Tony Rodrigues

This account is compiled from the talks and interviews Tony Rodrigues recorded between 2018 and 2024, and from his two books, Ceres Colony Cavalier and Project Starmaker. It gives priority to the earliest tellings and to the things not said in the books. His website is www.tonyrodrigues.com.

1.

Michael Anthony Rodrigues is born in 1972 and grows up in an old farmhouse on thirteen acres outside Detroit, half a mile from the nearest neighbor. His father is from Hawaii, a Navy man turned autoworker, a cowboy, more into horses and cars than the sky. His mother is the science fiction fan. She and Tony watch Star Trek together.

He is a top student, and in the advanced learning class there is one boy who surpasses him. The boy is brilliant and abrasive, Tony is cocky, and they pick on each other. The boy says his father is Illuminati. When the father comes in to judge the science fair, on a Wednesday in April 1982, the boy points across the room. That's him. That's Tony.

Thursday night the phone starts ringing and nobody answers it, which is strange in that house. Bright lights shine down from above the roof, and with them a feeling like static electricity, coming and going. He cannot move. Nobody wakes up. A blue orb comes crackling into his room and down the hall, and he hears it fly down the staircase. Then everything stops, and he tries to go back to sleep.

When he wakes again a Grey is standing over the bed, right in his face. His father is a prankster, so Tony says, Dad, take the mask off, you're not being funny, and reaches up and touches it. It is alive. It is cold and wet and it has big pores. Before he can scream it does something to him and he is paralyzed, and three or four shorter beings, reptilian-looking, come up from the foot of the bed, grab him out of it, and carry him off into a flash of light.

He wakes naked on a table in a surgical setting. They speak to him telepathically. Be calm. You are not going to be hurt. He is in shock, and then, whether it is something they give him or not, he begins to be happy. He thinks this is first contact. Tomorrow there will be spaceships on the news, and he is there for it.

They take a biopsy from the back of his head, brain tissue, and wait half an hour for the results. Not everyone can go; the technology relies on a genetic marker. Tony has the genes, but barely. He can go once.

The one who explains it is a short reptilian with a sense of humor, twenty-five or so in his own years, with a wife and a kid on a planet he goes home to every day after work. We want to borrow your consciousness. We need your consent. For twenty years.

Tony says no. He will miss his mom and dad. His sister will grow up and he won't know her.

No, no, listen. We have time travel. You'll be back in your bed tomorrow morning. You're lucky to be chosen. You're special. This is a blessing for you.

He says yes immediately. They strap him down, test for his dominant eye, and put a needle into the inner corner of that eye, and he sees stars, like being punched hard in the face.

2.

He wakes in a portable office building on an airfield in Inyokern, California, with a doctor examining him. Do you remember where you came from? Do you have any brothers? He remembers nothing. He can barely remember English. He has no memory of his family, the farmhouse, or the night before, and for the next twenty years he will have none. When they give him crayons he draws, over and over, a farmhouse with a long driveway, and does not know why.

It is a trauma-based mind-control program, run by ex–MKUltra staff with a new twist. The doctor in charge wants remote viewers, and he works out of a stack of manuals like a cookbook, one page a day. Today we have to do this. They twist an arm. A few days later they soak the children in ice water until they shake. A wooden contraption with screws goes on the arm; for some kids the arm is broken, and Tony's right shoulder is dislocated, and for years afterward it pops out again in his sleep. The doctor is appalled by some of it. He follows the schedule anyway.

They are drugged and suspended in chairs in front of movies, cartoons and training films and footage of animals and people being butchered, flashing fast, with messages underneath, eight hours on a reel of film that rewinds and plays again. Then the sleep deprivation starts, and Tony loses track of time. Every fifteen minutes in the night the lights come on with a buzzer, and the children stand beside their bunks, and a man comes down the row and slaps them, and they may go back to sleep. Then he comes with an electric cattle prod. What it teaches is that when you are shocked you go catatonic and wait for a command.

