Jean-Charles Moyen

This account is compiled from Jean-Charles Moyen's fifteen Connexion Alien videos and from the interviews he gave in French and in English between 2021 and 2023. His films Rive-Sud Origine (2019), Révélation Starseed (2021) and Révélation Starseed 2 tell the same story with his witnesses on camera; they were not used in the writing. His website is www.jcmoyen.com.

1.

Jean-Charles Moyen is born on July 7, 1969, in the Paris region, and a storm sits over the hospital while his mother is in labor, lightning right above the room where she gives birth. She nicknames him Capitaine Tempête. Before he leaves for Canada, decades later, his grandfather will tell him something he has never told anyone: as a boy at a Catholic school, very ill, he sees a disc of light spinning very fast on the ceiling of his room, loses consciousness, and wakes in the morning cured.

Jean-Charles is four, on holiday with his parents on a very big beach in France, playing in the sand, when his mother looks up and he is not there. He has not wandered off. He has disappeared. His parents ask everyone whether they have seen a little boy of four. The lifeguards search. It goes on for an hour, his mother in tears, and then she raises her eyes and he is sitting in the same place, playing in the sand as if nothing had happened.

What he remembers is a warmth wrapping around him and the ground going away, a beam of light, his parents getting smaller. He is in a chair of liquid metal that takes the shape of his body and follows him when he moves. Four beings of light stand around him, too bright to have faces, and they speak inside his head: Don't worry, everything is fine. Through the wide windows he sees space and the Earth, and he cries, because he thinks he will never see his parents again. One of them puts a finger to his head. The lights go off. A being in a suit comes into the room, green skin, red eyes, no hair, and takes him and explains something to him. Then they erase it. He will not remember the green being's face for another eight years.

After the beach there is something wrong with him, or something more. When he is tired he recharges. Around ten, in a supermarket aisle with his mother, he feels his energy drop, stops, closes his eyes, makes fists, and every light in the store goes out, the generator failing to take over. Jean-Charles, is that you? Yes. Put them back on right now, it's not funny. The lights come back, and a man with a can of peas in the next aisle is standing frozen, staring at the two of them. At the checkout the numbered lights above the cash registers blink on and off, on and off, and the same man is in the next line, still staring. His mother hurries him out.

It is like that all his life. A light source near him dims, flickers or blows when he is tired or upset. Bulbs burn out in the bars he works in. Once, after a breakup, twenty-five or thirty bulbs in his house burn out at once, and the real-estate agent asks if there is a problem with the meter. He can hold a dead battery for a few seconds and give it back charged. He puts his hand on a computer the children have given up on and it restarts. He talks to the dog and the cat without speaking. His hands get very hot on a sick animal, or on a person, and the pain goes.

His dreams bring things home. He dreams he is skiing and wakes with the tan-line of goggles on his face. It becomes a running joke with his parents: Where were you last night? He dreams he is on a beach in the Bahamas, warm sea, and wakes brown, with white sand between his toes and in the bottom of the bed. They live on the ninth floor of an apartment building in the Paris suburbs. There is no sand. His parents keep all of it from the rest of the family and from their friends, because in the seventies a child who says these things ends up in psychiatry.

2.

At seven or eight he learns to leave his body. He lies trying to get out and cannot relax, and the ceiling seems very close, and it is close, because he is up against it, looking down at himself asleep, a silver thread running from his belly button to the body in the bed. He rises through the building, sees his parents' balcony, goes up through the clouds too fast, and is in space with the blue Earth below him, the thread still running back. He turns, sees the Moon, and is there as soon as he thinks it.

On the far side there are structures, and people chained and tied and beaten, and tall Grey beings with big black eyes running the place, cruel. He tells himself they cannot see him. Two of them turn and look straight at him. The fear throws him backward into his body, heart pounding. He draws it the next day. Nobody talks about slaves on the Moon in 1977; he hears about them forty years later.

He goes to the center of the Earth through a duct and finds giants and dinosaurs and grapes and strawberries as big as footballs, and says that is where the Loch Ness monster comes from. When he is about twenty his father finds a book on the hollow Earth, and in it Admiral Byrd describes fruit abnormally large. He goes under the paws of the Sphinx and draws the tunnels. He goes into the sea off Bermuda and finds underwater bases and aquatic beings with tridents.

