Morgan Rae Johnson

This account is compiled from the interviews Morgan Rae Johnson gave in 2025, after the publication of her book Manipulated Memories (January 2025), which was not used in the writing. Her website is www.morganraejohnsonauthor.com.

1.

Morgan Rae Johnson, before she has that name, is a light being guarding a space between lives, and she hears a call from Earth itself. On the other side there is a girl who is going to be taken into a program, and it is plain from there that she will not get through it alone. Morgan makes a soul contract with her: an older, stronger soul will come in beside her. It is not the usual walk-in arrangement, where one soul leaves and the other takes the body. The plan is for both of them to be in there at once, because two souls open more energetic space in a body than one, and when the girl finally leaves, the space will still be there for Morgan to fill with more of herself. Somewhere between the ages of three and five she walks in. The girl stays until she is thirty or thirty-one, and then, because there has been too much, she goes.

Morgan chooses this life on purpose: to prove that a mind can evolve past anything, and to live through what is being done to children in the projects so that she can teach people to be stronger than it. There is also, she will say later, some karma of her own to work off, from lives in which she was not kind.

She is five, in kindergarten, when two military men come into her classroom. They take her out into the hallway, prick her finger with a handheld device, and read the screen: O negative, and the number 117. They ask if she would like to go and meet some other kids just like her. A car is waiting outside. It drives her to what they call the Elitist Academy, a school for gifted children that works with the government, in a big Victorian building two and a half hours north of Portland, on the road up toward Fort Lewis. There are five children in her class at a time, usually four boys and her. They come from all over the world.

Her parents are divorced, her mother is in her twenties and busy with a boyfriend, and the theme of Morgan's childhood is neglect. Nobody notices when she is gone. The academy takes her once a month, or once every few months, for checkups and testing and lessons, from school, from gymnastics practice, on weekends. In town there are families the program keeps, and their children become her friends, so that when she says she is spending the weekend with them nobody thinks twice. Her father and her stepfather were both in the Army, and her guess, years later, is that one of them got into trouble and she was offered to make it go away, that money changed hands, and that neither of them remembers, because agreements like that are not left in the conscious mind.

She hates school, runs away from it, and is put into an alternative school. When the men come for her there, they show their badges at the office and say not to mark her absent, and nobody argues. At the academy door a nurse meets the children and asks about home: what happened last night, how do you feel today. Then she puts something under the skin of the hand. It comes in three colors, and which one you get depends on your answers. Her best guess is that one makes a child docile, one calms a child who has been through something at home, and all of them put the mind where it can be written on. On the way out, most days, the memory of the day is taken.

2.

What they teach is energy work, magic, hand-to-hand fighting, and, from the age of nine, gymnastics. They teach remote viewing first of all. It is visualization, a step-by-step playbook for finding what the leaders want found: a vehicle, a person, a target in a cave, a war, an alien race, something in 920 BC. The protocol ends with a line the children say every time, show me where this person is located in this timeline, because there is more than one, and the wrong one gives the wrong answer. The viewing is done in a small booth with an intercom on one side, playing high frequencies that slow the mind down into theta, and a telephone on the other, giving the commands. The whole place is an experiment in how much you can get a child to do without being hands-on.

There are tracks. There is intel, there is remote viewing, there is the Monarch program and others. Morgan is mostly intel and remote viewing.

The testing starts when she is eight. They call them tests, and the children call them experiments. A machine pushes her head underwater, five seconds at a time. She is stood in a corner with meat beside her while a lion strains at the end of whatever holds it, clawing, almost reaching her. There are alligators. It is sold to the children as a good thing: they are getting stronger, they are becoming superheroes. It is torture, and its purpose is exactly what it does. A mind under that much terror has to stay alive and act normal, and the only way it can do both is to divide. She can still feel the line, energetically, where a part of her was pushed off into another area of herself. That part is the girl she walked in beside. The trauma splits the two apart. It is easier, she thinks, because she is a Gemini, the twins, and because they knew about the soul contract. They knew she was coming.

Then comes the electroshock and the programming, and out of it an alter is made, a second personality. Her name is Mia 369. Mia is undeniably Morgan, but with the emotion taken out. She feels no sexual attraction of any kind, that has been deleted from her, and yet she knows how to use it. She knows that Morgan exists. She dresses more provocatively than Morgan ever would, as a tactic. It takes Morgan years to hold both sets of memories at once, and when she does, some of what Mia did is a shock to her.

