Introduction

Tech Infantry was the best roleplaying game I’ve ever played. Like most Americans, it was a mutt; a little White Wolf thrown in with Robert Heinlein, mixed liberally with... well, to be honest, whatever was cool at the time. From “Season 1” played back in 1996 around whatever table we could find, to “Season 8” in 2004, played online between people on the other side of the world, it captured the imagination of any one who played it.

Over the years, it passed from one storyteller to the next, and developed a nasty habit of having elements that... er, didn’t make sense. It was my job, as one of those storytellers, to tie all those loose strings back together. One of the biggest loose ends was the Caal Invasion that was the trigger point for “Season 6” (or Y3K, as it was known) in 2001. What happened during this major event? No one, including the storyteller, seemed to know.

This gaping plot hole bothered me, threatening to suck in my jury-rigged universe timeline and crush it. In 2002, I was working at a call center on 2nd shift. You couldn’t read, couldn’t talk with co-workers for too long, couldn’t surf the Internet... and I had LOTS of spare time between calls. So I wrote this at work—by hand—and then typed it up to make the final edits. Prayer for the Technocrats became the novella that answered those questions.

Thanks to my boss, Gevonya Evans-Fennell, who never looked closely at what I was doing—but I always had the fastest response time, so she never had reason to. Thanks especially to Ed Stasheff, my faithful first reader, who I’m pretty sure is the only one who’s read the initial draft, and because of that, saved it from electronic oblivion. Glad it finally got printed.

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