Before sleep he switches on the illuminated globe his grandfather gave him and picks the place. On April 7, 1976, he writes in his diary that last night he was in the mountains of Japan, at Mount Fuji, in a lot of white light, inside a big spaceship in the mountain, with a very kind Japanese lady called Utsu who calls him Hoshi. But my name is Jean-Charles. Why does she call me that? I like Hoshi, it's beautiful. Hoshi means star. Around the same time he tells his family about a past life in Sendai in 1175, a wife, two children, an emperor who wants his wife, a village slaughtered, his wife dying in his arms with an arrow in her back meant for him.

His parents do not send him anywhere. They listen. His father tells him to go further. So he goes to a planet he calls Antares, where enormous crystals grow out of the trees and the ground, and the rivers run red over beds of crystal, and there are cat people and dog people and ordinary-looking people gathering the stones, some of which you can eat. He wakes with the bottoms of his pajama legs wet, like a boy who has walked through water.

The next time, he goes to sleep wearing his little denim backpack with an empty plastic bottle in it. He wakes in the dream in his pajamas with the bag on his back, which is strange, but he walks into the water, fills the bottle with the red water and the crystals at the bottom, closes it, and walks on saying hello to the cat people. In the morning there is no bag in the bed. Then his hand finds it on the floor by his slippers, and it goes floc floc.

He carries it into the kitchen where his parents are having breakfast, tells them, and sets the bottle down on the table. Big silence. His mother, distracted, puts her hand into the oven she is baking in and burns it badly on the red-hot heating element. His father, action and reaction as always, soaks a piece of cotton in the water from the bottle and lays it on the burn. What are you doing, we don't even know what that is. It smells faintly of orange blossom. There is no blister. The burn is simply gone. His father decides to make the miracle last by refilling the bottle from the tap, and the water turns black and dead. He keeps the crystals in a little box in a safe place, and one night the box is gone, like the drawings and a great many things Jean-Charles brings back. Someone is tidying up.

3.

He is twelve, in 1981, and at night there is somebody searching through his room. He sleeps on his stomach, and when he tries to turn to look he is pinned flat to the mattress and cannot move, only listen. So he starts sleeping on his back, where all he has to do is open his eyes. One night he hears it and opens them. A shape is standing in the dark by his drawer, tall, and when it sees that he is looking it goes still, thinking: if I don't move he doesn't see me. Then it moves. I see you. It comes closer, into the light of his night lamp, and it is about one meter eighty-five, with green skin and no hair and eyes that are entirely red, no pupils at all. It sits on the end of the bed. Hello, my name is Victor.

What are you doing here? Victor tells him he is not supposed to be able to see him, that Jean-Charles's frequency should not pick up the one Victor is in, that this is probably due to his very developed senses and other things he will understand later. I'm here to protect you, but I'm supposed to stay discreet. When they find out up there that we've made contact, I'm going to have problems. He vanishes. In the morning Jean-Charles tells his parents and they exchange a look: an imaginary friend, like every child.

A few nights later Victor is back, and says the Council of the Galactic Confederation has authorized him to stay in touch, because in the near future Jean-Charles is going to live through things and have a lot of questions about himself, and he is going to be part of something very big. Victor is from a planet called Ultima, near Antares, and holds a seat on the council up there, and Jean-Charles is one of his people, a starseed, on a mission to Earth he accepted before he was incarnated. He speaks with his mouth and also inside the head. He borrows things from the drawer, studies them, and does not always bring them back. Jean-Charles borrows his father's voice-activated dictaphone and puts it under the bed, and a few nights later it records a whole conversation, two voices, and his mother, who has heard talking through the wall, asks if he left the television on. The family keeps the cassette for years. Then it disappears.

Victor loves the cat. One evening the family comes home from the grandparents' to find blood on the furniture and a claw torn out and buried in the soft cherry wood of the cabinet, and the cat in the bottom of the wardrobe, ears flat, eyes like marbles. Victor bent over it while it slept to check that it was breathing, and it woke to that face a few centimeters from its own.

