Randy Cramer

This account is compiled from the five audio interviews Randy gives to Michael Salla in the spring of 2014 under the name Captain Kaye, from the Skype interview that September in which he gives his real name, from his first newsletter, and from two later conversations with James Rink of Super Soldier Talk.

1.

Randy Cramer is born on May 25, 1970, and he is not conceived the ordinary way. Somebody takes a sample from his mother and a sample from his father, opens the nucleus, plucks out the codons they want to change, puts in extraterrestrial DNA where they want enhancements, wads it back up, and implants it in his mother. He is born nine months later. He jokes that he was made in a petri dish. He was engineered in a laboratory from the ground up, and the laboratory was here on Earth.

His parents are both from a small town in Kentucky and moved out west as soon as they finished high school, mostly to get away from their families. They are working-class people, smart, with strong religious beliefs, and every year there is the question of whether there are enough shoes and coats for the three kids to start school. He is the youngest, after an older brother and an older sister. There is no shouting in the house, no beating, no drinking. He likes his parents.

Somewhere there is a piece of paperwork with his name on it and an enlistment date from when he is an infant, rank E-1. He has been a United States Marine since he was a baby. He is never recruited. He is engineered to be trained and deployed, and that is the purpose of his being created.

The project is called Moon Shadow, and it is three hundred children, about two-thirds boys. It is run by the Marine Corps special section, a division created in the fifties to handle anything to do with extraterrestrial technology or extraterrestrial biological entities, kept apart from any chain of command that isn't felt to be secure. His earliest memories are of group games with the other kids, strategy games that mimic hunting and war in a way that makes them fun, so that children want to play them. There is always a guy off in the corner with his arms crossed, khakis, buzzcut, mustache, ribbons, clearly a Marine.

The medical memories are the fuzziest, because of the sedation. Nobody treats him like an animal. People explain: we're going to do this procedure, you'll wake up groggy, and over time you're going to be super fast and super strong. He nods. He wakes with cuts and scars, and a few days later someone does a procedure that makes the scars disappear. First they work on the DNA. Then come the harder implants, in the spinal column and the brain. Then the fine-tuning, so that it all works together. The facilities have no windows. Recovery can take days or weeks in a hospital bed, sometimes partially paralyzed, and then it is back to training. The temporal scientists have it calculated, so that a child taken out for weeks is put back into the evening he was taken from.

His father explains the night visitors as angels and demons. Randy can't make that sit right. When he is about ten, his mother, a light sleeper, starts hearing footsteps in the hallway at night and sensing a presence, and his parents call an exorcist from the church to the house. His older brother came unraveled before he was ten—panic attacks, rage attacks, a childhood post-traumatic reaction to something very bad that nobody in the family will discuss. Whatever happened, Randy thinks, happened to his brother first, and whatever was learned from that went into him.

At ten he wakes with two hematomas on the insides of his thighs, near his genitals, perfectly round, nickel-sized, one on each side, right over the little vein they use for angiograms. His mother works in doctors' offices and thinks it strange enough to make an appointment. The doctor looks at the bruises and gives him a fifteen-minute lecture on the dangers of steroid use. He sits there dumbfounded. He wouldn't come near himself with a needle.

At eleven his eyes pop open at 2:56 a.m., heart pounding, and somebody is going through the silverware drawer in the kitchen. His hearing is good enough to pick out his father's snoring and his mother's and sister's breathing, so everyone else is in bed. He gets up in the yellow Spider-Man pajamas his mother bought at JC Penney for Christmas. His bedroom door, always shut at night, is open. The instant his head clears the frame the kitchen goes silent, and all he can hear is the battery clock in the living room. The dining room light is on, his mother's 150-watt bulb, and nothing is there. Then he sees the door to the garage standing open, folded into the corner, and the garage is black. Concern turns to fear. He senses that whatever is behind the door is no more than four and a half feet tall—one of his brother's friends playing a joke, he decides—and he flings the door back ready to kick the little punk in the stomach.

