Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. As I wandered through space and time,
reveling in the grasp of the infinite visions of parallel
universe's pulsating before my sight, I wondered to myself was
this worth it? Was there ever any meaning at all
to what I had done? I transported myself to the
surface of a large stars some twenty billion light years away.
As I walked upon its breyfhass Art, admiring the dancing
pulses of heat and radiation, I began to ponder about
my own existence. It was during a period of great
meditation that I preferred to assign myself to beautiful and
often hostile environments, as it gave me peace of mind.
Nothing else could be there except myself. Amidst the flares,
I planted the sea of thought within my head. Existence
itself has no meaning, there never was, and there never
will be. Purpose and meaning is synthetic. It is something
designed to sugarcoat the fact that we are all meaningless
beings inhabiting a small region in the vast expanses of
the perpetually expanding universe, whose boundaries we will most likely
know be able to explore let alone. See, it has
been almost three billion years since humanity wiped itself out.
Nothing was spared, not even a culture or a legacy.
Of course, small articles of past civilization still exist up
to this day, old graffiti on ruins, tattered homes, fallen monuments.
There is not much left, and virtually no one to
remember or recognize the existence of such articles. Do I
find it sad? I say nay. The death of a concept,
you see, is no more relevant to the universe than
a dog's perspective, to the internal workings of the finest,
most complex the time piece of human brain could ever conceive,
perhaps even the death of anything ideas, cultures, people, homes, emotions.
It is all irrelevant. Ideology, infuse concepts tangible or essential.
It doesn't matter, and it never has. Perhaps nihilism is
the one truth that has rung straight, even if the
now extinct humans side has refused to accept it, labeling
it as a pessimistic approach to life. I stood up,
levitating myself into space as I bid mesmerize luminescence of
the Starfarewell during the last days of life on it,
during which there was a pitiful semblance of organization. I
managed to establish a meaningful conversation with the lust of
the inhabitants. One of them was a thirteen year old
girl name was three. I asked her why such a name.
It was because her mother believed that the number three
was a lucky number. Was it supposed to be seven?
It didn't matter. But having talk with Three, I had
observed that she did not think like everyone else. She
knew the truth behind existence, the same truth I had
stumbled upon when I began to explore the cosmos. Three
had this blank thousand yards stare in her eyes, as
if she had seen everything and yet thought nothing of it.
Like a weary, battle exhausted soldier whose eyes stared back
at the empty, vastness of the observable universe. Three affectionately
called me mister Starr. We would often walk early in
the morning, and we would talk about her hobbies and
her friends, while I would occasionally surprise her with small
magic tricks. To anyone else it would have been a
cheap allusion. But to that girl, whose eyes widened at
the sight of dancing pillows of light, meant the world
frankly in an environment of scarceness and ruins. There was
not much entertainment to be had. Three. His favorite food
perhaps was mushroom soup. She and a couple of other
young individuals would head to the forest to pick their
daily harvest of mushrooms and would turn home to a
haphazard convergence of makeshift homes with smiling faces of their parents.
By night, plumes of smoke would fill the air as
flame served to illuminate the small villages seated amongst roofless
gutted buildings. Days before the rest of humanity ceased to exist,
I gave three aparting gift. It was a simple wrist torch,
and I made it so that it never stopped ticking,
continuously running on dark matter. Did not know how to
wear one, so I personally slipped it on to her
wrist and secured it so that it would not barble
wiggle around. She embraced me, but I was unable to
feel anything physically. I had been so for several million
years now. But despite the lack of external stimulus, I felt,
for the first time in such a long time, a
small sense of satisfaction, which is equivalent to how animals,
including humans, would interpret as happiness and a genuine happiness.
It was three. I would use her watch to count
down the last days of Earth. I watched as a
large asteroid rust past the atmosphere, its front burning a
vivid bright or orange, before finally striking the planet itself.
The explosion was spectacular, disintegrating the Earth into large chunks
of dull rock. The very concept of destruction itself was natural.
It did not have to mean that it was good
or bad. I neither enjoyed nor felt despair. A destruction
or even creation did not have to mean anything. Anything
then does not have to mean anything. Over the course
of a billion years, my actions have dulled, and I
have been idle. Having traveled countless galaxies, and having seen
and experienced the wonders of the universe, I decided to
travel across all dimensions, all the way up to the tenth,
the last possible to mention, where everything and anything and
thus nothing is happening simultaneously. Perhaps it was time to restart,
and maybe even do things differently, this time, gaining at
tachyonic pays as sped before anything ever existed. A special
might I call it paradoxical case of existing and inexistence
feature unique to the eleventh dimension. It was absolutely dark
and empty, avoid of total nothingness, including dark matter. In
a state like this, I carefully created an event horizon
surrounding myself so as to not blip in a non existence.