An ultra soldier is not a super soldier. A super soldier knows he is strong and acts strong and gets the job done in the open. An ultra soldier is hidden. The children are kept looking like regular kids, docile, unintelligent, almost silly, so that nobody would think a child was doing what they are doing. They are sent to parties and gatherings, some of them Illuminati, in teams of three. A lot of them are pool parties, which can be done in daylight. The job is to dig through bedroom drawers and offices for where the information really is, the pool house perhaps, and when one of the boys gets caught they all run. She is a gymnast, and she is trained in pole dancing, and as she gets older, fourteen and fifteen, the work gets more salacious.

Once they sit her across from a man with a list of questions. He is a criminal with a side contract with the CIA who has told someone about it, and she is to mark, for each answer, whether he is telling the truth. They already know. What they are measuring is her, how strong an empath she is, what she is worth to a young Illuminati association.

Mia is called up by a phrase. There are different phrases for different modes, but the person who answers is always Mia. The moment Morgan hears it she switches, and when she sleeps, she wakes up as Morgan, with nothing. She is fifteen and has just been given her first phone when it rings and the sentence is spoken. She withdraws. Mia tells her father she is going away for the weekend with friends, and he does not care, and the SUV is outside.

3.

It takes her to a private jet, and the jet lands outside Houston, where military men drive the children to a small building with an elevator that goes down into an enormous underground base. They call it a MILAB, a testing ground for new technologies, where the government works alongside the extraterrestrials it has and builds its own machines out of theirs.

The children are brought into a room with five matte discs set into the floor. A man with a remote turns them on, and above each disc stands a hologram of a different species the base works with. The holograms split open down the middle to show the organs, what the being breathes, how its anatomy compares to a human's, and a lot of it compares closely. The point is to get the children used to it, so that they will not freak out when they meet these beings in the viewing. Then they are told they are going to meet one of the Draco in person. Be careful if you ever meet one outside, but in here, with us, it will not hurt you.

He is nine feet tall, nearly three meters, and sits on what can only be called a throne, in a bunker full of the country's highest-ranking military men. He has wings, because he is royal, and the royal ones vibrate harder than the rest. He is lighter in color than she expected, with an iridescent shine to him; she will find him years later in the film Jupiter Ascending and be unsettled by how close it comes. He speaks to her telepathically, and the speaking takes her whole body. It is like hissing moving through her bones, and every muscle she has locks. It is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to her. All he says is You don't have to fear me today, and the way he says it is worse than anything he could have said. The two boys with her, ten or twelve years old, love him. Boys love dinosaurs, and this is the most powerful dinosaur in the world.

Then she is walked next door to a remote viewing room, where the children are set to finding a vehicle with a satellite on it that the CIA has lost to some rebellion against the agency. That night they sleep in a hotel in Houston.

The next day they are driven to a building that looks abandoned from the street. Inside there are people, a conveyor belt like the one at a courthouse door, and an elevator with a button marked T, which takes her and the two boys to the top floor of a science lab. This is a portion of Project Looking Glass. In the middle of the room a ball of mercury floats three feet off the floor inside a clear casing. There is one chair, facing the ball. They put her in it first. A man whose name she never learns fixes dials to her forehead and to each fingertip and straps her in, and everyone else goes to the back of the room, and they turn it on.

The mercury lights up purple, green and blue. The light becomes a cube around the ball, and a ribbon spirals out from the cube and flattens into a screen, the sharpest she has ever seen, and what is on it is her own eyes, her perspective from inside her head, and they can run it forward in time and backward. There is a crowd outside the White House, and everyone is shouting we want disclosure, and she is in it, part of some movement. She is fifteen. She does not know what disclosure is. There is space, beings she is working with out there, the military of other worlds, places off the Earth she will go. There is a courtroom, some kind of proceeding, with hundreds of people waiting outside it. Then the boys take the chair, and what comes up for them is the ultra training, the making of killers; both of them will go to Iraq during the war and be worked on there.

Before they take her home they take her back to the academy, because what they have just seen has changed what she is to them. She has become a future problem. So there is electroshock: a shock, a sentence, a shock, a sentence. The world is dangerous. You cannot trust anyone. Do not take care of yourself. They write it in over and over, so that the woman outside the White House will never come to exist, and what goes in over the next months is self-sabotage and self-harm. Later she will understand the shape of it: the goal was to get her to kill herself, or to get the boys from the program to do it for them, so that no blood would be on their hands.