It is a little guy in a black hooded cloak, like a Jawa from Star Wars. He pulls the hood off. The head is boxy and wide, the skin a dull pumpkin orange, big black eyes, a slit for a mouth, two nostrils and no nose. The second the hood comes off, the thing lunges. It grabs his left hand in its right and his genitals in its left and lifts him into the air by the throat and the balls. He can't breathe. Its grip is like iron. He tries to pry it off, tries to kick, tries to scream, finally gets some noise out—and sits up in bed. What a terrible dream. He carries that memory for years with photographic clarity. It never fades or changes the way dreams do.

Much later he recovers what came after. He didn't wake up. He passed out in the grip, and they took him to the vehicle and scanned, poked, and prodded him, and put him back in his bed. The whole thing was a test. They wanted to see what he would do about an intruder in his home. He got up, checked it out, and attacked. He passed.

The little cloaked people are cooperating with the special section, helping build super soldiers. They also have their own agenda, a back door, extra programming for what he might be good for when he is done being a soldier. He doesn't think their intentions are bad. If they wanted slaves, they would go about it very differently.

At school he scores the highest IQ anyone has ever scored there. One summer afternoon, home alone, a bearded man in an Oxford shirt knocks, asks for a glass of water, and asks questions about him until he is uncomfortable.

At thirteen the training changes. Real weapons, live ammunition. They are run for days at a time with special forces and black ops teams whose attitude is what are we doing with these kids—until the kids run, climb, and shoot, and the men are impressed. The soldiers call them the material, the big money. As a teenager he walks through Zombie Land, an underground urban mockup populated with people or clones infected with an engineered virus, for live-fire exercise. There is no cure except two rounds to the head.

Moon Shadow is one of the earlier programs that try not to use trauma-based mind control, because breaking a soldier a hundred times makes him fragile and short-lived. The brass asked how to build a Hercules, a Hector, and most programs drifted from that into building murder machines. Moon Shadow's programming goes with the grain: not kill on command, but a deep instinct to protect the tribe and its territory. Explain the threat credibly, and the soldier will use all his strength and cunning to destroy it. Other people at the table insist on controls, and the leadership rolls its eyes and puts in the minimum number of trauma-based ones. He absolutely remembers a few of those.

2.

He completes the program in 1987, at seventeen. There is a ninety-day period of final testing in every ecozone and temperature on the planet, sometimes in war games with other units, sometimes in live-fire exercises that are exercises for him and very real for somebody in another country, who is dead because of it. Armed forces around the world have lots of AK-47s and no shoes. Send five super soldiers against fifty of those guys and see how they do. You know your guys are going to win.

Then a routine pickup in the middle of the night, and he is at Lunar Operations Command. He is checked into a room the size of a jail cell but more civilized: sink, bathroom, desk, chair. Two security men in battleship-gray jumpsuits with gold fringe escort him to a big waiting area done in sunflower yellow, like waiting for the dentist in a very large room, with the faded carpet and mustard-and-avocado furniture of a 1970s office. A junior officer in an Air Force uniform he doesn't recognize pulls out a stack of paperwork.

Here's your contract. Twenty years. When you're done we'll wipe all those ugly memories you won't want anyway, age-reverse you, and put you back right after we took you, and you'll live your whole life over. You won't lose any time. You'll come back to a nice, cushy job. Everyone does this every day. Randy asks who he is working for. You're a Marine, right? You will always be a United States Marine. We are contracting you to the Earth Defense Force, which can subcontract you anywhere in the solar system. Most of it is boring. You'll probably be guarding nothing. The officer is a nice enough guy, but the point is clear: we can talk about this paperwork for a really long time, or you can sign it and walk out to your next thing. Randy initials and signs.

A bell rings, and everyone files down to a hangar bay. The vehicle is a bat wing, four or five hundred feet from tip to tip, built to move a thousand or two thousand bodies. Inside are reclining seats of memory foam that hiss and form around you. The lights dim, and the pilot comes on like an airline captain: welcome aboard this flight from Lunar Operations Command to your next station, which you are not cleared to know until we arrive.

