Michael Relfe

This account is compiled from The Mars Records*, Books One and Two, by Stephanie Relfe—the transcripts of the sessions in which her husband Michael recovers his memories.*

1.

It starts before Michael Relfe is born. His father serves in the United States Air Force, stationed in Las Vegas, and while he is there something is done to him—modifications he never knows about. Michael is the result of what they did. He arrives two months premature.

He grows up in south Florida. His mother is sweet and loving. His father, an air traffic controller now, drinks, and when he drinks he beats the boy. It leaves a vacuum where a father should be, and the people who are watching Michael know exactly what can be poured into a vacuum like that.

He is eight years old the night he wakes to find his parents gone from the house. He walks out through the sliding glass door and crosses the street. The people of the neighborhood are standing outside, looking up. His mother is there. Something is coming over the top of the houses—a rocket ship, tall and lit like a lighthouse. Nobody is surprised. It is the Air Force, doing some kind of test. Three or four light grey beings stand close by with equipment, and they do not frighten him. A damping field hangs over everything like a curtain. This is when they start doing things to him—changes, enhancements to a talent he already carries in his genes—and when it is over there is something at the back of his skull, a homing device the government can read from a satellite. In the morning nobody remembers anything. Whenever he asks his parents about it in the years that follow, they tell him he must have been dreaming.

At twelve they take him again, because they have to get to him before he hits puberty. Six Greys work on him alongside three military men and a woman, while two reptilian soldiers stand guard. They do something to boost his future abilities, and they put him back.

At seventeen he applies for an Air Force scholarship and spends a night at Homestead Air Force Base, outside Miami. The day is medical, physical, and psychological exams. The real testing happens after he goes to sleep. He is drugged, heavy, barely able to stand. A small red dot appears in the dark in front of his eyes, almost infrared, the size of his little finger, and he is made to concentrate on it. It is a probe—his own mind probing out. There is something like a curtain, and he tries to push through it and can't. Among the people testing him are tall insect beings, like praying mantises. There is no harm in them, no animosity; from their frame, they are just doing their job. Then the commands go in: You won't remember this. You're dreaming. Aliens are not real. It's all science fiction. He wakes, finishes up, and goes home. He does not get the scholarship. He has been pre-qualified for something else.

At eighteen he has his tonsils out in Hollywood, Florida. The doctor is a Navy flight surgeon. While Michael is under, a tiny crystal goes into the back of his neck through a needle. It works like a governor. It can produce any emotion, including artificial happiness, and it suppresses or enhances his natural abilities whenever they need. With the governor on, he runs at one unit of power. Without it, he has ten thousand. It also pushes him, gently and for years, toward the military.

He does three years of college. Then, at twenty-one, he signs a six-year enlistment for the Navy's nuclear power program, missing a single question on the entrance test. He is gung-ho, dedicated, unquestioning. The government and its discipline and order take the place of the father he never had. The people running him have a name for this. They call it special patriotism.

One morning in March 1976 his mother drives him before dawn to meet the recruiter, who takes him down to the Armed Forces Enlisted Station in Miami to be sworn in. Right before lunch he is taken to another part of the building, where the people are not Navy. They are NSA. They give him something to drink, like orange juice, and hook him to a machine that monitors his brain waves while he looks at pictures of deep space. They give him a drug—the same one he will be given later, before the tunnel—to see whether he can take it. They test him for hypnotic suggestibility, and his score is one of the highest of the day. Then a doctor with dark hair hypnotizes him and returns him to the general population. All he remembers afterward is being vaccinated. The NSA are the big-picture guys. They take people from anyone they want. The military are piss-ant compared to them.

In April, at boot camp, he spends a week in the hospital. A man assures him it's a simple operation. One implant, three millimeters across, goes up through his left nostril into the sinus. Then they turn him over, his face through a hole in the table, and cut one or two smaller ones into his neck. They wheel him into recovery to see if he is going to live. Someone says, "Mr. Relfe, you'll be fine." He wakes in his bunk with a neck so stiff he can barely move and the symptoms of measles, and that is what he remembers: a day in bed with the measles.

