Kuroda doesn't need Popular Mechanics to prove aliens exist

In the story I'm writing, my character Kuroda picks up Popular Mechanics' UFO issue, titled "The Alien File: Surprising Evidence We Are Not Alone," and looks at it with disdain.

What he sees is a big debate, and people in these articles rehashing and recycling what's already known about it. Kuroda doesn't need the debate settled. He knows for sure that extraterrestrials exist. He's encountered them several times. So he decides he's going to set out to get proof.

Kuroda doesn't need the debate settled. He knows for sure that extraterrestrials exist.

Whether we're alone is a real-world question people are still arguing about. Kuroda's certainty belongs to my fiction, and it goes back to the first story I told about him.

For anyone who missed that one: as an elementary school student walking home from PS 45 in Queens, New York, Kuroda met a blonde, pale-skinned, green-eyed woman who telepathically communicated one word to him, Andromeda. Then a craft that looked carved out of dark emerald or jade, inlaid with gold, landed silently, and a creature that looked like a reptilian, or a merman from the He-Man cartoons, shot her in the sternum with some kind of energy weapon. Kuroda has never feared extraterrestrials. Toward them he is neutral, observant and calculating, with distrust, anger and a compulsion to destroy them all. He doesn't believe any of them are here for love and light purposes.

Kuroda doesn't start out alone. Marcus Webb, director of the NPRI, the Non-linear Phenomena Research Initiative, recruits him.

In his quest for evidence that would prove to people these beings exist, Kuroda finds that a technology he created, called DemiPhase, short for DemiCerebral NeuroPhasing, can do more than knock their craft out of the sky by disrupting their frequencies. It also has detrimental biological effects on the entities themselves. It allows him to communicate with them telepathically, along with other things that might seem to be beyond human capabilities.

That's the critical turning point. Instead of turning that evidence over to the NPRI or other authorities, or letting anyone know what he can do, he starts reverse-engineering everything. He builds his own technology and his own biotechnological enhancements, and he becomes a kind of techno-villain.

He sets out to capture not only the technology but also the beings piloting and manning it. He creates his own facilities and his own organization, a breakaway civilization, and becomes a cool, cruel tyrant: knocking these beings out of their vehicles, capturing their craft and the beings themselves, and conducting cruel experiments on them. He does it to advance his own power and control, and to exact revenge for what he feels is a cruel lie upon humanity.

Then a demand arrives from beyond Earth. Nonhuman extraterrestrial intelligences want Kuroda turned over to them, whether by the U.S. government or by whatever entity he happens to be working for.

Gabrielle Zander is the one who reads it. She's shocked, but somewhat not shocked. The question the magazine is still debating is, for her, answered: the demand is confirmation that nonhuman entities, or some other advanced civilization, exist.

So Gabrielle starts digging. She wants his real name, his true identity and what exactly he has done to make intelligences from somewhere else ask for him to be handed over.

Gabrielle, Kuroda and the NPRI can be found across six previously published books: "The Intrusion Vector: A Metaphysical Catalogue of Abduction"; my Organelle series, named for the organelles inside cells, with three books published, beginning with "The Hunger Engineers"; and my Cut of the Carriage Wheel series, with two of three planned books published so far, beginning with "Beneath the Shadow of Your Smile." They're available through Amazon and my BookSpace bookstore, with "The Intrusion Vector" and the Cut of the Carriage Wheel books also on Amazon Kindle, and the bookstore section of WorldReadingClub.com links to all of them. Where each character turns up, and how they connect, I'll leave for readers to hunt down themselves.