World 31: They Live

CHRONICLE TWO: RISE OF THE BENEFACTOR

JUMP 33: WHOOPS, NO THEY DON’T

Previously: Hack the Gibson

Themesong: Countdown by Deltron 3030

“Oh… my… god…,” I gasped as the previous decade ended and I took stock of the state of my warehouse. “I… Dear lord… how many of these things are there? How the hell did I get this many FIGMAS?” The warehouse was swimming in them! I didn’t even know who half those girls were… and I have a memory palace larger than the fucking Pentagon! At some point in the last decade I apparently thought it was a good idea to have a throne made entirely of Figmas in lexan boxes. I had someone make a giant life-sized Figma of myself… made out of broken or malformed bits of Figma! If there were multiple ways to set up the same figma… I had all the combinations. I had fourteen… fourteen! shipping containers full of unopened Figmas! Why? Because I didn’t have time in jump to build them all.

“Oh… my… me… I…. no…. Best not to think about it…” I shuddered, trying to figure out how I was going to deal with the armies of small cute things that covered nearly every flat surface of the center of the warehouse, or the massive area I’d set aside for what looked like the largest action figure set-piece battle ever. There were some sixty-four thousand magical girls, mecha-musume, or fantasy babes posed in a megabrawl all around a giant black pig. I giant black pig that I had to remind myself was, in fact, a doomsday device painted to look like a big black piggy. Why did I have a doomsday device painted to look like a black pig?! And why, exactly, do I seem to have stolen Index’s habit? Where did all these stuffed animals come from!? So much of my memory of the last jump didn’t make logical sense, and I wasn’t just talking about the Esper stuff.

Looking back through my memories, it seemed that I’d done things that were cute simply because they might be cute! It made no sense at all. I’d been a being of logic even when I’d been prepubescent the first time… well, at least as any kid really can be. I liked logic. It was logical, it made sense! I didn’t do stuff like… like… like Twin Cannon Sister did. She was… moe. Soooo moe. My brain hurt. I needed coffee… all the coffee… and porn. And sex… and… I hadn’t had sex in a decade. That, clearly was the problem. A human deprived of sex for too long became a moe-taku… that explained Japan all too well.

It took me a full three weeks to decompress after that massive shock to the system and by the end of that period we were completely out of Romulan Ale. Fuck. I clearly needed a TNG jump to restock… and also to get a Replicator. TOS’s fabricators and food synthesizers were okayish… but they were big and clunky and not seventy years advanced like TNG would be… no matter how much I upgraded them.

Sure, Maegi Technology was advanced enough to make the Culture look like primitive screwheads, let alone the Federation of the TNG era, but matter replication like Star Trek used was based on transporter technology… and the Maegi had never cracked that particular piece of clark-tech… at least not to the point of complex matter creation. I wasn’t certain it was actually possible without Trek-Tech or divine asspull. I could upgrade a TOS synthesizer as much as I wanted, but something was missing. It never got good enough to make food that tasted anything close to fresh, and when I handed over the tech to the Maegi, they told me it was a dead end… clearly something was stopping me from abusing Treknobabbler to the fullest.

The same thing had happened when I’d tried to upgrade my warp nacelles to Transwarp technology, or use treknobabbled equations to slingshot around a star and back into the past. It was as if there was a limit to how much I could abuse Trek-Tech, and if it hadn’t existed in TOS I couldn’t do build it. The time travel lockout seemed to be a totally different issue, as the Maegi hadn’t been able to crack that either and every attempt to use my Tech Tree power had resulted in hellacious migraines rather than a step by step guide to a working time machine. 

I pegged it to having to deal with the actual laws of physics whenever I wasn’t using technology that was stolen from a given setting. For instance, I couldn’t build a working Mass Relay since I didn’t have any Eezo, but I could build Omni-tools because they were theoretically possible bits of hardlight technology. As for Pokeballs and Pokeboxes? Not a chance. The technology made no sense. Replica Rayspheres? No luck. Zords? Not using the Sentai-Tech. Essentially, if I or one of my crew hadn’t bought something that allowed use of the local technology, it couldn’t be exported into universes with different / standard technology rules. Treknobabbler could only stretch things so far, it seemed.

