My mom told me this right before she died.  As a kid. she grew up dirt poor.  One day the family moved, and they left a dog behind.  Mom talked about how bad she felt watching that dog barking and chasing after their car.  The last she saw of it he was sitting in the road howling.  Her father is unknown to me, he was killed by a Galveston County deputy sheriff while burglarizing some business.  That was in 1949.  Mom had a fear of poverty and once fussed at me for getting butter in a cafeteria when I could have got margarine for 2 cents instead of 3.  I didn't know the difference, we grew up on margarine that we called butter.  She was nine miles away in school April 14 1947 when Texas City exploded, killing at least 581 people.  She said she thought the world had ended. How anyone could abandon a pet out of convenience is unfathomable. I need to write to some Galveston historical societies and try to find out ...

 Smiling is illegal, citizen: Sentence - two years in the cubes. Society has no use for scofflaws and reprobates, creep!

  Prologue   Benvento Cellini wrote that ' All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they be persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand'.  Of course, Cellini was a genius artist and a psychopath who had something to say.  I'm not even a man, not anymore.  I have never been one, the Transition took place when I was a boy, I no longer remember my human body or appearance.  Hell, I no longer remember anything before the war, just the endless training and the soldiers I served with.  I was younger than the others, most of them were condemned to the Enhanced Infantry program, I was part of the 'Operation Ten Thousand'*, which took orphans and juvenile delinquents and bound them over to the Combat Modification program.  Of course, nothing like 10,000 went through the process, I think I was in the last group selected.  A...