Then the pilot says something he doesn't expect. None of you are going to see home for a very long time. Before we go, we're going to take one last good look, and give you a moment to think about why you want to come back. The ceiling becomes what the ship sees. The Earth hangs there entire, and it isn't a picture. The clouds are moving. Lightning storms flicker. There are no borders, only continents joined to continents, and whatever anybody down there is bickering about looks incredibly small. He feels that he is in a special place, that he gets to keep her safe, and everyone who lives on her, and maybe everyone who ever will. It is one of the most amazing moments of his life. Whatever happens, he is okay with this responsibility.

3.

The destination is Mars: Aries Prime, headquarters of the Mars Colony Corporation. The ship goes through a wormhole to get there. They walk down the gangplank into the open Martian air. It is thin and cool, like stepping out at eight or nine thousand feet, with a cold wind and a hot sun, and there is a rust smell, like an old factory. It is red everywhere, though the sky is blue; the red tint is a filter added to the rover pictures to make the planet look scary. For fifteen minutes at sunset everything turns purple. Aries Prime sits in a crater, ninety percent of it underground.

The corporation was set up around 1975 by multinational interests, Russians and Chinese and Germans included, because you can't spend trillions going to Mars without making it pay for itself. There are five settlements. Here he is informed that he is now a member of the Mars Defense Force, the private contractor that protects the corporation and its interests, and handed a chit that tells him which shuttle to board.

The shuttle looks like a soda can that has been through hell and back. It is loud, it shakes, and it flies twenty feet off the ground, low enough not to be a target. Three or four hours across the red rock, and it sets down in the hangar of Forward Station Zebra. Home for the next seventeen years.

The station is cut into a cliffside, and the living quarters at the back form a horseshoe: squad barracks around the outer rim, mess hall, gym, and simulators inside it. Less than a hundred feet away, in the same mountain, is a station exactly like it. Randy's is Division 098, Special Tactical Operations, and its sister is 097. Enlisted kids walk the new arrivals around the horseshoe calling names into the barracks, sixteen squads of sixteen, and at delta it is Cramer, Hansen, Delta Squad. Wait here for the rest of your team. That night the squad comes back and everyone realizes they are going to have to be friends.

The next day is powered body armor, an exosuit with hydraulic arms and legs and a big dumb helmet he calls the Buzz Lightyear, and the gauss rifle, a magnetic rail that sends a metal round out with no kick and almost no sound. They drill in simulators that plug into the nervous system and train muscle memory at faster than real time, twelve hours in three.

The base intel officer briefs them. The Mars Colony Corporation's job is to extract minerals and resources. Your job is to kill anything that tries to get in the way of that. There are two native species, a reptoid and an insectoid, and they are presented as savages and beasts, a really big pain in the butt, with no culture or technology. He learns later that none of that is true. The way things work on Mars is a constant testing of boundaries. Nobody wipes anybody out, because that leaves a vacuum and you never know what moves into it. If you get inside a nest, you kill the soldiers and break the eggs in the hatchery, and set them back a couple of generations. They will do the same to you. It keeps everyone in a constant state of war, and that is the balance. Then the old man, the colonel, gives a speech, and Randy is fairly motivated by it. He still respects the man. The first skirmish comes on about the fifth day.

Nobody leaves the station except to fight and come back. The simulators are also recreation: plug in and spend the afternoon at the beach. The division is coed, about two-thirds men, and to keep people from knocking each other out in the hallways the regulations are very liberal about sex in your off time, hetero and homo, whatever gets the hormones out of the way. There are no newspapers, no television, no music from Earth; the only thing you are to think about home is the fond memories you want to get back to. The cafeteria has coffee, and a strawberry cobbler that someone insinuates has never seen a strawberry.

Transport is the bulldog, a hovering sled with a canopy. The medical bulldogs carry stasis beds that slow the metabolism so you die more slowly, slowly enough to get back to the station and into the holographic beds. A holo bed projects a cell-perfect image of your own ideal DNA over the damage and makes the cells conform to it. A leg grows back in days, an arm in hours. He is bitten in half more than once by the giant centipedes the insectoids breed, twenty feet long with mandibles a meter wide. He loses part of his jaw. He gets put back together and goes back to duty. The bed repairs the damage. The trauma stays in the nervous system, waiting.