But Maegi Tech? Seemed to work just fine, what little of it I could replicate without a titanically vast multi-galactic empire to produce. I hadn’t thought about just how much I’d need Maegi tools… but then again, I hadn’t been able to take anything I hadn’t paid cold hard CP for out of that particular challenge… probably the Banker doing an end run against me trying to keep my entire empire. I’d been above material things as the Manifest God-King.

Seriously, the Maegi had had millenia to build some of that stuff. I had had just under four centuries since then, and I’d been busy. Even building the tools to build the tools to build the tools needed to construct hyperstructures took decades of matter manipulation. Super-tensile substrates don’t grow on trees unless you’ve spend thousands of generations rebuilding the tree’s genome practically from the ground up. Maybe the next jump would offer some much needed downtime someplace sane enough and with resources enough for me to do some teching up of my warehouse tech base.

And speaking of the next jump, I finally took a look at the new Vending Machines of Doom. The logo stirred something in my memories. “They Live?” I muttered, then laughed. “They… Live! Ha! Note to self, do not run out of bubblegum!” John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ was an eighties-era B-grade sci-fi movie starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, in which a homeless wanderer finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the alien race that has infiltrated earth and replaced all signs and advertisements with subliminal brainwashing terms like ‘Consume’, ‘Conform’, ‘Submit’, and ‘Obey’. Asskicking ensues.

“What?” Zane asked, looking up from the puppet show that Francine was putting on nearby. She was using some of my Figmas and a small part of me wanted to scream at her that they weren’t toys damnit… but I controlled myself and quashed that impulse.

“Zane!” I said, dropping down next to him on the grass. “Speed Run!”

“What?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow at me. He was, oddly, in his Lucario form, something he very seldom wore. Kendra was also not with him. They must have spent the last three weeks making up for lost shagging time to the point where they were taking a break from each other… or they’d had another fight.

I pushed that away, knowing that Zane would eventually tell me all together more than I’d wanted to know about whatever the situation was. “I betcha we can resolve this jump in a week,” I chirped happily. “Speed Run!”

He paused, considered, then grinned and extended one paw. “You’re on, tiny!”

Of course, I had only the seed of an idea; the exact details would depend on what I could buy and the actual state of the world, but I was pretty confident that I could do a better job than a muscle-bound numbskull (no offence to Mr. Piper, but his character (Nada) wasn’t the brightest torch in the lynch-mob. Any plan would have to start at the beginning, or rather, with Origins… in this case called Backgrounds. There were four; the first two of which were Drop-In (of course) and Drifter, which might as well be Drop-In version two point oh, at least if you’re ‘Merican. Which I had been, once upon a time. Drifter seriously didn’t really give one much more than a reason to be homeless in California in 1988, at the cost of a hundred Choice.

The other Backgrounds were Alien and Human Sympathizer… Yeah, no. I was not going to be one of those fuggly aliens even if the choice was free, and being a race traitor? And not in the made up KKK / Nazi way of betraying the so-called ‘white race’ but an actual traitor to the human race ?No thanks. Fuck that, and fuck them. Anyone who would literally sell out their own family / species / nation / planet to an alien force which would enslave them deserves a very long drop while attached to a much shorter rope. That one had to pay two-hundred or a hundred-and-fifty Choice for either privilege just made me hate the idea even more.

Drop-In or Drifter it was, and with not much difference on the front end, I’d have to check the discounts to figure out which was worth more… “Huh,” I grunted as the screen flickered. In all my jumps, that was the first time the VMoD had glitched even a little bit. “Odd,” I muttered as the letters reassembled themselves into their proper places and the screen reverted back to normal. “Whatever…” A quick comparison of perk-trees made it clear that there really wasn’t a question of which was better. Drifter had a freebie that I didn’t already have, and Drop-In didn’t even have a capstone perk. So, Drifter it was.

That freebie I mentioned was called ‘Situational Sharpness’, and while it wasn’t much (the ability to come up with the perfect insult, joke, or comment for whatever situations I found myself in, as well as a guarantee that I’d never lose my cool and always look like a badass when I needed to), it wasn’t a parkour skill I already had.

Being a Drifter also came with Bubblegum that was described as “Obligatory Bubblegum. Might run out. Refills after kicking ass or an act of badassery.” which made me laugh, and  the ‘Special Sunglasses’ that could pierce through the aliens’ disguise field, a feature I was fairly certain I’d be able to pretty easily reverse engineer. The part of the glasses that I probably wouldn’t be able to retro-engineer was that these glasses would pierce through any form of high tech or magical disguise or cloaking technology. Wouldn’t punch through, say, someone wearing a basic mask, but anything that tried to tamper with the visual information my eyes were seeing? Not a problem.

