Chapter One

When I think back to how I got to be where, and what, I am now I find it difficult to believe, even though I lived through every minute of it.

My story starts back in 1942 when I was the present my father gave to my mother the day he enlisted in the army. The fact that they had not married was beside the point as far as he was concerned. He went off and was trained at great expense to the country, shipped to England and stopped a bullet as he walked off of a landing craft on a French beach. I suppose that this was a result of the training not having live fire to get one used to keeping low.

Of course, this left my mother having to fend for herself and her baby as best she could. She did get through it, named me Marvin and raised me, schooled me and kissed me when, in 1960, I told her that I had enlisted myself. Well, except for maths and languages, I was a washout at school and the army was a steady job post-war. By that time it was a bit after the Korean conflict and I was posted to the Far East after my basic training. In Vietnam I was sent to General Staff to be the driver of one of the headquarters staff and soon found myself travelling all over the place with him in the back. I picked up enough French to get by with road signs the remnants of the French colonial days, as well as snippets of Vietnamese and other languages that flew around in that whirlpool.

I became very interested in tactics and troop deployment strategies and spent many hours with the General discussing things with me, just so he could pass away the boredom of travel. When my tour was over I was returned home as Sergeant Marvin and was sent to one of the bases near Washington. Here I was introduced to computers for the very first time; great hulks as big as wardrobes and stacked one behind the other in a big room. This was where we kept records of our numbers and where everyone was. I was given the job of punching the IBM cards that kept this monster breathing and started to follow the ways that computers thought.

In 1970 I was sent back as the General had asked for me and I spent the next few years in a state of fear as things went wrong for us. It was lucky that I wasn’t sent to the front (wherever that may have been on any one day) and was one of the first to be taken out with the General and the rest of his staff. It was back to Washington and computers again.

I looked around the shops to see if I could get a computer for myself and there was only a couple to choose from at that time. I discounted the Commodore 64 and TRS80 as too plastic and spent a fair chunk of my savings on a Kaypro 2 ‘portable’. Now, when I say portable I mean that you could, if you had eaten your Wheaties in the morning, pick it up as it was close to twenty pounds. The one thing in its favour was that it had a full metal case and that figured strongly to my military mind. Paint it olive green and it would not have looked out of place in a bunker. It had just one drawback, no internal memory. I could have spent a chunk more to get the Kaypro 10 with a whole ten kb on board but suffered with having to have the operating system on one floppy (five inch – no minis then) and what you were working on with another, all 190 kb of data!

The beast ran the Z80 chip and used BASIC as the operating language that I soon learned so that I could write my own sub-routines. A few years on I was introduced to FORTRAN which changed everything and caused me to swap the trusty Kaypro for something a bit more modern. As I reached the end of my twenty five years in the army I was approached by a guy from a new company that had been contracted by the government to write software for the military with a focus on training and strategy. I went from being in the army to working for the army and started my career in computing in 1985. I was, by now, a mature forty plus year old with a good job and a pension so, of course, I stopped looking after myself.

By 1995 I was heading a department that specialised in military simulations for training and war games. I had done well and was looking forward to my early retirement, vowing to take more exercise then to rid me of my paunch. Years of pizza and beer had taken its toll. It was then that my life changed.

I was flying from Silicon Valley to Washington for a meeting at the Pentagon and we were somewhat west of Kansas City when a bright light enveloped the company jet and I felt a strange sense of unworldliness before everything went black. I woke again sitting in a sort of chair with three ‘things standing in front of me. I suppose that being confronted by three ‘little green men’ of the fantasy comics would not be good for anyone; but for me, my overloaded heart said enough was enough and I felt an intense pain in my chest and along my arm before everything went black again and I knew, as I faded, that I, Marvin, was no more.

Oddly enough, I woke up again. This time lying on a bed, securely fastened so that nothing moved. When the beings came into view I didn’t feel frightened or worried this time as one stood over me and looked me up and down. It started talking in gibberish but, within a couple of minutes, I started to understand it. It was telling me not to worry as everything was all right, over and over again, and when it saw comprehension in my eyes it stopped and went from my view. Then it, or another – who could tell them apart – stood over me and gave me the news of where, and what, I was now.

Firstly it told me that I was on a spaceship, something it didn’t take Einstein to figure out. Then it told me that I had been captured in order to transfer my knowledge to a person who was just starting out in a computing job but a problem had come up. That person, on seeing them, had gone quite mad and they had to take drastic action. I was now in their body as my own had died of a heart attack. They told me that the company jet, along with the pilots and my body, had been released back into the air over the Badlands without power and would have crashed soon after. So Marvin was dead, who was I now?

They then told me that the person I now was had been heading for an interview at a company I knew of in Silicon Valley. This company wrote video games and the person I now was would be hoping to start there because of her good computing skills. Her!!!! They then told me that I was now in the body of Shirley Wilson, a twenty year old from Phoenix who had been transported, along with her camper van, from a secluded camp site near San Bernardino and that when my training was over, I would be returned to that spot with the camper as there was still nearly a week before the interview. I realised then that I did feel different in my body and that I felt young and fit again.

They then outlined their strategy. It seemed that they had been sent to our universe to seek out war-mongering worlds and destroy them, not by force but by subterfuge. They, themselves, were not a warlike race and that the three I had seen was the entire invading army. They had monitored my research and development from out in space and had decided that my mind was the best one for their means, not that they thought that I would still be attached to it.

It was Shirley who was the point of the exercise and I was just to be the knowledge base for her attack on mankind. I found my voice, strange that it was, and asked how one girl could bring down a world and they told me that it would be through video games that trained children to be merciless killers without thought of the consequences and that, when they gave the word, the entire world would be busy killing each other to the point that they only needed to mop up afterwards. One hell of a plan!

They then told me that I would black out for a while and, when I woke, I would have Shirleys’ memories and knowledge (but not her personality as that had been removed as insane) along with my own knowledge and would be at the camp site ready to move on to my destiny. I was also reminded that I was now their soldier and that I would obey their orders without question.

Marianne G 2020