Preface

What Came Before

Subtitled -
How to condense more than 861,500 words into less than a chapter!

Alternate universes exist. I know that, and some of our scientists have proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I know this because there are alternate versions of me out there, with variations on my powers and skills. Some of them are, politely, lame people. Some of them are megalomaniacs. I’m somewhere in between.

This is the third volume of my autobiography. If you haven’t read the first two volumes, I highly recommend it. I think the author’s a nice guy. But if you don’t have time, not a problem. Here’s the short and dirty.

A brief (!) synopsis of Book One:

I was born on a planet twenty-seven light years from Earth. I’ve tried to convert things into common Earth measurements, based upon the area of Earth where I ... finished growing up, basically. So, inches, pounds, feet, miles. I screwed up several times in converting things, including my initial age. My planet had a year equivalent to 443 Earth days. So, when a rogue white dwarf star got too close to my home planet, and my parents stuffed me into an experimental rocket ship, I was fourteen years old at home. I spent some time in suspended animation, and was revived by the ship’s computer just before my ship would have landed in Kansas.

The problem with that landing was radar saw my ship coming in, so I took over manual controls and ended up crashing in an abandoned salt mine shaft near Hutchinson, Kansas, in the United States of America. My ship was damaged, but I wasn’t hurt. Actually, I ended up with a lot of abilities that no one ever had before, that I was aware of. Speed such that I can run a mile in less than a second, vision such that I could see a fly on a twig a mile away, strength such that I can pick up multiple tons, flight, laser and heat vision, and seemingly invulnerable skin.

Of course, I didn’t know all of that at first, or how all of it worked. (Still working on how it works, actually.) I wanted to stay hidden. That didn’t last long, when I kicked up a huge cloud of dust running, and was found by a widowed farmer and his daughter. Since I wasn’t that tall, and obviously still young, they thought I fell off a circus train or something like that. I was trying to keep my abilities hidden, which also didn’t last long when I screwed up and exposed my abilities to Harry and Beth.

Harry had one thing going for him. He’d been crapped on by the system after his wife died, so he had slightly ambiguous morals. Beth figured that I could become the big man at her school, and the kids there wouldn’t treat her like they had been. Net result is I figured out how to find some buried Spanish treasure, and we sold some of it for a lot of money.

Enter Judge Elroy T. Bannister into my life.

I probably can’t say enough good about Elroy. He and Harry’s father had served in World War Two together. Elroy came home with a LOT of money, used it to help improve the city, and set himself up as the feudal baron of Reno County, Kansas. Over the thirty-nine years since the end of World War Two, Elroy had grown in power such that the Governor, both Senators, and all the representatives owed him their jobs.

Harry called Elroy, told him that I was the offspring of a deceased cousin of his, and all of my records were lost. Elroy is an honest politician. That means when he is bought, he stays bought. Bribing him with two pounds of gold didn’t hurt things. Elroy made all of the documents that I’d need to enroll in school and get all of the identification I’d need. In doing so, he ‘corrected’ my age to sixteen. I should have been made seventeen, but I messed up the math.

Politely, I really am a super-genius, but with some of my screw-ups you’d wonder. I also am slightly faster than a page-at-a-glance reader, and I have a perfect memory. Harry had a large collection of science fiction books, plus the psychology books from his late wife. I also found out that power is an aphrodisiac, meaning that Beth and I found out that our species are physically compatible.

We also found out that my sperm can ‘jump start’ certain abilities in Earth girls, too, as Beth and I ended up mentally linked.

I started school and had my first run-in with an authority figure, the assistant principal. He ended up getting fired, then tried to attack Beth, Harry, and me. If a police officer hadn’t had an emergency kit to do a tracheotomy, he would have died. That’s when I found out I could move faster than a speeding bullet, because I caught the ones that had been fired at us in my bare hands.

