Jean-Charles Moyen

Jean-Charles Moyen is four years old, playing in the sand on a beach in France, when his mother looks away for a moment. When she looks back, he is gone. Lifeguards search for over an hour and find nothing. His parents sit on the sand, devastated. Then, without warning, Jean-Charles is standing in front of them again, as if he had never left.

During that lost hour, a hot, bright light surrounds him and lifts him off the ground. He is seated on a substance that molds to his body as he moves, and he is levitating. Four beings of light surround him, reassuring him telepathically. The communication carries a sensation of unconditional love—a heart entering his body, filling him with calm and peace. The beings are intensely bright, almost angelic. Through windows he can see space, and the Earth below, and it frightens him; he does not want to leave his parents. One of the beings places a hand on his head, seems to check something, and a moment later he is back on the beach.

After this, unusual abilities begin to surface—telepathy, telekinesis. They tend to break out when he is upset or exhausted, and they come tangled up with light and electricity. In a supermarket with his mother one afternoon, worn out, he closes his eyes, clenches his hands, and thinks about recharging himself. Every light in the aisle goes dark. His mother asks if it was him. He says yes. When she tells him to put them back, the lights return.

The disturbances follow his moods; sadness trips the lights the same way. He can recharge a battery by holding it for a few seconds. He talks to his dog and his cat without speaking, heals them with his hands, and sends the dog after one specific ball among many by thought alone.

His dreams run vivid past the point of ordinary dreaming. The family lives on the ninth floor of an apartment building in Paris. One night he dreams he is in the Bahamas—and wakes with his face deeply tanned and white sand between his toes. There is no white sand in Paris. His parents are astonished. His father, protective, decides to tell no one.

Rather than fear it, his father encourages him to push further. One night he focuses on the universe as he falls asleep and wakes on another planet, among beings like humanoid cats and dogs. Crystals grow from the trees and the springs, and the water runs red. He wakes wishing he had brought something back.

So the next night he goes to sleep wearing a backpack, an empty plastic bottle inside it. He returns to the same planet, the same beings, and fills the bottle with red water and a single crystal. When he wakes, the backpack holds the bottle—red water, crystal, and all. His parents see it. They are stunned.

Later, at school, during an exam, he raises his hand to ask for the bathroom. No one answers. He looks around: everyone is frozen mid-motion. He walks out of the classroom alone. When he shuts the bathroom door, the lights cut out, and he reaches for the switch. When they come back on he is not at school—he is in the bathroom of his parents’ apartment, several kilometers away.

The school has to call a locksmith to get the bathroom door open. Inside are his bag, his pen, his ID card, his coat, his clothes. The door was locked from the inside. This is physical teleportation, not astral travel.

He is twelve when the nights change. A noise wakes him, and he cannot move—something holds him down. The next night he is ready: he sleeps on his back so he can open his eyes. The noise comes again. A shadow stands motionless in the room. “I see you,” he says. It does not move. He says it again, and the shadow comes closer and resolves into a figure—taller than six feet, green-skinned, hairless, its red eyes without pupils.

The being sits at the foot of the bed. “Hello. My name is Victor. I am here to protect you.” He exists at a different frequency, he explains, and is not meant to be seen—and then he is gone.

Two days later Victor is back. He has permission now, he says, from the Galactic Confederation to stay in contact: something unusual is coming, and he has been assigned to guide and protect the boy.

Not long after, Jean-Charles’s mother is alone in the apartment, reading beside a polished copper surface. She feels someone behind her. In the reflection she sees Victor, leaning over her shoulder to read along. Whatever else he is, he is not her son’s imagination.

At thirteen he goes to summer camp in the mountains—a cluster of chalets at the foot of the range, the boys sorted into bunk rooms by age, the days given over to the trails and the lake and the long alpine light that holds late into the evening. He settles in among a roomful of strangers who become, within a few days, the ordinary furniture of summer.

Then, on a hike up the mountain, he climbs without a hat, and the sun does the rest. By the time anyone notices, he is dangerously dehydrated, and he goes down to the hospital in critical condition. He complains of something beating inside his head, like a second heartbeat, and the doctors order a scan of his brain.

The X-ray machine fails on the first attempt, and the next, and the next. When the scan finally takes, it shows a small metallic capsule lodged in his brain—shaped like a Tic Tac, unmistakably an implant.

They keep him under observation. One day the doctors come into his room with military men. As they study the images, one of the men is speaking German. Then a mask comes down over his mouth and nose, green gas hissing through it, and he goes under.

That night a white-haired man with blue eyes, in a military uniform, wakes him: they have to hurry or they will miss the jump. Jean-Charles follows him through the corridors to a large elevator, where two men in black suits wait, red triangles on their chests.