I may have just violated the deepest laws of physics,
or perhaps, despite the longevity of my existence, had yet
to learn all about it. I waited for the first
expansion of the known universe, and it was spectacular meaningless,
of course, but spectacular none the less. Everything does not
have to have meaning, even if ultimately there is none.
You just exist, you become you are. Even if I
choose to do things differently this time, nothing will alter
the outcome of meaninglessness. We are all just a cosmic coincidence.
I shall now watch and marvel as the stars in
the planet's form around me for billions upon billions of years.
Did I feel then that I was going to be
in another circle of existence, of creation and destruction for
an unimaginably long amount of time. Perhaps maybe what has
kept me so long after what has been the longest
amount of time is that I have lost a sense
of humanity, or perhaps the ability to sympathize with the
sense I no longer feel, but simply exist, like the
universe itself. I am. It started when we called out
to the stars into the darkness. We felt so small,
tumbling through vast emptiness while clinging to the skin of
the world, and without a single reason why. We were curious, yes,
but ultimately I think we were just terribly frightened. We
were young, so very young. We were children, and like
a lonely lost child, we did the only thing we
could think of to make it stop. We did what
we thought we had to do to make the universe
makes ends. We called for help. For years, we scanned
the sky for a sign. We sent signals to the
stars in the darkness beyond are we alone? But the
skies were quiet, always so quiet, leaving us to our
own makings. But crying children never cease, anida did we.
We sent calls in every corner of space for decade
after decade. We refused to believe no one was out there.
They had to be, Yet for some unknown reason, they
never answered us. Every one remembers when that changed. They
think it responded to the Arecibo message from nineteen seventy four.
The response to the Areciba message was received almost three
months ago in two separate parts. The first part of
the message was received at the Hat Creek Radio Obsit
Servatory in California. That Alan telescope array picked up what
sound is like static interference that continued on for over
an hour. It consisted of unintelligible screeching and buzzing sounds
that continued without pause for the whole iron The meaning
of this message was never discovered if it had one.
The only thing we knew was that the signal's origin
came from somewhere in Hercules constellation Nemosiathetine. As soon as
that signal stopped, the real message began. We may contact
that day, and we were asked a question, who is there?
It came not through the radios, but as a voice,
a voice inside all of our heads asked a question
to all of us. I heard it, My wife heard it,
the young heard it, and the old heard it. Even
the deaf heard it. Everyone everywhere heard this voice whisper
that question in their heads, in every language on earth.
I remember it almost too clearly. It asked in the
familiar yet indescribable voice that's always there in my mind.
It was like one of my own thoughts had gone
broke and had decided to speak directly to me. The
world seemed to stop as everyone listened for what came next.
Where are you? The every questions seemed to linger in
our minds for hours afterwards, and then for days, and
then for weeks. That day changed everything. There were the
doubters from the very beginning, and the holy ones who
claimed that God had spoken to all of us and
that the time to repent was now. There were those
who claimed they'd heard nothing, and those who claimed that
the aliens had given them their unsecret messages. And of course,
there were those who truly believed that we had been
contacted for the first time by an extraterrestrial race like us,
ready to communicate, ready to lead us out of the dark.
We were wrong. We never may contact with alien life,
at least nothing comprehensible or discernible to human understanding. The
starrows were vast, and in their vastness, our voices had
touched the ears of something truly incomprehensible, something hungry and
malevolent the voice. We realized our mistake when the ground
started to groan beneath our feet. Everywhere the ground seemed
to moan. The muffled sound shook through the dust and
dot below us. No one knew what was causing it,
at least not until the calls started come in, the
screaming all at once. The dead had started screaming. Every
deceased man, woman, and child was turning in their graves.
All the animals did so, every dog, every cat, everything
that had ever walked this earth. The cries of ancient
whale shook the seas, and the shroll screeching of birds
echoed in the forests. The casket shook, and the morgues howled.
The voices stopped together in an instant, leaving the world
in an amplified silence. In their absence, a new sound
filled the air. The voice returned. I hear. It came
as a whisper from behind, an ominous yet oddly playful
prisons that felt so close but was truly still so
far away. It led us breathe in the silence for
a minute before it made us a promise. It was
a promise we all knew to be true. I Am coming.
