(Previous entry — First entry)

Monday, March 1
Morning

Good feedback again from the funding consortium. No raise from Spain this time out, though. Apparently we didn’t fly over enough.

Lab geeks finished their alloy research. Judging by all the smiles, this is some exciting stuff. And apparently we can make it ourselves, if we need to.

My interests are more practical, and they’ve learned that by now: they’re pitching a new armor design for the troops. Couldn’t have happened sooner. We need something to keep my guys alive.

I’m stationing some new men at Bram, and transferring some of our overstock of laser rifles there to arm them. After the fly-by scare earlier in the month, I’d like to have someone keeping an eye on the facility, even if it’s just a skeleton so far.

I’m also bulking up the science team some. We’ve got too much to research to do and not enough brains to throw at it.

—

Sunday, March 7
Evening

Personal Armor research complete. It’s an improvement. We’ll start manufacturing immediately.

Throwing the labcoats at a medi-kit project they’d proposed back at the start of the year, despite their protests — they’re as curious about all this alien gear as I am, but they aren’t in charge of keeping people alive, and I need everything I can get to help out on the field.

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(Previous entry — First entry)

Monday, February 15
20:56

Gila promoted to Sgt.

—

Saturday, February 20
8:00

Laser rifle production run complete. Re-upping.

One option I haven’t explored yet: remote-piloted heavy weapon platforms. As a potential solution to our troops’ vulnerability out of the transport, it’s an attractive idea — lead the way with a small tank — but the cost is considerable, nearly half a million bucks for one platform. Given that I don’t know how well these things would work in this unusual situation, that’s a lot of my budget to gamble.

Maybe next month.

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(Previously…)

Thursday, January 28
Evening

Goat, Cheetah, and Badger to active duty.

Standing force down to a dozen and a half. I need some more recruits.

And I need a new facility in Europe. Ears, at least, at first; an Interceptor as well, ASAP. We’ll go from there.

But there’s no money yet. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the budget meeting, exactly, but I’m ready to get it over with.

Laser pistols performed well. Squirrely aim, but they fire fast and clean. May phase out conventional rifles for all but my snipers going forward.

—

Monday, February 1
00:43

Who holds a budget meeting at midnight? I’m all for promptness but we could at least wait till normal business hours.

But then I wasn’t expecting to be literally handed a suitcase full of money, either. “Petty cash”, apparently.

So much for the weird news. The good news: the international consortium funding the project is happy with our work. Seven nations, in particular, gave us a funding boost.

None of those countries saw any direct intervention by X-Com in the last month, though. We may have briefly buzzed Spain with a fighter jet a couple weeks ago, I suppose, but that’s usually not grounds for a pay raise.

The good news is we’re flush again; with three million in pocket I can safely start construction on a new base.

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(Previously…)

Sunday, January 24
Morning

$400K for this Alien Containment lab. Worth it, I suppose, but I’m getting down to lint in my pockets at this point. Talked to my handler about budget advances, but he just turned me down gentle. Suggested I should seek revenue opportunities based on my existing resources.

February can’t come soon enough.

—

Tuesday, January 26
8:00

Production run on our first ten laser pistols just completed. Looking forward to field testing the things. With nothing else for them to do with their time, I’ve put the engineers on building another ten. I doubt we’ll need them, but the resale market has to be good.

And the larger radar array is now live. Hope that helps with our tracking. No sign of alien craft for several days now. Too much to hope that we’ve seen the last of them, though.

—

Wednesday, January 27
11:36

Report just came in of an alien strike of some sort in Novosibirsk, of all places. Not sure what to make of it; if civilians are involved, where’s the Russian military on this?

Scrambling the transport. Let’s go take a look.

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(Previously…)

Sunday, January 17
Evening

It’s troubling to me that we’ve confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life over the barrel of a gun. The existential implications are enormous; the military implications are frightening.

The loss of life…

Bear was a promising soldier, and his performance on this mission was superlative. Wolf and Weasel appear to have been gassed; they should recover, but being sucker-punched like that can’t be good for morale. Losses in combat are expected, but we had them outnumbered and outflanked. We need some new tactical ideas.

And promotions. Beetle, Wolf, Tiger and Eagle all showed excellent combat readiness. Sergeants, all.

These troops need leadership, and those four are going to be leaders, whether they like it or not.