Somewhere in these years an implant is put into the back of her head, behind the ear. It is still there. It turns alien speech into English for her. It is also, later, where the energy weapons aim.

4.

At sixteen she and Mia are both done. They have been deployed too often. The missions are shady, the world they move in is forced entertainment with no feeling in it, and where everyone around them believes in the work, they have begun to rebel for the sake of rebelling. Normally there is one way out of a program like this, and it is that they kill you.

Before that, there is the party. She is taken to an Illuminati initiation, the PG part of it, fit for children, the first few hours, a showing of everything she could have if she stays in the programming and works with them. A man tells her, Twenty years in the blink of an eye, and all of this can be yours. She can feel that something bad is happening further in, but nothing bad is shown to her.

Then the Illuminati and the CIA draw up a contract. It is designed to look like a release. She will appear to be out, the mind control will go on running underneath, and they will get twenty years of data out of her. They offer her three hundred thousand dollars, which makes no sense, because they are about to take her memory of the offer along with everything else. It is a thick contract, and she does not think she even reads it. She signs. Later she will suspect that a great deal was in it: the boys from the program who are set against her afterward, the assaults, the domestic violence. She thinks she was agreeing to all of that too.

They put her in a chair with a hood that comes down over her head like a salon hair dryer, and they go through her memories and take them one by one. The Elitist Academy. The Illuminati association. Anything with the CIA in it. Deleted is the wrong word, she says; they were pushed down into the subconscious, which is in the body, which is why she can get them back. In their place they write that she is a drug addict. She wakes the next morning wanting a dose of something hard, a regular teenager with a great deal of trauma and no memory of where it came from.

She drops out of school on the first day of her second year of high school; she does not get along with her peers, and the alternative school is too easy and drives her mad. She signs up for the Army at sixteen, to leave at seventeen, and something happens, and she has to wait until she is eighteen.

At seventeen her sister throws her a going-away party. That night there is a sexual assault. She goes to sleep, and wakes floating up through the ceiling, and is drawn under a ship and laid on a table. There are three small Greys and two taller beings standing over them. The three do the work, the probing and the blood, and the two watch. She believes they impregnate her on purpose. A week or two later she is at the airport, about to board the plane for the Army, when she is told she is pregnant, and she does not go.

Her mother forces her in the end. Morgan thinks her mother was paid, and that she does not remember it. The recruiter turns up at the house unannounced one morning when she has been out all night and has no good reason ready to say no, and she signs a six-year contract. In November 2003, at eighteen, with a war on and no wish to be part of it, she goes in as a 25 Bravo, information operator analyst, a fancy way of saying computer networking. Then orders for Germany, which thrill her, because she wants to be anywhere but Washington State. The orders are cancelled. She is sent back to Fort Lewis, an hour from home. Looking back it is obvious: the projects wanted her close.

She is nineteen, waiting for surgery, her first sergeant's assistant, fetching his coffee and doing his paperwork, a creative and a sensitive in a job with no room for either, when he tells her some high-ranking people want to see her. An Air Force commander takes her into a room alone. He has an opportunity for her. It is called a 20 and back. She could go to space. She cannot tell anyone, and nobody will know she went, because when she gets back they will take the memory of it and return her to her exact timeline, at the age she was when she left. She does not understand that last part and does not care. When someone offers you a contract to go to space, you do not say no. It feels like destiny, and she signs that evening and asks no questions.

5.

The next day a man she has never seen walks up to her and says It's time to go. McChord Air Force Base is across the street from Fort Lewis, and under it there is a terminal. The ship in it looks like a fighter jet crossed with a rocket, made of something like glass, with whatever moves it set in the middle and the seats in a ring around that. It is small, only a few people aboard, and inside it is like an airliner, with the same weight underfoot as at home. The engine is round, so every room around it is round, a shape she will meet in base after base out there. Her boyfriend is aboard. Neither of them was allowed to tell the other. He is a super genius, a computer type, and they find out on the ship that they are going together.

