I guess I should be happy this year is over as I sit on a cot mattress in a huge barracks like room. They can fit twenty of us in this room and there are three rooms like this on this floor. And there seems to be more floors below us. I guess now I know what Greystle was building.

Were they planning ahead for when the country would start falling apart? I’m pretending the sounds I heard from outside when I was walking down the stairs were celebratory fireworks. Should I be out there too? Fighting? For what I know. The past. But not sure what the fighting does. It doesn’t seem organized. Not to use the presidents term but it just seems destabilizing.

So it is New Year’s. A lousy fake holiday to begin with, now seeming even more pointless. No one is celebrating.

Should I reflect on the past year? Where it looks like so much has gone wrong with the year. With me. But so much has gone right with what I want to do. With Alpha. Is it wrong to take joy in that. When I should be miserable. Like the rest of the world.

I’ll take what I can get. I’m luckier than I should be.

Hard to believe at this time last year Ned and I were overseeing the shut down of all the other projects at the Simulations Department and the formation of the Alpha team.

Alpha has gone from a University sponsored study staffed mostly with grad students to some kind of military industrial skunk works in what seems like a blink of an eye. Or a few billion Alphan years I guess.