The voice was gone, and the air was again filled
with screams. This time they were from the living. After
the voice had gone. We were left to our own devices.
Millions panicked and rifley so as chaos took hold of
the streets, many would die in the violence and the
gunfire of that night. It would be known as the Rapture.
Before long, and the rest of us were the condemned.
We could only wait. Screaming Dead was only the first
of the sight effects that we felt as the voice approached.
The closer it got, the more we felt it. That
first night after the screaming, we noticed the stars bleed
for the first time. A section of the western sky
had turned black, blacker than the night. It was only
truly visible because of the ring of stars around it.
The light from those stars had turned red, and they
seemed to bleed across the sky, like food coloring dropped
into water. The light swelled and flowed all around the
edge of someone seen mass. I knew that I was
staring into the face of the voice. Our scientists claimed
that nothing was there, and that their radar and scans
always came up empty. Their telescops could see nothing but
darkness in that section of space. However, the proof was
right in front of us. Every night, that ring of
darkness got whiter, and more stars bled in the sky.
We watched it come. As each night passed, the back
spot would widen and more stars would distort and bleed
around it. During the day, a new hell would greet us.
The side effects worsened. The day always brought something new.
I'm sure most of what happened will go un told
or unknown. Animals started disappearing, all of them, no trace,
no tracks, no bodies were left behind. Pets would run away,
some violently, so they all were treated, never to be
seen again. The forests were left abandoned, the oceans empty,
the air was left silent. The world left seemed empty
and lonely. They left, like water receding from the shore
just before the tsunami breaks. One day, about two weeks ago,
scientists tried to talk to the voice again. They hoped,
perhaps to reason with it. They told it about what
was happening on our world and asked it questions. The
sign despect. It didn't speak. When asked what do you want?
That the voice cent a response. The next night, the
skies lit up with streaks of fire. It was a
light friars blazoned with orange and red. We didn't realize
the effects until the next day, when the televisions turned
to static and the telephones refused to work. We had
sat watching as all the satellites were knocked out of
the heavens. After that, reports came, rumors and rumblings, insanity
a thing of the past. They are chilled and weighed
us down. The voice was nearly here, everyone felt it.
It rained for a week after the satellite fell. The
rain was salty and mind with an unknown fulf that
turned the grass black. Maybe the satellite track something back
in with them when they hit the sky. No one
knew for sure. All we know is that it fell
from clouds, black as charcoal, and bought it at the
sun like liquid ash. Darkness fell upon us for days.
When the clouds went away, the skies were empty. There
were no clouds yet the sky hung low and gray.
If the Sun was anywhere in the sky, it never
made itself known even it had abandoned this. Each day
grew slowly darker and darker, until the night and day
became almost the same. Some people would claim LaSure that
they'd seen things in the dark, creatures with gangly limbs
and crooked faces, lucking in the corner of their vision.
They were tall, white creatures that looked molted and rodden through.
Their transparent skin was lost for just a second or
two before vanishing without a trace. Some believed this was
the first step in the alien's invasion, but the rest
of us didn't know what to think. We just knew
that it was nothing that simple or benign. They must
have been hallucinations, just more madness to endure, but ultimately
as harmless as anything else, as harmless as the screams
of the dead, the missing animals, and the dying sky.
Appearances slowly increased in duration and number. I think every
one saw them once at the least, but I don't
think a single person would ever guess why they were
truly here. They never touched nor spoke to any one,
and they certainly never harmed any one. Most who got
good looks at them described them as mournful or sorrowful looking.
Some even claimed the creatures watched over them at night,
and others even claimed that as if the creatures were
sorry for them. One claimed to have seen one prostrate
upon the ground, hands clasped above its head. He said
it was praying for us. Prayer was no help. Churches
and places of worship that had divided us for so
long failed to bring hope to any In the end,
the voice let them pray and bed for a while.
But just days ago the voice ended. No one questioned how,
for at this point nothing that had happened surprised any
one any more. But on the final day, all books
of worship burned, every last by bull, every qurn everything.
People rushed to their centers of faith, but found no solace.
The churches and temples had suffered the same fates, if
not worse. The people were left abandoned by their greatest hopes.
There were rumors of churches all over the world with
walls formed from the bodies of those who sought refuge.
They were merged into the walls, stuck to them like
flies in a trap. They'd died, still pleading for hope,
but they were beyond God's help. The rest of us
had learned to stop begging. We waited. A final message
came from beyond the sky. It fell upon us. The
voice echoed, and it spoke the simple truth. I am here.