Unfortunately, the sunglasses also turned the viewed world monochrome and inflicted brutal headaches… and weren’t exactly subtle if you were wearing them indoors. They also weren’t x-ray specs. However, I could ignore pain, and by importing VIctoria into the glasses, I could use their effect with the hard-light constructs or omni-gel contact lenses without needing the incredibly unstylish sunglasses.

To augment the utility side of my operations greatly, I bought the Human Elite (race traitor) freebie perk ‘Incredible Wealth’ for a hundred Choice, bringing me down to eight-hundred. Sure, money wasn’t exactly an issue, since I had largely unlimited resources, a steady supply of food, a home with no bills or taxes (more than one, actually), and more media than I could consume in even a life as long as mine… but money has utility over and above making one secure and comfortable, and as tool, it was practically without equal… if you had the right currency. Incredible Wealth neatly did an endrun around the need for money changes… or working. Effectively, it gave me a constant income that would be directly deposited into my warehouse once every in-jump year… and any money that had been deposited into this ‘First Bank of Warehouse’ would be automatically converted to the local currency upon withdrawal. That was a most excellent use of points.

I also (after another glitch, stupid machine) snatched up the highest value perks from the Drop-In and Drifter Lines, since both sounded useful. The DI’s ‘Brainwash-Proof’ only cost me four-hundred Choice, but made me immune to alien propaganda and, as expected, made brainwashing me impossible. Resistances were always nice… Immunities sooo much better. The Drifter’s ‘Hero Sense’ cost me another three-hundred, but it was a small price to pay for a kind of sixth-sense for when ‘shit’ was about to ‘hit the fan’, allowing me to react accordingly and (at the very least) move in just the right way at just the right time to avoid a backstab, betrayal, ambush, or impending disaster.

That left me with a hundred Choice, which made me hmmm as I stared at the screen with a slightly fixed expression as I ran the numbers in my head.  Deciding that I needed more Choice, I tabbed over to the Drawback Section.

This prompted Zane, who was leaning over my shoulder, to ask, “You’re not  seriously going to take drawbacks, are you?”  

To which I replied, “Oh. yes I am!”

Zane, aghast, half-whined, “Whyyyyyy?  You’ve already got every we need!”

“Because, Zane old boy,” I said, barely able to keep myself from laughing, “you’re coming in with me… plus, this scenario is bean and toast. We need to ramp up the difficulty!” I thrust a fist airward as if declaring my defiance of overly simplistic jumps.

“Nooooo…” he moaned. “Stupid movie is stupid!” I’d subjected him to the entire memory-movie via telepathy, which is both a neat trick and kinda creepy, depending on how one looked at it.

“Zane, that’s what I love about you…” I said, patting his hand on my shoulder. “Thousands of years old and you’re still a duffus.” Of course, sometime early on in Raildex World, I’d hit my 13,000th year as a jumper, and I’d been busy obsessing over plastic miniatures and animal ear hoodies, so I wasn’t exactly one to talk, but least hypocrisy has never really bothered me.

Hypocrisy comes in four main flavors: Least, Lesser, Greater, and Greatest. Least is when one teases others affectionately for failings one also possesses, and is largely sardonic. Lesser is when one believes that something is ethically or morally wrong while still doing it one’s self. It is one of the humorous and perhaps sad things about humanity that one can be completely ernest in believing, say, that eating meat is ethically wrong, while still being unable to stop oneself from doing so. Greater Hypocrisy was the real trouble, the true evil. That would be when one espoused a belief system that one didn’t believe in. Such people were a danger to society; liars, cheats, and bastards the lot of them. But if they were evil, there was a category that was even worse; The Greatest Hypocrite was one who earnestly believed such actions were wrong for others, but perfectly acceptable for themself. Megalomaniacs, tyrants, and madmen, they were the worst of an already bad lot. Such people were, incidentally, the kind of people who belonged to the Human Elite faction.

Zane, not being interested in the nuances of treason or hypocrisy, glowered at me as I selected ‘Bollywood Fighting’ (+100), because a) hilariously long fights are funny and b) because absolutely no one in this world was going to be stronger than me. He fumed as I picked up ‘Sudden Realism’ (+200) which promised to add drama… like running out of bullets at the worst possible time. Then he got down right pissed when I took ‘They Know’ (+400) which would make the Aliens aware of my true identity or at least suspect it in some way, and know what my plans, in general, were.

