9-11

by on September 11, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I went home from my new job twenty-two years ago in time to find out that a plane had hit one of the Trade Towers. I watched the second plane hit. The third at the Pentagon. The fourth in a field. I watched people jumping from the buildings. Towers collapsing. And when I went to say something on the website I was an admin at, I found my admin access revoked and the forum locked down. When I asked the other admins, they said they didn’t want Americans talking about it on their website. 9-11 will forever be a reminder to me that some people hate us enough to literally spend their lives to kill the least dangerous of us. And that others hate us enough to stop us from even talking about it. Hate makes people do crazy things. Never forget.

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Family

by on September 10, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter was mostly retired from politics and the military while I was growing up. Yeah, she would make the calls that needed called, but she wasn’t really on active duty back then. She did come back for The War though. The Space Force needed qualified people to man the defenses around Earth and the other Core Worlds, so Grandma volunteered to help out. She saw more than one Chinese or Russian invasion force show up at a world she defended. Grandma called them up, said what she was prepared to defend the world with, and asked what they wanted to attack with. An old friend from Singapore would invariably answer and they would have a nice conversation about the stellar weather. It’s amazing how many people didn’t fight over the worlds she defended.

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Family

by on September 9, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter and her counterparts from Singapore kept the lines of communication open between Russia, China, and the Western Alliance for a century and a half. Whenever things needed saying and diplomatic missions weren’t sufficient, someone would call Grandma and she would call someone else. Grandma had contacts few of the other conduits did, so she got called a fair bit. I still remember… I think it was the Christmas of ’99. She was grumpy when that call came in, but she made a call right in front of the family. We spent our Christmas dinner talking to some guy in Russia and his family, who were also enjoying a Christmas at home. Nothing exciting happened that Christmas day, or the days after. Nothing at all. It was a real quiet holiday for everybody.

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Family

by on September 8, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter came home a genuine hero, and she used the fame to get exactly what she wanted. The final frontier. Space. She pulled strings and got transferred to NASA. Yeah, she was a genuine NASA astronaut. She went to the moon, Mars, and beyond. And when the Western Alliance needed a military governor for Mars, they decided they needed someone with her connections to govern our part of the red planet. The Russians and the Chinese thought the same thing and sent their own veterans of Singapore to command their colonies. Grandma and her counterparts didn’t want war, so they kept a lid on things up there. They kept the peace, and that is no small task.

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Family

by on September 7, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter and her Chinese and Russian counterparts killed a lot of Rogue AIs at Singapore. Their strike teams and the AIs that fought with them breached Singapore’s defenses and helped destroy the entire nest. Burned it all the way down to the silicon. Then they partied like warriors who had gone through hell together and walked out the other side. Not a one of them wanted to fight the others, and they made certain to report that fact to their superiors. And their superiors were quick to report how helpful all their counterparts had been in saving the world to their superiors back home. Grandma really just wanted to go home. She’d gotten way too close to dying more times than she could count with her boots on, and she wanted peace. She got it.

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