They make you think it's all chance. In reality, it's all planned ahead.

2.

He finishes basic electronics school at Great Lakes, Illinois. There is supposedly no room for him yet at Nuclear Power School, so he is assigned as an instructor assistant and told to wait.

He is asleep in the barracks when someone wakes him past midnight and tells him to follow. Still sleepy, he goes down the hall. An officer is waiting with a handful of other sailors. He tells them about a program—very hush-hush, many levels above top secret. Special training, special duties, vital to national security. Fast promotion. Extra pay. He asks for volunteers.

All of them say yes. No one is given the chance to go back to his room. The fact of having been chosen overshadows everything. It's like a James Bond movie.

They are led down the hall to what looks like a broom closet. Behind it are steps going down. Underneath the Great Lakes base there is an entire underground area. They are sworn in to a different kind of military, a new organization: the M.D.F., the Mars Defense Force. Somewhere in the processing Michael signs an agreement, six hundred words long, with a joint project of the military and the Greys. He agrees to let them put implants in him, to track him, to keep him under surveillance and monitor his health, to go where they wish, to let them take biological samples, to let them teach him and store information inside him. In return they will keep him healthy, and they will take him off the Earth when the earth changes come.

He is issued clothing that is all synthetic, because natural fibers clog the air filters where he is going. Only at the end, just before the shot, do they tell him where that is.

The shot comes from a gun, not a needle. It is scopolamine. It stops you from going crazy in the tunnel. Sometimes people don't survive the tunnel.

They line up on a platform in front of the tube. The order is to walk in fifteen feet apart, ignore anything you see or hear, and just keep walking. It is cool inside, and there is a weird throbbing. He takes about two hundred steps toward the light at the end, and when he comes out people catch him and hold him up, because it's very disorienting. They greet him, give him a couch to lie on, and he sleeps.

It is a jump gate, a tunnel through hyperspace, the technology that came out of the Philadelphia Experiment and Montauk—no longer an experiment, just everyday transport. And the tunnel does time as well as space.

He wakes tired and hungry, and someone tells him he can have anything he wants. The mess hall is very nice, almost like a restaurant. He is introduced to the others in his group—fifteen of them. The real training starts in a week, he is told. Until then it's basically a vacation.

Mars Base is several large installations, above ground and below, and the main one is a city of two to three million people. There is a bank, with money that is only good here. There are bookstores, gyms, tennis courts, swimming pools—it's like being back on Earth. They spare no expense.

When the week is over they get an orientation about their jobs. It's called remote viewing, and they are here because of a talent they were born with. They weren't picked because they were smart. It's genetics—they were chosen back in grade school, from blood tests. The whole thing with the Navy was a setup. There will be a series of tests, the doctors say, and some people won't make it. It's nothing to be ashamed of. They'll be reassigned.

Nobody mentions the drugs.

They stand lined up in lightweight blue jumpsuits, like the ones on a submarine, barefoot on a cold floor. They never tell you what's coming. First the scopolamine, so that you have no will of your own and can't go violent. Then the brain drug, the one that opens up the psychic channels for good. You have to have the talent first, or it has nothing to work with. Michael lies under it for three hours with electrodes on his head and neck, a pressure in the middle of his forehead, his body not tired at all and unable to move. He is not allowed to sleep. It is boring. When it lifts, everything is clear, and he has a sense of well-being. It happens once a day for eight days, and between sessions they sit around watching TV and eating. The scopolamine is what keeps the other drug from harming him. It works for him. Other people fry.

Three of the fifteen die.

Two weeks in, he is strapped into a chair in a darkened room with wires on his head, in front of a curved movie screen. He sees nothing on it but a blur. The images are flashing too fast to see, and the information is going in anyway—procedures, history, loyalty, aliens, technology. Under it run the commands. Keep everything secret. Tell no one. You're special. Fight the enemy. Loyalty and honor. Each session runs three hours, and when he comes down his head feels like it is going to explode. Over twenty years he will sit through more than fifty of these.