Since I was coming into school late, the principal decided to see if I had any athletic abilities. The Hutchinson High School football team (the Salthawks) weren’t that good. I’d never played before, but this was an opportunity for me to show off for my girlfriend. Turns out I qualified as the Varsity Quarterback. It also turned out from other testing that I was too smart for high school, but the law said I had to attend at least some classes. But I also could take classes at the local community college, at the same time.

Beth and her two lifelong friends, Dora and Eve, were outcasts at the school. I rather quickly ended up dating all of them, which irritated a few people. One of the football team decided he’d redecorate a wall with my face. I moved, and he broke his fist. A bit later, someone started a rumor that I was homosexual, so a former member of the football team decided to come out to Harry’s house and attack us. I broke his arm, and was simply holding him when a police officer showed up. I may have pushed him at the police officer while waving a tire iron, so that took care of that issue permanently.

Harry ended up reconnecting with his old high school girlfriend, Emily Miller, who was vice-president of the local bank, when we started my checking and investment accounts. Due to some various things ... like Emily ending up pregnant ... I told her the truth about me. Since Dora, Eve, and Beth were all planning on moving into a modular home with me in the near future, we had to get parental permission.

Neither set of parents were happy, but the minor detail that I had also gone out and found another lost Spanish treasure, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, took care of most of their objections. It was now mid September, and I’d already played in and we’d won two football games. A lot of people were realizing that our Hutchinson Salthawk football team was going places. I also managed to salvage my spaceship and fix the computer that had safely brought me here.

Things changed for me on Earth shortly after that. Terrorists in Beirut blew up the US Embassy Annex building, and Eve’s brother was injured in that attack. I grew up under a different moral and ethical code than Earth. I made sure that things were under control at home, then put together an outfit and flew to Beirut, destroying where the terrorists had trained, and also attacking their sponsor in Iran. My powers had increased considerably, so it was quite easy to blow up lots of their military gear and kill their soldiers.

Then I came home and we won the next football game. Harry and Emily had gone on their honeymoon, so Elroy tried to be sneaky and set me up with some investment people. That included his own niece, Margie. She had an MBA from Wharton and was 25 years old. She also had an issue, in that she was so smart, men didn’t interest her. Until she met me. Literally two hours after meeting her, she was in the barn hayloft with me, fell in love with me, and was moving in with us that night.

We set up a company called CEDEM, Financial, because Elroy and his best friend from the war, Earl O’Connor, were planning on retiring. Elroy realized that with my money, I could help Reno County and Kansas like he had been doing. There was an incident at a Ponderosa restaurant, where Elroy’s daughters found out they were bastards, because Elroy was rendered sterile in the war. He only had Margie and Emily as his family to inherit, and Earl had no one because his son had died in Vietnam. They dumped it all onto me.

Under my moral code, I realized that there was only one way to make sure that my kids, when they grew up, would have a safe world, and that was to end the war. I created the Messenger from Above, went to Iran and Iraq, and pretty much destroyed most of their air forces and navies. I also left a mark in Switzerland, in front of their embassies, to end the fighting.

The minor detail that I got caught on camera freaked out a lot of people. I finally told Elroy the truth about me, and we came up with a plan where I’d go to New York City and make a demonstration at the United Nations. I flew there, called the media that I was going to appear at the UN Building, picked up two cops that were just doing their jobs, and burned a lot of marks in front of the UN Building to ‘End the Fighting’.

There was a networking company just getting started up out of Stanford University, called Cisco Systems. I wrote some software so they could be about ten years ahead of their competition. I also had millions of dollars sitting in the bank, so I invested in them. There was another company near Seattle, named Microsoft. I wrote a full spreadsheet program for them, and made it compatible with Macintosh products, not just regular IBM based PCs. And a young lady, Marcia, that was working for Microsoft has a similar response to me as Margie.

We figured that we’d need some security, and the head of Microsoft Security got us set up with the best in the business. How good they really were, I wouldn’t know until much later.

Eve’s father has a psychotic breakdown because he can’t handle that I have this much money and power.

