On the second of April, 2012, I had an encounter with an amazing personage who left me with a most unexpected gift. As for the rest, I am no storyteller; I lack the capacity to make such an incredible tale convincing. Indeed, I believe I was chosen specifically for my inability to embellish, as the snowballing proliferation of versions suiting the aims of various political and religious factions was exactly the reason for the text’s delivery to a messenger some nineteen centuries in the past. If I were to say to you that this manuscript, along with sophisticated translation technology, was placed into my hands, and I was importuned to publish a pure copy long before the motivation to alter the text would exist, thus providing a historical record of the original, surely you would shake your head in well-deserved skepticism. So treat the entire tale as fiction, if you will.
As with all translations, there is a need to balance the literal meaning of the words and the intent behind them. I have done my best to preserve both textual accuracy and the rather colorful language of the authors. I have kept the cultural idioms of 36th Century Galactic Standard wherever possible; in cases where a verbatim translation would be all but incomprehensible, I have rendered the language as best I could into common 21st century phrases. For example, the intent of the statement, “Go sit on an active antimatter drive,” is probably comprehensible to my contemporaries, whereas, “Whelan offsides the Eldemann asteroid duck city,” is probably not. In the latter case, it has been translated as “Admiral Whelan rocks.”
The poem in chapter 17 is the same poem referenced later in the narrative, written by W.B. Yeats. The motivational posters interspersed within the text are by Cuinn Cleary. The cover illustration is a reproduction of “Self-Portraits Not of Me #66,” mixed media, by Driscoll Garrett
– MC, 12/27/2012