The roof of the hangar is the floor of the base. It opens, they rise straight up through it, the camouflage goes on so that nobody sees them leave the atmosphere, and within minutes they jump out of Earth's orbit through a corridor of folded space and time. The trip takes between one and three days. It does not need to. They are being given time to get used to a ship before they are thrown across the galaxy.

They go into the Moon vertically, through the surface, into a hangar inside it. The commander of the base is a woman. For three days the recruits spend a few hours a day in healing chambers, med beds, which clear anything minor that is wrong with them, and they are told that from now on they are to take care of their bodies, that this is not optional. They are issued IDs and uniforms, black, with a collar, the plain sort everyone wears in Star Wars. Everything is signed on clear pads, like tablets cast in resin, and everyone is signed in and out.

The commander calls her into her office. To be a human female out here, she says, is going to be a tough ride. There are stations and ships where men have not seen a woman in years, and she gives Morgan some warnings about that, and issues her an electric baton. There are sixteen women in the fleet. So the commander is sending her, and the boyfriend with her, to officer school, because they want her for the full twenty years, and a five-foot-tall woman is going to need rank before people are made to respect her.

She gets a day to choose what she will study, and chooses psychology, and humans, because she is about to learn things about people she could never learn on Earth. Humans, the commander explains, are at the bottom of a social order out here; the older races look at them as little children. Someone who understands people could become a kind of ambassador, building better morale between the races. That becomes Morgan's job description.

Outpost 347 is in the Alpha Centauri system, four light-years away, where a quadrant of the galaxy sends its officers to be trained, neutral ground run by some coalition of races she is never told the name of. The planet is rocky, orange dust, desert, a few trees, and the trees are blue. There are two suns in the sky all day and a third that shines at night like an enormous star, and around one of them, whoever built this place has put a ring, a band of metal around the whole sun, to draw the life force out of it for weapons, for shields, for whatever they need.

The school is a copper building, the whole thing copper, which she thinks is for conduction. There are Lyrans, with the faces of lions and lionesses on humanoid bodies, with fur, who are not very nice to the humans. There are five humans in the school. In class every being reads its own language off a clear pad, and she cannot read any of it, but the implant behind her ear lets her hear all of it as English.

The first year is not school; it is human acclimation. Chakras, energy, the other species, the things every other race already knows. Then four years of school. She does not make many friends. She and the boyfriend do not last, and before she leaves she falls for one of her teachers, a woman from a planet called Raya, fully humanoid except for pointed ears, whose name is Sierra. Sierra's teaching contract is ending and her parents have arranged a marriage for her at home, and she does not want it. So Morgan looks through the job openings for somewhere they can both go, and finds one that says only that it is classified and leaving soon. They both apply for it, and they both get it.

Morgan graduates, and is made a second lieutenant.

6.

The classified posting is a Stargate team, aboard a ship called the Portus. It is a small flat disc, camouflaged, sitting in the middle of nowhere, and ten people are allowed on it. Nobody talks about it afterward. The gate is a man-made portal about twenty feet across, almost weightless, and it looks like water with a metallic shine. It is ancient. It connects into the natural portals that run all through the galaxy, including Earth's. One person on the ship knows how to operate it. Nobody else is told.

Each team is three. Each member has a vehicle, one fitted for cargo, one for arsenal in case it is needed, one that can go underwater. The vehicles hover, and each one starts only under its own driver's hand, the way nearly everything out there starts. They jump once a month, looking for another world in case Earth is destroyed. That is what they are told, and they are soldiers, and it does not mean that is why. The equipment can see the plant life and the climate on the other side. It cannot see animals or beings, and those are guessed at. Instead of a machine sent ahead, there is Sierra, who is psychic and astral-travels to each planet before the jump.

What they find is deserts where the water would kill you, and worlds so cold you cannot get out of the vehicle, and it gives Morgan a respect for Earth she never had. In one year two of the ten die. The team's security man is taken by an enormous animal, which they then have to kill. The other is lost to weather. Twelve jumps, twelve months, and Morgan is made a first lieutenant early, which makes people angry.

Right before the year is up, a reptilian comes aboard. Nobody knows why he is there; it is supposed to be a human thing, and she still thinks it is. He is pushy with the crew in a way that frightens her: have you found anything, where did you go, is there anything you are not telling us. They give him all they can, which is nothing. Humans and reptilians work together on and off, she comes to understand, and the reptilians push, and the humans say no a great deal.

