And so I'll leave you there. There was still much to be done, of course. Wolf was still in jail, Hap was running around with the Mars Unionists, and Grocke . . . well, Casey hadn't found her way back to my bed, for obvious reasons. Thorpe was dead, and everybody felt pretty awful about that, because while she had been the head receptionist, she was also the acknowledged mother of us all, the matron of Marsec. She was dead, and so were over three hundred other Marsec employees. Rawlings was right; everything he had built up was coming crashing down around his mangled ears. But I don't think he cared, that dreary Sunday in April when he lay in the corner of his vandalized apartment, the wind rustling the curtains and smoke pouring from the forest--his forest. I know that so much of what has been written about this long and sometimes violent saga--this Third Genesis that Ben spoke of--too often focuses on the brutality and combat of the war. But to simply dwell upon those aspects of all this would be lose to the aliens. Maybe we would still walk upon our own two feet with no shackles around our legs or minds, but we would have lost, lost those things which make such great conflicts such as this worth every last drop of the cubic meters of blood spilt. To focus upon the hate and carnage would be to ignore those things--the comradeship, the friendship, and the love. These are the only things worth killing for! Not greed, not power, not some demented vision of right. Love. Oh, there will still be the greedy, the power-mad, the fanatics; but what is their conviction against love? This is what men have killed for and will kill for far into the future. Out of love, for friends, for family, for God; that is where the purest crimson flows. And so when Rawlings kissed Nat upon her lips, I knew that we would win. 7/29/98 END TRANSMISSION. BEGIN SHAMEFUL DISCLAIMER. First, a word about myself. My real name is Benjamin Wakuda Fischer. I am eighteen and a half years old, and will be attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison this fall. I will be there for a planned five-year tour of duty, during which I have determined that I will 1) gain an engineering degree of some sort, 2) play in a college band, and 3) become a published author. My God, my God, my God. What have I created here? Microprose had the gall to create a game atmosphere that so degrades the original attractiveness of XCOM: UFO DEFENSE . . . and I had the gall to actually base a serial novel within its bounds. How? By changing the happy-go-lucky neo 50's style of MegaPrimus to the angst-filled MegaPrime of Karl Williams. In order to write anything, I have found, it is necessary to first have some experience upon which to base it. True, one may create the entirety of a work (of any art form) upon their preconceived notions of what a certain state of being is, but that is shaky ground, a crude foundation upon which to construct your castles in the air. Has any of us ever been in the line of fire? Can any of us actually raise their hand and say, "I did something when something needed doing"? I am no soldier. I would gladly fight--and die--for this nation, the United States of America, the closest mankind has come to recreating that primitive dream of Utopia, Shangri-La, the Garden of Eden . . . MegaPrimus. But I am no soldier, and I could not fight like a soldier. In my writing I strove to epitomize what the perfect soldier was in only one man: Jack Rawlings. Yes, he cries, laughs, swears, and drinks Coffee Boss like the rest of us, but deep down inside, he is a killer. Who would wish a label like that pinned upon their shirt? And that is how I view soldiers. They are the line of last resort. They act when conviction or necessity is so strong that lives must be forfeited in order to resolve a conflict. Can any of us write that story? I cannot. And that is why this, Apocalypse Arc, must go unfinished. There are other reasons, such as the copyright issues, my urge to move on to other venues, my sudden immersion in the University. Laziness features prominently, also. But if I am to become a professional or even a semi-pro at this arcane business, I must move beyond the realm of fan fic and thoroughly verse myself in less die- cast matters. Plus, there's the fact that the babes don't dig fan fic too much. You, the reader, are free to protest loudly this decision. I have enjoyed the majority of the correspondences I have recieved, only one major conflagration marring these memories. (That will go unelaborated upon--the involved are aware of their roles.) The Internet truly eclipses all seven wonders of the ancient world . . . I do not regret this long and wonderful epic that was born two and a half years ago, some cold winter, when I read Larry Mann's Saga II. I feel that I have grown significantly since the first infantile gropings of The Long Trek to Normality and Breakfast and the abortive writings of Osaka and Nara. Well, not that much; but I have learned that the greatest verses come from within myself, not from a particularly inventive assassination of computer-borne enemies. So I am proud to say that I cut my teeth upon XCOM fan fic. I have seen this niche grow from the pioneering of Russ Mann to the full-blown Wagnerian operas of Mangubat, Rakki, and Fernando. I have enjoyed the lot of it, and I hope the same unto you. Whatever demented prose I manufacture from this point on, no matter how bizarre or far-removed it is from my old stomping grounds, I assure you that it will all bear the seal MADE IN KANSAI.Ben W. Fischer
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