The insectoids don't like to fight themselves. They engineer other insects to do it, stinging beetles the size of a small dog, hatched by the hundred thousand, and a patrol can find itself inside a swarm that feels like millions. The reptoids fight up close, with bladed weapons, and they pull their punches. If they really wanted to bring the fists, they would crush the humans on the battlefield. Mostly they want to see what you can do.

For years the intelligence is wrong about who is fighting whom. A reptile is a reptile is a reptile, they assume. It takes a long time to understand that there is a second reptoid species, invasive, the Alpha Draconians, who are fighting the natives and the insects and doing everything they can to keep the three of them at each other's throats. Day to day it doesn't matter: if anything comes close, suit up, go out, fight it, and do it again tomorrow.

In his third year a fresh recruit arrives and is put in Delta Squad, and he hates her instantly. Within a year they are madly in love. They break regulations and marry.

4.

About halfway through the tour the MDF starts bringing in clones, whole divisions of them, to take the hits. The clones are made from the men already there, and Randy finds himself drilling batches of himself, eight identical younger brothers at a time, seventeen or eighteen years old while he is past thirty. They are dumb, undisciplined, and nearly impossible to train, and some batches come with black, soulless eyes and are sent back as garbage. An egghead explains why. To make a copy that will hold together, they have to take the tiniest sliver of your soul and put it in the clone. Otherwise they have to use some other spark of life, and those go wrong. There is a limit written into the universe: just under ten thousand copies of you can exist at once.

Around the mid-nineties the jump rooms arrive, localized wormholes for moving troops on the surface.

Well into his second decade he is squad leader of Delta, and the squad is captured. It is intentional on the other side. The reptoids have had enough of the game and want to get closer to this hairless pink ape that landed and started giving them trouble. They call themselves the Gah Luka, the children of Gah Luk, their word for home. They aren't nice about it at first. He is hung by his arms in a stress position and questioned for days. Then he is let down and allowed to mingle, and to live as a member of the community, and that, he feels, is a blessing. They run genetic tests on the prisoners and find that the humans are long-lost cousins from tens of thousands of years back.

He lives with them for almost six months. They stand up to seven and a half feet, sandy to reddish brown, broad-shouldered and very strong. They speak decent English with a thick accent and don't want him speaking their language, because saying a word badly is an insult. They live simply, in tribal communities, like the Amish. Everything they eat is giant salamander tail—the salamanders are the size of a truck—stewed with fungi and lichens, no sugar and no spice, so that it all tastes of dirt and is incredibly nourishing. They fight to right and fight to truth: to know a person's soul, you fight them. They have a compassion he never expected, kind to one another and to the prisoners, and he comes to consider them family. He spends most of his time with a shaman chieftain whose name he can't pronounce, and when the chieftain tells him to pick one, the Bible family in him comes out and he calls him Ezekiel. Ezekiel is fine with that. They put him through their warrior training and psionic training; he doesn't like to go into it because it sounds braggadocious.

They tell him the history of the planet. The Gah Luka are the remnant of the ancient Martians, who were advanced enough to blow out their own atmosphere in a war, about ten thousand years ago. The oceans boiled, winds ran at a thousand miles an hour, and everything on the surface died. Only those already deep underground survived, and they split. One faction said, we have killed our planet, and we will stay and heal it if it takes twenty thousand years. The other said, everything's dead, goodbye, and left. The southern tribes went back to the old ways on principle: forward got everyone killed, so they fight with primitive weapons and live for war. The northern tribes are more mystical. While the reptoids were underground, the insects came up and built their hives on the surface, and by the reptoids' own law that was allowed. Ezekiel's tribe takes him to meet the insectoids for the first time, with the saurians as go-betweens. Then they give the squad its gear back and send them home. Tell your people about us. Tell them we are ready to talk when they want to talk.

The insectoids are about five and a half feet tall and look to him less like mantises than like giant black ants walking upright. Their language is hissing and humming, so they mostly speak straight into the mind. They regard the planet as their great mother and do not poison her. They find humans gross: all their insides worn on the outside. When the humans visit in body armor, that is more comfortable for everyone, because then the humans have an exoskeleton too.