“I thought we were going for speed run here,” he growled.

“We are!” I chirped, unreasonably pleased with myself.

“EssJay!” he snapped. “You just bought the thing that lets the genocidal alien menace know that we’re coming to kill them and free the Earth from them!”

“Yeah?” I asked, shrugging. “Good! They will know I encompass their doom!” I growled, no longer chipper. “Fifteen minutes Zane. How fast do you really think an alien race that has to resort to stealth conquest and recruiting collaborators really can get their collective asses into gear? Because I’m betting that the mobilization needed to fight us off is going to take them a whole lot longer than fifteen weeks, let alone minutes. Let’s kick this anthill!”

He considered, then asked, “Won’t their basic emergency planning slow us down a bit?”

“Really?” I replied, arching an eyebrow as I regarded him. “You’ve seen the movie. These Alien idiots got taken down by Rowdy Roddy Piper and some sunglasses. We could cakewalk this scenario and be home in time for tea without some conflict.”

“I’d actually seen it before. AJ and I caught it on cable in Buffyworld… and you’re mental.” He sighed. “But I guess you might have a point.”

“Yes… well… it’s true that I’m mental,” I said, waving a hand at all the figurines still decorating far too much of the warehouse. “But of course I have a point. It’s right at the tip of my nose.” I giggled and stuck my tongue out at him as he harrumphed at me.

With eight-hundred in the bank, I imported Zane for six of that. The Companion Import was silly expensive, but there wasn’t much else to buy, to be honest. Even worse than the outrageous cost, the imported companion was limited to whatever choice of background I had taken, so that made Zane a fellow Drifter… almost said fellow traveller, but while my group is remarkably communist, I don’t actually support communism. So that got him the ‘Situational Sharpness’, Bubblegum, and Sunglasses too, and he took the Brainwash-Proof as well (momma didn’t raise no dummy), and both of us picked up a useful little perk called ‘Hip Fire’ with our last two-hundred, which would allow us to aim with and fire rifles or similar weapons from hip level without sacrificing much, if any, accuracy. I mean… I’m a crack sniper and this meant that I could be a reasonably decent sniper firing a sniper rifle from my hip. The word you’re looking for is ‘Insanity’… also ‘Badass’.

So that was that, right? Well, not quite. The damned machine went down the moment that I locked in my build and it was 28 hours before Ahab and Joy could finalize theirs. What the hell was up with these glitches?! Anyway, speaking of the Lady and the Serpent, they came in as Human Elite, partly for the contacts, partly for the fact that Human Elite got not only ‘Incredible Wealth’ for free, but 100,000 dollars US as starting cash… but no bubblegum… poor them. Once again, I really wanted to throttle whoever had written a jump. Not only was the companion import stupid expensive, but that hundred k that Human Elite got? Yeah, it was an item called, I kid you not, ‘L.O.D.S.A.E.M.O.N.E’. Yes, missing the final period in addition to being a lame name. Why not just call it ‘Loads o’ Money’ if you wanted to be… never mind. To make matters so much stupider, it cost four-hundred Choice for anyone other than Human Elite, and was described as ‘a small fortune’ that automatically converted into the local currency. A hundred k hasn’t been a small fortune since 1916! That was the last time the dollar had the effective purchasing power of a late eighties million dollars. A small fortune in the year I left Origin Earth certainly wouldn’t be two hundred thousand dollars, which is, effectively, what a hundred thousand in 1988 dollars would be worth in 2015. If it seems like I’m being pedantic, maybe I am, but we were paying real Choice Points or at least sacrificing other options for an amount of money that was supposed to be a useful tool… not a marginally useful chunk of one time change. Still three yearly deposits to the group fund would be nice.

That said, I tried to request clarification… but the system went all buggy again and crashed for another three days. When it came back up, I tried again… and the system injected me straight into the Jump… or kind of.

The world went grey instead of black and there was a sound like the sky being ripped open by a badly tuned chainsaw while flights of peyote addled cherubs screamed the lyrics to every heavy metal song ever recorded through a running blender. As the sound spiked from hideously painful to so loud the atomic structure of my ears was in danger of spontaneous collapse into proto-matter, the world went greenish-orange, then I crashed, hard, into the ground… or rather, the Santa Monica Freeway.