Then he is brought, standing, into a room full of Greys. There are about fifteen of them. They walk around him, looking him over. They are the doctors and technicians here, neutral toward their subjects, always doing something to someone. They put a band on his head and cut in between his eyes. He is partly conscious for it. They install control circuitry. They install a circuit breaker, so that if someone attacks him while he is using his abilities, it kicks in and stops him being fried. And they install the interface, the connection between his third eye and the machines. A voice keeps telling him to concentrate on the red dot while they watch their monitors to see whether it fits. It hurts. He is still alive at the end, so he didn't reject it. He passes the test. He hates it when they do that.

A couple of days later he sits down at the machine for the first time. He pulls the cradle toward him, leans his forehead into it, closes his eyes, and makes contact. It's like logging into a computer system. It verifies who he is—if he weren't the right person, it would kill him immediately. Then a whole virtual world opens in his mind, balls of energy and clouds that he has to move around with thought alone. No hands, no eyes. Normal thoughts are too fuzzy; he has to train them. Sessions can't run longer than two hours, because the machine uses up so much life energy. He is ordered to eat a lot before and after, to drink the high-energy drink—he likes the fruit punch, not the orange—and to swim and work out, because physical exercise builds the life energy back up. Afterward he naps, plays basketball, has dinner, does his homework, sleeps. It is laid-back and fun. Everyone's equal, even though that's not true. They are told it's strictly training. Later they find out that their missions are being decided by the results.

Thirty days in, the class files into a lecture in coveralls, carrying notebooks, expecting a regular day, and is told, We're doing something different today. This time the chairs are like dentist's chairs, and what goes in is mathematics, planets, the capabilities of their own spacecraft and the enemy's, weapons, velocities, tactics. They'll all be glad when they can get out in the field.

3.

He is no longer in the Navy. His outfit is called Tech-Psi, and he is a sergeant—a manager, but not a high one. He rides a tram to work. He sits at his station in the control center with his hands on a plate and headgear on, a screen in front of him. The work is tactical remote viewing. It runs from recon—data gathering, covert spying, listening, finding out what's wrong inside a piece of enemy equipment and quietly sabotaging it. It's no big deal. You don't move a thing; you affect the energy affecting it. From recon the work runs up through defense, and he moves up fast.

He defends the grid. At first he is assigned one area at a time, and the biggest is the base city itself. Priority goes to key personnel. The highest priority of all is the jump gates. Mars is where the gates to other star systems are kept, because there is too much interference on Earth, and every moment of their use is logged and guarded really tight. The gate Michael guards goes to the Pleiades. The enemy has people doing this stuff too, reptilians among them. Static shields never change, so operators like him probe them constantly for penetration, and when something gets through he can trace it back through space-time to its source. He is never alone on duty; backup operators and supervisors can join him instantly. Some shifts he is hooked into weapons systems, or assigned to watch over attack craft out on patrol.

One shift he is scanning space when a single ship comes in. It looks okay, but something is not right about it, so he goes inside. The crew look like normal people, but they're not. He scans the captain: fuzzy, not a person. He has already given the alarm and others are behind him, but protocol says he is still in charge, and he is trigger-happy.

He is very good against shields. He reaches out and lightly samples one, like tasting it, then moves his field forward and sideways in all three dimensions at once. He operates at a higher harmonic, merges with it, and it never knows he's there. The traps the enemy sets to catch people traveling out of body don't stop him. They don't have shields for what he can do.

That is why he is moved to offensive work. Most remote viewers never come close. What passes for remote viewing back on Earth covers about the first three or four days of training at Mars Base, and most of those people would never survive the drugs. Offensive work takes raw horsepower, and it takes something else: you have to be a cold son of a bitch. He has both. He also has extra strands of DNA—twenty-four of them.

His first termination comes without warning. It is presented as a training exercise, and at the last moment they are told it's for real. He is given a number, not a name. If they don't give you a name, it can't be personal. He is given a DNA sample, which he can read on the machine and wrap up like an envelope, and a general area: Los Angeles. He swoops down on it like a bird, matches the DNA, and locks on. He reports that the target is located and requests further orders. The order is upgraded to terminate. He requests clarification, as per standard operating procedure. The order is to terminate. He requests final clarification. The order is to terminate.