At the end there are a few days of killing training. A film shows a gun being loaded, and the children sing along. Nine, the last one is mine. A murder. Eight, the last one is mine. Another. Down to one, and an explosion, and it starts over. Because that is still in him, he does not own a gun. He is afraid of a phone call one day.

Most of the class qualify for something called Theta. Remote viewing begins, out-of-body sessions on headphones run by people from the Monroe Institute, with drugs, and then the near-death drugs. Somewhere in this stretch the children are flown to the Moon on a triangle craft for surgery, and flown back. When the near-death drugs work, each child is shipped to a post.

It is December 1982.

3.

An underground train takes him to Montana. A woman picks him up and drives him to her house in Seattle and puts him in a dog cage in the laundry room. She comes by with a sandwich, lets him go to the bathroom, and puts him back. Then she leaves for two days to fetch her husband, and leaves him some water.

They come back with two other children, a boy and a girl about his age, and he is let out and cleaned up and given a place to sleep downstairs. At night there are rituals. He walks in with an IV drip hooked to his arm, and the man is stark naked in a Baphomet helmet, a horned goat's head, and the women, his wife and another girl, are naked too, one with a horse's head on. There is a dead body on the table—a young boy. They are drinking blood.

Are you shocked by what you see? The man is cheerful about it, like someone at a barbecue before a game, unconcerned that he has just murdered a child. Why did you do that? Tony asks, and the man asks whether he believes in God. Pray to your God to come and save you now. He is bullying a ten-year-old in a debate, and Tony knows he is wrong, knows that with the right words he would eat him alive, and knows he does not have them yet. The anger of that never leaves.

It is a communion. Tony is to participate, or go up on the table next to the body. I've got no problem putting you right there and killing you right now. Make up your mind. I only have a minute. Tony sits silent, which is the only protest he has. The girl, blonde, his age, has already done it. Just do it. Nothing bad happened. So he does it.

Afterward they are laid on tables in the basement and drugged one at a time. The girl goes out first and starts talking loud and crazy, and they start asking her questions. Then Tony goes under. They are drugging the children to the edge of death and writing down what comes through, business information, who knows what, and it is accurate.

Tony asks the man whether he wants to know his name. It doesn't matter what your name is. You're the dead. You're all the dead. I'm the only one that's alive. That is how these people speak of everyone else. They are the living. The rest of us are a crop.

4.

In January or February 1983 he is flown to Peru, to a river town in the jungle called Puerto Tahuantinsuyo, now Boca Colorado. He knows the year because a kid there has a T-shirt that says 82, and the others make fun of him for wearing last year's shirt.

Once a month a C-46 Commando cargo plane takes off with a load of cocaine for Santa Marta, Colombia, ten hours each way. They lost an airplane, and they have paid to have Tony there so they don't lose another. Over Acre his handler wraps him in a Faraday blanket, puts an IV in his arm, and gives him a ketamine derivative. Tony is unconscious for eight or nine hours, and while he is under, he talks. Police positions. Where it is safe to land. He is sick for days afterward.

The handler is a young man, the only person in the village who speaks English, and he is not happy to be stuck with the boy. But things Tony says come true, and after a while the handler has a notepad of questions from the villagers to ask him while he is under, and he charges them for the answers. Tony speaks fluent Spanish in that state and does not know a word of it awake. He speaks to the handler's dead grandmother. The money from the second plane trip bulldozes and builds the town's plaza. The village calls him el loco pequeño de la luna, the crazy little boy from the Moon.

The first flights he remembers nothing of. Then he starts to remember the other side. It is a dark room with a window that looks out at his own body, and there are entities in the room, stuck there, fighting each other to speak through him, while he is pushed into a corner. That is what the near-death drugs are for. They are pharmaceutically manufacturing a channeler, a medium, out of a ten-year-old.

