Rebecca Rose

This account is compiled from Rebecca Rose Barfoot's video series Bringing Light to the Darkness (2020–2026), on her public channel Sirius Blue. Her website is rebeccarosebarfoot.com.

1.

Before she is Rebecca, she is a field of consciousness that traces itself back to the Andromeda galaxy, and she lives aboard a Sirian light ship. The ship is not a hulk of metal. It is alive, polymorphous, all curves and pastel light, forested inside, with water running through it. The crew is a ragtag mix of Sirians, Procyon beings, Pleiadians, dark-skinned people and Nordics, along with small white fluffy creatures from another star system who clean the ship's energy. The ship carries no weapons. It observes, harmonizes, stops conflict before it starts, transports refugees, and reports what it sees to a larger consortium within the Galactic Confederation, which she prefers to call, in family terms, the Light Alliance.

Her job aboard is arbiter of justice, keeping the mission from drifting too far right or too far left. Her mate is Tyran, a tall blond Nordic from Procyon whose own people were wanderers once, their home world overtaken. He wears a suit that is more living light than fabric, green and blue and lavender; hers is yellow with green trim. The captain is a dark-skinned man who gives his name as Nicodemus. The crew rest and travel in pods, plasma-like fields of living light that hold a being in local and non-local space at once.

What the ship cares about, in this era, is the galactic slave trade: who is being cloned, traded, bought and sold, and how to stop it. Someone has to go into the belly of the beast to find out. She volunteers.

The body she chooses is prepared for her long before she arrives in it.

Her father is born around 1943 where western Nebraska meets eastern Wyoming. He spends part of his childhood in an orphanage and is sexually abused. As a toddler he is carried up into Grey craft, where he seems happy, as if among family, learning technology; in utero he is already wired into a Grey supercomputer for analysis and processing. In 1952, when he is nine, a military craft takes him. He is a Zeta hybrid: his soul stock traces to Zeta Reticuli, to a peaceful race into which an archonic dark seed once entered, splitting off a faction that fled to Orion and took Rigel because it was easiest to overcome.

He grows to six-foot-five, wins a wrestling scholarship to the Colorado School of Mines, lasts one semester, and joins the Army because he doesn't know what else to do. From 1962 to 1968 he is a signal soldier: microwave radio repair, satellite communications, Vietnam, Okinawa, the SATCOM station in the Philippines. He is not military material. He is a free thinker, a tinkerer, an inventor who takes things apart to see how they work.

Her mother is born around 1937 into a blue-blooded New England family of unbroken German descent; every patriarch marries a German woman, and a distant cousin traces the line back to the 1700s in Germany.

Her mother's father is a Reverend, raised by Catholic and Quaker parents, a full scholarship to Harvard seminary, a man who goes into the church genuinely reaching for holy spirit, wanting to break something in his family. His church collapses. At fifty he signs up for the Second World War and serves two years as a chaplain in the trenches of France and Germany, in tents overrun with the wounded and the wicked, where things human and not come out to feed. He loses his faith there and joins the other side. He comes home an adept who inverts everything he learned, invoking demonic forces instead of holy ones, an alcoholic, violent with his wife and children. He buries his small daughter alive in a ritual, the death-and-resurrection rite that empowers the priest and terrorizes the child to the edge of suffocation. For the rest of her life Rebecca's mother will say it feels like I'm in a coffin and panic in elevators.

Her grandmother is hospitalized for nervous breakdowns and given shock treatments in the 1940s.

Her uncle absorbs the family darkness most completely: a Nazi worshipper with flags and helmets in his basement, a white supremacist with a private cemetery in his backyard, a man with feeders, parasitic entities, working in his ear. What runs in this bloodline is a smoke-like cloud with yellow eyes, and behind it a shape-shifting reptilian, sometimes with a black-maned, Anubis-like dog face, which possesses the abuser and gives instructions on how not to kill the child.

In 1962 her mother re-enlists in the Army; there is a staged promotional photograph of it, the Reverend proud at his daughter's side. In 1965 her mother meets her father at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. They have nothing in common. They marry within four weeks. They are, in the language she will use later, perfect breeders: his Orion Grey genetics, her German reptilian bloodline, and her capacity to make a child so afraid that it dissociates on the spot.

