Two devices were salvaged from Dulce, a magnificent piece of alien engineering that could actually alter the genetic code of stem cells, sequence by sequence, and an ultradense gas-crystal memory editor that could withdraw the entire memory contents of a brain, even a large brain, from a body, enable it to be programmed and edited, then replace it in the brain, or any brain with enough memory capacity.

Both devices were beyond the extraordinary, but the memory editor was at least comprehensible. It quantum-entangled modeled neurons in its memory with real ones in the target brain, then duplicated their coherence potentials, meaning that the precise contents of the neuron were transferred to the machine memory.

The body could then be destroyed or allowed to die, and the whole contents of its brain placed in a new version—or an entirely different body, as long as the brain was compatible with the stored information.

Was the duplicate person that resulted the same, or somebody different?

The aliens didn’t care. They used this device to achieve immortality, also to alter their memories, even to implant purchased memories of things they had never done and places they had never been. Among the many activities they carried out on earth, aside from attempting to hybridize themselves with human beings, was to use sophisticated implants to gather desirable human memories for later resale. They did a lot of things here. They mined Earth for some sort of material that repelled gravity. It was found embedded in lead, iron, and uranium seams, from which it had to be extracted atom by atom. They took human eggs and semen to other planets and presumably created their own human beings there.

All of these were reasons why they demanded that their presence be kept secret. There had been threats, the first one delivered to President Eisenhower in 1952: Do it our way, or you risk the death of Earth.

The gene splicer was mechanical, not chemical, which was what made it even more amazing. Its working parts could only be seen under an electron microscope. There were needles, for example, just ten atoms thick.

With such precision available, there was no need to use crude chemical techniques such as restriction enzymes to coax sequences apart so that new genes could be added. You could design any gene combination you wanted, then grow it in an embryo in the lab.

The first one of these—mostly human—had been inserted into a host female, who had hemorrhaged during the birth of the ten-pound baby. The second had been brought to term in an artificial womb, then matured to the age of twelve before being given consciousness. It did not know, to this day, that it had no memories from before its twelfth year.