Sometimes a voice comes for him from above it all. Come with me. It takes him out of the room and shows him the universe at once, stars and lifetimes, and once, when it says he is ready to meet the creator, a place like a colosseum where millions of balls of light wait in rows before a huge whirling black ball of energy. I'll see the ones that put themselves first. Those go forward. Now go and fix everything you've done. The rest wait a long time. To the ones that put others first: return. Make it better. He wakes on the tarmac in Colombia and does not remember it, but he feels it.

He has friends in Peru. It is the last time in the twenty years he will have any.

Around thirteen the system begins to fail. He gets very sick under the drug, and more of what he reports is gibberish. After two years they send him back.

From 1985 to 1988 he is privately owned in Seattle, on an island, in the house of a billionaire.

There are other boys. They are kept on collars and chains and disciplined with electricity. They are pitted against each other, so that if two of them begin to be friends, they are quickly made to regret it. The house holds fundraisers and parties, and the wealthy and the famous come, and the children are put in a staging area, and the guests choose a boy or a girl and do what they want. It is filmed. Many of the guests are told the children are clones, not real, not human. Tony feels every bit of it.

When his file follows him into the space program, this period is in it, in plain words. He is used as a sex slave in Seattle.

5.

In the summer of 1988 the woman drives him to two men in a van. They give him an injection and he is out. He wakes on a ship, twenty minutes from the Moon, with a military officer beside him. Whoa, you're awake. You're going to be good for me.

Through the windows on the way in he has seen where he is bound: a trapezoidal base built on the Pentagon's design, because the plan was paid for and the shape holds up in vacuum. Inside it is a spartan office building. He has been sold into a program of the Mars Colony Corporation.

The training is not combat. It is mind control again, milder than Inyokern, and it is about one thing: the fight-or-flight response. The classes are long elaborate movies, each with a problem, and each ends the same way, with you dying to solve it. It is better to give your life for your brother. Why run? Then everybody dies. Over and over.

Then the field test. The children are put in an arena and made to defend themselves against enormous insects, fast and violent, to see whether one of them will give his life for the rest. The instructors are happy with the result. In the morning they are walked onto a much larger craft. A few minutes after takeoff he is asleep. They put everyone to sleep for the trip, and for years he will remember it as instantaneous.

In orbit around Mars they are not cleared to land, and they wait for hours. It is 1989. He is sixteen, going on seventeen, and they lie about his age.

In the hangar, soldiers separate the boys from the other passengers, tie their hands, bag their heads, and march them onto a smaller craft. They fly to a forward base, a research facility built for three hundred, overrun by the local insects, evacuated, and now being brought back online with fifty. The bags come off in a corridor.

The real soldiers are Marines, and there are not enough of them to meet a million insects on the battlefield. Tony's group is an experiment to fix that: boots on the ground, quickly and cheaply, with minimal training and minimal equipment. Bait. The soldiers are nineteen, twenty, jacked up on drugs, locked up with no girls, and the boys are their servants, a dog to kick, and they kick.

The missions are walks. Six boys and two soldiers go out onto the surface in bright white environmental suits, golf balls in the Martian daylight, with soldiers up on a hill behind railguns. As the insects move in on the bait, the guns engage them. The skies are pale blue, the sunsets purple, and when a storm is coming the sky turns red. Inside the suit is a stimulant, a button above the hip and a needle, that makes you strong for two or three minutes. Running on Mars does not work; after a few steps it turns into leaping.

On the third mission they are attacked. The insects come from behind, and Tony hits his stim first, out of fear, and takes the lead, and then it wears off and the two boys with him, who saved theirs, pass him. So he is at the back when the swarm arrives, twenty beetles the size of dogs, and two or three of the big spider ones. One comes down on him from behind and bites his arm off and holds him down. We've got one. Kill those. They go over the dune and he hears the other two die. He has never fired the gun they gave him. He begs. Please don't kill me. I don't want to die.

Then the mantid comes up, a praying mantis, with antennae like olives stacked on a straw, and it looks smart, because it is. When it is close, the pain stops. He is taken out of his body and stands beside it in an empty room, in a dream, and looks down at himself and sees the blood but cannot feel the arm. It is searching his mind, and it narrates what it finds to something else. I see him. He's back at that base. Here he is in Seattle. Here he is in California. This one was tortured. It is professional. It is not angry and it is not cruel. If I'm ordered to kill you, I'll kill you. But I don't want to. We need to know what you are and what you're for. They are something new on an old battlefield. We'll let you go.