Another day, alone in the apartment while Jean-Charles is at school, his mother feels someone behind her and turns, and turns, and there is never anyone. She crouches to take books out of the little cupboard under the big Breton clock, feels it again, and this time does not turn. She raises only her eyes to the polished brass pendulum, and in its reflection Victor is leaning over her shoulder, reading what she reads. She tells no one but the family. She never feels threatened by him; when something goes wrong in the house she says, Can Victor help?, and something happens.

Years on, Jean-Charles's daughter, three, complains every night at bedtime that it is too bright, pointing above his head with the lamp off, and one day in his arms, passing the mannequin he has painted green and shaped to look like Victor, for his own sake, she points and says, That's the man who comes into my room.

Some nights now he is not in his bed and not in his body either. He walks with Victor down long corridors, and Victor shows him rooms, and people in uniform pass them. It is only much later that he understands what he was being walked through.

4.

In the summer of 1982 he is thirteen and his mother's bank sends him to a colonie de vacances, a summer camp, at Embrun, in the Hautes-Alpes. Under the chalets the boys find stairs and a network of corridors linking the buildings, and, off one of them, a huge rusted door chained and padlocked and marked DANGER, pointing in a straight line toward the mountain.

On a hike he leaves his hat behind and takes a terrible sunstroke. They rush him, dehydrated, to the hospital in Briançon, put a drip in his arm, and because his head is splitting they send him for a brain scan. The scanner misbehaves with him inside it. The first X-ray shows a spot on the brain; the radiologist and the doctor think it is dust on the plate and do it again. The second shows a small metal capsule, like a Tic Tac. He keeps losing consciousness. When he opens his eyes a doctor in white is holding his X-rays up to the light in his room, and beside him is a military man in camouflage, and Jean-Charles cannot follow what the military man is saying, because he is speaking German. A mask comes down over his nose and mouth, a greenish gas, and he is out again.

A hand on his shoulder. A military man with white hair and blue eyes. Hurry up, get up, we have to go, we're going to miss the jump. He does not know what a jump is. He gets out of bed in his hospital gown and follows, down a big corridor, thinking they are transferring him to another section because of what they found. At the elevator two men in black wait, black glasses, a red triangle on the chest, and the four of them ride down for far too long; a hospital is not that deep. He starts to panic and the lights in the elevator pulse and dim. The old soldier knows what that is. Don't worry, everything is fine, you have nothing to fear. When the doors open they are not the doors they came in by. This is where I leave you. Keep going alone.

It is a hangar, and it is full of children in hospital gowns, lined up. He is not afraid. A voice inside him says, Hold on, it's all right. At a table a woman tells him to put his hand in a box. What is it? It's for your DNA. Warmth and tingling in his hand. She gives him a black suit with a silver winged horse on it and tells him to join the line going into the light. In the light he is pierced by thousands of needles all at once, something like liquid, and a few seconds later he is somewhere else, another hangar, a very futuristic military base, with military men and people in white suits.

They sort the children by age and by sex. For several weeks there are tests, speed and logic first, then clairvoyance, out-of-body, telekinesis, and then the fear: rooms where nightmare creatures are put in front of them to see who can hold his fear and who cannot. Many fail. He does not. People in white suits take notes on him particularly. A doctor says to a military man, This is the boy I told you about, and Jean-Charles knows him. It is the radiologist from Briançon. Come on. Go into that black room. In the dark something very strong is waiting. It comes out of the shadow, huge, a mantis, and lays its great front leg on his shoulder and looks at him with its eyes, and in his head: Relax, it's not painful. You have been chosen. He collapses.

He wakes in his bed in the hospital, head spinning, sick as if he had come off a roller coaster, and sleeps. A horn wakes him. He is on the bus back to the camp. He has no memory of leaving the hospital and none of the rest, except the Tic Tac. His mother later receives the bill but not the X-rays. They have been lost, she is told.

5.