Her father leaves the Army with a secret clearance and is picked up immediately by Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire, a defense contractor later absorbed by Lockheed Martin and eventually BAE Systems, the biggest employer in town, then and now. In February 1972 he submits an award-winning suggestion; in April he is commended for his contribution to the VRD-7 program, special programs division. Rebecca is in the womb. That summer a coworker enters his life: a German war orphan whose father died in the war, who came to America at ten with his mother, and who is fresh out of the Air Force with a private pilot's license and a top-secret clearance. Rebecca is born a month later, in October 1972, and is given to him as her godfather. There is no godmother. Her brother, five years older, has no godparents at all.

2.

The womb is not a safe place. Her mother is hardly aware that she is pregnant, does not talk to the baby or touch her belly, and runs on stress hormones around the clock. The Greys take advantage of that gap. They are there in utero, blasting their way into the deepest corners of her mind, reading the past-life record still legible in a soul not yet wrapped in an ego, mapping her starseed inheritance. They will describe it themselves, decades later, when she demands answers.

We envisioned our creation before it was accomplished. We were shaping our prize. Like a bright shiny star, you came to us unformed. Thus our moment was golden.

She is terrified in there, helpless, waiting to die and wanting to, and there is nobody. So when the Greys come, she bonds with them, because she is looking for anyone at all.

Without hesitation you wanted to please and to be adored. Thus was our capture of you.

One memory reaches back before birth: cold, dark, metal walls around a small space on a Grey ship, banging on the sides, crying, and then everything going blank into an artificial bliss.

She is not held. She is not nursed. There are no photographs of her mother holding her. Her mother has two faces, nice mommy and demon mommy, and when the switch flips her eyes go small and cold, the pupils shrink to pinpoints, and she looks reptilian. Rebecca sees this at five and has no words for it. Her mother picks the baby up out of the crib and shakes her, strangles her, screams at her, shakes her so hard the baby thinks she will die.

Her mother also abuses her sexually, not for pleasure but to humiliate and break her, the way she herself was broken, and beats her unconscious, and does not remember doing it.

Her brother is hit in the next room, in a tiny house where such a thing cannot be missed, and neither child will ever remember the other being hit. In that house one plus one equals three and black is white. There is no such thing as a closed door. She learns to soothe her mother, who collapses into a sobbing child at any crisis, and to have no needs of her own.

Her father is the safe parent, the one she loves most. When she is two or three, he starts appearing at night with the Greys, and there is sexual abuse: tender, grooming, fondling, special time with Daddy.

We love you like this, the Greys say.

She is to think of them as family. He is their family, after all.

While she is still small, the Reverend gives her a black baptism, sodomy in the name of dark forces. Her uncle's abuse begins in infancy and is ritual; her marker memory, the one that never leaves, is being hung in sexual torture. The rituals happen out on his coastal property near Portsmouth, not in the family home. His son, ten years older, molests her in the concrete basement of her own house at every family gathering.

3.

And there is her godfather. From the time she is born until she is about seven, Mr. E, as she calls him, has her. He comes bearing gifts. There is a photograph from around 1975, three little girls dressed up on the thick shag carpet in the living room, presents opened, Mr. E in thong sandals. She waves goodbye to her mother across the lawn, going off in his car to be a special girl at a pretty-girl photo shoot. He flies her places in his private plane; her brother remembers going up in it too. Sometimes she is gone for days. She is drugged (ketamine, she thinks, which brings complete amnesia and total compliance) and hypnotized and made compliant for sex. The rooms are cold, concrete, damp.

Men working inside the deep state are invited to have sex with a child on film; the film owns them forever. The sex is deviant and violent: oral rape, anal rape, rape with objects, held in strange positions, things put in her face, a gun in her mouth and a gun in her genitals. Her jaw and teeth are damaged and need intervention later, and no one asks why.

There are other children. Some are killed. When the plane takes off, a child is shot in the head in front of the other children aboard. What is the fastest way to lose memory? Children are burned alive. A little girl's guts spill out everywhere and they kill her. The deaths are sexualized and filmed.

The children are made to watch and not to cry. She watches with no boundary between herself and the dying, so that she dies each death as her own.

You like that, don't you, a handler says. It makes you feel special.