He wakes and the pain comes back. One of the beetles wants to know what it is like to bite someone, and it bites his foot off. The suits carry automatic tourniquets, to stop the bleeding. He gets one on his arm, crawls to a dead soldier and takes his for the leg, and cannot go further. Two soldiers come for him, take the rest of his stim for themselves, and carry him back a few kilometers. He is losing blood and wants to sleep. Stay awake. You're going to see your purple sunset. When he fades, the soldier hits him in the head. The moment the base doors come into sight, the soldier lets him sleep.

He wakes with his arm and his foot back. His shoulder, which has been coming out in his sleep since Inyokern, never dislocates again.

Two men debrief him. What did the bug say to you? There is a message, which the mantid asked him to deliver. Tell them we're not that stupid.

That is the end of the program. The insects adapted far ahead of somebody's schedule. The boys sit in their cubicles for six weeks with nothing to do, useless now, while the Marines come down and have fun with them.

6.

Then they are flown to Aries Prime, without the bags this time. It is a city, not a base, and everything about it is new. A glass hallway leads into a dome of something clear, with the red dirt piled over it and a little sky showing at the top, and under it a fountain and palm trees, and men in suits carrying briefcases.

He is given a studio apartment with his own bathroom, the best quarters he will have in twenty years. When he comes in there is a tray of food and thirty minutes on the clock, and then a box in the room puts him to sleep. Each morning a soldier walks him to a school, where a tall Grey, big-headed and arrogant, sits him in front of a computer and plugs him in. It tests him for command, which he barely misses, and for ship's crew, which he fails, and sorts him into skilled labor: ship maintenance. Six months of that. The Grey abuses him mentally, and after the forward base that is a relief. Nobody kicks him.

Then he is sold, from the Mars Colony Corporation to the Ceres Colony Corporation.

One morning a man in a beret walks him to a crowded train station. A bar comes down over the lap like a roller coaster's. The train lifts onto its cushion, accelerates into the tunnel, and then there is a poof, a camera flash, the disorientation of standing up too fast, and the train is already slowing, dropping onto its wheels.

He is somewhere else. It is like walking past a vending machine in a mall and then, around a corner, past one twenty years older. A girl's voice on the loudspeaker: Welcome to Ceres Colony, the most advanced colony in the solar system. Mars said the same thing about itself.

There are guns everywhere, sidearms on everybody. The new arrivals are herded into a hangar, and a chrome disc flies over them, low, crackling with static so their hair stands up, and the boys from Mars stand dumbfounded. They are handed slips of paper with words in German and made to read them aloud, a pledge, and to give the salute. A man on the podium threatens them. You'll say the words, or I'll take you over there and shoot you. Is anybody going to die today? They get haircuts, and a train to the barracks where he will live for more than a decade.

It is a prison without bars. Three concrete-block walls, an open fourth wall onto the hallway, a narrow bed, a table with one empty drawer that he never puts anything in, because he owns nothing. The Germans found it, ruins of something built long ago by another species, an airlock already in place, and moved in and built inside the caverns.

His first morning they put him on the wrong train and he ends up in the mines with a shovel. The rock of Ceres is chalk. You can draw in it with a finger. The miners break it up with ultrasonics aimed by lasers, vacuum the dust out of the microgravity, and lay the gravity plating further in. They are not mining for anything. They are mining for room.

When he gets back that night two men are waiting—to execute him for running away.

7.

The next day he walks through an umbilical straight into his ship, which he never once sees from the outside. It is an old submarine, World War II, cramped, pipes everywhere, converted by the Germans when they first had the technology and needed hulls that could take pressure the other way. Its name is something like Blitz Bus. Every door has a threshold ten inches high, and every morning he tells himself that today he will not hit his shin on one, and every day he does.

