Title: The Border of Light

On the stretch of Interstate 10 that snakes through the heart of Texas like a vein of asphalt prophecy, a man known only as Brother Alton roamed from truck stop to revival tent, from migrant chapel to halfway house. His government file called him CI-7431TX, an FBI Confidential Informant with jurisdictional blur blur between Waco and El Paso, authorized to "embed within mobile religious subgroups for the purpose of pre-emptive threat mapping."

He carried no badge. Just a beat-up King James Bible with the spine warped from heat and sweat, and a memory for faces as precise as forensic software. He would sit beside you at a Whataburger, buy your coffee, ask where you were headed. Then, with eyes bright and solemn, he’d say:

> “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”
—John 1:11.



He’d say it like a whisper meant only for you. Then he’d wait, watching your silence. Not for guilt. For resonance.

Brother Alton wasn’t looking for sinners. He was looking for echoes.

Each time he cited that verse, a small mark went into his field notebook—just a word: received or not. If you asked him what it meant, he’d nod like you were halfway initiated. If you brushed it off, he'd just say “Be blessed,” and vanish like dust on the tail of a Greyhound.

Behind his sermon-like rhythm, behind the calloused charm, was a strange mandate: construct the largest religious profile ever formed along an American highway. Not for conversion. For surveillance.

Washington had theories: that the most devout are the least predictable, that doctrinal drift correlates with radical latency. Somewhere, a predictive model believed that mapping scripture against human response might preempt disaster.

But Alton’s motives had started to blur.

Because in those verses he planted like seeds, in those offramps of confession, he began to believe something neither bureau nor algorithm expected: that maybe he was the one unreceived. That maybe the Light didn’t come from Langley or Quantico, but from the silence after a man hears the Word and either cracks or kneels.

And somewhere between Fort Stockton and Junction, on a night when the sky looked like cracked leather above the oil rigs, Alton flipped to John 1:11 and scribbled his final note.

Just one word.

“Me.”

Then he dropped off the grid.

And to this day, some say you can hear that verse on the CBs late at night, bouncing off trucker radios like static gospel.

> “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”



And some answer back:

> “I receive.”