Back at the camp he holds nothing back, so he tells the boys in his room. They call him a liar and a monster. One night he cannot take it anymore. He waits until everyone is asleep, climbs out the chalet window, and walks into the field at the foot of the big mountain across from the camp. He sits on the ground cross-legged, looks up at the stars, and says it out loud. Venez me chercher. I don't want to be here anymore. Come and get me. A star moves. It comes closer and it is a disc, golden, and light and heat surround him and his feet leave the ground.

Aboard, many creatures are waiting for him, as if they had been expecting him, and greeting him: Hey, salut, ça va? Victor is there. Welcome aboard the Solaris. He walks a long, very bright corridor, and coming the other way is a splendid blonde woman with big blue eyes. Everyone calls her Marie; her name is Maria. Bonjour Lucas. He is not Lucas, he is Jean-Charles, but that is what they call him here. Follow me.

She takes him through a door into a classroom whose desks float in the air, translucent, and the pupils at them are children of other races, strange heads all of them, so that he is the strange one with his ordinary face. There is one other human child, a little boy with black hair and enormous green eyes, three years younger, and there is one empty desk, beside him. His name is David. They know each other. Neither of them can say from where, only that it is from before, and that it is a certainty. They are inseparable from that day.

Through the wide windows there are planets. The Solaris is one of a fleet: small reconnaissance craft of every shape, long ones, spheres, carriers, and floating cities with waterfalls and animals. He has a cabin with a med bed, a bed that heals. The food is a paste, like baby food. The classes are on developing the abilities: telepathy, empathy, telekinesis, fights and evaluations every day, with teachers who are mostly not human, and breaks to walk the huge ship with the other beings. The alien children tell of their own worlds, mind to mind, and all of them are taught where they come from, which is the stars. Maria holds a high rank in the Confederation, he will learn; she works with an industrial conglomerate, has helped build a ship, and is accredited to teach children. David will be told, years later, who she was: Maria Orsic. She tells Jean-Charles he is special and unique, a super starseed, because he can teleport himself with no device, which they have never seen, and she gives him different training from the others.

She introduces him to a mantis, very impressive, very kind to him, telepathic and telekinetic, the same one who chose him in the dark room. He fights her, which is like fighting a wall that knows your mind, and what she teaches him is not strength. If you fight a Draco, he knows what you're going to do before you do it. So you build a screen in your mind and you think nothing. Behind the screen, you strike. And she tells him never to fight a black Draco. A black Draco is too fast and too strong and you do not want that.

The children are not sent on missions. They observe. They travel to other worlds and stay on other planets and meet race after race, so that later they will know who they are dealing with. Years pass this way, until the two boys are grown men of twenty or so, standing in a corridor of the Solaris. David, smaller, comes into his arms. We're friends for life. We're going to see each other again. Maria, beside them: We'll see each other again sooner than you think. They step into tubes, side by side, and the tubes take their years back off them, and Jean-Charles is put back into his bed at the camp on the night he climbed out the window.

His roommate has locked the door and the shutters and put a chair against the door and is sitting in front of the empty bed, waiting, and has fallen asleep. When he opens his eyes Jean-Charles is in the bed. He says nothing, to anyone. Years later Jean-Charles is a student working a job, and a young man finds him in the cafeteria. I have to tell you something. The night you went out into the field, I followed you, because I was afraid you'd do something stupid. I saw a disc of light come down and you disappeared. I ran back and locked everything. He waited all those years to say it because he did not want to be judged.

Nine minutes by car from the camp is the Boscodon forest, where three women in their sixties vanished on the same trail in 1995, 2015 and 2016, dogs and firemen and fifty volunteers finding nothing. Jean-Charles only learns this in 2021, checking a map.

6.

At school, during an exam, he needs the toilet. He raises his hand and asks the teacher, and she looks straight at him and does not answer, and nobody else moves either, as if time had stopped and he were transparent. He gets up and goes. The toilets are on the second floor, a closed room with no window, and the light runs on one of those timers you twist for three minutes. He is standing at the urinal when it clicks off, and in the dark he feels the dizziness of standing up too fast, and reaches for the button, and finds a switch instead. The light comes on in the bathroom of his parents' apartment, several kilometers away.

