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Awesome! Thank you.

Congratulations, Randy. That is great news.

Hi Alan. It's great to hear from you, although I wish the news was better. I was my mother's caregiver for a few years, both before and after she went into a care home. The care home staff took over the heavy lifting, leaving me free to help in other ways to keep up her spirits (e.g., running errands and buying things she wanted or needed). It was definitely a stressful time.

I'm glad you're in good health. Few people in my family make it that far, especially the males. I suspect my own biological age is 5-10 years greater than my chronological age. Isaac Asimov was once asked what he would do if he learned he only had a year to live. His answer: write faster!

All my best to you and your family.
Dirk

Yet you would happily read it if it was called chapter 1 instead of prologue? What's wrong with that picture?

Funny thing, Cathy thought my opening battle chapters (1 & 2) in Archangel should perhaps be labeled a prologue since it takes place well before the main story, and I kill almost everyone off. Ever hear of a 24 page prologue?

Actually, the wine was infused with the power of God, so it'll keep forever. No refrigeration required.   The compound is Satan's, not God's. Also, clear-cutting for growing grapes would be more visible from the air.

May the Force be with you, Bill. Keep on mending.

Every human life requires a soul (of course), and although Satan can screw or rape as many women as he wants, God will only grant him the opportunity to procreate once using the soul God provides so that the Antichrist can be born. If there's miscarriage or the newborn dies at childbirth or later, Satan will once again be at risk of ending up in the Lake of Fire. However, God sees to it that that doesn't happen.

Connor's "cousins" are fully human, descended from real human parents from the beginning of the breeding program. Thereafter, the descendants are mostly a mix of boys and girls raised within the program, so each of them has a human soul. That continues for two millennia, ever since Satan read an early copy of Revelation (late first century). As you can imagine, he doesn't like the outcome, so he cooks up the wager with God, which requires that God provide a soul once Satan was ready to breed.

Satan kills one of the adults who was in the breeding program to get the guy's body and DNA, which Satan takes over (i.e. De Rosa's zombie body). All Satan has to do then is find some poor woman to serve as the AC's mother. De Rosa rapes her, mixing his DNA and hers. Her DNA is descended from someone who escaped the breeding program long ago, a lineage then lost to Satan. Her "wild" genes combined with De Rosa's genes from the breeding program is what gives Connor greater powers than those of his cousins and father. God provides Adam's soul at the moment of conception, and Connor is born.

De Rosa had no idea Campagna was a descendant of the breeding program. One sticky issue is why didn't Satan have Connor's genes looked at. Even though De Rosa knows this is the Antichrist, and safely assumes Connor is generally safe from an early death (the cousins all have powerful immune systems and are able to heal quickly from illness or injury), one would think he'd still be interesting in knowing how Connor's DNA differs from his own. Plot hole, for now.

In Catholicism, life begins at conception.

The fact that Satan chooses to rape Campagna, leading to the whole cascade of events in the trilogy, is pure coincidence, but I find those in interesting stories all the time. I think it's great when you can tie your characters to the heart of the plot. Connor's anger at the fact that Satan raped his mother leads to a cascade of events resulting in Satan's demise. After stabbing Satan with the dagger intended for Christ, Connor tells the dying Satan: I loved you, father, and I would torn the Earth in two for you, but you raped my mother for sport. ...  Your evil acts created me, and in so doing, you sealed your fate.

There are effectively backups. The most recent generation from the breeding program, although I guess that means Satan shouldn't order the death of the rest of the kids.

Yeah, I'd rather not go there. Although he's 80, if he lives long enough for my books to get finished, any "son' could be seen to be a disguised version of the real one. Highly unlikely, but why go there? Also, my story has a subplot where a group of super-humans has been bred by evil. Remind you of any historical regimes? A daughter I could see using as the geneticist. I'm always looking for good roles for women in this story.

>The only issue is that some people will state that God limited man's age to 120 years. That is up to interpretation.
The oldest person ever whose age has been independently verified is Jeanne Calment (1875–1997) of France, who lived to the age of 122 years and 164 days. It definitely needs reinterpreting.

