In late 1944, Kurt Vonnegut had met Colonel "Wild" Bob of the Four-Fifty-first Regiment on the Prisoner of War train to Dresden. "Wild Bob" was almost the only survivor of the regiment, having lost forty-five hundred men. Or boys mostly, in what Vonnegut thought of as the "Children's Crusade".

Kurt Vonnegut	"God be with you, boys!" ~ Colonel "Wild Bob", delivering his last address to his already dead troops Kurt Vonnegut was a fourth-generation German-American living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as an American Infantry Scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden. In 1967, Vonnegut needed help with his memories for Slaughterhouse-Five, and decided to contact the crazy Colonel. For the sake of balance in his anti-war diatribe, if nothing else. And just taking up an open offer, after all.
Peacenik

Missing	In 1975, a tour de force performance as Lord Southmere in One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing had earned Nimmo enough popularity (and credibility) among fans of detective fiction to earn him the role James Bond despite the inevitable comparisons to Sean Connery.
Roger Moore had abruptly resigned after the Spy Who Loved Me had failed at the box office. Hoping to capitalise on the success of One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing, a slight change of format was introduced. The new Bond Girl for the next movie, Moonraker would be his Scottish Nanny, the actress Molly Weir.

Brunel	In 1867, at a price of £10 million Great Britain completed the Alaska Purchase from Russia. Shortly thereafter, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, having recently recovered from several years of ill-health, arrived. He began a new engineering “first” - the Fort Sitka-Mexico City railway, the arterial transport link upon which the North American Union was founded.

In 1989, in one of the final acts of the meltdown of Western Monarchies that year, West German Head of Government Helmut Kohl resigned. After German re-unification, he first fled to the America but was extradited by the new US government to Germany, where he was imprisoned and tried for high treason and crimes committed during the Cold War (specifically the deaths of 192 Germans who tried to escape the Kohl regime). However, as he was dying of cancer, he was released from prison. He died in exile in Chile about a year and a half later.	Helmut Kohl

LBJ	In 1988, Simon Burns published What if Jack Ruby had missed? in which Lyndon Baines Johnson is discredited by Lee Harvey Oswald's testimony. The story climaxes in in September 1964 with a tearful President telling America I will not seek, not will I serve...

In 2007, Rat sees the Mesh as it really is, lines of streaming green code: he finally becomes "the One". Agent Smith makes a final attempt to physically attack him, but his punches are effortlessly blocked, and Rat destroys him.	Agent vs Rat
The other two Agents flee, and Rat returns to the real world just in time for the ship's EMP weapon to destroy the Sentinels, which already breached into the ship.