I looked at my hands as I pried myself off the tarmac. I knew this body. I’d spent eleven months in it way back in my first century of jumping. I was back in an 80’s action movie for the first time and… I was back in the psyche of Lt. Sam Jones, LAPD, Retired. Five years had passed since I’d left Sam, who’d spent most of those years sitting on his porch and drinking beer and yelling at local gangbangers to get off his lawn.

That had lasted until a recent Earthquake had cracked the foundation of Sam’s house, causing a gas line break that had resulted in a massive fireball taking out the entire structure… and then the insurance company had found radon, and in trying to clean it up had uncovered an ancient Indian Burial ground, and so Sam had been rendered homeless as one thing after another kept his… my… home from being rebuilt. I was sixty-nine years old, and the intervening half decade had not made me any less grumpy.

I felt the full force of the drawbacks from the aborted and heavily glitched previous jump reasserting themselves, especially ‘Get Off My Lawn!’ which  had made me cranky as hell, all the time and locked my age at what it was. Twice in a row I was agelocked, just at different ends of the spectrum. Fun! And ‘One Riot, One Ranger’ meant that I had good reason to be grumpy, since I was always the one who got called when shit needed fixing. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but then again… 80’s action movies.

However, being in ‘They Live!’ meant that the third of my old drawbacks make sooo much more sense. ‘Suburban Hellhole’ had meant that the world was in a sorry state, with wars and crime rampant and guns everywhere and a steady rise in Big Brother type nonsense… not the lame TV show, the surveillance state. Of course, that too fit in entirely with the feel of John Carpenter’s weird little cult film.

Thankfully, with the negatives came positives. ‘Do You Feel Lucky’ (which boosted my intimidation factor while holding a gun, but didn’t work on non-punks, non-mooks, or non-civilians), ‘One Bullet Left’ (which gave me a final round in the chamber of any weapon once I ran out of bullets), ‘Beyond the Threshold’ (which made me sarcastic, as well as tougher and harder to kill, when being tortured), ‘Hidden Talent’ (which made me a skilled Sushi Chef), and ‘Old Age & Treachery’ (which kept me in peak physical condition no matter how old I got… which was good because I was immortal) all came roaring back in full force.

I’d lost them when the glitch that had sent me to Sam’s world instead of Bastion had been corrected… but now? Now I was rip-roaring ready to lay down the law as a grumpy, cranky, old fart. I even got my small duffle bag full of mundane tools for any one job. It was called ‘The Right Tools for the Job’, and the job could change from day to day.

When I’d been here before, my purchasing report had included a single incomprehensible line-item that had, apparently, cost eight-hundred Choice out of the 80s Action budget. There hadn’t been a description… but now there was one… once I managed to get back into the Warehouse to check the screen report. It was called ‘If it Bleeds’, and had nothing to do with the evening news. Rather than being ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ this was more in the nature of ‘if you can make it bleed, you can make it die!’

See, what it did was give me a truly unnatural talent for killing, the ability to kill things that normally didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t die. It didn’t grant me any special weapons, nor any other skills, but what it meant was that, in theory, even things like gods and immortal beings would, for some reason, lose their immunity to death while in combat with me. If I could beat them in a fight, a reasonable fair and suitably epic fight at that, I could kill them. Permanently. I couldn’t just make a wish to do the deed. There had to be a huge struggle or some dramatic tension… without one of those, it was pretty much guaranteed that I’d messed up, and that I’d very soon have a very angry (and prepared) immortal after me, looking for a rematch and not holding back at all.

So, being Sam wasn’t all bad, but I was still cranky as sin and I might have taken it out on the aliens. Thirty-seven minutes. That’s how long it took. Thirty-seven dog-be-damned minutes. I wanted my god-damned money back! We took out the ‘Alien Threat’ in less time than the movie ran. ‘Sudden Realism’ or not, ‘They Know’ or not… Thirty-Seven Mother-spanking, Cheese-Eating Surrender-Monkey MINUTES! I didn’t know whether to be offended at how easy it had been or annoyed that I’d lost the bet!