He locks his focus on the target and builds up the energy. It comes from below and moves up his spine. He puts it out in one large blast. Each operator chooses his own point of attack. Michael usually chooses the heart, for a heart attack, or the third eye, for a stroke. This one is a Navy captain who has been spying for the Chinese. Michael has no thoughts and no feelings about it. If anything, he is pleased—not everybody can do this, even with the machine. He is a little pissed off that they threw it at him without warning.

The slang for the job is a fly swatter. A week later he signs in, does a couple of warm-ups—things to find, targets to locate—and the third item on the list is a fly swatter: a DNA scientist at a university in Chicago, spying for Israel. Brain blast, 8 p.m. Chicago time. He logs it. There is a spy under Dallas and a software man in Houston, both working for Faction Two, the people opposed to the New World Order. Michael's side is Faction One. There is an executive inside his own organization who is selling out. There is a young military remote viewer in Kentucky who found out things he wasn't supposed to know about Mars Base, and a CIA photo analyst at Langley who saw an installation on Mars during the few moments a shield failed. There are reptilians masquerading as humans—a remote viewer spying on the base for his own race, a high-ranking one disguised as a lieutenant in the Pentagon. That one was fun. There is a seventy-four-year-old reptilian scientist on one of their satellites, studying how remote viewing works in humans so they can stop it; Michael slips through the installation's shield, waits an hour for him to be distracted, and blasts him. One target is a well-known person on Earth. A stroke.

One of them he will be sorry about. A reptilian scientist, deep underground beneath New York, heavily shielded. Michael watches him for three hours and sees no opening. His shift ends. He sleeps, comes back, watches three hours more. Then a gap shows in the shielding, right behind the head, and he hits it quickly with what he has. It paralyzes a lot of the target's systems. Before he can recover, Michael builds a big thrust and blasts again. The target was a good guy. He was for freedom, and against all the stuff going on in the different programs. Killing him hurt the cause of freedom.

And once, on what starts as a watch-and-recon, he senses that the man in the green uniform is not what he seems. The order is upgraded. It is one of his first, and he does it crudely, not wanting to, and blasts him. The thing was never alive, only animated: an organic robot, a shell with an artificial intelligence inside. A synthetic. It gets shut off.

They work you a lot, to keep you dull, so that when they give you something like this you have no emotional attachment. It gets to be like a game. There are days he is angry and thinks, I'll fry your ass. He thinks he is hot shit. He almost doesn't need the machine. By the end of his tour the count is seventy—humans, aliens, and synthetics.

Things have been put in him to keep him this way. A doctor on Mars gives him the commands while he is under the drugs. You can't trust anyone. You have no friends. You don't need anyone. They want him to love no one but them. His mind is cordoned off into four compartments, sealed from each other with passwords—the same person, running different software. Michael No. 1 is the everyday man. Michael No. 2 holds the remote viewing, the telepathy, the remote influence, and the terminations. No. 3 holds flying, fighting, medicine, teleportation, time travel.

Living on Mars is, all the same, the most positive memory he has. The food is good—he eats vegetarian. He goes out to the desert, and to the old ruins. Visiting politicians and VIPs come through the gate for a few weeks at a time, and they are strictly off limits, because the permanent staff must never touch anything connected to the Earth timeline they will one day be sent back to. Everyone on the base is married. Michael's wife is named June. She has dark hair.

They take a vacation in the hills, a hiking trip. They don't bring ropes. June really wants to go; she wants to impress him. On a slope of loose gravel her foot slips. She slides face down, hits the bottom, flips over, and strikes her head. It is a quick death. He has a communication device and he calls for help, but it's too late. He blames himself. He didn't protect her.

4.

Remote viewing is a very stressful procedure, and duty rotation is required. Offered a choice of other training, Michael chooses flight. He becomes the pilot of a single-seat planetary attack craft, his telepathic talent wired into this job too.