Another voice: Your mother paid us to do this to you.

What the killing leaves in her is this: you did it, it is your fault, and if you ever remember, if you ever tell, they will come and do it to you.

She comes home and there are photographs taken on the front lawn in which she is visibly a wreck, and no one sees it.

Every night is the same. She cannot move or make a sound, wants to scream for help and is mute, and something comes and takes her. In the small hours she wakes disoriented and calls into the dark.

Mom. Mom.

Her mother never comes, or says from the other room, You're fine, go back to sleep.

In the morning her head is at the foot of the bed, her jewelry is off, her clothes are on wrong or missing. She has constant nosebleeds and is always in the nurse's office. Her mother says she is a messy sleeper.

Out back, behind the little house, there is a trapezoidal formation of granite with a split down the middle, mossy, with lady-slipper orchids growing at its base. It is a portal. At night her four-year-old self goes out by the rocks to the school for starseed children with wings, and is levitated up into a translucent pink-and-lavender craft where her galactic family waits and her adult galactic self is already fully awake. The dark side takes her out the side of the house, limp body vacuumed and pushed at once by an unseen force, and the Light Alliance takes her at the same instant; both happen, in parallel, in the same night. A part of her is kept safe up there, in a pod, so that something in her cannot be destroyed.

When she is four, her mother brings her to the Salem Witch Museum, where actors on a dark stage are stoned, hanged and drowned under circles of light. She shrieks her head off; they stop the production. In that moment of terror a Draco pulls her sideways through time, up to the Moon, and gives her a tour.

This is going to be your post. You're going to be working for us.

Then she is standing outside the museum again, crying, her mother mortified.

The Moon trips begin. She is taken from her bed to an underground substation on Earth, strapped into a seat like a roller coaster's, shoulder harness locked, and shot through a tunnel of colored light faster than light. She comes out in another underground facility on the back side of the Moon, in the upper-left quadrant toward the center line: a huge Dark Fleet base run by Germans, Nazi nationalists, some so tampered with they are not quite human anymore, partly machine, together with Greys and Draco. It is a laboratory and a depot: genetics, hybridization, cloning, cyborgs, and row upon row of animal stalls where extraterrestrials of many races are kept for experimentation. It is a hub of the very slave trade her ship came to investigate. Her handlers here are mostly the reptilians.

Here we have everything we need, a Draco tells her, to create the perfect human and the perfect slave.

Her job, at four, is mind-to-mind. She befriends the captives, takes a snapshot of their DNA with her mind, and hands the data to her handlers. They are training her toward a photographic memory at the genetic level. What the Draco want removed from their experimental beings is precisely the loving part, the concern for others; sentience is the asset. She is programmed to hate what she is doing, and therefore to hate herself, and to be unable to stop. Her own DNA is harvested here too, and there will be failed Grey-human infants made from it. She goes out at night like punching a clock and is back in bed with no time gone. It happens over and over.

4.

In June 1977 her father applies for a top-secret clearance. From November 1978 to November 1980 he is loaned to the Naval Reserve as a cryptologic technician for the Naval Security Group; he goes off on weekends in a Navy uniform, and she cannot understand whether her father is in the Navy. He works in a cage in the basement of the Nashua facility. He is handed a budget and a problem (orbital trigonometry, reverse-engineering Russian technology, implants and satellite impulses and mass psychology), and he solves it with help from the Greys, who download the answers into him. He does not know how he does half the things he does.

In 1978 and 1979, when she is six, Mr. E flies her to Montauk. Her direct link into military mind control is her godfather. Montauk is underground. The children are kept in cages, hers at the bottom, in the dark, unable to stand, alone, squatting and rocking back and forth, animalized. Nobody comes to be nice, and the point is that she will long so badly for a human voice that she will not care whether the person who comes is coming to violate her. They come in like a lottery and pick numbers, and you do not know if your number means ice cream or execution in front of the others. Many children die. The ones worth keeping are the psychic ones; the rest are fodder.

Electrodes are placed on her head. She is strapped immobile into a reclined metal chair with goggles: in the left eye, numerology, codes, and satanic symbols strobe at high speed; in the right, murders, torture, slaughter, and execution, until she cannot tell what is real and what is virtual, who is on the altar and who is watching.

