?It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.? I find those words appropriate in the ‘verse. And I’m not just talking about the worlds around us sojourners, but the condition of the heart.

You see, we walk in the footsteps of gods and duel with mages of unimaginable power, but when ego starts asserting itself, the Multiverse quite promptly proves us wrong and shows us the utter futility and pettiness of any such mindset.

That is how I felt right about now. Ten Deltas, scared out of there wits and little more than kids, were my only allies, not including the girl beside me. That was another complication. I was approaching a hundred and fifty years old myself and I was long since married, developing the the hard won instincts of a grandparent by having raised countless adopted children. The specific problem was that I, by and large, hadn’t aged a day since entering the ‘verse well over a hundred years before and I could see the natural response of a teenage girl looking at a desirable teenage guy (relative to a position of character and trust…just to elaborate). To be fair, it was deathly subtle. She hid it well under layers of courtly training, but experienced eyes are a good match against talent.

Nonetheless, I didn’t need it right now, despite it’s subtlety. That is why I have always fought for a gender segregated military; not because of any anachronistic views of women’s fragility, but the resulting friction and sexual politics. Commanding armies gives you strong opinions on the subject.

Anyway, we we’re about two hours out of Chicago. The old deuce and a halfs were lousy and efficiency, but great on fuel capacity, meaning we could probably make St. Paul and the regional office without stopping for diesel. It also meant I could et new thoughts consume me.

I had a significant part of Oswald’s mind. How much I couldn’t tell, but I had vital details nonetheless. The first thing I realized is that all the APCs and equipment and the truck weren’t Army, they were the part of some type of ?national federal police corps? that had been erected by Pres.-for-life Kennedy after his wife’s death.

I also knew that all of this didn’t happen overnight. It was a mix of logical and rationalized decisions leading up to it. Pulling out of Vietnam was the first. Increasing jurisdiction and police powers of federal agencies was the next. After that, one by one, they broke down barriers, erased checks, and unbalanced the balances. The last nail in the coffin was probably the Congressional decision on December 17th, 1968 to vest almost all Congressional powers into the Executive, leaving these people with the current conditions.

As bad as things were, they were better than other places. South America and Asia had been given over to organized crime. The Soviet Union was a truly Orwellian police state. Europe was in the middle of a neo-fascist fever which left NATO a joke and Interpol non-existent. It was, unfortunately, the most accepting world in the world in respect to Deltas.
There had been a time when Deltas were not feared, but loved and envied, particularly through the harrowing works of various costumed vigilantes. Comic books were like the dime serials of the 19th century, exaggerating the events, but far more real than any comic book from my world.

And I was also able to answer the nagging question of where the term ?Delta? came from. Turns out that the first Delta was an American in 1917 fighting in WWII who saved twenty men by throwing them head long out of a trench behind a rock outcropping two hundred yards away while the Germans charged them. Their COs discounted the whole thing as battle fatigue until a British doctor examined the guy after he showed no ill symptoms poison gas attack. The doctor claimed to have observed four stages in his transformation from a regular human and he cataloged each stage under a letter of the Greek alphabet, the last stage being the ?Delta? stage. The definition was in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1919 (the year after the end of the war) and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary by 1923.

Of course if you think that was more than you wanted to know, then you have no idea what I was going through having to sift through the crap from Oswald’s brain. He was obsessive, having having had a rather pathological chance of heart after he failed to kill Kennedy, he went from a man with dreams but few plans to an obsessive workaholic with goals that could be counted on one hand.

Then I started getting images, then tastes, then smells, and then all the rest of the senses. I got sexual conquests and the hookers in back alleys. The hazed blur of vision on a wave of gin and later vodka. The hours of tedium in libraries and basements. The manic conspiracies that once dwelled in the back of his mind. You see, I now had every memory of every fear and phobia, except it wasn’t buried in his subconscious now. It was all to present in my waking thoughts.

The on-coming headlights jolted me out of a stupor and back into my lane as I heard squeals and grunts from the back and Annalise spring from a cat nap, her fingers digging quite deeply into my arm with reflex.

?What just happened?!?

?Well, I nearly crashed into that truck right about then.?

She breathed heavily and gave me a stare that could part seas if it wanted to.

I got a comment from the back and answered in response with a grunt, which seemed sufficient to the lot. I figured that now was a time as good as any to get all our ducks in a row and the ambiguity between Annalise and i out of the way.

?I wish I could talk to my wife right about now.? The statement hung. I could give you cliched sayings about pin drops and the density of air, but I think you get the effect. Her face turned pale, but she did little to respond for several seconds, besides swiveling her head and staring blankly at me.

There were no tears, stifled or open, but I saw that austere shell wanting to crack, to rend apart like continents. I didn’t know what she exactly thought of me because I had stayed far away from her mind, holding to professional ethics like a doctor, because I had held similar power.

However, some thought pickups are unavoidable. After years of practice a mind becomes so sensitive that thoughts pass as scents through the air. Her thoughts were one resounding crash across the ether. All her pictures of marriage, children, old age; all were now banished to the recesses of memory. I knew it was not some fleeting infatuation. It had been a deep abiding, a calm that she had found someone she could call her own. All of that in one mental scream.

So I said nothing. She turned into the corner where the seat met the cabin and wedged her face into the crevice. Nothing console her, save time and the Almighty himself.

That dichotomy, of frailty and a vague shimmer of greater purpose, has always perplexed me and even been a burr in my faith. I see the vast failings human kind, but those same fallen souls can show what their Creator meant them to be.