He is on deep-space recon at the edge of the perimeter when he comes up, real fast, on some bad guys. It's a task force, and there is a big one at the back. His orders are to report the intruder's position and return. He doesn't. He is excited, gung-ho, bored for action, and he is a smart-ass. He goes after the big one, gets as close as he can, and launches his weapons. He does some damage. He takes another pass, and then a third.

The ship fires a missile. It doesn't explode. It penetrates the cockpit and goes through him. He is slammed back into his seat at twelve Gs. The front of his ship is crunched and it springs away, tumbling. There is shrapnel in his knee and his neck, his left arm is busted, something is projecting from the right side of his chest, and he is bleeding to death, still strapped into the chair. The beacon is going off. His suit is a very advanced automatic survival suit. It seals the wounds and pumps him full of drugs, and puts him into suspension.

He drifts for a week before he is retrieved. They put him back together in two operations. It was his own fault, and they promote him anyway, to Captain. He never finished his degree, and he made officer after all.

After twenty years he is called in for debriefing. They don't let you stay too long, because the memories become too hard to erase. They read his aura. They read his DNA. They make copies of his memories. He signs papers.

They strap him face down on a bed, his neck exposed, cold and numb, and put in the crystal that blocks his abilities. Some people don't survive the crystal. A doctor lays in the booby traps, ten of them, each with its own commands to protect it. Your heart will stop if you remember. You will have a stroke if you remember. You'll go insane if you remember. His sex drive is turned down, his testosterone held down to five percent. Conserve your semen.

Then he goes into a machine like a CAT scanner and lies there for two weeks, semi-conscious, while his body is age regressed by twenty years. They have to be careful not to make you young too fast. You can lose your personality. It is pure boredom. The crystal blocks the abilities, and the regression blocks the memories. They don't take the memories away, because they may need him again. They are waiting for something big to happen, and they like to keep on hold the people who made it through.

He walks back through the tunnel. They call it a timeshot. He comes out at Great Lakes in 1976, about a week after he left, the same age he was when he first stepped in, and wakes in the base hospital feeling twenty-two again. They tell him he has been ill.

For the next twenty years there are two instances of him, a sailor on Earth and a soldier on Mars, completely isolated from one another. It is not a parallel universe. He served six years relative and twenty-six years absolute.

5.

Over the missing time lies a memory of being an instructor assistant for six months with nothing to do. It is flat, like a cartoon. He can remember going to McDonald's but no day-to-day detail. He never questions it, because the next thing is Nuclear Power School in Orlando, twelve hours of study a day, no time to think about anything that came before. Then the reactor prototype in Idaho, more electronics school in Memphis, the naval air stations at Jacksonville and Pensacola, and finally an aircraft carrier.

About two years in he becomes a Christian, without much to show for it. He is cold, hard, and arrogant. On the carrier, in the middle of a family crisis, he asks for help through the chain of command and meets indifference and scorn. In a confrontation with a superior officer he loses his temper and does something with his mind. He reaches into the man's chest and squeezes his heart. He stops himself, knowing he could have killed him on the spot. A few months later the officer retires from the Navy with heart problems.

He is honorably discharged in 1982 and becomes a software engineer, logical, narrow, a loner. When people ask about his military service, he has a standing joke: "...and I deny working on the Mars Colony." It always gets a laugh.

In Tulsa in 1983 he sends away for a cassette by a Baptist preacher named Win Worley, a recording of a mass deliverance. Alone in his room he prays along, and when the preacher starts calling out demons by name and ordering them to leave, things start leaving him. He burps, he coughs, he cries, he dry-heaves, for an hour. Afterward he feels very different. It is the first freedom he has had.

He is still in the system, though. In Kansas City in 1988 he lies face down on a table for five hours while an older doctor with grey hair puts an implant in his neck. The doctor looks human, because of an electronic field around his body, one good enough to fool video cameras. In real life he is six foot seven and reptilian. He has contempt for humans. They are easy to fool, and they are a valuable resource. He must make sure the operation is a success, or he will be punished.