Sierra's parents come too, just before the end, and they are not happy about Morgan. So the two of them look for another classified posting far enough away, and find one on Venus.

The ship cannot land on Venus. Five of them strap bubble shields to their chests, each bubble its own atmosphere, each one coded to the drop point, and jump, and the bubbles pull them down like magnets through the freefall to a small, inconspicuous building standing alone on the surface behind a force field. Inside it is blue marble and gold, with gold hieroglyphs in circles all over the walls.

The cities are not on this plane. To reach them you have to go up, and for that there is a doorway shaped like a triangle, a hole punched right out of space and time, with no edges and nothing visible on the far side until you are through it. Walking through, her whole body buzzes and tingles, and she knows in her bones that her DNA is being changed, taken up to a higher vibration. It feels lovely. On the other side there is a giant city inside a military base, with civilians everywhere in it, the most amazing place she has ever seen or heard of. She is happier there. Her body is bouncier, less rigid; the bones are not hard.

The Arcturians are botanists, and she is their security. They are tall and blue from head to toe, bald, with pointed chins and little ridges of bone standing out at the temples, and the same gold hieroglyphs run over their whole bodies, raised like tattoos. They feel feminine, stoic, regal, and everything they say seems to come straight from the Source itself. They are making serums out of plants and essences for the sick, all over the galaxy, and she helps them however she can, and learns everything she can. They are her favorites, of everyone she meets out there.

Sierra and she live together. One day Sierra comes home with a belt. She puts it on and a menu comes up on the wall, and she scrolls through it and picks things, and her body changes: white eyes, purple eyebrows, white hair, very long eyelashes, very long nails, a tail. On Venus the density is low enough that the body can be talked into it. They spend a long time going through the menu, changing random things and laughing. A few days later Sierra is gone, and Morgan never sees her again.

One night before that, while Sierra is away, she wakes with a mantid, a mantis-like being, hanging over her bed. It is ten feet tall, three meters. It tells her to go back to sleep, and she does—and while she sleeps it drives a syringe of eggs into her stomach. She wakes in the morning knowing something wrong has been done to her, and the mantid is taken away and tried for breach of procedure. Her guess is that it wanted Mia, a soldier of its own. The eggs are removed.

She has been starting things on Venus, programs for the other soldiers and for the women, and the military begins to limit her, keeping her out of the field with the Arcturians, and she does not know why. She is not a quiet person. After five years she is promoted again, and she is put on the worst assignment there is.

7.

The fleet calls it Mars Max. They enter the planet the way they entered the Moon, down through caverns into the inside, where mountains have been hollowed out, because most of the planet has had to be dug out to be usable. It is beautiful, and the people living in it are desperately poor. There is nothing to trade, because there is nothing there but rock, so there is no way for anyone to leave. The water is bad and has to be processed, and there is never enough food. The planet is being mined, and there are species fighting over the mines. Houses are small rooms cut into the rock.

At big tables people trade whatever little gadgets they have, and if you set something down and look away, it is gone, and everyone knows that is how it works. There is a great deal of begging. On the base she feels lucky to have a room decent enough to sleep in, and she feels for everyone outside who has nothing. Every kind of being and robot is crowded in together, and nothing is going on except survival. It feels to her like a prison planet. She has heard people say since that Mars was freed and everyone there is happy, and all she can say is that where she was, it needed help.

She is military police. She has an anti-gravity buggy a little bigger than a motorcycle, and she rides it around the district keeping the peace as best she can. She makes friends with a shopkeeper, pale pink, with a comb on the top of his head like a rooster's. In the mountains on the outskirts there are spiders nine feet tall, who turn out to be gentle. There are gelatinous beings with arms and legs so small they can barely walk. Everyone is unhappy. There are three women on Mars: two of low rank, and Morgan, their officer. She stays five years.

By the end of Mars she is sad in a way she cannot fix. She is one of very few humans wherever she goes, and when she is among humans they are almost all men, and on Mars she cannot find anyone to be with. There are no traditions out here, no holidays, no celebrations. It is a job. She does her work and goes to her room. She is an artist, and she wants things to be pretty and life to be fun, and none of it is. Her orders for Saturn come through and she does not want them. She has a few years left on her twenty, and she wants out now, and she has what she will later call a tantrum.

