[Spaceman's Story 04] • Deja Vu

I’d had a few years since my visit to Taes to get used to my new life and family. Two wives and two daughters made life a lot more complicated than I’d imagined, but having my own custom-built starship sort of made up for that. I was expecting some retaliation from Julie, the head of the Bree council, for the last stunt I pulled, but for some reason she was being nice to me. That scared me more than anything. I could only assume she was taking a little time to plan her revenge properly. Of course, everyone else just thought I was being paranoid. Well, it had been proven in the past that I was usually right, so was I really paranoid?

Since I was first abducted by the aliens, I’d had an issue with reality. If I analyzed my current situation logically, it seemed that it was more likely that I’d had some sort of mental breakdown that day and all this space travel and alien nonsense was just that, nonsense. The only problem with that sort of thinking was it didn’t seem to make any difference. I mean, who is the crazy one? The person who doubts reality as they perceive it, or the one who simply accepts it? I found it just best to go with the flow. In the immortal words of the great twentieth-century philosopher George Costanza, “It's not a lie... if you believe it.” If reality was a variable and not a constant, so be it. That’s why God invented alcohol.

So, I had decided to simply accept the current reality I found myself in. I had resisted the Collective’s attempt to get us more involved in the happenings of the unaligned worlds, but as time passed, it was obvious that my resistance was futile. When friends on these worlds asked for our assistance, it just wasn’t in our nature to refuse them. This of course made me and all the other members of the Ranger teams even bigger targets for our adversaries in the region. We had become the Collective’s de facto galactic police force whether we wanted to be or not. Julie was offering us all sorts of help since this was a bigger task than we were prepared for. Her help just made me that much more paranoid, and as paranoid as I was, I never saw it coming.