At the school his coat is on his chair and his pen on his desk, and the toilet door is locked from inside. They call a locksmith. The room is empty. They call his parents, who cover for him: he wasn't feeling well, he went home. His keys are on the desk with everything else. The alarm is on and the front door is locked when his father gets home.

The second time he is looking at a photograph of his girlfriend, wishing he were next to her, and the dizziness comes, and the little needles, and for a fraction of a second nothing, and he is standing on her doormat in his slippers, in winter, thirty minutes away by bus, with his coat still on his bed and his shoes on the floor and his keys still in the locked apartment on the ninth floor. His father comes with his things. She leaves him a few weeks later; it is too much for her.

At sixteen he rents a VHS camera and films himself, his dog in his arms, putting the light out with his hand. Just before it goes out the dog's ears come up.

At twenty or so, a Friday the thirteenth with a full moon, he goes to a nightclub on the Champs-Élysées with a friend. He does not drink; his shots are juice, and he is usually the one who drives the others home. A woman in the crowd looks like Morticia Addams, black lace, dark lipstick, a face too white, eyes very very blue, and seems to float when she walks.

At the bar he checks the mirror behind the bottles: there is himself, there is the barmaid, there is the man on his other side, and between them, where she is standing, a gap. He nudges her with his elbow to make sure she is solid. She is. His friend sees nothing in the mirror. Under the black light she smiles, and her teeth are fangs. He leans to his friend's ear, across fifteen meters of noise: Did you see her teeth? She looks like a vampire. At the far end of the club her head turns sharply and she looks straight at him, and it is one of the few times in his life he is truly afraid. They leave.

In the phone booth, as they call for their ride, a detonation goes off against the glass and something like blood runs down behind his friend's head. No car, no bicycle, nobody on foot. Years later, at an evening of ghost stories, a stranger tells one about a gothic girl in a nightclub in Bordeaux with no reflection, and the footsteps and the beating of wings that followed him into an alley, and everyone laughs at him, and Jean-Charles says, Excuse me, it's my turn, and it's the same story.

7.

In 1990 he begins his military service as a commando parachutist. One Easter night, with the men of his section, he watches a black triangle as big as a football field cross in silence over a former American air base, when there are no flights. In the morning they report it, and the officer tells them it was nothing, and that if they keep asking they will go to jail.

In an exercise the nerves and muscles of his arm tear, and they send him to a military hospital in Paris for three months. There is a psychiatric wing, and the staff forbid him to talk to the men in it, so he does. At night, smoking in the corridor, they have watched a doctor and a military man come for patients strapped to stretchers on wheels and take them to the elevator, and the elevator goes down past the morgue, with a special key, to a level that is not on the buttons. They followed once. When the doors opened at the bottom a reptilian in a suit was holding them.

He goes to check. At the elevator a guard wants to know what he is doing on this level. Wrong floor. The guard does not believe him and is threatening, and Jean-Charles looks him in the eyes, and, curiously, the guard walks away. The next night there is another stretcher, another strapped man, and when the doors open it is not a reptilian holding them but a tall Grey in the same kind of suit, big head, big eyes, skin between gray and blue. He goes back to his room. In the morning the men from the psychiatric wing are gone. Where are they? None of your business. They left. Don't forget your shoulder treatment.

The treatment is an experimental infrared machine called Excalibur, meant to rebuild torn muscle. They lay him under it, connect him, and forget him, and it burns him to the second degree. Terrified of a lawsuit, they drown him in painkillers. One night, heavy with morphine and sliding into sleep, he sees the door open and a doctor come in with a military man, and they wheel him down. At the bottom his eyes are open and there are other people on stretchers. A sting at the back of his neck, adrenaline, and he sits straight up with no pain in his shoulder at all.

A soldier walks him to a table. Put your hand in the box. Tingling and light. It's to compare your DNA signature with the one we took when you were young. And there it is: the box in the hangar, the winged horse, the line of children, the light. He puts on a black suit and goes down a strange corridor where a very powerful blue light pulses, into it, and the needles go through his whole body.