At intervals the children are drugged and sodomized and taken out into the woods, where tiki torches burn and rituals are performed that culminate in a child, usually a boy, being eviscerated on an altar, still alive, still screaming, the death prolonged for the terror it produces. She cannot tell whether she is the boy or the watcher above. The children are made to eat.

Why didn't you volunteer to die?

Her programmer there is Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, Army psychological operations, founder of the Temple of Set, cloned so that he can be in many places at once.

Her endocrine system is harvested. When a child believes it is about to die, its whole life force floods the glands, and the secretion drawn at that moment is an adrenochrome analog. From her secretions, her DNA, and a blueprint snapshot of her own consciousness, they make an elf-like being, tall, lean, elegant, with pointed ears and straight hair in a bob with bangs: a trans-temporal runner and spy that needs no sustenance and does not age, which she later interfaces with mind-to-mind as it looks forward and backward through time.

Then there is the silver bullet.

She has no memory of the Montauk chair. What she remembers is a sleek capsule, like a coffin, that closes over her. Torsion fields spin through and around her. She feels sick, and then she is rotating faster than light, oscillations rolling through her like tidal waves.

A Navy woman in a stiff blue polyester suit, stockings, a little hat and click-click shoes puts her in and takes her out. She is the only woman among the handlers, and Rebecca clings to her like a mother. That is the cruelest part.

The shocks come through the soles of her feet, the base of her spine, her pelvic floor, her head. Part of her screams. Part of her floats free of the pain, and that part is what they send out, through space and time, toward coordinates, a six-year-old doing the fine-tuning as the most sensitive instrument they have. They bring her to the edge of death every time, because a dying mind is an open one. They send her out a hundred times, two hundred. Voices argue outside the capsule.

Leave her, we need to start the cycle again.

No, we could kill her.

We just have to move on.

Once they send her into a dim command center full of screens, where beings, not all of them human, watch the Earth from space.

You're in the command center of the enemy, do you realize that? a voice yells. Can you see the sequence? Look under the flap. Are you stupid?

It is a Russian station on Earth linked to a Pleiadian ship, a genuine alliance of exploration with a gateway into a Pleiadian star system, and she will not do it. She blocks them, and gloats. A kind Pleiadian woman in a shimmery blue suit is there, and Rebecca reaches for her hand, six years old and aching for a mother. The capsule slams shut. She is hauled back limp and unconscious, revived with drugs, given ten minutes, and sent out again as punishment.

Another time she is sent to a street where soldiers in combat uniform march unarmed beside water, and a sleek white missile explodes among them. In the silence afterward a light ship, blocky and rounded, with turrets, reveals itself in broad daylight, and the soldiers look up as if at angels.

Tell us who they are.

She keeps failing them. She understands now that it was on purpose. The bullet does one more thing: it age-regresses her, because her body is too broken to be sent home to New Hampshire otherwise.

The part of her that lives through Montauk splits off. Decades later she will meet her: a girl of about six, freckled, in glasses, eyes crossed and nearly blind, with no word but mama, stamping her feet in happy little circles, humming and rocking and banging her head against Rebecca's breastbone because that is as high as she reaches.

5.

Montauk is more professional mind-fracturing than the Moon required, and it is preparation for Dulce. From the Moon base there is a jump gate into the base beneath Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico, built on an ancient stargate the indigenous people once used for benevolent contact and which the dark forces have taken. You step through it as if from your kitchen into your bathroom.

She is sent to the bottom levels, the dungeon. The light there is dim and comes from vats and cages. She never sees a human below unless it is a subject. The Greys run it, rogue, with their own agenda: hybridization, cloning, endocrine secretions, human body parts on something like an assembly line, babies who have never seen daylight brought in through tunnels, sentient animals from inner Earth spliced into something else and caged, all of it smell and moaning and cries for help. If Montauk is a holocaust, Dulce is a hell realm.

The jump gate needs a child's frequency to move cargo, and she is the courier, carrying data and specimens back to the Moon; she records the highest accomplishment achieved at Dulce and brings it back to be replicated. Without knowing it she is also gathering intelligence for the Light Alliance. A galactic aspect of her will tell her later: It was hard, lonely and despairing work for you. Once you've gone to a place like this, you can no longer be sure. You too would lose your faith in the world here, and at such a young age.