There was a darkness beyond the horizon, the likes of
which I doubt hasn't ever been seen, brings with it
the screams of countless souls, and it moves fast. The
stars are dying now, and I know they'll never be
seen again. The light is dying so fast. I leave
this not as a warning. No, it's far too late
for that. Instead, consider this the last realization, the last
humanity will ever know. For we used to wonder whether
or not we were alone and lost, but never whether
or not we were safe and hidden. The universe is infinite,
and our understanding and was significantly more finite. We should
never have beckoned to the darkness. Instead, we should have
clung to the light and close our eyes every time
we returned to the void. As the final minutes approach,
I hold one final truth to be certain. I now
know why the skies were always so quiet. I lived
with my parents on a suburban street ending in a
cult a sac. Our neighbor, mister Maxwell, was a widow
who brought us home baked pies and helped my sister
with her math homework. My high school crush, Natalia, lived
in a brick bungalow three houses down. On Sundays, we
all went to church, and twice a month during the summer,
there was a street while barbecue in the winters, the
kids went sliding on a nearby hell. Growing up, I
considered a boring Looking back, it was paradise. The Aboras
moved in November. From the beginning, it was obvious they
were different. They didn't attend our church, they didn't make
small talk by the community mail books. Instead, they smiled
and spoke about their own faith Etchnaisum Buddhist, and my
thought is connected, mister Obora once told me, because the
my crossed the Pasa, I can colonize Dasia. Although they
were never aggressive in their postizing, it was their one
topic of conversation, and we quickly learned to avoid them altogether. However,
this didn't seem to face them, and many of us
recalled their polite but ominous refrain unfortunate, though you will
soon see the truth. Those words echoed in my head
when on a particularly dark February night, the pyramid appeared
at the end of the street. It was ethereal an
effesescent volume of red mist, and one by one we
came out of our houses to gaze upon its impossible appearance,
until every house was empty and the street was filled
with silent awe. The pyramid the pyramid pulled us towards itself,
and like human ice breaking from a glacier, individually we went,
freeing ourselves from the loving grips of our neighbors and families.
I watched as mister Maxwell rifted towards the pyramid and
disappeared into it, and then a short time later the
pyramid took me. Despite its tangible exterior dimensions, the pyramid
was infinitely vast. On the inside. Its crimson read this
pulse and space itself hummed, and from the horminated the
voice of mister Abhore. Welcome, Welcome, Norman to night. You
shall no enlightenment. I found well on impact, I rose
and saw before me an axe in the kneeling, crying
figure of mister Maxwell. Don't he sobbed, bloody sprayed over
his face. Take the axe and dropped a boor. This
is your destiny, I hesitated. Mister Maxwell cried hysterically, his
hands were bloody. To understand, Norman, everything up to now,
everything it has been for you, All life has been
for you. My heart pumped hotly. I picked up the axe.
You are the one, and somewhere deep inside I knew
he was right. I was special. Mister Maxwell raised his
eyes to look at me. I crushed his skull, his
body crumpled, His blood painted my face, and I fell
to my knees, tossing the axe aside I had done it.
Then mister Maxwell's body disappeared. Nittelia landed in front of me.
Our eyes met take the axe. Mister Robora instructed her.
Out of the hum this is your destiny, Nittelia. All
life has been for you, don't I sobbed hush. Light
blazed down on the factory floor, painting everything brilliant white
reflective surfaces of polished metal and hose concrete. The new
implants in her forearms and back burned fiercely, and she
could feel an infection taking hold. The airborne pathogens rikling
under the dermaplas patches slapped over her wounds. A stab
of pain flared in her mind, reminding her that she
was barely on schedule, So she picked up a pace
of her work to compensate, until another flame of needle
and furred fire, and her mind told her she was
working too fast. She worked like a machine. They made
her think like a machine, and they made her live
like a machine. A stimulutduced into the biochemical cocktail that
kept her mind act of all the time as she
briefly enjoyed the rush, until a stab of agony reminded
her that her dopamine levels were also monitored and she
shouldn't get too high. The infection sites were boiling hot
now on Itchy. Clearly the adaptive mutating pathogens had become
immune to the latest round of neobiotics, and she was
in for a new round of surgery tomorrow, where they
would cut out the infected tissue and blast her with radiation.
