Sometime during my last year in isolation, the state of Massachusetts determined that the antiquated facility I called Hell would close down. Pierre Borgia, by then U.S. secretary of state, immediately arranged for Dr. Foletta, my personal keeper, to transfer himself and me to an asylum in Miami.

It was the summer of 2012.

The rules at the Miami facility were different, each inmate assigned a team. No longer able to exert his autocratic rule, Dr. Foletta needed someone on the staff he could manipulate into signing off on my yearly evaluation. His pawn would arrive a week later in the guise of a graduate student.

My mother?

Yes. She was so beautiful, so enticing … consuming all my thoughts, disfocusing me from the mission at hand. I tried to quell my love for her, but as the doomsday drew nearer, our souls touched. Then, in her most difficult hour, your mother sacrificed everything she held dear and helped me escape.

Together we discovered the Balam, a starship buried long ago beneath the Kukulcán Pyramid. Within this vessel we found the remains of Kukulcán, the last survivor of a more advanced humanoid race called the Guardian. The Guardian had come to our planet long ago, fleeing the rise of evil that had enslaved their people, transforming their world into a hellish existence. The Guardian had avoided enslavement by taking refuge on one of their planet’s moons. But the evil ones were not satisfied with their conquest. Inhabiting their planet was an alien serpentine creature that could bridge the gap between dimensions of time and space. Trapping the creature aboard a transport ship, they sent it into space and through a wormhole. Members of the Guardian brotherhood chased after the transport in the Balam. Their vessel’s presence in the wormhole altered the wormhole’s trajectory … depositing both ships in our solar system, 65 million years into Earth’s past. This historic journey not only resulted in a cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs, it created a causal time loop in third-dimensional space.

Most of the transport was destroyed upon impact, but the life-support pod containing the creature remained intact.

Knowing a deep-space radio transmission could awaken the creature, the Guardian programmed the Balam to remain in orbit above Earth. The ship would deflect any incoming signals while the Guardian remained immersed in sleep pods. Sometime around 11,000 B.C., the Balam landed in the dense jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula, not far from where their enemy lay buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

It was about this time that the great flood caused by the last ice age thawed, and Homo sapiens became the dominant species on the planet.