Alien Among Us (TJ Steele Book 1)

by L. Edwin Brown

  Clark Aerospace, was located in an industrial park, in West Sacramento, just off U.S. 50. I arrived at Clark Aerospace at 8:30 in the morning and was greeted by Mr. Clark. We spent some time in his office talking. He said it was hard for him to believe, I was only sixteen. I took his statement as a compliment and thanked him. He finally took me out into the production area, after handing me a pair of safety glasses.

  The company had sixty two employees, both in the plant and the office areas. Mr. Clark took me to an area, where all their research and development was performed. This is where I think you would fit in, he said to me. There were two other men working in the area. One was at least sixty and the other was in his fifties. I didn’t say anything, but it was clear to me, why the company hasn’t developed anything new for a while.

  I stayed with Mr. Clark until 1:00 that afternoon and told him I would let him know, within a week, whether or not I was interested in a job.

  After leaving the plant, I drove around the West Sacramento area. There was a small community of one story homes nearby, as well as an RV park. I stopped in at the office of a new, fairly large apartment complex, and talked to the manager. He had several furnished apartments available, but said they were going fast. I knew he was full of shit, because his mind told me, the apartments had been empty for a long time.

  I returned back home to Edwards Air Base on Wednesday and told my parents about the job and the Sacramento area. I said there was an upscale apartment complex about a mile from Clark Aerospace.

  On Friday I called Brandon Clark and told him I would take the job. My first day at work was April 18th.

  Because of my age, Brandon Clark and Clark Aerospace signed a two year lease on a furnished apartment for me.

  By the time I reached my seventeenth birthday, I had completely turned things around for Clark Aerospace. Even the other two gentlemen, in the research and development department, were excited now. They watched and learned, how I made things happen. I was making a six figure salary, but money didn’t interest me. MIT had sent an additional two hundred thousand dollars, to my parents, for some of the work I had completed, before leaving there.

  I was still excited about the advancement in the personal computing industry. I bought an Apple II computer in October of 1977, but was not impressed with its performance. I was more in favor of a PC type computing, running DOS.

  I started 1980 out, by purchasing a financially strapped computer startup company in Mountain View, California. Brandon Clark was not thrilled with my new adventure, but I assured him, I would not neglect my job at his company.

  I changed the name of the computer company from Boys at Play Computers to Steele Cyber Technologies. I changed the direction of the company, working every weekend in Mountain View. The two hour drive, back and forth from Sacramento to Mountain View, each Friday and Sunday nights, gave me plenty of time to think.

  By the end of 1980 the computer industry was booming and I was right in the thick of it. We were developing some of the fastest and most compact computers on the market. An Austin Texas company was building our PC cases, per my specs.

  I bought a ten thousand square foot gated security home in Los Altos, California, on my twenty first birthday. My mother decorated the home for me. I would have loved for my father to retire from the Air Force and my mother to leave teaching and come live with me, but they had their own lives to live.

  In 1982 I purchased Clark Aerospace, after the death of the owner, and while the company was in a down turn of business. I change the name of the company to Steele Aerospace and secured several dozen new clients for the business. I hired a managing team to run Steele Aerospace, while I beefed up Steele Cyber Technologies.

  In 1985 I added a hundred thousand square foot addition to the Steele Aerospace facility and moved Steele Cyber Technologies into a new building, twice the size we had before.

  A year later, I purchased a company in Charlotte, North Carolina that supplied Steele Aerospace with parts for the jet thrusters, built in our plant. I changed the Charlotte company’s name to Steele Manufacturing in 1987.

  On one of my mom and dad’s visit, she said it was time for me to think about a wife and to give her some grandkids. I think it was just her way of telling me, that I’ve been living alone, for too long now. I didn’t want her to know that I had a regular visit from a very young high class prostitute, who took care of my sexual needs.

  By 1990 I owned a dozen companies. I formed a new corporation call Steele Global and brought all my other companies in under this one company. In 1991 Steele Global went public, listing on NASDAQ at $57.54, price change net 14.51%, with a share volume of 1,019,457. I personally controlled 52% of the stock. By the end of the year, the stock had doubled and split.

  Steele Global operated its corporate office out of the tenth floor, of the Transamerica Building, in San Francisco. I was spending my time, between all the Steele businesses, and letting my board of directors, run Steele Global.

  March 11th 1993, I was asleep at home, when I heard noises coming from the back of my house. There was no power to the house, except the rechargeable night lights scattered around in each room, and the phone was dead.

  I stepped into a small closet like room, off my bedroom, to check the security system. It had been activated, but with the phone lines cut, it wasn’t communicating with the central monitoring company. The backup batteries would keep the security system up for several hours.

  I scanned the cameras and saw three men in the living room. I removed a Smith and Wesson .45 caliber hand gun, my father taught me to shoot, from a drawer next to my bed. I knelt down, on the back side of my king-size bed, and waited. I was not nervous, nor was I scared.

  The first man entered the bedroom, closely followed by another. I aimed the gun at the first man’s crouch and shot him, in his private area. The other man returned fire and I put two in his chest.

