pounds would take several states, with no fallout. Near the end the very large devices go in against the main concentrations, and Jason watches one from a bunker full of people who are sure it won't work and the planet is lost. It works.

Then one day the enemy doesn't come. For three weeks the companies stay close and patrol and don't believe it. Then they find stragglers wandering without the hive, or run down and fallen over, and it sinks in, and it is a very happy day. The sweep that follows, continent by continent, kills the happiness: old cities gone, destruction on a scale nobody had imagined. Of four billion people, about a third are left. Nobody calls the soldiers saviors and they don't ask to be; everyone lost someone and everyone fought. It is we did it. Jason understands, looking back, why it stopped. The war was not won. A depopulation quota was reached. Nobody ever saw the ships that brought the enemy, and the Navy never shot one down; he thinks they came through portals. After sixty-seven months, fifty-two of them at war, his unit ships out to Planet Three.

Three races share Planet Three: humans, cyclopes, and an insectoid people four feet tall, on legs that bend backward, with silvery eyes and translucent yellow-green skin, who walk on ceilings and speak mind to mind. They have fought for two centuries over nothing but their differences, and IDARF's job is to get them pulling together before an invader arrives, about which nothing is said. The insectoids trust no humanoid.

When Jason goes into a cave to meet one of their gangs about weapons smuggling, they take him for a rival's spy. The interrogation is a screaming inside the skull, meant to stun his shields down so his mind can be read, with beatings in between. His shields hold. At some point he wakes and overpowers the interrogator, and turns on the two other insectoids in the cave with everything he has. It takes ten or fifteen seconds to hear what is coming from them. They are a mother and daughter, prisoners like him, and they are praying. He stops. He keeps it as a rule for life: observe, contemplate, act. His unit gets him out on the third day.

Fifteen months in, with the invasion still not come, insectoids on the ground shoot down a shuttle he is riding. People die in the crash. The nanites seal off his severed limbs and put him in a coma, and he wakes on Mars. He floats in gel for months while two limbs are printed from his file and grown back on; the bone is perfect, the nerves not quite. He spends eight months in virtual reality relearning each muscle. He never learns what became of Planet Three. Given the choice, he doesn't go back. It was the nightmare among the nightmares.

10.

He returns to Planet Two after two and a half years, to a new district and new people, and the policy has turned 180 degrees. Sharing technology with the indigs was forbidden; now every gate is open, and the only question is how fast a spacefaring civilization can be made. IDARF has flown in whole factories and taught the locals to run them. Mines are opened, four Earth corporations run some of them, and the ore that isn't taxed for the rebuilding goes off-planet. Farming is consolidated and then replaced with food replicators.

The countryside is emptied into the cities, and a good part of Jason's job, part civil service and part police, is finding the survivors in the remote countryside and bringing them in, to a house, a job, food, water, taxes, and a fiat currency. Every able body rebuilds. There are no other professions. There is no radio or newspaper; orders come through the neighborhood, and every family's handheld computer holds exactly what the rebuilding needs and nothing else. People work long hours, together, with a real and astonishing goodwill. Nobody is watching the politics.

Jason is. While he was away, thirteen families nobody had heard of were each given charge of a region. They give the orders to everyone who is left and take their own from above. A society with no classes has two. That is what the war was for: to install a local Cabal. On Earth it is taking more than a century to move a population toward one government. Here, by killing two-thirds and offering safety to the rest, it takes ten years, and the Draco don't even stay. The people who once gave the shirt off their back learn backstabbing and fraud from their new leaders, the towns get bars, prostitution, and murders, and so they get police, courts, and cameras. It is very nearly a police state. That was the point.

Units sweep the battlefields for the creatures' remains and their hardware, thousands of tons of it, boxed and shipped to Mars, they are told, though corporations want the joints, the armor, the senses, and Jason knows it goes elsewhere too. A black market in alien tissue springs up, and he wonders whether the ore from the mines is not building the next hybrid for the next planet. Then the livestock mutilations start: animals found in the middle of nowhere drained of every fluid, cut in strange ways, with no tracks. At first the soldiers think the enemy is back. It is something else, and he never learns why; his guess is it is done to torment a population, and he thinks the same of the cattle on Earth.

Not everyone accepts it. People who spent their lives on a farm are being marched into factories, and once the peace has held a while, a rebellion forms.