To keep her, they offer her a ship. That is how people are given ships out here: they grow them from your DNA. They take blood and a tissue sample. For the first three months it grows in a tank, in a hangar full of other tanks, until it is about the size of a car, and what grows first is the shell, and the shell looks like bone. Then it is taken out and set up with machines in the hangar, and it grows tens of feet a day, the way a person grows, bones first, and then a metal-and-glass-like substance is laid over the skeleton to protect it, and in six months it is a fighter with room for a crew of twenty. She watches all of it, which is why she stays.

A being with tentacles connects itself to the ship during the building to talk to it, because it is alive. It has a personality and no feelings. It talks to her and to nobody else, and it takes no effort, because her DNA is in its structure; she asks it a question and feels the answer. To start it she lays her palm on a console that stands chest high, and no one else's hand will do. What she comes to understand, near the end, is why they were so generous. The ship was for Mia too. When Morgan was not available, Mia could be called out, and the ship would start for her, and go where she was told.

She is a ship commander now. The tasks are small: supplies to Mars, which needs everything; things dropped off at Saturn. Cargo moves in great containers, as in the series The Expanse, and she ends up dating someone who works one.

And there is a side mission. Her Venusian friends' families are under attack in a civil war on a planet called Gula, and her ship is sent to help. She helps. She gives aid and pulls people in off the ground into the ship while the planet burns. Only afterward does she learn the commander of the mission had a request from the reptilians. There was a rare mercury on Gula, and with a war on nobody was guarding it, and while she was pulling in the wounded it was taken. Mercury is a commodity out there; it goes into anti-gravity, and it goes into the Looking Glass on Earth. The ball that floated in the clear casing in Houston when she was fifteen came from a war like this one. Her ship is still out there. Someone is flying it.

8.

Getting into Saturn is seamless, a different kind of shield perhaps, and she never learns how. The planet is full of bases, but at its core there is a small place, no bigger than a city, and around that core three bases stand in a triangle, joined by hyperspeed tunnels, because the distances are enormous. They love triangles in space, and circles. The gold base is the reptilians', and they have shut it down and let no one else use it. The silver base is for team building. The first thing you see, coming into the core, is a chessboard so big she cannot say how big, with mechanical pieces that take three soldiers apiece to move, so that whole companies of soldiers come out to play a single game and have to work out together how to make one knight move. The bronze base is where the galaxy meets.

It is a hall of a size she has no words for, and thousands of beings come to it from everywhere, not a council exactly, not one federation, but all of them at once. Around the outside of the building stand giant statues of the races that have gone extinct, so that everyone walking in remembers what the meeting is for. What is decided inside is who needs what, which planets need supplies, how the solar system is going, who is in control of what, and the tasks are handed out from there, including hers.

There is one thing everyone in that hall understands and nobody argues: a planet's people have to evolve on their own. The great races help. They give ideas, inventions, inspiration; they move things along from the side. They do not come down with the rulebook and clean everything up, because a people who had that done for them would not have grown at all. She sits in the hall as a fly on the wall and learns to be around big people, and by the time she leaves Saturn she is becoming a major. It is the last station of the first twenty years.

She signs on for a second twenty. The second enlistment is Mia's as much as hers, and its story is for another time.

At the end she is taken back to the Moon, with her old boyfriend, who has gotten out at the same time, and put in a pod. It looks like the beds in the film Avatar, human-sized, full of a blue gel with bubbles in it. Seven days, seven hours at a time. There is a button in the lid that puts her to sleep, and she can press it or lie awake, as she likes. What she feels is vibration; they call it biogenetic cellular healing, and it takes the body back to the DNA sequence recorded when she came in, so that every cell remembers being nineteen.

Then a machine like an MRI, with a screen at the front of it, shows her pictures of her own life: beings she knew, duty stations, badges, uniforms, everything that could trigger a memory later, so that each one can be blocked in turn. They cannot get all of it. There is too much. They get the major things.

Then the timeline. There are infinite timelines running at once, she will explain, one for every choice that could go either way, and most of them die out, because not enough energy is put into them. From one that is dying anyway, they take a body: hers, at the age she left. They stop the clock on Earth, fetch it, and lay it beside her, and a machine moves her consciousness from the one into the other, or the other way round; she cannot be sure which. That is why the regression came first, so that the body would remember what age it was before it was swapped. What they do with the body left over, they do not say, and she is furious about it. She has never broken a rule so much as demanded the reason for it. Then she is put into her bunk in the barracks at Fort Lewis, the day before she left.