Can't use Mengele's son since he really did have a son, who is still alive. That could get me sued.

I like not having to have a "formal" compound. If they're deep in the jungle, there's no need for walls around the compound, the conditions would be harsh since Satan wants to toughen the kids up, there's no need to provide food for them, water they can get from a nearby river and rainwater, minimal clothing from the outside world (I'm thinking loin cloths and no shoes; it's always hot and humid there anyway), and if they're stupid enough to get lost foraging for food, then Satan doesn't want them anyway. He's not looking for someone he has to rescue. It's a good thing I never ran an orphanage, huh?

Satan's breeding program seems somewhat like the Bene Gesserit's attempt to create the Kwisatz Haderach, except Satan has the kids on a tight leash when it comes to who breeds with whom (yes, there are girls there too). I now have two potential roles for a geneticist: determine who reproduces with whom to bring about certain desirable characteristics in the offspring, and mess with Connor's DNA prior to insemination to make him even more powerful than the others, while simultaneously creating within him an overwhelming genetic urge to serve his father. FYI, the geneticist is a former disciple of Joseph Mengele, spirited out of Germany after WW2. One of the things the geneticist does early on is to adjust his own DNA to extend his lifespan since it's yet unknown when the end will come, and the breeding program has to continue until the Antichrist has been successfully created.

A third role for the geneticist would be to keep a handwritten journal documenting much of what he has done. That journal makes it into Romano's hands midway through book 2, who shows Connor that his overwhelming urge to serve his father, which Connor mistook for love of his father, is nothing more than genetic manipulation. And it comes with a built-in guarantee: if ever someone were to turn off the gene(s) involved, the carrier of the gene(s) will die, although it takes about two years, which gets us right to the end of trilogy, when Connor will be 18.

One big issue for me is to explain how the geneticist is able to perform/perfect all this research, which is light years ahead of modern genetics. Satan's breeding program will help. Many of the "supernatural" abilities of Connor and his predecessors were developed through the millennia-old breeding program. I'd like a better explanation, though, for why Campagna's genes turn what would be a powerful offspring into a superhuman. Even Connor doesn't know the limits of his powers. He thinks he does, but he's never faced a situation requiring him push himself so hard that his genes turn him from powerful into superhuman, similar to what happens to the Duncan Idaho ghola in one of the later Dune books. Wish me luck trying to explain, even at a rudimentary level, how that is possible. Probably no one will have an actual answer, although the characters can speculate about it.

One possibility is the way long-distance runners are eventually able to run non-stop (until they run out of readily available fuel), far beyond whatever wall previously prevented them from doing so. That happened to me many years ago, and the endorphins were firing on all cylinders, which is probably part of what kept me going.

Yeah, I thought of that too. In theory, I could use one of the lost cities as the "compound" where these kids live and train. I had thought to bring supplies into the compound, which would have required a road or river, but I could just as easily require that the kids eat whatever they can find/catch, otherwise they go hungry. Naturally, they'll eat bugs and worms. And civilization is dozens of miles away through the jungle, and they have no idea where it is and how to get there. So, I don't even need to add fencing or walls around the compound. In fact, one of the tests is to be led out of the compound blindfolded for a number of miles, tied up, and left alone to find their way back.

One of the powers i might give some of them is the ability to sense life forces in the jungle and even communicate with them, be it animals, vegetation, or otherwise (Connor talks to animals in book one). The kids who can do that have the best chance of finding their way back. Occasionally, though, some of the kids say screw it and decide not to look for the way back. There could be stories over the centuries about white kids occasionally stumbling into native villages, usually by following a stream or river. Medical supplies are not needed at the compound since all of the kids have the same powerful immune system as Connor. In fact, if someone is so seriously injured that they require outside medical assistance, they're simply left to die. Basically, a nasty place.

Not all of this will make it into the books, and some of it is sure to change as I get closer to writing book three. I'd like to find a way to hint at the existence of this compound and the breeding program, if not in book one, then definitely in book two, otherwise it will seem like it came out of nowhere and was never really properly set up in the overall story.