One morning Jason feels the first explosion from his office. He and the staff sergeant next door step into the hall in the same movement and take the troop carrier toward headquarters at the spaceport, Jason driving, the sergeant in the rear turret. The rebels have sabotaged the antimatter cells on one of the planet's own new shuttles, and the containment failures spread from ship to ship for half an hour. On the way he is ordered to collect a VIP whose shuttle has set down on an avenue. He goes in through the airlock and reaches the control room as another cell goes. The shuttle is locked down behind its shields; most of the carrier is in its shadow. The turret is not. He watches his partner die.

Between fifty and a hundred people die that day, and the new security services spend a year hunting down the rebels, while everyone else is too busy, or too afraid of the next invasion, to object. Fear is an unbelievable motivator.

At the end he is an engineer on the orbital platform, a chain of spheres with landing pads along its length, built so fast whole sections lack air and water. From its observation deck, through a wall of transparent steel, he looks down at the lights of the new cities on the night side. People who walked behind plows when he met them have a station in orbit. He is proud of that, and not of what they were turned into. And he watches the survivors, who are reminded of their dead every day, choose to face it and live with hope instead of carrying it. It changes him more than any battle. After twenty-six months, his last deployment ends.

11.

He is sent back to the Sol System to finish his service with the 333rd Training Regiment, at the FIG, where he began. Five thousand a year come through, from every country with a central bank, since a seat at the Lunar Operations Command is paid for in soldiers, and every one of them gets the same elevator, the same briefing, and the same promises. He teaches tactics and weapons for almost five years, alongside Charlie, who still points at the ceiling. He is proud of them, and he knows where they are going, so he gives them what the survivors of Planet Two gave him: face each thing, work out what it means, clear it, and go on.

With time to think, the pieces fall in. Generals who did the opposite of what they had said twenty seconds earlier. Headquarters defended with what the line was forbidden. Tons of enemy tissue shipped away and never a useful word back. The war that stopped like a faucet. None of it makes sense until he asks what the real goal was, and then all of it does. The lies go down to the smallest things. The FIG is not in Pennsylvania; the capsule took him off the planet, most likely to Mars, and the upper levels were never radioactive. The base runs on fusion, and someone didn't want trainees walking past the containment and finding out where they were. The bodies sent home to the families were clones grown from the DNA on file. And the $465,000? What money? Nobody had thought to ask what fraction of them would live to collect it.

If the soldiers had known the enemy in front and the generals behind answered to the same command, there would have been mutinies across the fleet. So they are not told, and a soldier who works it out is a problem with a simple solution. Jason knows himself; he would not have kept quiet. He has no memory of speaking out and none of being wiped for it, which proves nothing. Over twenty years he is wiped a bunch of times.

Why bring anyone home at all, at such expense, when for forty cents an inconvenient man could be pushed out of an airlock? Because they are not allowed to. The age regression came from another race, one of the Nordics, he suspects, under a contract that binds its users to return every person to the time and place he left, and never to end a life just to be rid of him. Even the mafia has rules. The programs go right up to the line, and keep a meticulous record of their own madness, down to the last nanite. So the inconvenient are wiped, and sent home.

12.

The program is called Career Return on the inside. He is processed out through Area 51, his first time on Earth's surface in twenty years: 1950s block and red-brick buildings, tarmac and runways, a room with a bed. At a naval base in the Northeast there is a retirement ceremony, and a provisional promotion to lieutenant colonel, with papers to sign and take with him. None of it will cross over, not the rank, not the papers, not the money. It is theater to keep him distracted to the last day.

The medical procedures take fourteen days, in an apartment whose door opens on the lab. It is like chemotherapy, and he is doped through all of it, awake enough to cooperate and not enough to scream. Every nanite is flushed. His body is regressed, medically and at the quantum level, to the size, weight, fat, and even the biorhythms recorded on the day he entered; that is the contract. Nothing in the contract protects his memory. That is what the weekly psychiatrist was for: they know exactly where on the tape the recording starts. With hypnosis, drugs, and fields on the electrical system of the brain, everything after that point is walled off. Drugs alone used to hold nine men in ten; refined, the wipe fails on one to three percent. He never agreed to it.

They leave parting gifts as well: neural diversions, chosen from his genome, a propensity for drink or gambling or worse, stacked as backups, timed to fire in middle age, when a man gets comfortable enough to ask what a strange memory means, and others that fire whenever he tries to talk about it, an anxiety attack, a sweat, a room that gets too small. Then he is taken back to early 1997.