As the Messenger from Above, I flew to Afghanistan and destroyed their poppy fields, and told the Soviet Army it was time to take their toys and go home. I made a bit of a mark in Moscow by destroying Lenin’s Tomb in about four seconds flat. I also told the head of the Soviet Union to tell Israel to plan for a meeting in Tel-Aviv between them and the leaders of the nations they were having issues with.

Syria decided they didn’t want to play, so I pretty much took care of them, including their hidden poison gas factories. I showed them I wasn’t playing around when someone tried to assassinate the leader of Lebanon. I think that crushing a rifle into a small cube, as well as throwing the assassin into the sea from ten miles away may have influenced their decision to believe in peace.

I’d also been busy buying land, because I’d taken some knowledge from my home planet and made two things. The first was a wind turbine that used magnetic bearings and would be more efficient than anything here on the planet, and the second was a chemical my Dad had created for his rocket science. I wanted to help Hutchinson and Reno County, since under my code of ethics, this was my home and as the leader of the home, it was my job to care for everyone.

I took a night off and flew to Pakistan, freeing Benazir Bhutto from captivity and making a bit of an impression that arguing with me would have fatal results. I used my heat vision and incinerated more than half the Pakistani government.

Our football team had continued the winning streak, and I was being considered possibly the best high school quarterback in the country. Some people in town weren’t happy with our lifestyle. The Baptist Preacher had been against us for quite some time, and he ended up attacking the girls and me. When I broke their legs and otherwise unmanned them, in pain, the Preacher confessed he’d been running a child molesting ring. That brought all sorts of attention to the town, so to help keep the negative publicity out of the national news, I visited China, threatened them, and then destroyed the North Korean military.

Keep in mind that meant at one point, I picked up a Soviet destroyer from out of a North Korean Harbor where they’d been trying to refuel to comply with my orders, flew it through the air a few miles, then put it back down into the sea.

At this point, I figured it was time to deal with Washington, so I flew there as the Messenger. That’s when I found out another reason Earth was so much like my former home. There was a memorial to those lost in Vietnam. I found that I could speak with the souls of the dead that were inhabiting that memorial. I went to the White House, picked up President Reagan, and brought him back to the Wall, so he would hear and hopefully beat some sense in to Congress.

Back at home, we met with people from Siemens AG, and they agreed to build a factory to make turbines in Hutchinson. I also got to meet Leon Hess and Lamar Hunt, and watch a professional football game.

Remember I said my semen helped improve Beth? It’d done the same with all of the girls, because we were having a good sex life. It also helped make all three of the younger girls much smarter, such that they were able to test out of the rest of high school, so they were starting community college as well. We all took the SAT and ACT tests, because I knew where I wanted to actually go to college.

Eve’s brother, SJ (Stephen, Junior), had been home on medical leave. He’d figured out that I was the Messenger. He thought I would kill him to protect my secret. I told him what I felt. Cal was me, and the Messenger was the secret identity. We had more money coming in, so I put SJ in charge of finding us some airplanes.

China decided that since the Messenger had said that each nation was in charge of its own borders that Taiwan was part of them, so they attacked. I showed them the error of their ways, destroying some of their attacking forces, then laying waste to about a ten mile wide swath of the country, killing more than ten million Chinese in a few seconds. I also destroyed their government. That’s when I flew to the Moon and sculpted the surface there with my mark to quit screwing around and listen to me.

After that, I talked to the government of Germany, briefly, then flew home. That was just in time to fly in an airplane to California, to meet with the people from Intel about their computer chips, and meet the people of Stanford. I took the MCAT and LSAT, passed both of those with perfect scores, and we made arrangements to live there.

We also met Marcia’s attorney, Leonard Poulson. It turns out that he knew Elroy from after the war. And Marcia was already wealthy, because her father had been the best pyrotechnics man in Hollywood. Marcia had inherited his skills, too. After an evening dinner chatting with Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, and Patrick Wayne, among others, we came back to Hutchinson. One of the things that Marcia had brought back to Kansas with her was some jewelry her father had found in a cave in Europe.