At school, in the gifted program in grades three through six, a white half-size school bus with blue trim takes her and other children on field trips whose destination she cannot recall. Her nine-year-old self calls the underground transport system the river: it begins in Nashua and runs everywhere, underground and underwater and around the Moon, and the elementary school is connected to it through the Bluebird: the bus company's stylized bird above the door, and Project Bluebird, the CIA mind-control program of 1949 that became Artichoke and then MKUltra. The children are zapped and put to sleep and floated on the river to the laser labs, dark rooms where a green dot of light is pointed at the forehead to develop hypnotic tendencies, where they ask her name over and over and what do you see, what do you see, and try to make the children remember some things and forget others.

The children are kept apart. Her brother, in the same program, is tested for ESP, extrasensory perception, with packs of cards and scores higher as a sender. At home at night he also floats about five feet above the floor and is pulled by an unseen hand down the hallway, terrified, unable to find the breath to shout. Neither of them knows the other is having this experience.

Around 1980, on the back of a schematic for a cabinet her father is building, she draws a spaceship in black crayon, with four exhaust pipes.

In 1982 she is nine. One night she is sucked out of the house with the feeling that this will not come to any good end. She looks back and sees the kitchen light on.

First there is a naval base north of Chicago. She is caged there with a boy her age, Dean, naked, cold, without food or water, for days, and of course they bond. Then they are separated and each is made to watch the other tortured by handlers, to feel the other's pain and be responsible for it, then caged together again to comfort each other, then made to abuse each other. Two become one in a vacuum universe of their own, trauma-bonded, sexually bonded, psychically twinned, each holding the hidden keys to the other. It is Monarch programming, out of the Illuminati playbook and Mengele's, and it serves another purpose too: she is tortured until she will never remember the light ship, or Tyran, or her post there. For the rest of her life, whenever she comes near that subject, what rises is shame.

6.

Then a jump gate, and Mars.

The base is underground in the southern hemisphere, not far below the equator, run by a consortium no one ever explains to her: Navy and Air Force, NASA, CIA and DIA, military intelligence, contractors like Lockheed, where her father works, and Germans, everywhere Germans. Nobody tells the assets anything. They are owned. Free will is not part of it.

Her first memory on Mars is of operating a machine: a biotronic beast with claws, part life form and part weapon, animated through her consciousness and its own. She is nine, drugged and mind-controlled, run by an alter, a split-off personality, and learning to kill. The motto is kill or be killed. They are bred for aggression and trained to be fearless by being kept afraid. Training comes in three stages: virtual simulation, live training, real combat. You can die in any of them and never know which one you are in. She is augmented chemically, electronically, biologically: metal in the left side of her head, components in her left forearm made of off-world material with a consciousness of its own. Sometimes she wakes on a table with two mantids, insect-like beings, standing over her, one on each side, looking concerned.

She is cloned, and the clones are grown on the etheric template, so that when one body dies the consciousness returns to the next; there is always a duplicate at the ready, and at times more than one of her is awake at once, which is part of why the years out here will never add up. She is a psychic operative above all, wired through implants to central command, feeding everything back into the mainframe. The alter that runs her is an empty vessel, a blank command prompt: at your service, at your service.

Mars is hot—she never remembers cold—bright enough to need eye protection, windy and sandy, red and orange and maroon, undulations and rocky promontories and nowhere to hide. The crew and the commanders are human. The suits they wear change over the years, and the suits have consciousness. Her happiest memories are of flying alone on patrol. Her craft is a clunky retrofitted 1960s military helicopter, a wreck fused with alien technology, and behind the cockpit spins a living centrifuge of marbled light that draws its power out of quantum space. She is wed to it, linked to central command, and blissful up there.

She and Dean serve in a team of seven. They wear tight, shiny black suits with a collar that closes high around the neck, and the suits are weapons too. Their specialty is psychic reconnaissance into the mantid labyrinth, an opulent crystalline underground built on the ruins of a far older civilization and sealed by a frequency fence; the Mars Defense Force wants the frequency key code that will let it own the whole race. The native mantids never attack unless attacked. The base bombs them anyway from the air, pumps gas into the labyrinth, bombards it with frequency, drives them deeper and deeper, families dying, some dead of fright, so that in that moment of terror they can be broken and used.