I had Zane pull Black Jenny, with AJ in the Assault Shuttle and Petra, Francy, and RayRay in the three Orion fightercraft, out of the dock while I communed with the electron flow of LA with my friendly neighborhood technology. A broadcast of that order was going to be using and beaming a non-metric fuckton of energy. I isolated it, then painted it like a christmas tree, backing up the electron flow to the point where the building was practically giving off Cherenkov radiation and watching as the building simply… came apart at the seams under the quantum pressure. The forcefields my team had bracketing the building pretty much ensured that the only casualties were Aliens, their employees, and sympathizers. Yes, yes. I’m sure some were innocent, but this was a war for the fate of humanity and the planet earth. I would mourn the dead when the planet was safe from the conquering bastards.

We, meaning me and VIvian, isolated the other regional control broadcast centers one-by-one, using their unique (and standardized) broadcast signature, taking them out with precision power surges. They weren’t as hardened as the main LA base had been, and all I wanted to do was take down the illusion grid. It was important to leave behind some seriously terrified alien assholes and their human sympathizers along with the evidence of how they’d been doing whatever it had been that they were doing.

Alien ships started lifting off from all over the planet, but my comrades were up there in high orbit, blasting the skull-faced gits to kingdom come like some bizzaro inversion of space-invaders. Meanwhile the Bosses were capturing alien techs and storing them for interrogation.

“You realize we just took all the fun out of this?” Zane commented as he commed me once the initial exodus had been vaporized.

“Zane, old boy. I did no such thing,” I replied, glowering at him, “I added fun! I didn’t subtract it!”

He snorted, then asked, “Okay? How do you figure?”

“Look, the reality of the setting is that the movie took an hour and a half to cover the events of a week or so. Even assuming RRP wasn’t around to bring down the mess, we could scarcely do worse than half-rate rebels led by a day laborer. We were always going to take down the aliens in a month or two tops… unless we fucked off to the forest and went camping for a year. Now the real fun begins.”

“What fun?” he asked, brow furrowed.

“Society is about to collapse,” I said, half grinning. “There are going to be wars, there are going to be purges and witch trials and six kinds of fucked upness. That’s why I took ‘Sudden Realism’. I wanted the world to react like… well… like the entire planetary leadership and most of the corporations and celebrities were either alien or alien conspirators. And… if we’re incredibly lucky… the aliens will try and come back!” I bit the end of my cigarette off. “And we’ll make them get off our god damned LAWN!”

Spoiler Alert. They did come back. Double Spoiler Alert, cloaked mines. Boom. Triple Spoiler Alert… I reverse engineered their teleport watches. Interesting. Portal tech… fairly sophisticated. Doubted it would work in other universes, but I stored it back in the data-banks just in case, then we stepped through onto an Alien World. Did some sightseeing, checked out the local hotspots, met interesting people… and killed them. Did some readings of the night sky, leveled a few major cities, stepped back through the gate. They didn’t have FTL. They used gates… gates with relays. Relays linked with quantum entangled bits, FTL Coms, creating and linking portals. All of it spread from a central hub-world via nearly-light-speed drone-ships.

Good system… vulnerable as hell… and they used ion drives… nice… but no match for my assault shuttle, let alone the Jenny… I should write a book… ‘How to Bring Down a Trans-Stellar Colonial Empire in Four Easy Steps!’. I loved every minute of it… especially the loads of battles that went on for too damned long. Best Drawbacks ever!

Oh, and Earth? Soooo fucking messed up when we left! Seriously! Think Africa after the colonial powers pulled out… on a global scale. Inner me wanted to do something about it… but Joy pointed out, and rightly so, that these people had just come through an era of being told what to do by aliens. Outer me just wanted everyone to go fuck themselves. And we were, appearances aside, just more aliens.

So we left them to it. All the petty squabbling and bitchery… let them worry about it… it was their birthright after all. Though I did have Joy issue a firm blanket statement than anyone who tried to turn this into an excuse to conquer or commit genocide or other atrocities would find themselves and or their countries experiencing the full brunt of Big Sister’s wrath. Big Sister was my anti-alien defense grid, and while I wasn’t going to become the world leader pretend, but, at least for the next eight years and change, that Earth was under my protection… and that meant from enemies within and without.

Want to know the worst thing about ‘They Earth’? All the movies sucked… and there weren’t any good figmas… I checked. And no damned internet… even the videogames sucked… if I hadn’t been busy killing Skullhead Aliens and drinking too much, I might have gone stir crazy. Sure sure. I got a lot of tech-work done… but all work and no challenge? Not for me. I was seriously hoping that the next jump would be a bit more… substantive.

Next: West Wing Side Story

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