  The third man came running into the bedroom when he heard the first guy screaming in pain. As soon as he cleared the door to my bedroom, he started firing his gun wildly. I put one bullet in his chest and one in his head.

  I walked over to the only live survivor and put my foot in his crouch. I pushed down, getting his blood on my bare foot and causing him extreme pain.

  How many more are they, I asked. The injured man replied, with a Spanish accent, they were only three in the house and one in a car. I ripped up a towel, from the bathroom and tied the survivor’s hands behind his back. I put another full bullet cartage clip in my gun, while the injured man kept pleading with me to get him help.

  I took the intruders guns and headed down stairs. I made my way out to the front gates and saw a car parked on the street. I entered my security code into the personnel gate and slipped through, trying to stay out of sight of the car, parked on the other side of the street.

  When the driver saw me, he put the car in gear with his headlights on high beam and was attempting to run me down. I put five quick shots through the front windshield and then jumped out of the way. The car swerved and ran into the huge stone pillar that supports my driveway gates.

  I reached through the window of the car and felt no pulse on the driver. I had hit him twice in the head and one bullet through the neck. I made my way back to the house and into the garage, where I call law enforcement from an OKI cellular phone, in my car. The police had already gotten calls, from my neighbors, about gun fire in their neighborhood.

  One of the first police officers to arrive at my house knew me and took my hand gun. The police allowed me back into the house, the next morning, long enough to gather up some clothes, until their investigation was finished.

  I headed over to the Hilton Hotel and checked in. I call the Los Altos police to let them know where I was at if they needed me. I was asleep, when a detective came to my door and asked, if I felt like coming down to the police station, for more questions. I called my attorney before leaving with the police officer.

  They asked me a bunch of questi
ons about the shooting. I told them, they could get all the information they wanted off the video security tapes, from my house. The detective that drove me to the station, came into the conference room and said, the man I shot in the dick, was wanted by the FBI, along with his brother, who was the second man I shoot. All four men were wanted for the kidnapping of U.S. Senator Edward Johnson from California. After a ransom was paid they murdered the Senator and dumped his body.

  It was clear, they planned on holding me for ransom and would have probably killed me, after they got what they wanted.

  I was cleared of all charges and it was determined, I had acted in self-defense. I was back in my house two weeks later, after a company came out, and cleaned up the mess. They repaired the bullet holes, in my bedroom and repaired the stone column, by the gates. After this event, I had an automatic generator installed and upgrades on the security system.

  I went home to Edwards for week around my thirty third birthday. My father said, he was retiring at the end of the year, and my mother told me, this was her last year of teaching. They were planning to move to Denver next summer. I spent a week with them before heading back home.

  November 22, 1993, I was in my office early, on the tenth floor of the Transamerica Building in San Francisco. I had a planned stock holders meeting for 10:00, then I was headed to North Carolina. At 9:15 I was sipping on a hot cup of coffee at my desk, when a strong painful feeling shot through my body. I sat the coffee cup down and leaned back into my chair. I knew the pain was not medical, but caused by the great loss, of someone I loved.

  When the feeling went away, I moved to the conference room where my board of directors, were waiting. My mind was not on the meeting. I allowed the directors to do all the talking, while I focused on the earlier event, in my office.

  At 12:30, I went down to the street level, where my car was waiting, to take me to the airport. The company jet would fly me to Charlotte, North Carolina. There had been some labor issues at the Steele Manufacturing plant and I wanted to put a stop to it, before it got out of hand.

  When we pulled through the gates at the airport, I got a call on the car phone. My secretary had given my cellular number to the Utah State Police. My father had borrowed a Cessna 170 from a friend, at the Air Force base, and he and my mother, flew to Denver, Colorado the week before Thanksgiving.

  They were going to buy a cabin in the mountains and were working on the final purchase. They were returning home, so they could get ready for Thanksgiving. I had promised them in August, I would come home for the holidays this year.

  They were flying across the Rockies, in an early sudden blinding snow storm, when the aircraft went down, somewhere around Mitchell Arch. They were still looking for the plane, from the ground, but needed to wait until the storm let up, before they could do an aerial search.

  I gave the Utah Police a list of phone numbers, where they could reach me. I told the officer, I would be making arrangements to fly to Utah, the next day.

  That night, a little before midnight, I got another call from a Utah State Ranger. They found my parents plane and were sad to say, they had both died in the crash. He said they would be taking their bodies to St. George and he gave me several phone numbers, where I could contact someone, who would help me with their remains.

  I sadly buried my parents in the small cemetery next to the church at Edwards Air Force base. They had spent most their lives there and I knew this was where, they wanted to be laid to rest. My father could have been buried at Arlington National, but he would never want to be separated from his sweet Mary.

  Like most of the things in my life, grief hit me differently, than other people. I was sad, but I had every wonderful event, of my life, with my parents, locked in my head and no one could take that from me.

  I stayed on the base for another week going through papers and packing up things in my parent’s home. I would be turning over the home to the base and needed to move everything. I had Mayflower Movers, take everything to a climate controlled storage facility, in Mountain View, California, where I could take my time, deciding what to do with it.