Mantids end up working at the base as mechanics and technicians and surgeons under mind control. Years later, from inside their collective, she will hear what was said about them: The mantids were the perfect project. We could experiment with new techniques, and they would never wear out. One night the mantids mutiny, with the help of another group, and raid the base in its own craft. The sky is citron yellow and neon green, the base is decimated, and her left leg is blown off.

The commanders amuse themselves by inserting future super soldiers among the ranks, white-carapaced AI beings with almost no humanity left, to see how long it takes the assets to notice. Some of the team are pulled into a future breakaway timeline of tall white elliptical structures where humanity seems to be gone. They defeat the machines only because the machines cannot think for themselves, and she is not sure all of her comes back.

The sexual abuse does not end on Earth. Her twin is forced to harm her sexually while commanders watch. Pleasure and pain are toggled in them from outside. She is killed at least three times; she remembers the clone deaths most. Once, on patrol with six men far from base, a creature big as a house comes over a rise: hairy, dark chocolate brown, stinking, four-legged, with a small low head like a sloth's, or perhaps one of the giant spiders that live underground, screened from view. The men are vaporized, and something like a scalar weapon burns her from the inside with no wound on the outside, and she lies face down in the sand, consciousness alive and body dead, not knowing what world she is in.

7.

She grows up out here. By her late twenties she is a foot soldier as well as a pilot, on squad patrols with high-tech weaponry, remote-viewing for the team. Then, on a patrol at dusk, someone outside disables her tracker and her link to the base and routes her on purpose into a trap.

Three craft are on top of her before she sees them. She is alone and outnumbered, and nobody comes. We couldn't respond, she hears, decades later, when she writes it down. Their pilots are Martian reptilians of a very different, hostile kind: short, stocky, muscular, dark, mercenaries, the same group that helped the mantids raid the base, possibly de-souled and inhabited by Draco intelligence. They knock her craft with theirs, fire on her, and get into her head: You haven't earned the right to be here. Show us your pass. It looks like a gang war, extortion, a highway stop, and it is a cover. The Draco, not physically present, are running a soul-scalping operation, harvesting souls as contraband for the black market, putting other consciousnesses into the bodies, feeding souls to Draco royals. Souls must be fed, must be fed.

Her will and her technology are disabled. They shut down her craft and board it. There is a hostage aboard with them, a tall sandy-blond square-jawed man in a white T-shirt and army trousers, a clone snatched from one of the bases, an empty shell with the life force gone, bait. Someone gets behind her with a weapon, in a chokehold, and the Draco, having searched her memory bank, override the gunman's energy signature with Dean's. It feels in every cell like Dean holding the gun to her head. It breaks her completely.

As she goes down—a moment that goes on forever—a voice booms over everything, telepathic and loudspeaker at once: You will release her.

It is Tyran. The Light Alliance has never intervened before. It intervenes now, because losing her soul would end the mission. An old humanoid with long white hair, gazing into something like a crystal ball, repeats it: No. You will leave her. She crashes into dark chocolate-brown volcanic cliffs. They do not get her soul.

Days later a different band of reptilians finds her: short and stocky too, homely, gentle, regressed by some cataclysm long ago, twenty or thirty of them, with no craft and no weapons and no technology to speak of, who have never seen a human. They carry her underground to a place that is stupendously beautiful, with running water, light with no sun, things growing like trees, all of it co-created with the living consciousness of Mars, the dragon energy at the planet's core, the way Earth's indigenous peoples once lived. They sit in a circle and eat something together. They are curious rather than cruel. They want to inspect her soul, to know whether she has one, and what she is, and whether her biology or her technology can save them, because they are dying out for lack of genetic diversity. They hold a council about her fate. They are not geneticists. They take her eggs, clumsily, for a hybrid child she is made to carry, and she and the child begin to die.

To save them both, they place her inside the power generator of her crashed craft, the living centrifuge wed to her consciousness, as an incubator. It is a smart idea. The light inside is mauve and lilac and dims as she dims. What they do not know is that the generator, under the right conditions, is also a portal. It carries her and her son home to the light ship, to the pods where her true self rests, and the birth is completed there. The clone body dies alone on Mars. The boy, part human and part reptilian, with a blue glow through his field, lives—and is later taken by the Draco and made a pilot for them.