Maria is standing in front of him with a big smile. Hello again. You see, it wasn't so long. Excuse me, but who are you? Oh yes, excuse me. Follow me. A room of vertical tubes. She puts him into one, and there is great heat and strong light, and when he steps out he has all of it back, whole. She hands him another suit, with a circle on the chest and the shoulder, three black spheres and a triangle left open at the bottom, and takes him into an amphitheater full of adults, many of them not human, where David is already sitting, waving, happy, the same children from the classroom now grown and in uniform. Behind Maria hangs an enormous emblem, a planet crossed by two rings with stars around it, a kind of united nations of planets. Welcome to the Solaris. She begins her speech, and his service begins.

8.

The Solaris is a long ship, an aircraft carrier crossed with a rocket, carrying several thousand people, with a botanical department and a tactical one and inner lakes and separate ecosystems, one for each race aboard, since a feline needs different air from an aquatic. It is part of the Franco-American fleet of Solar Warden. The crew is everything: Asian types, tall blonds, hybrids, felines in suits with a hole for the tail, who speak mind to mind and sometimes try, awkwardly, to say it aloud as well, Greys, aquatic beings, reptilians of the good kind, red and brown. The command is shared, every officer able to run the ship alone if something happens to the rest, and the one at the top is not human. Everyone aboard can pilot, and everyone does more than one job. Jean-Charles is a captain and finishes a commander, with about fifteen under him, humans, hybrids and aliens, for rescue missions off the planet and diplomatic missions on other worlds.

The Solaris docks to the Excelsior like a hub in space. The Excelsior is the mother ship, a city under a glass dome with hills and waterfalls and dolphins and whole species reproduced inside it, a place where you could live out a life, with a cafeteria where a hologram scans you and the replicator makes whatever you point at, chicken or vegetables, a paste like baby food that looks nothing like the picture and smells and tastes like the real thing, and a bar that serves a blue drink full of oxygen bubbles that hits like a shot if you drink it fast. To move about the Excelsior you stand on a lit square and are somewhere else. He goes there many times, and remembers it less well than the Solaris.

The Draco are the enemy. Three meters, a ton, telepathic, and they respect none of the agreements. Not all of them, he is careful to say: some have changed camp, and the enemy is the imperial Draco, the ones who made their agreements with the Germans. The Confederation's arrangement with the human programs is that the humans keep it informed of what the reptilians are doing on Earth, and in return it helps against them, in this system and in others, with genetically modified super soldiers where needed. There are exchanges of technology, and of soldiers, some going up to serve and others coming back down to Earth. David is modified in a med bed, a program that alters his DNA and sends him out with the same face and a different body: bigger shoulders, bigger arms and legs, taller than he is today though not two meters, and quick, far quicker than muscle alone would make him. Jean-Charles is not modified. His weapon is what he was born with. On his belt is a button that throws a force field around him. Some of the others wear a teleporter on theirs; he has never needed one. The suits for Mars are exoskeletons, for the strength, with a small air filter, because the air outside on Mars is full of sulfur and metallic particles. There are people living inside Mars, the way there are inside the Earth, and the aliens can breathe the air outside. Humans cannot. The Draco know it. In a fight they aim for the filter. People are born on Mars for generations, and are told the Earth was destroyed long ago in a thermonuclear war, that not a soul was left and they are the only ones who survived, and they have no way of knowing whether they are being lied to.

The missions are what the classroom was for: to bring people out of slavery. On Ceres the prison is under the surface, humans and aliens, hybrids, children, cells with iron bars and cells with force fields that cut you if you cross them, insectoids and black reptilians for guards, and the prisoners with no arm, no hand, pieces of bodies on the ground, people emptied of all emotion, broken inside. It is horror. They bring out who they can, and on the Solaris the med beds do what they can, and where a body is too destroyed a new one is grown from the person's DNA and the consciousness moved across with a crystal.

