About AK Llyr
AK Llyr is a writer, futurist, IT management consultant, Navy veteran, former intelligence analyst, and all around Sci-Fi geek.
When you have traveled to all seven continents, and more than sixty-countries, you get to see a lot of the human condition and are changed because of it.
Weather in a closed Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on “Emerging and Imminent Threats to Global and National Security” that you co-authored, or sharing a pot of Indio Viejp and a cup of Chicha with the local resistance before heading deeper into the green, what you see and what you do will have lasting affects on how you see the world.
Each individuals personal life experiences not who you would like to be, define who you see in the mirror, and if you can stand to look for more than a glance. I’ve been lucky in that I survived my travels and my trials mostly intact, and learned truths I did not know when I started, although not without pain or loss. Many of my friends and colleagues were not as lucky.
Life’s travels and experiences have consequently broadened, hardened and softened my perspective on life and taught me that humanity, “except in extreme circumstances of deprivation, fear, and religious fanaticism,” the world over, is made up of pretty decent people.
As to what I have learned, and personal regrets? Mirrors can still make me flinch. But I am beginning to accept who I am, as I try to repay my debts to the world at large.
The Bifrost Saga
This story line started back in 1997 with a book titled Dominos, that was set in 2048. Our protagonist was a plucky, little, retired NSA analyst and veteran of several successful and one not so successful JSOG missions.
Due to a disagreement with my former employers at Fort Meade Maryland over the content of the story, and their insistence that is incorporated processes and procedures that were classified, the book never went to print, and I am not known as the next Tom Clancy.
As to the term “JSOG” or possibly Joint Special Operations Group, it was rumored to possibly be a joint taskforce headed by the CIA, with additional resources from other agencies and drawing its members from Marine Recon, Navy SEALS, and other elite units. JSOG “officially” did not exist, or was disbanded in the late 1990s. It depends who and when you ask.
Rumors as to its current status persist, and though the name may have changed, the players are the same. Or so it is rumored. (It may also now be known as the Special Activities Center or SAC, as opposed to JSOG, SOG, or the CIA’s “SAD” Special Activities Division, which was also disbanded, or never existed.)
(NOTE: Recently, April, 2021, during an MSNBC interview, a former National Security Advisor who was present and involved with Operation “Jeronimo”, SAid on air, that the group tasked with the actual planning of the mission was JSOG.)
The original “hypothetical” JSOG from the 1980s, was the brain child of a warped mind who use to head Naval Intelligence, went on to head the NSA, and then to a directorship in the CIA. (He was also the only former still living head of an American Intelligence Agency that did not sign a letter condemning then President Trumps collusion with Russia.)
But none of that is important. What is important, is they wouldn’t let me publish. Though I can resubmit it in 2024. Given the opening hook was about a global pandemic centered in Wuhan China and how the global powers and survivors dealt with the aftermath, I am not encouraged.
Fast forward to 2007, a decade later and having only partially gotten over my mad. I began writing again. This time focusing on what would have come after such a devastating plague. I laid it all out in logical (to me at least) progressions leading to the time of the Bifrost Saga, 2369.
Add in time for a house being destroyed three times, raising a family, an economic collapse, and four years helplessly watching the rise of American fascisms, and I am running a bit late on finishing it.
The good news is, I am still working on it and hope to have it done before the fictional date of the start of the pandemic in Dominos.
Air That We Breath
I loved reading Robert Heinlein’s Juveniles, such as Starman Jones, Have Spacesuit will Travel, Between Planets and others.
I have also watched a plethora of almost illiterates juvenile science Fiction come out in the last decade that held no science and was also light on logic, believability, and littered with two dimensional shallow characters.
Now I agree, having been a teenager. There is an argument that many of the species are shallow and illogical, but not all, and that still does not justify the authors lack or logic, or science in the plots they are compiling, nor why Hollywood would purchase and produce them.
I hope this endeavor will live up to my own standards, and also hope to have it out to BETA readers this summer.