The screen is the whole job. 079. Go to the tool room. Get this tool, this tool, and this tool. Go to this junction. Open this valve. He does the thing, comes back, and the screen already knows he is there. He is locked in the lower deck and a half with two other men, and the people upstairs watch them through cameras. He cannot feel the ship move. He knows it does, because they call down about things that broke while they were out.

Then the buzzer, which he can still hear, and the line of naked men, and twenty seconds in the shower, and the clothes for the day on a hook with his number on it. His suit is different from everyone else's. The rest of the block work the mines, and he is ship duty, so they bond by hating him. The two men he works with become lovers and do not like him either. For six years he does not have one friend. He wants to die. He has been programmed at Inyokern not to kill himself, and he finds it is not in him.

There is a rule: the ship comes home every day. Never a night out. It is a health matter; something takes a toll.

The time travel is called anti-telephoning. When the Germans first had it they used it aggressively, to fix what went wrong, and were punished by beings who live outside space-time. An officer tells him what the punishment is: to be taken out of your body and made to live as a bug in a swamp, eaten over and over, for a thousand years, and then put back into your life. So there are limits. You may travel time. You may not alter it.

The loophole is this. The ship leaves Ceres at eight in the morning and spends the day wherever the work is. When the work is done it jumps back, not to the dock but to a point five minutes' flight away, at five minutes to eight. From there it flies home at full speed and docks a few seconds after eight, after it left, so it has never come home before it went, and nothing has been altered. But at 7:55 the colony is already watching the spot where it is due to appear. If they see it, the mission worked, and they send it. If they do not, the mission failed, it is cancelled, and the ship never leaves. That is how they can schedule missions that aggressive.

The lower crew are told the Earth has been destroyed. Tony half hears it as rumor and does not believe it, because he was just there.

8.

After about four years an officer comes into their work area one morning. Do you qualify as expendable? There are missions that are dangerous. If you volunteer, you stand a chance of being promoted, or dying. You have to volunteer.

He says yes, please. It is a win-win, in a macabre way. If he dies, he is out of here. If he lives, he might get promoted.

Months pass and nothing comes of it. Then one weekend evening an officer collects him from the barracks. The colony has met a new race of Greys, he explains on the train, and struck a lucrative trade for technology. They need labor, and Tony is in the pool. He thinks something good is about to happen to him.

At the end of a hallway fifty men dressed like him wait before double doors, and behind the doors somebody is screaming. He's going to be tested, right? No. He's going. Every few minutes a man is brought out and hauled away, and one of them, skinny and out of his mind, screams at the line as they drag him. Don't go. Don't go. It's more than ten years. Kill yourselves. Guards come out and say anyone who speaks will be shot.

Inside, two Greys of a kind he has never seen strap him to a table and tell him he will serve another ten-year term. You can't do this. It makes you go crazy. A German in medical gear says it is different technology and he will be right back. A needle goes into the back of his neck and another into the tear duct of his eye.

He wakes in another body, a port at the base of the skull, in a galaxy where stars have stopped forming. Every day for ten years he flies a clear pod into a nebula nothing shines through and pushes house-sized rocks toward a purple target on his screen, a gravity well others have been piling up for centuries. He is making a star. Understanding how takes years.

A few minutes after the needles went in he wakes on the table on Ceres. They walk him back to the barracks with the weekend off. He remembers none of it. The trade, he hears, falls through on the other end. Ceres calls it a success and is paid seventy percent.

One day a mission takes him to the Moon, to a lower level of the base, and two German officers he has never seen take him off the ship. As they walk they talk in his ear. You are representing us here. The Nachtwaffen. He is not sure of the name. Even though you're a slave, you're one of us. Nobody here tells you what to do. Fifty feet later he turns a corner and two Greys are escorting a small Black boy, nine or ten, to a door, and the boy sees Tony and comes running at him full speed, screaming, arms up. Tony kicks him in the chest. The boy goes down, and the Greys do something to him, and he gets up and goes with them. Tony feels, for a moment, that he has done something tough. He has kicked a child down.