That thought was a dividing point between the angst of this world and the answer to shout back into it’s darkness. Mind you, while I admire Ghandi and Martin Luther King and others of their ilk, I could not call myself a pacifist. ?Turn the other cheek.? and the surrounding passage are the foundation of that philosophy in modern times (not including it’s older forms), whether it’s practitioners were Christian or not, but the emphasis to the exclusion of any defense of self or others has always seemed a casualty of logic and man’s want to make Scripture fit his sentiments.

But I was old enough now to know the profound ambiguity of fallen worlds and that the Creator is not one of camps of thought, but one who lays all bare in a harsh and perfect light. I new that war would not serve His will.

We were still going to Saint Paul, but with a very different goal now…

Actually we were headed to Minneapolis. I stopped on the outskirts and got everyone out. We moved in groups of three and four until we met in the center of town, near an RF transmitter.

So I stretched out before, as with the street lamps, modulating the signal into a tinny series of clicks and long strikes that make up morris code. The travel outward, bouncing off the ionosphere into the distance and sending ham radio operators into confusion.

I gave it half an hour and a black van pulled to the curb, the door sliding open with practiced timing. A hand slid out of the interior shadow and beckoned us forward into the cabin. I waved everyone in.

The van meandered out of the city to an outlying farm town. We pulled up to a row of large and weathered grain silos. Our hooded friends pushed us out and pointed at a small shed as they took the van down the gravel road that we had just come here on.

So we went to the shack, had the obligatory gun pointed into our faces, and were let through after a thorough frisking and what felt to me to be a mind scan. Then we went through a hatch buried in the dirt of the shack floor. We ended up inside the silos and there, in the center of a rather oddly shaped interior, sat a man in fatigues chewing on a cigar and looking around a vast table at other faces. As we approached he turned to us.

?Where’s Cavalier??

It wasn’t a question that could be answered lightly and a smarmy response might earn a certain measure of backlash. I answered him (known as Patriot, from what I overheard) the only way I knew how.

?I killed him.?

?Bound to happen sooner or later.?

His expression matched his words, something of regret mixed with relief.

?He was a good recon source, but the guy had screws loose…Anyway, what the hell are you doing here risking lives? If you’re the knew cell leader, then you should be turning around and getting back into the field. Chicago is going to be nearly impossible to get you back into for at least a year. We might send you to New York–?

?No.?

He definitely didn’t like being interrupted.

?What?! I run things. I put this resistance together and I am sure as hell not taking orders from some punk kid–?

?I am far older than you think. And I am here to end this all, not to take orders. If you want to ally with me in my cause than I welcome it, but you are merely an obstacle if you don’t.?

I kept my palms open and my arms at my sides, just to keep the tension from boiling over. I wasn’t here for territory, but a goal, and I wanted his help.

So he put the cigar down and said, ?Fine. Show me I’m wrong.?

I laid it out. Each cell would gather like minded civilians to volunteer. Only enough to fulfill the purpose. No more. Each civilian group would fly out to Washington D.C., with people taking different flights at staggered times. I needed, minimum, one million people.


Slowly, and though much criticism of everyone there, I pounded the concept home and his face went from scowl to something akin of a parade rest. Then he spoke.

?All right, damn it, we’re going to do this. Get you’re sorry hides on the line. I wanted this done yesterday.?

Turns out we had our numbers, and quite a few offers to uncover gun catches and circulate them. I held firm and we declined.

So we flew to Washington in twos and threes and the Deltas followed in buses (the air transit system was too closely monitored for fugitives and suspected revolutionaries). We gathered as small groups in alleys and along streets in D.C., using a hand gesture easily missed to those not looking for it. From there we clumped and grew into the larger and larger groups, some times stringing for blocks or even a mile. We converged at 1600 along parallel streets and then pushed inward. This took about forty five minutes. Above Deltas handled the Primers and air power being assembled against the mass of humanity.

I won’t say that there weren’t casualties and much blood ran that day, but the sheer number of us caught the security goons off guard and the real Secret Service simply prevented him from being hurt, escorting him into the street for us and marching him to the Capitol building where a joint session of Congress was held to formally impeach him that night. He was held under citizen’s arrest until the morning, when he was put before one of the few federal judges left on the bench of the Supreme Court (a man in his nineties) and we held a jury trial, gathering random people from the street as jurors, though some were ready to lynch him. It was November of ‘99, so we had elections to commence.

I endorsed Patriot as President, being now well known after the Revolution. He won by a slim margin, showing that the country still suffered vestigial Delta hatred. I took I took Chief of Staff of the Army, purged the officer Corps and patched up the command structure as best as I could before as I could before commencing new NATO exercises and sending a massive surplus of weaponry to the UK and Scandanavia (the only two regions to honor their NATO obligations). That ticked off the Soviets enough to finally bring war, which we won, but not with out our losses. The Franco-German lead European Federation wanted in on the occupation and half my time was split between administering relations between post Soviet states turned neo-Octoberist democracies and keeping the Eurocorps troops on their side of the border.

I restored Annalise to her thrown, taking her cousin by the collar throwing him in the closest prison. She never did marry and I didn’t know exactly. I knew it couldn’t be just because of me, but i also couldn’t help feeling that I had a role to play. Early on I gave her a vial of my blood.

?In this lies the secret of what I am. If you use it you will never die, but you will also never have a place to call home. You will meet others who share the same with you. We may even meet again.?

After going through ten Presidencies as Chief of Staff of the Army and watching the colonies on Mars and the Moon reach five digits each, I retired. I got blindsided by a meteor while doing some high atmosphere flying and that was all she wrote…