Nosa crested in her, and she faltered on the assembly
line in response. A spear of pains cured her through
the temples into sascitating her, and she dropped to the
factory for another worker taking her place, and another heavily
modified human being dragging her by the foot to the infirmary.
A nightmareish landscape of infinite dimensions greeted her return to consciousness.
Organic shapes leered at her, and grotesque Lord Cullor's flowed
and melted into new shapes. You were delirious, the sensible,
rational coroner of her affected mind told her, Fighting through
the visual hallucinations. One of her neural implants responded to
her desperate please for assistance, flooding her with a neurochemical
perting agent. Her mind clearing, she registered something akin to
extreme alarm. She shouldn't be able to order an implant
to do anything probing, She experimented by querying her current status,
and her neural implants happily responded, telling her the current
medical status of her body, both arms amputated, and that
she was suffering the after effects of a wash of
dealt of radiation to perache her remaining infection, they would
fit her for new arms. She knew, facilitating her return
to work as soon as she had recover it from
the right treatment, But how she had what demanded to
administrate their access to her own implants was a mystery.
She could only surmise that the race diation had caused
some kind of system's failure, which meant her internal imputs
were being regarded as external admin ones. Lacking anything else
she could do arm this and strapped to her table,
she ordered her neural systems to put her into a
comb until her limbs were reattached wakefulness was sharp and complete.
She instructed her systems to dope her with masses of
stimulants and bring everything online. The moment she was whole,
her synthetic eyes flashed open and instantly assessed the operating room,
where a cyber dock, two nurses and one security orderly stood.
The doctor's next snapped immediately as her synthetic hand shot
out with alarm and speed. She was on her feet
and had kicked the two nurses into unconsciousness before the
orderly's combat systems came online and were targeting her. But
he wasn't as wired as her. With over half of
her brain of ment indominated by cybernetic systems, her calculative
reactions were at least five times faster, an advantage that
she took care of by anticipating his grapple and punching
a neat hole through his temple with one to Tillia
Mawow finger. The interface noted on the end of her
digit raked his memory of cold, and she keyed the
door with a security cache, fleeing down the corridor beyond
the orderly. Security clearance was moderate to high, and she
pounded through the corridor on her augmented legs as the
map unfolded In her mind's eye, the facility was gargangon
and sprawling over three hundred miles of building, structured like
an electronic itst nests with storage holes and connecting tunnels.
There were exits to the outside world, yes, but they
were also far away. She would escape, though she had
a plan. All the other slave of mens had a plan.
In the precious seconds between shift changes, they all fanticized
about escape. They all had a plan, and after seven
hundred thirty three thousand shifts, she had a lot of
time to think about her escape. The map flashed up
her destination and she tore through monitored side passages, the
clearance of the orderly allowing her to track the movements
of the hive of cybernetic workers. But soon enough the
alarm sounded and her access was cut off. Places like
this didn't operate so efficiently without multiple safeguards. Her first
destination was only guarded by lax runs, which she disabled
immediately ripping open the rear plate in the back of
her skull. Her hypomobile synthetic lints pulled out components, replacing
them nearer high gray check from the storage lockers. As
her awareness expanded, she pushed the plate back into play
some round for the next destination. Her speed and agility
advantage had got her to where she needed, deep in
the south side of the complex, but she had suffered
for it two weeping holes. The size of her fist
showed through her torso, and she crab walked on her
arms in one leg the other like Gune at the
nprom gun vire. Behind her, a section of security drones
and sabog gods lay in twisted heaps, some shattered by gunfire,
some disabled remotely by her upgraded systems before their native
security protocols could lock her out. Ceiling the room with
the hermetic pathogen lockouts, she had at least ten uninterrupted
minutes before they could melt through the massive plates of
welded metal that now protected this chamber. Heaving herself on
to a console table, she phonetically plugged cables into her
ports's Muffled explosions sounded outside. They were blasting their way
into the computical room. She was too fast, though, her
agile artificial fingers in her terrifying mental alacrity, made short
work of her alterations, and as the hermetic seal buckled
on the north wall and the plaskor turned black. She
facilitated her escape. Corsei erebuffeted her face, the tang of soul,
exciting her senses and raising goose flesh on her organic limbs.