Long afterward, when his first interviews come out, that boy, a grown man in New Jersey, contacts him. He remembers it too. He hated Tony for years, and he tells him it was a dick move, and he is right.

9.

The Blitz Bus is dying. Valves corrode faster than they can cut them out. On its last mission, a combat situation Tony knows nothing about from below, a valve that always sticks needs turning, and he crawls into the housing and forces it loose and is burned, very badly. Normally a man would be left disfigured. Because of the circumstances they spend the money and restore him completely. If he were an enlisted man this would qualify him for one of their highest medals. He is a slave, so it doesn't. But it catches the captain's eye.

The ship is decommissioned. He waits months, is trained, and is promoted to cargo engineer on the new ship, the Max von Laue, built on a stealth chassis leased from a non-human species. At the first briefing, a dozen men around a table, the captain goes round asking each why he is here. When he reaches Tony he says he is not even qualified to be at this table, and reads from his report, which has everything in it, Inyokern and Peru and Seattle. Then he asks the table who among them qualifies for the medal. You do, sir. He does. If he weren't a slave he would outrank every one of you, and you would be saluting him. That is why he is here. I expect great things. Tony is frightened by it. He has had no training. He has been tortured through his childhood and is crippled by it.

The captains belong to a fraternity that is a kind of religion, in an atheist society: they worship the act of giving yourself for the rest, and someone who has done it in combat is holy to them. If you weren't a slave, you could be one of us. After the briefings, sometimes, the captain holds him back and talks with him for twenty minutes before his post. In another circumstance, you and I would be friends. Of everyone on Ceres who kicked him or looked past him, this is the man who treats him like a friend, and it is the biggest thing that has happened to him in years.

He rides a different train now, to the front of the ship, eats a muffin off the good food replicator, and sits in on the morning briefing, in German until someone hits a button and the translator comes on. And one morning the officers agree that the ship is doing well and there should be profit sharing, and somebody says these guys are at the table too, we should pay them, and they vote on it. Twenty francs a week.

And from the Max von Laue, for the first time, he sees the star field. No Earth, no sun, only how many there are. It is a moment for the whole soul. It is preposterous, after that, to think we are alone.

10.

On Friday he takes the slip of paper they hand him, don't lose this, it's your account, and goes to the trade window, two kilometers down the hangar, a cavern nineteen kilometers long. For a few francs a month there is facial recognition, and every machine and restaurant knows your face. Or he can put his money on the chain, a blockchain of many digital currencies, some of which gain value very fast. He has been through mind fracture and the word chain scares the shit out of him. He takes a standard account and carries paper. The money has an old German with a spiked helmet on the front and, on the back, always, a battle scene from the Thirty Years' War.

He buys the cheapest train ticket, not knowing it is one way, and gets off in the red-light district because the crew told him to, and buys chicken teriyaki on a stick, real food, twelve francs, most of his pay, and it is the best day of a rough twenty years.

The condition of the freedom is his productivity score, a number for every day, a carrot and a stick. Stay out all night if you like, as long as you show up and hit your numbers. He learns to eat the replicator food while it is still burning hot, because the engineer on the other side waits for his to cool, and eating fast puts Tony ahead on the report. He still eats fast.

He wears a collar and a jumpsuit that say what he is, and in public anyone may put him to task. You. Come here. Pick up that garbage. On the trains he is nervous until everyone pulls out their phones, which are clear, see-through, and then no one sees him. They are all on their apps, and he is bitter that he has none of it.

So he does not go where the families are. He goes to the red-light district, where nobody is uppity and nobody puts him to work, and sits in the foyer of the club, where a low-gravity art piece has been installed, balls of fire and water floating free until the gravity pulses on and throws them into violent splashes, and he watches it until he is thrown out.