The elevator drops far longer than any hospital is deep. He starts to panic and the lights buck and flicker. The man sets a hand on his shoulder and tells him it’s all right—and the lights steady at once.

When the doors open, the opening is a different shape than the one they entered, and what lies beyond is no hospital basement. It is a vast hangar, and it is full of children, lined up and waiting. “This is where I leave you,” the man tells him. “Everything will be fine.” An inner voice says the same.

A woman at a table has him lay his hand on a device like a photocopier; a band of light passes over it, reading his DNA. She hands him a black suit marked with a winged horse and points him toward a tunnel of light.

He steps into the portal with the other children. The tingling hits him all at once—thousands of needles driven in together—and his awareness snaps off for a fraction of a second. When it comes back he is standing in another hangar, this one futuristic, military. Staff in medical coats and uniforms start in immediately on the children’s fear responses.

They sort the children by age and gender. Over the weeks the tests pile up: speed, logic, adaptability, then clairvoyance, out-of-body travel, telekinesis, fear pushed to its edge through nightmare simulations. Many of the children wash out. One of the doctors points Jean-Charles out to an officer as the boy he mentioned—and Jean-Charles knows the face. It is the radiologist.

They take him into a dark room. A mantis—huge, unfolding out of the shadows—lays a limb on his shoulder and tells him, without words, that he has been chosen. He collapses.

He comes to in his hospital bed. Then everything goes dark again.

The next thing he is aware of is the blare of a bus horn. He is in his seat, his bag beside him, riding back to summer camp—and a stretch of time is simply gone. When he tries to tell the other boys what he remembers, they laugh at him.

So he lets it drop. The camp closes back over him: mornings on the trails, afternoons in the cold lake, marmots whistling somewhere up the scree, evenings that run long and loud before lights-out. Days pass and nothing comes for him. He is a boy at summer camp again, and the hospital starts to feel like something the fever invented.

Then, one night, he tells his roommate he is going out the window to walk in the field at the foot of the mountain. He sits alone under the stars and says out loud that he doesn’t want to be here anymore—that he wants to be taken. Above him a star begins to move. It widens into a disc. A beam comes down and lifts him into a large craft.

The ship is called the Solaris, and the first one to meet him aboard is Victor. A blonde woman—pale, blue-eyed—gives her name as Maria and tells him to follow. She leads him down a long corridor into a classroom out of no school he knows: the desks hang in the air, and young beings sit at them. His training for a secret space program starts here.

Only one of the other children feels familiar—David Rousseau, another French boy. When Maria sits them together they know each other at once, the way you know someone from across several lifetimes.

The training is psychic ability, combat, and testing that never lets up. Jean-Charles draws specialized instruction and works closely with a mantis. The trainees cross to other worlds and meet species after species, readying for missions still to come.

When it ends, Maria comes to tell him they will see each other again sooner than he thinks. They step into a chamber with a tube, and Jean-Charles is set back into his life on Earth—at the moment just before he climbed out the chalet window.

He is twenty-one, doing his mandatory military service, when an injury puts him in a military hospital in Paris. After a complication in his treatment they take him underground and work on him with technology that belongs nowhere in that building—corridors of pulsing blue light, and the needle-sensation he already knows.

He surfaces aboard the Solaris. Maria is there to meet him. “Hello again,” she says. “You see—it wasn’t so long.” He does not know her face.

She brings him into a room of vertical tubes. They step into one together, and his memory comes back whole. He is given a new suit—a circle broken at the bottom by an open triangle—and walked into a large amphitheater, where David is already waiting.

Under a great emblem of a planet with two rings, Maria addresses the assembled group, and Jean-Charles’s adult 20 and back for the French secret space program begins.

The Solaris, he learns, belongs to Solar Warden—a joint program run by the United States and France. He rises to captain, then commander, leading mixed teams of humans, hybrids, and extraterrestrials on rescue and diplomatic runs.

On a rescue mission to Mars he and David run into a hostile Black Draco, and Jean-Charles is cut down. David’s team breaks through and gets him back to the Solaris, to the medical section, where crystalline medbed technology rebuilds him completely.

Twenty years in, molecular regression takes his body back to the age of twenty-one. His memory is wiped. He wakes in the military hospital in Paris.

The memories come back years later. Jean-Charles Moyen and David Rousseau recover the same details on their own, apart from each other; when they finally meet in France, they confirm they served aboard the same ship. Their books, their films, their interviews line up point for point.

Years on, working at a French bank, Jean-Charles runs into his old summer-camp roommate—who tells him he followed him into the field that night and watched him vanish into a disc of light. That confirmation removes any remaining doubt that it was all real.