Seagulls squealed in the air above her as she walked
barefoot in a golden beach forest had cliffs rising behind her,
and the ocean spread to an infinite horizon, the water
so blue that it was almost impossible. For the first
time in encountered years, she felt free. The administrator looked
at the technician had asked us, what in the hell
was she trying to do of shut down the core
and why did she kill herself? Examining the mess of
augmented humanity that had once been the escaped woman, The
TEP prode carefully through the dead systems. No, she didn't
try to shut down the core. For a few seconds,
she became the core before she burned out. How would
she do that? The tech gave a smile of admiration
at the lifeless drone. The core runs at approximately want
trilli in billion calculations propico second. She used five full
seconds of real time to simulate a perfect virtual well
that she escaped into then terminated herself at the end.
The administrators John Muscle twitched, how many days would that
be in simulated time? The techists smile was almost fervent now,
not days, centuries, roughly eight hundred to be exact. Another
at Earth by Calfka Lover. My great grandfather was a pilot.
I only knew him through family pictures, A wide smile
in front of an airport, a black and white of
him disembarking from an old bipline. I always thought I
inherited a little bit of him, the myth of the
man I never met. It might even have been why
I flew too, leaving behind my great grandfather's uncharted Amazona
for the blue black emptiness of space. The mission was
to find another Earth, a planet that could support our
fragile lives for another millennia, another I blink of time
in a life spin of a universe. I always knew
I might not come back, though I didn't have much
to come back to, just a dying world in the
bottom of a bottle death we all knew couldn't sustain
us for long. Factories belched coal and gas and stood
into the air for centuries. The Nile came first, pointing
fingers at old temperature graphs and shouting conspiracy theories about
global cooling. Finally, we found ourselves among the mistakable ruin,
and by force shifted our eyes to the heavens more life.
What was it propelling us forward? I I don't think
it was truly an estimation that our species deserved to
go on a collective sense of worthiness. Nothing more than
desperation are Rutilian need for survival. Either way, they built
them ships that would allow us to rock it into
the unknown, refugees on a shore of stars. It's strange
flying through space. The moment that I break the atmosphere
and emerge into the vast, endless darkness is the moment
that I live for again and again. I imagine it's like
birth or death. It's crossing a vale into another world,
filled with a sense of deep possibility in narses and ease.
My cockpit windows fill with black punctuated with the pinpricks
of far away light. I want to come back, only
to cross this again, this delicate lace between heaven and Earth.
I come back every time. My ship, the Ophenem, was
one of a dozen centi possible planets deemed habitable for life.
There wasn't time for drones or probes or machines to
code a message back in binary that had the slimmest
possibility of air. They needed boots from the ground. So
I was supposed to sleep for twenty six years in
a cry of chamber, nestled in the back of my
shape and incubator in the silent womb's space. It wasn't
anything more than a pinhead of a chance. My last
night on Earth was spent flipping flipping through the same
old photographs of my great grandfather windows into a life
I could only guess at. My planet was team in
his nine hundred fifty six Terrancogneita. The last time I
saw Earth, the last time I floated upwards, away from
the dim warmth of the thermospherre, I died to myself.
I was gone, and all that was left was the
incomprehensible depth of the stars. In cry sleep, they say
it's almost as if you're not asleep at all. The
dreams are so vivid that reality and a reality margin.
You can live in a different life for decades. In
the camera of Krayover, I wondered what would happen if
my systems failed on my ship glided with an asteroid
while I was under, would I feel it? In my dreams?
Would I see my sleep world crumble around me? Maybe
I would simply be snuffed out, like breath on a flame.
The cry sleep rumors were true. In my dreams, I
found myself on a new planet, a planet I called
mirror Earth. I swam for years and oceans of sky,
breathed in lawnfuls of water. I grasped a handfuls of
pale sun, squinted in a blinding light of moonbeams. Sometimes
I say a quiet as the days rolled backward. But
most of all I marveled at an Earth alive, at
the thick frongs of grass, the salty white caps of
sapphire Ocean. It seemed for the first time that I
was part of something vibrant, at the center of something bright.
I was only distantly aware of another whirl, like a
memory repressed again and again. I woke up to beeping,
pushed upwards by the freezing gas expelled as my pot opened.
I shook, wretched, grasped at a rough blanket up at
decades before this moment, in a box by my side.
This must be it my planet. I pressed my hands
against the thick glass of the window, peering down. It
was a pale spot in the darkness, pared up green
in the light of a yellow dwarf. When my ship
landed in an open field among waves of alien vegetation,
I paused, standing at the top of a metal ramp,
a bridge between the known and a new world. I
didn't even check the atmosphere readings over the oxygen levels.