The same year Michael checks into Buffalo Bill's, a casino on the Nevada state line. He has a great fondness for the place, though he neither drinks nor gambles. In his room the phone rings, and when he picks it up something happens. Then there is a knock at the door. It is a man he knows, his controller, a military man who has been in the program since 1947 and has handled a lot of people. It's a job. It's necessary. It's boring sometimes. He drives Michael to the prison out the back, where everyone is pretty friendly. A voice says, "You won't feel a thing." A cap presses on his forehead for two hours, and a locator goes in.

Some nights at home the phone rings, and Michael gets out of bed and walks the length of the hallway to answer it, and afterward can never remember who he spoke to. He is reporting in.

In 1995 he moves to Australia. At a conference in Sydney he meets Stephanie, a kinesiologist trained in a technique called clearing. She thinks he might be the man for her, except for something she sees behind his eyes—an unusually large amount of suppressed rage.

On December 26, 1996, she sits him down with the two cans of a biofeedback meter in his hands. There is no hypnosis. He is fully conscious while she watches the needle and sends him through a memory, again and again, until the charge comes off it. He wants to know about the rocket ship he saw when he was eight. The needle starts to fall when he mentions the Navy. She takes him through his postings one at a time—boot camp, Orlando, Idaho, Memphis—asking at each whether he was involved in something else. Nothing reads until she gets to Great Lakes, instructor assistant. His whole body starts to chill and shake.

She asks him where he was at that time. He doesn't want to say it. The answer is too incredible. She asks again.

"Mars."

Two days later she asks whether he killed anyone there, and he cries, which he never does.

6.

The work takes years. The memories come out of order, in fragments, behind walls of I don't know and there's nothing there—phrases that were put in him, which he has to repeat aloud until they give way. Stephanie finds the commands lodged in his brain, always in sets of ten, and removes them once she has the exact wording. After each session he feels as though things have been torn out of his head, and something lifts. The rage drains away. People who used to feel threatened by him start to warm to him.

They assume it is all in the past. It isn't. One night early in January 1997 three beings who look like Greys, but are from the Pleiades, take him from his bedroom to a ship, take a blood sample that leaves a triangular bruise on his arm, and receive his report. The Navy is in charge. Some part of him is still on duty—he defends a ship called the Orca and monitors alien bases in Utah and Arizona. Two weeks later, after the session in which he relives the crash of his attack craft, a scar appears down his left forearm—a foot long, perfectly straight, surgical, hairless, raised to the touch. By the next morning it is gone.

In July, reptilians at Pine Gap, the American base in the middle of Australia, put a hook into his heart while he sleeps, to siphon his energy slowly enough that he won't notice. They barter it to a demonic power. What they are after is his metagene.

In August 1997 he and Stephanie marry and move to the United States. He insists they spend part of the honeymoon at Buffalo Bill's.

On the night of October 3, 1998, in Indianapolis, he kisses Stephanie goodnight and goes to sleep. A woman with short, straight dark hair wakes him. A portal stands open in the bedroom wall, and he walks through it with her, naked and barefoot, without question, because it seems like the natural thing to do. On the other side is something like the reception area of a hospital, very cold. He is assured that his wife is fine and that it's only a check-up. They lay him on a hospital bed on wheels in a hallway where everything is dark blue, the gowns, the sheets. They push a long thin tool up his nostril to place a marker, and he tastes blood. They lay cold metal on his heart. They cut into his groin, then close him up with no stitches. It's like on Star Trek: they use a bright light and the flesh goes together. The staff are human, except for one. It is old, like a grandfather, a dark powerful energy the others take orders from, interested in him the way a scientist is interested. "Good night, Michael," someone says.

In the morning he steps out of the shower and sees two healed scars, one on each side of his groin where the thigh meets the scrotum, with a purple triangular mark at the top of the right one. He has never had an operation there. For Michael, this is what settles it. He is not imagining these scars.

It is a jump gate, opened by the people who own him, and it comes every month. A friend who works on the energy body finds that pieces of his soul have been removed and stored in a vast hangar, in bell jars stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction. She also finds an energy clone, built from half of his etheric body, that can be fitted into him to run him like a robot. There are six others beside it, and one empty unit. His squad was eight, and one has died.