Chimpanzee assigned to transport roster. I have a few ideas about throwing explosive objects at little grey bastards, and Chimpanzee’s got the best arm I’ve seen yet.

Tomorrow I need to review this recovered alien tech. See if we can’t use some of this to our advantage.

—

Monday, January 18
Morning

I’m going ahead with the laser rifle project, though I’m tempted to have the geeks look into the plasma weapons we recovered as well. It’s a shame we didn’t have any of the new laser pistols off the assembly line in time for last night’s op.

And these ship components. Techs tell me the stuff is fascinating at first glance.

And we need to get an autopsy going on these recovered aliens. A lot to do. Those extra scientists can’t get here soon enough. I’d bring in more still, but the budget is almost blown and I won’t get reallocated until the start of the month.

The question remains as to what the craft we secured yesterday represents, exactly. Was this a sole excursion? Part of a group of ships currently on around Earth? A scouting party?

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(Previously…)

January 17, 1999
19:44

This is it: our first engagement with the aliens. Or whatever they are.

It’s a small craft near Granada, sighted on the ground. Helmet-cam audio/visual monitoring active. Combat log commencing. Operation go.

—

01

Beetle reports immediate contact on opening the transport doors. Short, grey, big head. Twenty yards off.

Clean shot. It’s down. Notch one for Beetle. One small bullet for man…

Weasel clears the transport, IDs the alien craft due south. Looks like an east-facing door, no movement.

Poor cover around landing zone, half the team on the ground near our ship and the other half waiting ready just inside.

…

Report of hydraulic noises from vicinity of craft. Machinery? Doors?

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(See previous entry for context.)

Saturday, January 2
12:02

Guns arrived. Didn’t even have to pay extra for overnight shipping. Possibility exists that X-Com is funded by Amazon.com.

—

Monday, Jan 4
12:00

And here’s those new recruits.

—

16:53

Troop review. Educational. For one thing, my first crop wasn’t a fluke — this is about as good (and bad) as it’ll get, it looks like. Mix of competencies. Mix of physical abilities. Some of these grunts could stare down a grizzly, some of ‘em nearly fell over when I walked past.

Callsigns for the newbies: Turtle, Peregrine, Gila, Gazelle, Ox, Chimpanzee, Albatross, Gorilla, Hamster, Bull, Goat, Porpoise, Marmot, Cheetah, Badger, and Wolverine.

If we keep growing the team I’m going to have to break out an encyclopedia.

I’m assigning Peregrine, Ox, Albatross, Gorilla, Bull and Wolverine to the active team along with the original complement. Troop transport holds 14, no reason not to have a full boat if and when we see any action.

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(I have been thinking for a while about the idea of replaying the fantastic classic resource-management/turn-based-tactics game X-Com: UFO Defense, while writing up the experience from the perspective of the notional in-game organizational director through whose hands the player controls the world. This is an experimental first entry in that director’s personal journal. If this stays entertaining for me, there’ll be more entries in the future.

If you’re unfamiliar with X-Com and enjoy video games, I encourage you to go check it out pronto. It’s a classic, and still holds up well fifteen years later. And it’s like five bucks on Steam.)

—

Friday, January 1st, 1999
12:03 hours

Well, here it is at last. We’ve got an alien problem.

And somehow I got stuck with the job of putting that problem to bed. I must have done something pretty bad in a previous life.

Here’s to my directorship of the Xenomorph Defense Command Initiative. A mouthful. X-Com, the staff is calling it.

—

13:17

I don’t know if I’m being intentionally left in the dark or if my handlers just don’t know a goddam thing themselves yet. Neither option comforts me.

What I do know is that I’ve been given surprisingly little information about the alien threat. I have files on our materiel resources and equipment — ships and weapons, base facility blueprints — but it’s not much, barely more than brochures. And there are databanks for alien artifacts and life forms, UFO components, etc, but those files are in Old Mother Hubbard territory.

When I asked about that, my contact just shrugged and said that filling those files is part of X-Com’s job.

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So I spent February writing and recording an album from scratch. It’s done and available for listening downloading:

Go check out Inchoatery!

I’ve also written up a bit about the challenges of pretending to be a whole rock band as a solo musician, in a blog post over on the music site titled The Lonely Iterator.

Over on music.joshmillard.com, I’ve just posted ten demo recordings I made yesterday for the album I’m writing and recording this month.

Check ‘em out!