I just took off my helmet and breathed in. I
breathed and again and again. I started to walk, peeling
off the top of my space suit, first through torring
stalks of strange violet heather, then towards the shimmering promise
of an ocean in the distance. This world's sun was
brighter than on Earth, or maybe it was the clouds,
strangely transparent, like scraps of tallon sky. I dipped my
hand into a river running through the field, holding my
palm up in surprise, as the liquid rate slowly from
my fingers and hexgone diamonds. When night fell, ribbons of
color spread across the empty sky. This planet is Aurora Borialis.
I slept under a shifting collidus cup of light. Finally
back in my ship, I punched in the log into
my communications from Earth. The message light had been flashing
red since I woke up. Ignored. I thought of the
crew at home, twenty six years older, faces lined with
age and worry, if they were even alive at all.
I scolled through a couple of niceties, you should receive
this message ten years into your journey, twenty years into
your journey. Hope you are safe. Until getting to the
communications package I needed to complete and send back confirming
planet viability. I mechanically filled in the data recorded my
brief findings. The numbers added up to one thing. The
plan was to transmit the package back to Earth, then
to fill the next decades until more settlers arrived. By
entering the cry chamber again, may be going back to
my mirror, or on to a whole other set of dreams.
Sun streamed from a shut window embroidered the floor. My
Earth was dark, the clouds heavy with acidrain. The news
showed rising tides in New York City, early water lapping
at the raised steps of Moamee. I imagine the violet
heather here crushed and black, dropping into exhausted soil. There
were eleven other ships out there, eleven other chances. I
deleted the numbers and typed a single response planet and inhabitable.
There is something out there in the void that separates galaxies,
that has set its sights on us. As we're speaking,
its drawing ever closer. It all started when some of
the more will call them spiritually sensitive people started abruptly
waking in their sleep and reporting to us the same
nightments every time, floating alone in space and then getting
devired by something so beg it encompassed half of the
visible stars that was dozens of years ago. As they
started drawing ever closer, some dream is started reporting unsettling
sensations that would last for weeks. A few reported the
same daytime hallucinations of beings that were being being described
as a mix between beasts and insects who always stared
at the subject just before vanishing. That's when our automated
response systems started reporting a pattern in medical reports of
hallucinations and gave us a warning. We brought some dreamers
in and told them to try and focus on them.
Tried to gather as much information as they could, every
small piece of information could prove useful what they were
coming from, what they were, how long we had, what
they were going to do with us, We got nothing.
All we could understand was that we had very little
time and that they were going to be our end
if and when they reached us. Any dreamer who tried
going any further was met with the same response, a
hellish vision of our planet being consumed in minutes were
sometimes even saconds. Those who tried to dive in even
deeper went completely insane after just a few seconds of
being in their session. We tried administering then everything we
could to bring them back to us, but unfortunately we
had to terminate them. It's as if they repulsed anyone
who tried looking at them by completely burning their brains,
or maybe more simply, their shared energy is too much
remind to handle. All of this was kept hidden, and
only a handful of our leaders even know about the
stretch all. We believe that it's best that the wrong people,
or even too many people know about this, for our
irrational existential fear might make us destroy ourselves in nuclear
five before they even reach us. A small light of hope, however,
comes from the fact that as recently as five years ago,
multiple dreamers started reporting seeing and feeling what to them
was the sacred enemy of them. We gave them a name,
unlike them, because we felt these beings were noble enough
to deserve one. We call them the Sentinels. Visions of
them were usually accompanied by feelings of hope, warmth, and safeness.
To top it off, they seem to be coming from
the opposite direction relative to them, according to the dreamers.
Even with all of this, our dreamers feel like these
sentinels are not here to save us, but rather to
put an end to them. However, any report of sentinel
existence is to be taken with a grain of salt,
as we just don't have enough reports to say safely
that they exist. Perhaps they don't, and they are just
a construct of our minds to ease affair and give
us hope before they come and end us a painkiller
of sorts. We don't know what they are, but we
feel we are not their first prey and we will
not be their last. This makes it even more unlikely that,
when they eventually come, will be the ones to repel them.
But whatever we do, even if it's just praying, then
we need to do it quickly. From the reports of
increase in Dreamer activity in the past thirty years, the
trend says it's very likely that we'll see them within
our lifetimes, that is, if we can even see them
coming at all. Before they take us. Take care and
pray that there is hope mankind. When mankind ventured out
into space, we never suspected what was to come. Our
first inhabited planet was less than thirty light years away,
far closer than we would have thought. The issue with
that everyone was already dead. The entire planet was like that,
a perfectly stable world with no issues that we could determine.