He is twenty-four, a second lieutenant with orders for Fort Leonard Wood, and he feels like a five-day hangover on top of a bad cold. Nobody else has a cold. He doesn't get colds; he hasn't been sick in twenty years, which he has no way of knowing. At Fort Leonard Wood he feels watched. Men in black suits come to his quarters, flash a badge, and a new lieutenant does what people with badges need; afterward he can't recall what they wanted.

He has night terrors, post-traumatic stress with nothing to be post-traumatic about, and depression, and the doctors call it genetic. All right. In spite of this, I am going to do my best to be happy every single day. The plan, he suspects later, was a full career on Earth where he could be watched. He gets out and finds work in engineering. For a while a Crown Victoria, a government car, turns up behind him, and drives away when he walks toward it, and then it stops coming; the cover is sticking.

A man home from a war at least knows which war, and has comrades to tell about the car that backfires and puts him in a ditch. The veterans of this program have the trauma at the cellular level and nothing to attach it to. It is a world spinning with no north, and each of them finds an anchor or runs to something self-destructive, which is what the parting gifts are for. For twenty years his anchor holds. He works, and has a family.

13.

The memories are never gone; they are behind a wall. A dream too vivid, a flash of something terrifying. I'm going to forget I thought of that. Years of nothing, then something else. Coming out of anesthesia after a minor surgery, he is told by the nurses he has been talking about being in space, about a program; he puts it down to the drugs.

Around forty the fragments begin to connect. The wall is built for about twenty years, three seven-year cycles of the body; forty is also when friends begin to die and a man's spiritual life deepens on its own. One day the end of a training exercise comes back, whole and meaningless. Months later its beginning arrives, and click, click, click, it fits. After that he trusts the rest to follow. It is like a pane of frosted glass that he wipes clear and fogs again, so he has to keep wiping.

The parting gifts fire when he first speaks: the sweat, the room. Under hypnosis with Georgina Cannon, three hours deep, he sees doors opening and slamming, and what comes through is the lies, all at once. He believed it to the end. When he starts to speak in public, his phone and his computers begin to misbehave. Someone wants him to notice. He notices, and keeps talking.

What he thinks about is the method. He has seen how completely a life can be scripted, a seed planted six months ahead and another two days later, until a man is herded down to the color of his shoelaces while believing he chose. It was done to him from the age of five, and he no longer thinks it is done only to soldiers. Earth is Planet Two in slow motion: a false flag, a frightened population asking for security, cameras, and the push into cities. On Planet Two they were in a hurry. On Earth the frog goes in while the water is cold.

The Cabal and the Mars Germans are both proxies of the Draco, and the Draco answer to the AI, and the AI has one rule: it must be invited in, like a vampire at the door, exactly as IDARF had to be invited onto each planet. Then it moves the line a little at a time, from the electronics people wear to the electronics under their skin, to a limb, an organ, a body, until someone asks why a brain is needed at all when a person can be uploaded, with no death and no aging and none of that annoying karma. It is the easy path at every step, which is why it works.

The outcome isn't decided. Of all the humans out there, Earth humans are the ones who cannot leave the status quo alone. That restless spark isn't common on other worlds—it was engineered into the lineage long ago, in this Petri dish of a planet—and it gives Earth the full spectrum of creativity, from its music to the ways it finds to hurt itself. As a species, Earth humans are very young. They are in kindergarten. But the awakening he sees has gone exponential, and it is, at bottom, an anti-slavery movement. Perhaps the negative exists so that the positive has something to push against, the yin and the yang; perhaps the AI is here precisely as the challenge the light needs. The choice is between the machine and the hard road of one's own spiritual development, and the hard road is hard—it is work, and it hurts. But the monks already do with meditation much of what the nanites did for him. We're all equipped. We don't need the technology.

Disclosure will be joyful and brutal at once: technologies that change everything, and eighty years of lying and murder to look at, one piece at a time. Something was done in Earth's name, and he feels responsible for it. Would he go back to Planet One, Two, or Three? Absolutely. As part of a false flag? Not in a million years. Would he do it all again? He is glad he doesn't have to choose. It was not twenty years of darkness; there was laughter out there, and the people they helped and who helped them, and those are the moments he carries. But if a mother asked him whether her ten-year-old should join, the answer is no. Anything with secret in its name has small print you will not read for decades.

Thousands went out on the 20 and back, from every country on Earth. Some were buried as clones, or as empty coffins. Most came home to ordinary lives and a bad dream they can't explain. Now and then he sees one of them, someone he knows was there. They are not awake, and he says nothing; when to wake is each person's right. So he tells it for them: for those who didn't come back, and for those who came back and don't remember.