One day on patrol his squad passes a hive where the drones are laying things out in the sun, and it strikes him that a small group is never treated as a threat. He tells the squad he is going to walk up and say hello. One of them says, go ahead, I want to see you come running back with one arm and screaming. He walks up and waves. The drone puts a name straight into his head, Steadfast, and says, I live here. He hasn't planned anything past hello, so he asks if he can come back with his friends. Back at the station his CO says no way, and notifies the diplomatic corps. For about six months, every day, officers from the diplomatic corps and a few enlisted, Randy among them, go into the hive, and it ends in a treaty.

Treaties are signed with the native reptoids and the native insectoids, the Draconians are recognized as the bad guys, and the three go after them together and drive them out of the Martian sphere for good. The war he has been part of for seventeen years, which was going for more than twenty-five, is over.

His wife dies before it ends. He has known her twelve and a half years and been married to her ten. A projectile takes her in the back of the head, and she dies in his arms. He has never known a bond like it—someone beside you fight after fight, who will kill for you and die for you and shows it every day. He fights the next day. There is no time to grieve.

5.

After seventeen years and three months he is a sergeant major. Then the order comes. The eggheads want artifacts from an old reptoid site, an ancient temple the natives have asked the humans to stay out of, and four divisions are going in to get them: 098, 097, and 096 and 095 from the neighboring station. Nearly a thousand men. A thousand men to pick up an object is weird, and the treaty was just signed, and most of them have a bad feeling. He goes to the command staff, and then to the old man, and uses whatever weight he has: this is dirty, these guys hold back nine times out of ten and if they really come at us we're done. The colonel agrees with him. I've got my orders, now you've got yours. Get in, get your job done, get out. If there's a problem, get out. I hope this doesn't go as badly as I think it will.

They go down through tunnels and caves and gather in a domed chamber the size of the Astrodome. They try to raise headquarters, and the radios go dead. Everyone looks at everyone else. All around the dome, at even intervals, what looked like rock becomes doorways, and out of every one, like water from a drainpipe, pour very large, very angry Martian warriors swinging bladed weapons in both hands, moving in a spiral, and the outer ring of humans just starts dropping. The circle pulls in and pulls in. It is like being caught inside a blender. Somebody finds a frequency, and HQ says stay put, the wormholes are jammed too, any minute now. When the extraction comes it is the big ship-transport wormhole, opened right above what is left of the circle, and it sucks the survivors up, and whoever is touching the event horizon when it closes is sliced off wherever they touch it.

The next thing he knows he is on the med-bay pad and the medics are coming, and all he can see is the top half of her, the blood coming out of her so fast that she goes pale so fast, and lifeless so fast, and all he can do is yell for a medic, I've got people dying. Out of nearly a thousand, fewer than thirty-five live. Everybody he has spent a decade or more with is gone at once. It is a dumb command decision by people at the MCC who wanted whatever was in that temple badly enough to violate treaty space. The natives don't tear up the treaty. Your guys came into our temple like we told you not to, and we killed them all like we told you we would. Don't do it again.

The division is done. A superior officer comes to his med bed and asks whether he wants to go to flight school. He doesn't bat an eye. He has wanted to fly since he was a kid. After a couple of weeks in a medical unit where they sit him in a chair with electrodes and flash things at his face, something meant to dissolve the weight on his chest, he is at officer candidate school. It starts at Lunar Operations Command, moves to Titan, and finishes farther out. The other candidates are young pilots at the start of their careers, and when they groan under the training he says, wake me when the hard part comes. Six months, a salute, and he gets his bars. He has done the thing he always wanted to do, and he is proud.

6.

He is posted to EDF SS Nautilus, an intergalactic-class carrier, a cigar three-quarters of a mile long, with the command and the scientists and their compartmentalized business in the nose. The ship is run like a Navy ship by an O-6 captain, Roger L. Kirkland. His air wing is Blue and Gold 213, and unlike on the ground, where every MDF uniform is the same, the flyers wear patches that say what country and service they came from. He is a Marine captain, an O-3. Once he is called before the old man for a captain's mast and punished pretty good, maybe more than he deserved, for something he fully deserved to be punished for. He doesn't want to talk about it. Otherwise he likes Kirkland, who refers to his superiors only as the goddamn brass upstairs.