There are rescues on Mars, on the Moon, on Alpha and Delta Draconis, women and children, human and not. There are the other missions too, the ones nobody talks about: diplomacy with cat people and good reptilians, so many races over the years that David puts it at perhaps a thousand, agreements for peace and for crystals, which are the currency out there, crystals for med beds, crystals for weapons, crystals to eat. On those missions it is David who speaks for them, the intermediary with races the others cannot reach, reptilians among them, mind to mind. Jean-Charles serves on the lunar base Artemis and on a base at Epsilon Centauri, and the fleet operates in Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Orion. The names of the military bases, the number of his contingent, the name of his sergeant, he keeps to himself. It is not that he does not know them, he says. It is that he cannot give them without putting his family in danger.

9.

The first Mars mission with David is diplomatic, and a bad idea. A reptilian stabs David, and the wound carries a parasite, a symbiote meant to live in him, and Jean-Charles gets him out because his instinct is to protect his brother. The med bed clears it.

The second is when he is twenty-four or twenty-five, a rescue of two families. David feels it is a trap and says so, and Jean-Charles, who is the fighter, who has the belt, tells him not to worry. On the surface they are surrounded. He shoves David behind a container, and in the time that takes he has not pressed his button—and the Draco in front of him is black. It knows he has not pressed it. There is no time to think nothing. The big tail slices the air, the dart at the end of it, and opens his side, deep and long, and he is on the ground, screaming so that David still hears it. It is a pain nobody could imagine. He feels himself die. David's squad shoots the Draco and it melts into a dust of fire, like in a film.

They lay him on a bed that floats and rush him to the Solaris, where the med bed fills with liquid over his face and the crystals warm him, and it takes a long time, far longer than it should, because everyone had thought him dead. When he can stand he goes back to work, and his team, because everyone is happy, takes him to the Excelsior to drink the blue drink, and he drinks his too fast, and his head spins.

At the end of twenty years he is put into a tube that sends powerful waves through his brain, and his body is regressed to twenty-one, and he is sent back to 1991. Before they take him to his room he hears someone say, Erased everything correctly this time. He wakes in his bed in the military hospital in Paris with a burned shoulder and no memory. He is not discharged. He is on standby.

10.

For thirty years he does not know. He works thirty-five years in martial arts and bodyguard work, and as a videur, a bouncer, in the bars, and things keep happening around him that he cannot explain. On a winter night his car hits black ice, rises off a snowbank, and stops in the air inside a blue bubble before it drops straight down.

In 2009 a fight breaks out in his bar and he takes a man from behind, and someone punches the man, and the man's foot pins his, and they go down together, a hundred and fifty kilos on top of him, and the back of his skull lands on the steel corner of a speaker. No sound, no picture. His eyes are open and his head swells to twice its size, and a nurse in the crowd takes his pulse and finds nothing for nine minutes, and the people stepping over him do not recognize him. He is somewhere very white, with people in white above him, and Amazing Grace playing. Then the people are in gray and red, marked premiers secours, first aid, and there is no music, only the radio.

At the hospital they phone his girlfriend to tell her he is probably dead, and she arrives to find him sitting up on the bed with his head its normal size, an hour after. He works the next night. The scanner at Longueuil breaks down when he is put in it, and when it finally runs, the radiologist calls him in to sit down: thirty-five years in the job and he has never seen it, not a mark on the scalp, as if the man had never fallen on his head in his life. He cannot hear the hymn now without weeping.

In a bookshop in Lille two little white books with a triangle on the cover, on MJ-12 and the Greys, come off a shelf they were never stocked on, and the cashier lets him have them for whatever he likes. They sit on his night table for twenty years, and when he unpacks his boxes in Quebec, at Mont-Saint-Hilaire, he reads the publisher's address for the first time: Beloeil, the next town over. He meets the author in a bakery.

The films come first, because he has to say it somehow. Rive-Sud Origine takes seven years, a docu-fiction in which he plays an agent named Jonathan Fox, after Fox Mulder of The X-Files, and hides his own life inside the plot, eighty-five percent true; people ask him afterward which parts. Then, in 2021, fifteen short videos, Connexion Alien, with Mélanie asking the questions across the kitchen table, everything he had kept for forty years. Mélanie is his wife and a hypnotherapist in the Dolores Cannon method, and when he goes under hypnosis with her he walks up the beam into the Solaris again, down the corridor, into the classroom, and hears himself called Lucas, and sits beside the boy with the green eyes and knows it is David Rousseau, and weeps on camera telling it.