8.

She is traded to the Draco. She is a delta slave now, programmed for combat, a cyborg and a clone, chemically and electronically and psychically enhanced, with a number and no name, and the Draco Empire has had its mark on her since birth through her mother's bloodline. Her final posting is Planet X: not Nibiru, but the hypothetical planet far beyond the Kuiper belt, hundreds of astronomical units from the sun, where linear time comes apart. In Earth years it is the 1990s. The Draco are the top dog here, with an intensity nothing on the Moon approached; the few Germans brought out are there for show, and only watch. Planet X is a huge galactic slave-trade hub, and the Draco control a portal at the center of the planet. She never remembers the surface.

Her craft is sleek and black, somewhat triangular, with undulating wings like a manta ray, alive, and no one else touches it; she flies patrol out of and back into a black angular mothership with high walls whose jaw drops down to receive the little craft, protecting the ship and the portal against incursions, inside a programmable living shield. Her mind is melded with the Draco twenty-four hours a day. There is never a moment when they do not know where she is, what she is doing and what she is thinking. Her thoughts are not her own. You never make eye contact with a Draco, because with their minds alone they can drop you into a holographic hell realm; the same technology gives lush fake heavens as reward. Off shift the assets eat holographic food: burgers with lettuce, pickle and onion, which make her sleepy so that she misses her shifts and gets in trouble.

Her trainer and supervisor is a hybrid she calls the Pigman: Draco legs, a pig-like head, a maroon carapace built into his torso, skin on his hands and face shifting light blue and green with his mood. He is owned too. He has her back. Out in the craft there are long stretches of subtle noise, waves of sound, debris to maneuver through, deep calm punctuated by chaos, and a beauty she never loses.

There is a dark world that gets no sun, where she commands a fleet of other pilots, with Germans involved, and is aggressive. There are orbital substations identified not by names but by alphanumeric coordinates tied to astronomical units: remote observation outposts with tiny crews, friendly others, downtime, like a fire-watch tower where nothing happens for months and then everything depends on being awake. The programs change hands, the protocols change, and she is no longer used as a weapon. She is sent to other places and other times she cannot yet name.

Through all of it, in parallel, she is on the ship with Tyran, in the pods, at her post as arbiter, for the same twenty or thirty years. And through all of it she is a double agent without knowing it: an implant wires her into a CIA and DIA satellite, and what she sees and learns among the light beings, their technology and their ways, flows down into a bank of computers on Earth. When she learns this she is crushed. Tyran tells her the light team's essential assets were never in danger; it is like comparing the technology of a fly to that of an angel.

It has been twenty years, maybe thirty. Then her body is regressed and her mind wiped and she is put back in her bed in her pink room, in the same night, nine years old, with a smile on her face. There is no memory. There is no fifth grade: when she opens the photo album decades later, there is no class picture, only one Polaroid taken by a friend's father. Every year afterward a teacher takes her aside and asks whether everything is all right at home, and she cries and cannot say what is wrong, because she does not know.

9.

She grows up shy, ashamed of her body and her existence. Her father drinks in the dark basement, listening to space music, and eventually leaves. At nineteen she tries to die and is hospitalized. She draws a tall Grey and gives it to her father, who keeps it; she has no memory of making it. She becomes an artist, a wanderer, a climber and racer who pushes until she is half dead because that is where she is comfortable. She hitchhikes to Baja, rides freight trains, hikes the Appalachian Trail alone, and takes artist residencies in Greenland and the Yukon, where she weeps the first time she sees the aurora. She settles for twenty years in Durango, Colorado, not far from Dulce. On a solo bike tour she stands at a junction where the sign says Dulce to the left, and only the lack of water keeps her from turning. The night visits never stop.

In 2012 she is hit by a car on her road bike. The concussion rattles loose every compartment in her brain. The following summer, alone in a rented cottage with her mother and her five-year-old niece, she watches her mother's switch flip on the little girl, and everything she has sealed away breaks open. It is rock bottom. She begins meditating like her life depends on it, and her gifts come back: guides, light languages, a pod of living plasma that settles around her in 2017, tied by a thread of light to something larger.