The fighters are named after snakes: the single-seat viper, the two-man cobra, the rattlesnake with a physical tail that whips like a wave so that at a distance it reads as a wave rather than a vehicle. The bomber he flies is the albatross, a boomerang eighty feet across with non-nuclear bombs the size of a motorcycle in its wings, one to five megatons each, five hundred a side. When in doubt, throw lots. The inertial damper removes the inertia and gives a little back on purpose, so that a human can fly it like a plane. Patrols are capped at twelve hours. Space madness is real: too long with no ground anywhere and your head starts to think thoughts that aren't regular, until your feet are on a floor again.

Ninety-nine percent of the work is patrol. Anything you meet either hangs around and talks, or it runs very fast or it shoots at you, and then that is your job for the day. He escorts the diplomatic corps to meetings where ships come edge to edge, and twice a diplomat spacewalks on a tether to meet another in the void, ten feet tall inside its suit. Twice he flies bombers, because they need the pilots. One of those is the Zeta base on Ganymede, which they bomb the fuck out of, and as far as he knows that is the end of the Zeta problem in the solar system. He goes a couple of dozen times to the diplomatic station orbiting Jupiter, a circular hall a mile across with windows eighty feet high, built for beings from eighteen inches to seventy feet tall. He sits across a table from four canis beings, dog people who talk the way huskies talk, through a translator box, and catches himself wanting to scratch behind the cocker-spaniel ears of one of them. Randy, do not start an intergalactic incident.

Every time he is in medical he tries to thumb through the extraterrestrial biological entity manual until a nurse takes it away. It has fifty-four species in it, coded red, yellow, white, and green. Draconians are red. So are the Zetas, whom nobody in the military ever calls greys—they are whites, two factions at war with each other, neither looking after human interests. Fewer than ten species are green.

Lying for days in a holo bed with nothing to do, you learn to pretend to be asleep, because then the doctors in the next room keep arguing. They argue about the clones, whether the way they are used is ethical, and about the gene-picking, whether it is science or just Nazi and racist. Operation Paperclip brought the Nazi scientists over, and nobody should believe they stopped being eugenicists when they landed. There is a counter-voice, and it is getting louder, and he worries that it ends in a civil war between factions who both have starships and super soldiers.

7.

The end is an unceremonious day on the Nautilus. You, you, and you—you're going home. He is shuttled to Lunar Operations Command and debriefed: here's what you know about what you did, here's what you don't, though it may not matter because we're going to suppress it all for national security. Don't worry, we'll take care of you. Shave, clean up, dress uniform.

The banquet is held in a hall with one whole wall of thick glass on the lunar surface and space beyond it. The food is yummy. Two speakers he doesn't recognize, an older man and an older woman from the covert hierarchy, say poetic things about service, and he thinks pomp like this is mostly for the speakers to feel good about what they've done to you. Everyone is thrilled to be done, and the room is loud with it. The last speaker, who gives the big farewell, is Donald Rumsfeld. Randy is a little surprised. He knows something, or he wouldn't be there.

Before the medical center, he sets one memory in his mind and holds it there. Of everything he is willing to forget, he will never forget her. Never, ever, ever.

What they do to him is not, strictly, an age reversal. They hatch a fresh clone, transfer his consciousness into the younger body, and repress the memories. He suspects the cellular memory in the old body would have brought everything back too fast. He wakes in his own bed, sitting up out of a dream that went on for months and then is gone, and looks in the mirror. Oh. I'm seventeen. It's 1987. Okay. It is fifteen minutes after they picked him up. The brain wants to accept what it sees.

Cerebral implants divert any thought that moves toward memory, and for a decade and a half his mind goes left, right, left, right, pulled around outside his own will. There is one specific program: whatever you do, don't join the military. But he has just spent twenty years as a Marine, and the first recruiter he goes to see is the Marine recruiter, and he is this close to signing. Then something emotional is done to him and he feels weak, and goes back to say tear it up, and the Marine office is locked for lunch, and a Navy recruiter is outside smoking a cigarette. Bet we can get you a better deal. His handlers, he decides, couldn't stop him rejoining, so they settled for the lesser evil.