She wakes up nineteen, with a good career and a long relationship and everything a person could need, and an anxiety in her that has no reason to exist, and a depression she has never had before. The boyfriend is back too, and neither of them knows anything, and they carry on as though nothing had happened. The Army, at exactly that moment, puts together a cheerleading squad, and she is put on it. It is what she wanted in high school and never had, and she is fairly sure now it was arranged to keep her busy.

Then the surgery she had been waiting for, and pain medication after it, and a medical discharge. The pain medication becomes hard drugs, and the hard drugs become ten years. She does not regret a day of it. She was carrying something she could not see, and she needed something to soothe it, or she would not have stayed on the planet at all. Her family, one by one, is turned against her, by the machines she will later describe as suggestion tools, that send a sentence into a person's head and let them think it is their own. She thinks it is safer for them that she stays away.

9.

She is thirty-three and living in a homeless shelter. It is July 2018 and there is an eclipse. All day she feels water rushing around her, moving in the shape of a snake, and has no idea what it is. She is not religious or spiritual. She has never had the time; she has been trying to survive.

She lies down on the bed with headphones in to meditate, and some of her guides come, and some of her friends from out there, and they hold her body still and switch her chakras on, one after another, all of them. The force of it lifts her off the bed, spins her, and throws her onto the floor. Something like a shot of rainbow light hits the back of her head, and her brain feels as though it is turning inside out. It is violent, and when she gets up she knows about space, and about the ETs she is connected to, and about her gifts. For a week she can hear other people's thoughts and feel their feelings, and she can eat nothing but raw food. She gets sober that month, on July 13, and stays sober, and her family never sees it.

The academy comes back first, and the ultra program, and the encounters, all of the childhood before any of the space. She has to learn to tell the astral plane from a memory, because they look alike and are not. The memories do not come as dreams; they come as a knowing and a picture at once, and she can go looking for them, because after that night she can move around in her own subconscious. They come in pieces, out of order, and each piece she takes on makes room for the next.

She can see past, present and future potentials now, and she sees what her parents said about her behind her back, what old lovers said, what was done to her in the projects, and she has been running since 2018, hostel, hotel, Airbnb, from very scary people who follow her and go after her friends and wreck her relationships, some of them government. When space comes on top of all that, in 2021 or 2022, she is angry. She is already overwhelmed by her own life, and now there is more.

Eventually it turns into what it also is, a wild adventure. For a long time she does not know that she is going to be okay; the more that comes back, the less okay she seems likely to be. Then she realizes she is not alone, that other people have been through this and made it out and have lives now, and that she can have one. Somewhere in the last year she stops being scared. She decides she is going to live, whatever is going on, and to carry her safety inside herself. It takes her seven years to write the book, because she will not read or watch anyone else's account until her own is down, so that not one memory of hers is bent by someone else's. In January 2025 she lets it out, terrified up to the moment of doing it, and it feels like the release of many years of stored secrets. It is the first of three. The second is Mia's.

She has teleported since then to the center of the galaxy, where the black hole is a highway joining many galaxies, and come back into her body as though the body itself had gone and returned, switching back on in three-inch boxes. We are singularities, she thinks, points at which everything is happening at once, which is what people mean when they say time does not exist. She does not miss anyone out there, or her time there. Life is cyclical. She will be in space again, in some life. There is nothing to regret.

The ex-boyfriend has not remembered. She has told him a small part, and he did not believe her, and that is all right. She hopes he does remember, because it would explain the anxiety and the years of self-destruction, as it explained hers, and she does not push, and she uses no real names, because she will not put people into a light they are not ready to be seen in. Her ship is still out there. She has seen a crowd outside the White House, and the handlers who saw her in the mercury wanted her scared for the rest of her life so that she would never stand in it. Every energy weapon and every program aimed at keeping her down ended up healing her.

She is not a victim of it. Nobody is, she thinks; everyone came in with karma, and that is why things happen. What her awakening taught her she says plainly now: there is a battle, and it is inside. It shows up in the world because it is going on in us. If everyone won their own inner war, there would be no wars, and no one would kill anyone, and the animals would not kill each other, and it would be a utopia. There are worlds like that. They exist. It is just not how we have chosen to learn yet.