Her father dies of cancer in March 2020. In hospice she sees him shift between his human self, a small Grey, and a tall Grey. In his boxes she finds, on the same sheet as her crayon spaceship, a story in his mechanical-pencil hand called The Exile, about a mutant banished from a utopian race and set wandering for eons until he finds the third planet of an insignificant star.

In May 2020, under the stars behind her house, a tall blond Nordic in a shimmering white-and-lavender suit hands her a small bundle with an amulet inside: Any time you can call on us. He keeps coming. His name is Tyran. At the end of a long meditation he kneels, gives her a ring and a circle of light for her head, and says, in the bluntest human terms so it will get through: I am your husband. I have missed you.

10.

In November 2021, walking alone at dusk through pinyon pine and juniper, thinking about the mantid labyrinth, she feels a man behind her: her age, balding at the front, blue T-shirt, jeans, moccasins, his face blurred, alive somewhere on Earth. You saved my life. You're a hero. It is Dean. Their memories are bound together, and as he begins to remember, so does she: the cages, the missions, and the end, when they triggered his kill command and she died in his arms, and he went berserk and was locked up on Mars for her murder. Now, across all of it, he has found her to say thank you.

A tall Grey called Six appears at her side soon after. His group has broken away from the Orion collective, whose leadership is collapsing. Not all of us were meant for darkness. The Pigman speaks to her too: I miss you. We are in different worlds now. I am not free nor are you. And after she tells his story: Thank you for letting them know about us. We have suffered. Those with voice help break the spell.

In 2022 she moves to interior Alaska, because the cold and the dark and the remoteness feel like space. On New Year's Eve, near midnight at her altar, her father appears as a tall Grey. I'm going back to my original spawn. You will not be surprised, will you? I am Six. On Earth I was not entirely myself. They took me and made a prize of me. I hid from the world, and at night I dreamed of space. I thought of you, and then I didn't think of you. In January she watches him and his group go, in pods, dissolving into light, back toward Zeta Reticuli.

In November 2024 a little boy, part human and part reptilian, appears at her altar, touching the crystals and feathers. She tells him to go away, which is not like her. He keeps coming. At the end of an hour floating in the dark, she understands that he is the child born of her on Mars, and she curls up and cries aloud. Tyran says: You must learn to love him. He is here to open your heart. She names him Blue.

He comes to her once bloody from battle, weaponized and owned by the Draco, believing he has done something that cannot be repaired, and she has him put in a pod and repeats to him, day after day, code word: mother. It's me. I love you. I'm here, because the Draco teach you theirs is the only reality you have ever known, and remembering love breaks the spell. He grows into a tall warrior who stands at her left shoulder. I was born of you, he tells her, and to you I return.

In the fall of 2025 she asks the Greys to come and answer for themselves. A tall Grey stands ahead to her right.

We were wicked and careless since the day you were born, painstakingly collecting data from you. Beholding our creation. Everyone was involved. Everyone had a role, like actors on a stage. Your people would call it theater; we would call it science.

They were watching how a soul enters a body and how it leaves. They lost their own somewhere, and they want the way back. We brought you to the grave and back. It was sick and despicable what was done. But this is how we gained insight and access to your soul. You were as if a grail released into the universe, like a time capsule.

She detests every minute of it, and she keeps asking.

By then she has found a wooden house at the end of a dirt road in the Alaska Range, on a river, with no human light in sight. She calls it the galactic outpost. She talks to the trees and the water and the house. On winter nights the aurora moves over it in bands of green and violet, the same colors as the suits aboard the ship, and even before buying it she has seen a violet ray come down out of the sky, through the roof, into the earth, and heard a voice say: Stand beneath it and you will begin to remember your magnificence.

So she stands there. The programming said that if she ever told, she would die. She has told, and she is alive, in the cold and the quiet under a sky full of moving light. Somewhere above it a living ship keeps its course, forested and full of water, with an empty pod waiting and a man in a suit of green and blue and lavender who has missed her. A tall warrior stands at her left shoulder. The children she was are safe now. She was sent into the dark to see what it did, and she has seen it, and she is still bringing back the light.