Boot camp at the Naval Training Center in San Diego smells familiar—industrial paint, industrial cleaner—and the sound of a hundred feet marching in cadence gives him flashbacks to being five years old, which he explains to himself with movies. He doesn't drink or smoke, so in the evenings he takes long walks. Two weeks into general-duty training a tall clean-shaven white man in civilian clothes and a shorter Filipino Navy chief in sunglasses, jacket zipped to the chin, arms crossed, come down an empty sidewalk near the north gate. The civilian is a preacher with a small local church, inviting young sailors to Sunday service. Randy has no problem with church if it gets him off base. The chief never looks him in the eye.

They drive him in a tan minivan to a street near Balboa Park where every condo front is identical, so that he could never afterward say which door he went through. Inside are five wooden pews a side, an arch off a wedding-rental truck, and no banners. The congregation is a pear-shaped man with a limp handshake, the preacher's wife, and an elderly couple from Kansas in the row in front of him: his Sunday suit forty years out of style, a size too small and made of brand-new fabric, her polka-dot dress a size too big, and neither of them shifts or itches once. Actors, off the costume rack. He never sees any of them again.

The third time, on a bright Sunday, the two men drive him toward a sermon up near San Bernardino, with a case of Snapple on the floor with the seal broken. He doesn't want one. He gets thirsty. Fifteen minutes after he drinks it, he slumps and passes out. What he remembers at the time is dozing through a sermon and running back to the barracks ten minutes late—oh yeah, right, church boy, the chief on duty says. What he recovers later, replaying it in theta, is a seldom-used gate at the north end of Camp Pendleton by the artillery range, two men helping him up a ramp whose lip hangs three inches off the ground beneath a vehicle hovering eight feet up, leaving no mark. A chair, straps, and the far side of the Moon.

The Navy was a mistake, and the pickup is to make sure the memory suppression is holding. As he remembers it, they strip every layer of his body away in a tank until there is nothing but his cranium and spinal column, and then build everything back on top of it. When medical clears him, a mid-level bureaucrat in civilian clothes says, oh, is this one of our special subjects? I have some people I want to show him to. He is walked from room to room and shown to men in suits who feel like politicians rather than soldiers. He does dog tricks. Watch how fast he can kill this guy. Then he is taken to an indoor gladiator arena with an audience and music, and set with a few other super soldiers against a group of men, and another group, and a giant insect, and a giant reptile, to applause and cheering, until it is over. It is a chapter from the Roman notebook. If you have all the power, why not have games. He is sedated and returned to the artillery range, to a time not long after he left. The next morning he wakes from the strangest dream about fighting giant scorpions in a ring.

Within forty-eight hours, alone in an empty barracks looking through supply cabinets, he sees and hears Jesus Christ. It is the sixteenth-century Jesus, and he doesn't think Jesus looked like that. The message is: get out of here, leave the service, go home, this is not going to be good for you. He is in shock for days, and the same weakness comes over him, the need to make the decision a child makes to protect itself. Three things get you out once you're in: sleepwalking, bed-wetting, and suicidal tendencies. He can't fake sleepwalking. He lies there with a full bladder telling himself to just piss the bed, and the potty training is too strong. So he tells the chaplain he keeps thinking about taking his own life, sits in the hospital with his arms crossed for two weeks, and is given an entry-level separation, which means he was never there. The paperwork is worth nothing toward any benefits.

8.

He goes home and back to school, and looks in the mirror asking what is wrong with him. The honest answer that comes back is: things I can't live with. I've done things and lived through things I can't live with. He doesn't know what that means. He isn't suicidal. He wants the pain to end. From that moment the job is to get to the truth of the pain, because otherwise he will never have a normal day. Every yoga teacher, shaman, and healer he asks gives him the same answer: do your work, connect the mind and the body every day, and the answers will have to come out. So he does it every day. He becomes a jack of all trades, anything flexible enough to survive the days and weeks a memory takes out of his life. He is no drinker, but there are nights when he finishes half a bottle of hard liquor to turn it all off.