He has seen David's face once, in an interview, a few weeks earlier, and known him. Janny Charrueau, who runs the UFO network MUFON in France, has told each of them about the other; Jean-Charles was assistant director of MUFON Québec. Jean-Charles sends David the film; David sends his book. They meet on a screen and cannot speak. In David's book are the two white books from Lille. In David's own regression, done with his cousin months before, on his own, with no knowledge of Jean-Charles's, is the Solaris by name, the blonde woman, the classroom, the older boy, the two Mars missions, the tail, the scream, and the corridor at the end: We'll meet again, my brother. Three years earlier, when David despaired of ever reaching Michael Salla, his guide Ezahyel had told him a Frenchman he knew in the programs would come back into his life. Ezahyel and Victor, it turns out, work together.

11.

From there the memories come on their own, and other people's arrive to meet them. In December 2022, teleported at night, in his pajamas, he is standing at the foot of Mount Fuji, and then inside it, in a ship whose walls light up in gold katakana, Japanese characters, as he approaches, with a portal in the ceiling like water that will not fall, and Utsu, black hair, blue eyes, silver suit, who calls him Hoshi and says it is enough for today. Afterward he goes looking through his boxes and finds the diary from 1976, and in it, in a six-year-old's hand, the kind Japanese lady in the mountain who calls him Hoshi.

Two months earlier, in Orlando, he meets Tony Rodrigues in the flesh. At seven Tony had a friend called Charlie who came into his room through a portal of lightning and wanted him to follow, and he did not; Charlie was Jean-Charles's nickname, and Tony's mother remembers. On Ceres, among the broken people he carried out, one of them, he thinks, was Tony. He had remembered the Ceres prison, and put it in his second film, nine months before Tony's book about Ceres came out, when nobody outside knew what was in it.

Rebecca Rose he meets another way. One night he is in the Excelsior cafeteria, waiting for his plate at the replicator, when a woman comes up to him. Hi, Jean-Charles, how are you? Do I know you? Yes. Her name is Ruby, she says, but she has a lot of names: B25, B7, B17, Becky. She goes back to her table, where a tall reptilian stands close to her like a bodyguard, and a tall Grey beside Jean-Charles asks why he talked to her. Don't talk to her. She is a replicant. She waves to him with a big smile, and the reptilian gives him a look: What do you want? Then he is in a corridor with a view of space, outside a training room where she is fighting reptilians in levitation, and he knows her. Rebecca. She turns. Nobody has called her that in a long time, she says. Her name is B25.

He wakes and writes to a stranger, a message in a bottle. Two or three days later Rebecca writes back: everything he saw is true, and B7, B17 and B25 are the names of her clones.

Two nights after that the vision picks up where it stopped. She asks him to come on a mission, and outside the Excelsior, at the hub, she shows him her ship, which changes shape like a liquid. He has to change his frequency to go in, and walks through a portal with a tingling all through him, and she takes him to a room of tubes where every body in stasis is her. Outside the tubes are memory crystals. Every consciousness is linked to her mind, she tells him, and whatever each body lives on its missions, she has. You are talking to B25. I think we have met already. I am just not sure it was in this body.

He writes to her again when he wakes. She is crying, she answers, because he is right. She does not remember him, but reading him made her sad, because she feels a link between them. She was broken in the program, like Tony, and there is a great deal in her she cannot reach, and he may be one of the keys to it. And the living ship, which you synchronize with your own energy: she has never told that to anyone.

In the last film the witnesses talk: his parents, past eighty, who kept the sand and the bottle and the cassette in their memory for fifty years; the friend who stood beside him when two men in black came to his workplace to threaten him; the ones who saw the directed-energy weapon and the blood that was not like other people's. Victor tells him, early in 2022, that a fleet has arrived in the solar system, a city in space, and that something very big is coming. Jean-Charles thinks all the starseeds who served in the French and American programs are on standby. If you have an extraordinary life, you must have extraordinary evidence. He has it. Whether anyone wants it is their business.