There is a girl there who circulates, blonde, small and athletic, and the first thing she does is reach up and grab his collar and give it a jiggle. It's a shame he has to wear this thing, because he's kind of cute. Nobody has ever touched him like that. She is stunning. Her name is Marie. Weeks later an officer from the ship tells the owner that this man would have had a medal, and men with medals get a free one, and she walks into room five. It is the first time he has been with a woman. It is like a bolt of lightning between them. Fifteen minutes later, they are both mad for each other, head over heels, as if they had joined into one thing. They fall in love, which nobody intends.

She was taken in 1993 and is seven years into her own twenty, trafficked on Mars and sold on to the club. She has been told the Earth is destroyed. He is sworn to secrecy and tells her anyway. She does not believe him. What she misses is the sun on her skin, and every time he comes back from a mission she asks whether he saw it. She worries about him dying out there, and wants him off the away missions. He can afford to be with her once a year. The rest is talk, hours of it in a booth, and when the light in his cell goes out five minutes after he gets back, he cries himself to sleep. Extra-species sex is common in the district, and some species do not have intercourse as we understand it. It is mental. Some of the girls are broken by it forever. To those beings the humans are something like pets.

They talk about whether they will remember any of it. She wants a double shot of whatever they give you to forget, because this woman is not who she is. I want to remember you, she says. I don't want to remember all of this.

The society is Deutsch. They do not call themselves German, or Nazi. They left the Earth at the end of the war, and they answer to a High Command in Antarctica, and above that to bases around Jupiter, in the temporal bubbles, where Tony believes the Orion group sits, the thousands of species under the reptilians. On Ceres the leader holds the title of Führer.

Marriages are arranged from a genetic database. The wives do not look happy. It is a 1950s life, run by the military. The Germans push atheism hard, for a military reason, Tony thinks: you cannot pull the trigger on something you believe is yourself. The officers drink a milkshake every morning that keeps them from aging. You're going to grow old, they tell him, and we're not. Their national day is the Thirty Years' War, the first time, in their history, that humans defeated an extraterrestrial force, the one behind the Catholic Church. We did it with horses.

11.

He runs the two cargo bays on the left side, with five to seven men under him. The main bay at the rear belongs to a Ceres officer who runs a black-market business out of it: books, VHS tapes, anything he can get at Diego Garcia. His men watch movies down there on the long flights, and Tony's men beg for reviews. One comes up raving about a Stephen King film with a monster coming out of a toilet, it'd mess you up, man, because Tony has said he is afraid of what can come up through a toilet. When Tony sees Dreamcatcher in a theater, years later, on Earth, it is a memory breaking through.

Diego Garcia is the main Earth stop, in the middle of the night, a small box dropped and tons of cargo picked up off the tarmac. Once a crate breaks open and he finds bags of coffee inside and reports it, and the whole mission is delayed, because the ship is knowingly smuggling coffee to a world where it is a narcotic.

There is a bay under the main bay, a few feet deep. One day the men say there are people down there. Tony does not believe it, and sends a man down with a broom to look, and there are seventy or eighty of them. The ship has stolen them from other traffickers. Sometimes they are told there are people aboard. Sometimes they are not.

The mandate of the ship is not to explore. It is to acquire technology by any means necessary: trade for it, or steal it. Whole shiploads go out and a mathematical formula comes back as payment. Four or five star systems in a day is normal. The natural wormhole near Jupiter reaches about eighteen other galaxies, and when the ship jumps through it everyone vomits.

Ceres entertains guests, species after species, to charm them into trade. As a slave Tony is under orders not to speak to any of them; his mind is poisoned. But he is in public, and he sees them. On a train, a lady eleven feet tall, over three meters, very dark blue, who smiles at him with a big bright smile, radiant, and he feels he has seen a unicorn. The most advanced species want nothing to do with it. They want what a man wants with the squirrel in his yard. Venus is forbidden; whoever is there is too far ahead. Pluto belongs to another species, hostile.

12.