He realizes he has never officially left. So he resigns. He says it out loud, in the name of Jesus Christ: he resigns from the Mars Defense Force, from anything to do with the military, and leaves that game.

They keep coming. In Dallas, on July 9, 1999, a man stands in the doorway in the wall and says, "Come with me. Michael No. 2, identification—" followed by a thing, a color, and a number. That is how it works. The visit is for the compartment, not for him, and Michael No. 1 goes back to sleep knowing nothing. On the other side one of them calls him Mr. Relfe. When he asks a question, the answer is, "Yes, Captain." For the first time he is asking what is going on, and they wave it away—it's no big deal, you're just here for a check-up. A controller implant in the roof of his mouth has been damaged by his dentist's drill, and with a pen-like tool that sees through tissue they swap it for a new model. "Nothing but the best for our boy," someone says, possibly being a smart-ass. The hospital is at Homestead Air Force Base. It is the place he slept one night when he was seventeen.

That autumn they operate on his forehead and keep him four days in machines that speed the healing, feeding him cherry jelly. Then they timeshot him back through the same portal to the night he left.

In November 1999, two weeks after they book flights back to Australia, he is driving a rented moving truck through Louisiana with Stephanie in the car behind. A state police car with dark windows follows close behind them for fifteen minutes. As it finally speeds past, Michael feels the brake pedal go to the floor, and a thought arrives in his head: that would be an easy way to get rid of me. At that moment a front tire explodes. He gets the truck stopped. The repairman says he has never seen anything like it. After that, Michael and Stephanie decide to publish their records under their real names. It is the people who hide behind false names who get killed.

7.

It takes them a while to find him in Australia. Then telepathic contact wakes him and tells him to prepare to walk through the portal. It opens at the foot of the bed, and he crawls to it. On the other side the people are different. They tell him he is in their region now, and that they will be handling his case. A bald man in a white lab coat, more magician than doctor, tells him, "You're starting to remember too much. We'll take care of that." He has Michael close his eyes and calls something up, a being six thousand years old that spins a web over Michael's head to block his memory. Its purpose is to steal, kill, and destroy. Then come the commands, given under lights that blink back and forth: Don't do clearing. The meter is off limits. Don't believe Stephanie. They reopen the cuts in his groin, close them again, hand him a glass of orange juice for his stomach, and tell him they'll see him next month.

When Michael finds the web-spinner, he understands it is not a demon but one of a species they have enslaved. It would like to leave, but it would be punished so badly that it doesn't dare. He prays it home. He prays, too, for the young military telepath at Pine Gap who has been assigned to watch him and needs a machine to do it, until the kid gets frustrated.

When they go looking for the old agreement with the Greys, it is still in force. Michael No. 1 ends it, and so does No. 4. No. 2 and No. 3 do not want to.

The Mars Records goes onto the internet, free, on April 2, 2000. The reprisals begin. Two boxes labeled "Michael's files" vanish from their house. Stephanie wakes with a hard lump in her breast the size of a duck egg. It is radionics, a death signal, and it shrinks by half when Michael prays against it by name.

On the Fourth of July—their idea of a joke—a soldier in black camouflage steps out of the portal holding a little box. "Come on, Mr. Relfe." The box doesn't need a password. It beams the electromagnetic signature of scopolamine straight into his implant. This time the place on the other side is darker and more military. It is underground at Pine Gap. He has been brought here because he's a hard case. Other men and women are being led down the hall, each with a guard of their own. There are five portal areas here, and different programs. Michael says he doesn't want to be here. He struggles with the guard and throws a kick at him, and a wheeled metal table gets in the way. The guard presses the button again, and Michael does what he is told. In the morning a quarter-inch chunk is missing from the middle of his big toenail.