  The next seven years brought tremendous growth to Steele Global. The board of directors was fed up with the way I ignored them. I loved working with my hands and had no plans to sit in some stuffy office, pushing papers all day.

  The board of directors, were plotting a way to relieve me, from my CEO position. The thing they didn’t know was, I had read each and everyone one of the sneaky little bastard’s minds and knew what their plans were.

  I was all alone at home on my fortieth birthday. I had given the servants a day off including my security staff except for a single guard at the gate. I called Wanda Dubois, a hooker I had been seeing for the past fifteen years. She came over and spent the evening with me. When I woke the next morning, she was gone.

  I walked around the ten thousand square foot house, wondering why I needed all this space. I was standing on the back patio, staring into the pool, when my housekeeper, Lois Dyer, showed up. I turned and looked at her, as she walked into the kitchen. It was at that moment, I realized everything I had accomplished over the years. I was a young Billionaire, controlling a Fortune 500 business.

  Is there more to my life than this, I thought. I’m not even sure I’m human. I have the ability to do things, no mortal man can do. Most of what I can do, I keep hidden. I also didn’t want to end up like William Sidis.

  William James Sidis is another individual whose exact IQ score was unknown. Experts have pegged his IQ somewhere in the range of 250 to 300, the same as mine. This would give him the highest IQ score in history until now. Born in 1898, he entered Harvard at the age 11 to study mathematics, which at the time made him the youngest person to ever enroll at the prestigious university. After completing his studies he began teaching, but found that the students in his class, who were older than he, did not take kindly to being educated by what they perceived to be a boy.

  I understood this better than anyone. I was also subjected to that at UCLA. During Sidis’s rapid rise through the educational system he suffered socially, unable to maintain close friendships. A stint in a sanatorium after his parents, who attempted to reform his political views, put him there. Upon his release in 1921, the troubled genius stepped away from mathematics and academics entirely, and lived a relatively normal life. He died at the age of 46 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

  I was looking at my reflection in the still waters of the swimming pool and realized, even though I was forty, I looked twenty five. I was aging very slowly. I have never been sick, not even a simple cold.

  When I was home, during summer break from MIT, I was working in a hangar at the air base and cut my hand. I stared at the wound and bright red blood. Within seconds, my hand healed itself. I knew this was not normal, but my mother always said, I was special and not the norm.

  I called a board meeting for 10:00 Friday morning, August 11th. I had the meeting setup and scheduled in the auditorium. I wanted all the board members, corporate directors, and supervisors to be there, from all the Steele division.

  I was up early on the eleventh and drove myself to San Francisco, to the Transamerica building. I deliberately delayed entering the building. My personal secretary was waiting, pacing back and forth in front of the first floor elevators. Hurry Mr. Steele, everyone is waiting. I was in no hurry I wanted them all to wait.

  When we reached the tenth floor, I told my secretary I was going to enter through the stage doors. I stood back stage and listened to the chatter from the executives in the audience. I opened my mind and listen to their secret thoughts.

  When I walked out on to the stage in front of the large red curtains there was a lot of chattering among the people in the audience. When they saw me, the place went quiet. You could hear a pin drop. I didn’t need a written script. I had everything I was going to say, stored in my head.

  I stood and stared at everyone, before saying a word. I started off telling how I first built this or
ganization. How I developed products on my own that no other company could do and I wasn’t even old enough to vote. If I touched something, it turned to gold, I said.

  I’ve known for several years now, the Steele Board of Directors have been meeting in private to see if they could come up with a way to relieve me of my duties.

  I hold 52% of all Steele Global stock and I wasn’t going anywhere, until I was ready. Well at lease that was true, until today.

  I stood silent for a few seconds. I stepped out to the edge of the stage. I looked the crowd in the face, and said. Ladies and Gentlemen of Steele Global. I’ve negotiated an agreement with Allen, Alter, and Smith Brokerage House, located here in this building, on the twentieth floor. They are to sell my 52% controlling interest in Steele Global before the end of this year. I will no longer have any interest in Steele Global and at the conclusion of this meeting, I will resign as the corporation’s CEO.

  In case the board is interested, Microsoft has placed a bid for my controlling interest, with the brokerage house. Their interest is only in Steele Cyber Technology. The rest of the corporation will probably be broken up in small companies or liquidated. As far as I’m concerned, the board of director’s can all go to hell.

  I spent the next thirty minutes detailing the transition as well as the current financial position of Steele Global. I wanted everyone to know, the corporation was a viable business, and if they wanted to keep it that way, they better pool their funds and compete for my stock options.

  I didn’t want anyone in the audience to know, I’ve instructed my broker to use Microsoft only as leverage to elevate the stock price and not to sell off any of my stocks to Microsoft. I wanted Steele Global to survive, but I also wanted the board of directors to be concerned they may lose control.

  I stepped back away from the edge of the stage. Once again, I was quiet for a few seconds. Then I looked at everyone, and said. I’m going to see what else this tiny little planet has to offer. Once I’m gone I’m gone and nothing will bring me back.