It is about 2000 when he wakes one day and knows it is over, and feels completely different. When he does the arithmetic years later, from 1982 it is eighteen years, and it should be twenty. Then he works it out. On an anti-telephoning day you live a whole day and come home at the same time, and lose eight hours of calendar. Enough of those days, over about six years of missions, cut two years off. Twenty years lived. Eighteen years gone.

The last six months he has spent demoted. He hesitated on an order in a combat situation, and lost his account and his train pass and his evenings to a sixteen-hour day. He has not seen Marie since. He does not get to say goodbye.

He does not want to go. He is in love. He is livid, and he fights it. They send him anyway. On the six-hour flight to the Moon he paces while the others sleep, and says it to himself for hours. I'm never going to forget her. I'm going to find her. I'm going to remember. I'm going to remember.

On the Moon they look ahead. There is a probability, a chronovisor tells them, that he will retain his memories, and it has to be brought under a certain percentage before he can be put back. So he is taken for another round, in a corner office, and from its window, once, he sees the surface: night, the floor of a crater, mountains all around. It takes a week. The names go best. Then he is put in a machine and it feels like a crematorium, like his body being vaporized, and he remembers the pain.

He wakes on a table on the back side of the Moon, ten years old, with ETs around him, and he has his mother and his father and his sister back, and nothing of the twenty years. That is why he thinks the body he lived in was a clone. He lived in a body with no memories in it and came back into one with all the old memories and none of the new, and the simplest explanation is that his consciousness was moved out and moved back.

Friday morning, April 16, 1982, he wakes in his bed in the farmhouse. He looks at the toys on the floor and has no interest in them. He has the feeling, without any memory to go with it, of not having been home for twenty years. At school that day he raises his hand to use the bathroom, and the teacher says go ahead, and he asks where it is. The whole class laughs, and the teacher calls his mother and says he may have amnesia. His father takes a photograph of him that day, which he still has, and in it he does not know who he is. You changed, man, his father will say, for years. I don't know what happened to you, but I want my son back.

At school he withdraws into himself. He feels like an old man among children, and in his twenties, when his friends start going to bars, it bores him, because he has done all that. At nineteen he reads the Bible cover to cover, then the Quran, the Satanic texts, the Buddhists, looking for something in writing that allows for what he remembers, because he has never forgotten the first ten minutes: the Grey at the bed, being carried out, the morning after. Chan Buddhism is the only one with room in it for other planets. Something is wrong and he knows it. He does not know what.

13.

In May 2015 he has bad headaches and a doctor sends him for an MRI. Two weeks later, twenty years come back, years at a time, and the first months are pretty scary. He remembers the keystone days first, the fight, the promotion, the first stars, falling in love, and works outward from those, in the mornings, five minutes at a time, because there is programming that stops you writing it down. Then he starts checking.

NASA's Dawn probe is circling Ceres, and nobody can explain the bright spots in one crater. He can: salt with a little magnesium, from a geyser of salt water he watched through a porthole. NASA later agrees: salt, from brine deep inside Ceres. He draws the flight path he remembers, over that crater to the mountain they called pyramid base, where the hangar is. The maps name them Occator and Ahuna Mons, and the line is where he drew it. When his editor asks what the rock was like in the mines, he says chalk, and looks it up, and Ceres is sodium carbonate.

In 2016 he goes back to Seattle and knows his way around, down to the candy bin inside the corner store's door, thirty-five cents now. The three portable buildings at Inyokern are on the satellite pictures and absent from the national database of taxable structures; they are a special district, answerable to Congress and not to the local police. People who have been to Boca Colorado confirm the plaza was built in early 1983.

On the operating tables in space, when they opened him without anesthetic and he asked them, telepathically, how they could do this to him, the tall whitish Greys gave the same answer every time. You're not going to remember it anyway. When he was beaten, when he was raped, the answer was the same. You won't remember this. It never happened.

He remembers. He has thought about why, and there is no one answer: the MRI, the two years of being pushed across to the other side once a month as a child, maybe something that was meant to be. But before any of that he was in love, and he wanted to remember her, and on the way to the Moon he swore that he would. That is the whole argument, and it is the only thing he is proud of.