That night he learns what it is all for. They are harvesting cells from his testicles to create other people, all of them metapsychic, to populate another planet on the far side of a permanent jump gate. The children are raised in command families. All they are told about Earth is that it is polluted and that they are special. There has to be a planet and a population in case this one is lost. They won't make the same mistake twice. It is just a continuation of the Mars program. Michael puts it his own way: he is a lab rat and a stud bull, on the best health insurance on the planet. When he sends off a saliva test that summer, the lab assumes the sample is damaged: his testosterone is lower than a ninety-year-old man's. Stephanie finds the commands holding it at five percent and removes them, and a year and a half later it tests like that of a man in his twenties. They have been conserving him, and keeping him young.

They escalate. They put goggles over his eyes with flashing colored lights to drive the commands in—Forget about this facility. You made this up. We're not here—and follow them with an alien drug to make sure the commands stick this time. It doesn't work. They back him into a new machine, molded to his body, that hooks into his neck and puts drugs and data directly into his etheric body. "That'll hold you for a while," the doctor says. A reptilian scientist, working unseen through the human doctor, leaves his own commands there. You are ours. We own you. Serve us. We are your master. When a Pine Gap operator jams one of the sessions, Michael sends the attack back a million times as strong, and sees the man rip off his headphones and say, "Oh, shit." Stephanie talks him down, first to hitting back at eight-tenths strength, then to praying for them instead. After that, life gets better.

In August they pull fluid from the organ between his eyes. It is another harvest, something to do with his ability. It's an assembly line. Somebody says, "I've got another one." At the end of the month it isn't the Navy's people at all but three reptilian doctors, who cut a sample from above his chest while he lies asleep on a slanted bed, then levitate him back down into his own. Stephanie is taken with him that night.

In September they press a plate against his breastbone that shoots energy into his thymus. It is an inoculation, and afterward they expose him to the disease itself to make sure it took. He runs a fever of 39°C (102°F) for five days. It is for whatever is coming. In October he is at his computer when sharp pains go through his chest. A remote viewer is doing to him exactly what he used to do to others. He survives it, and he knows it is not because of his abilities.

He has been praying hard for a way to make it stop. That night, October 15, 2000, it comes to him like finding something that was lost. The jump gate damages the space-time continuum, and the continuum can be healed. He can't imagine healing all of it, any more than healing everyone in the world. But it can be done locally. He asks God for legions of angels to seal off the house. Then he lifts his hands into the air as though he is laying them on space itself, and asks in Jesus' name that the space-time continuum inside this sealed house be changed so that the enemy's jump gate technology will not function in it.

The portal does not open that month, or the next. The Greys are mad about their quota.

It holds for six months. They move back to America, to a house in the woods. In April 2001 the Greys come in person, twice in two weeks, in a ship parked nearby, with a short-range transporter instead of a gate. Under an ultraviolet light the next morning, his scars glow fluorescent pink and purple from the sterilizing agent. The second time, they beam a device at the neighborhood that puts every house to sleep. Three Men in Black in suits, hats, and sunglasses—hybrids, born on Earth—stand off to the left while Greys and military men open his groin again. Stephanie, a week pregnant, wakes certain the embryo has been taken. Among the commands left in her are There was no baby. Leave Michael. Aliens are our friends.

And on that second trip, after recovery, the ship goes into orbit and docks with a mother ship, where he spends two days in lectures, high-speed movies, simulations, and exercises. They are about the enemy, a species from a long way away that the pilots call bugs, or chiggs, and that is planning to invade. He is only told what he needs to fight them. He is training as a pilot. At the end he says goodbye to his friends and takes the shuttle home, and is back in bed within the hour.

So he was right. They kept him on hold in case they needed him again.

He widens the prayer to cover transporters, teleportation, wormholes, walk-through-walls technology, and whatever comes next, and the taking stops again. He holds nothing against his country. He loves his country and his planet and would stand with them against any enemy. He believes his planet has been invaded and some key command structures compromised. He apologizes for whatever harm he did while under their control. He doesn't think he deserves to get out—he volunteered—and it is only by mercy that he has come this far. He would still like to have it all explained to him one day, even if he could never tell anyone.

He has a message for the government. They still owe him back pay with interest, and a monthly retirement check at Captain's rank for more than twenty years of service. He expects it ASAP.

And he has one for anyone still in the military: never volunteer for anything.