The desert sun over Santa Fe hung low and molten, painting the adobe walls gold. On the plaza steps, the flags of every regiment fluttered in the warm breeze. Reporters crowded in, confused, curious, half-expecting a prank. But G.I. Joe wasn’t smiling.
He stepped forward, boots clicking on the stone. In his hands, a leather folder stamped with a seal that looked suspiciously official for something that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Demi Moore waited beside him, sunglasses on, posture sharp, the way only someone who’s already been a Navy SEAL on film can manage without trying.
Joe opened the folder.
“Before I hand this over,” he said, voice low and unexpectedly poetic, “I want to say something.”
He looked out over the silent crowd.
D. H. Lawrence once wrote:
‘I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.’
He closed the folder gently.
“That’s the spirit New Mexico needs. No self-pity. No excuses. Courage in the cold. Strength in the storm. And there’s only one person I trust with that kind of backbone.”
He turned to Demi Moore.
“With this—” he lifted the folder “—I give you the government of New Mexico. Not symbolic power. Not ceremonial authority. Real leadership. Because you don’t freeze. You don’t fold. You don’t feel sorry for yourself.”
Demi raised an eyebrow, smirked just enough to show she accepted the absurdity but also the gravity.
“Well,” she said, taking the folder, “if I’m running New Mexico now, first order of business—everyone gets a haircut like G.I. Jane.”
The crowd erupted. Joe saluted. And the wild desert, with no self-pity of its own, watched quietly as Demi Moore became the most unexpected governor the Southwest had ever seen.
Joe leans back, eyes half-closed like a man replaying a classified memory, and begins:
“Roswell wasn’t a crash,” Joe says.
“It was a correction.”
He explains that in 1947, the timeline split like a cracked mirror. One branch ended in nuclear winter; another in the rise of the New Pharaohs. But Joe—the time-travelling archivist of mankind—was sent from a far-future council to seal the breach.
When he arrived, the desert night was glowing with ionized air. A disc-shaped craft, buckled but still humming with chronal energy, lay half‐buried in the sand. Inside was the pilot: a grey sectoid, its black eyes flickering with data from timelines humans would never survive.
Joe approached calmly, wearing the containment gauntlet forged from metals that don’t exist yet. The creature tried to speak directly into his mind—showing him images of alternate Earths, some beautiful, some monstrous—but Joe held firm.
He whispered a single command phrase taught to him by the future elders:
“For mankind’s sake, the line must hold.”
The containment field snapped into place, forming a silver cube around the grey. The creature thrashed, then went still, its telepathic voice fading like a dying radio signal.
Joe lifted the cube. For a moment, the desert wind stopped.
When the military arrived the next morning, all they found were confused airmen, a debris field, and Joe handing over the containment unit with the calm certainty of someone who has already seen what happens if he doesn’t do this.
He told them:
“Lock it deep. No sunlight. No questions. This one belongs to the future.”
The Roswell incident became a myth…
Because the truth was too heavy for 1947 to carry.
And Joe returned to his own timeline—mission completed, humanity nudged one step closer to survival.