At nineteen the Moon Shadow memories start to flood in. In a downtown mall a woman in a polka-dot dress brushes past him for the fifth time and he walks straight up to her and asks if she is following him, and her face goes from casual to terrified, she says no, of course not, and is gone. Around thirty the lights come on. He wakes in the night with they're coming, they're coming in his head, runs to the living room, shoves the sofa against the door, and crouches behind it, and after a minute understands that nobody is coming through the door right now, but his body is terrified all the time. At least one evening a week he lies back on the sofa and says, event number one is blank, and works forward, memory by memory, gap, gap, for hours, laying it out in chronological order so that it makes sense. The thread that finally gets him into the forbidden part is her. She is the first solid thing he remembers, and he has to lose her all over again and grieve for her for the first time. His higher self tells him the loop can't close until he is thirty-seven: from seventeen to thirty-seven his body was in two places at once, a temporal schism, and only when he passes that date the second time is he in one place. It takes about as long to heal from the service as it took to serve. In April 2006, calling himself Zed, he tells Eve Lorgen about the training as a child and about kills in the jungles of Central America. He does not mention Mars, because he doesn't have it yet.

He never gets a speeding ticket, in a lifetime of driving like a speed demon. Police who see his face give him a look like oh, crap, turn off their lights, and drive the other way. A friend asks a man in a sheriff's department whether there is a list, and is told, yeah, there's a list and you're on it. Not a list of people to watch. A list of people not to touch. The pickups never stop. He wakes with pains in his arms and asks his body, and his body says, we had a checkup and a few more inoculations. In 2012 and 2013 the checkups go from quarterly to weekly. He counts eighty-nine inoculations in a year and wonders what is coming that he needs them for.

In the middle of August 2013 he is sitting in meditation when a voice speaks in the back of his skull. It is not telepathy. It is a micro walkie-talkie implanted long ago, a tiny speaker vibrating against the bone, and it sounds like someone talking with a plastic bucket over his head. Hold up four fingers on your left and three on your right. He doesn't move. It repeats, in exactly the same tone. He holds up four and three. Now two on the left and four on the right. Great, you can hear me clearly. Do you recognize my voice? He does. It is a former commanding officer, and the officer puts him in touch with a Brigadier General Smythe, and over several weeks Randy asks every furious question he has and gets every one answered, simply and accurately, with never one word of green berets or fuzzy bunnies. The general points him to particular corners of European Space Agency photographs of Mars, and there is a circular object joined to a symmetrical one, casting a shadow, in the bottom of a canyon. There is an apology: sorry we put you through the ringer. The memory shell breaking off, they tell him, was how it was supposed to work. He was built to self-repair. And the general says, I'm giving you the go-ahead to go public with everything you know. Everything? EVERYTHING. Nobody, not even an enemy, would tell a man to do that. Nobody gives him orders anymore, but he agrees, on condition that nothing is restricted. The general mentions the soulless pricks on the committee he is supposed to answer to, and says Randy can use his name.

On February 25, 2014, calling himself Captain Kaye, he starts telling Michael Salla the story from the beginning. In September he uses his real name and his face, and puts up a website called Earth Citizen Consulting. He talks to a lawyer about back pay, and says he will take a settlement, because a settlement sets a precedent for everyone else. He gets hate mail. Once he is poisoned with something like an industrial solvent, and for five days an orange, oily fluid smelling of petrol comes out of his lymphatic system, and afterward his throat is paralyzed and he lives on liquids for a year. Behind his left ear a dog-tag implant is visible. He is trying to raise the twenty-odd million it would take to build a civilian holo bed from scratch, because nobody inside can hand him a schematic without breaking the Espionage Act. He teaches psionics in Yelm, Washington, in person only. The general, a World War II officer well past a hundred, briefs him a couple of times a week. In 2019 his virtual age is forty-eight and his actual age is eighty-three.

Young people write to ask how they can join. He writes back: have you not been listening? You do not want to do this. He would like to go back to Mars once, not to serve but for closure, the way Vietnam veterans go back to Vietnam, to stand there and say, yes, I was here, this is what it was like.