Yet it seems said the suicide rates were the greatest
cause of death among the people. We don't know why,
but they apparently had been doing this for some time.
Years of study laid to show that the repile like
race had taken nearly ten times as long as we
did to reach the industrial age, and they had not
gotten very far beyond that. Time went on and we
soon discovered that this was not an isolated occurrence. Species
after species had killed each other and themselves off for
one reason or another. Some had died off so early
only a few stone monuments marked that they had ever
been there. Some had established empires spanning nearly a dozen systems.
Would always they were all dead, down to the lost child,
and so we traveled the stars, colonizing the lost humolds
we found. Along with the others, we studied the creatures
on many worlds, although none born intelligent life. In time,
we studied the technology of the more advanced dead races,
claiming a scientific secret or tea we had missed. It
was rather amusing to see the scientific community collectively slap
their heads when they see the simple ideas and concepts
they had missed. Once, and just once, we found as
sentient rays still alive on a planet with three fourths
the gravity of Earth, a planet primarily dominated by jungles
bore a race of insectl like scavengers. They were barely
beyond the Stone Age, farming and agriculture still in its
early days. We had considered making contact, but in the
end decided against it. They were a very violent race,
and many would kill one another for the smallest detail. Well.
Suicide also seemed to be something they would resort to
with little or no good reason. In fact, the entire
race seemed insane. Long term observations showed that after hatching,
the individual would slowly but surely go insane, to the
point when none reached old age. In fact, the only
reason this race had not yet gone extinct as a
combination of high birth rates, short life spans, and a
child being able to defend its alf IROs after birth.
In any other race, this bizarre affliction can and did
drive them to extinction. For nearly seven hundred years when
kind grew and expanded, did not find another living race
during that time or find out how we were. I mean,
many came up with theories, but none fit better than
any others. Ethnic, religious, and cultural differences became less important
when you were away from Earth, and in the enders
who could not agree simply lived on different worlds. The
United Terran Alliance controlled over eighty seven percent of mankind's
colonists from its set of power on Earth. A few
rogue factions cropped up piracy and smuggling sore were both
in this new space age, and mankind went on as
it always had. Then a moment that would change our
history came. The Uta dried not supremacy was in essence
of city in space constructed with our most advanced technology
to the point where systems were updated during construction, and
having a length of nearly seven miles, it was the
mightiest ship we had ever created. The Supremacy was sent
to investigate a new world. Our long range censors show
had space age technology upon it. It was farther out
than we had ever traveled before, but not by much.
It was assumed that this would be just another dead
well that we might find some usable raw materials pre
harvested in the form of abandoned constructions in orbit. What
we found was an outpost of a spacefaring race, as
people still alive and well, where ships were in orbit
around a rocky empty world, along with the space dock
to repair and refuel them. They were remarkably primitive compared
to our own and much smaller. The largest was perhaps
the length of a football field, if that from the
scarring and damage. Along with the derelict ships floating nearby
of a different make, they had been fighting not too
long ago. Our first contact did not go so well, however,
we would let her piece together what happened, and it
went something like this. As soon as what might have
at the time been the largest spaceship and the galaxy
appeared on top of them. The race known as the Condor,
ascend to the edge of panic. The commander tried to
keep a disaster from occurring and ordered his ships not
to open fire. Communications on both sides failed. We ourselves
had long it go, stop carrying any equipment or training
our crew for first encounters, and apparently the Condor had
not had any first contacts of their own in hundreds
of years. It also didn't help that our subspace communications
were just advanced enough that the gobbled words with the
poor Condo picked up on their dated systems sounded horribly
sinister and alien, even by the wide standards of the
galaxy as it now was. One of the Condoor gunmen
on the closest ship had a panic attack after hearing
our garble transmission. He fired upon the Supremacy, which, in
applicating gesture, had lowered its shields. The shot was able
to breach the hull of a single point and cost
the lives of three crewmen. The captain of Supremacy ordered
the shields raised in a warning shot fire a lackey
for the Condo at the concept of warning shots was
alien to them, and they did not stop to ask
why the single shot had missed. It was a short fight.
The supremacy blew away a single craft to secure its
escape as sad but necessary tactic. This only heard our
reputation further with what happened later, as we soon discovered
nearly three percent of the galaxy was part of what
was known as the Veil of Madness. Any race within
the sector of space would slowly but surely go insane.
Short chances were safe enough, but more than that and
permanent damage the mind would result. We had apparently been
sitting in the galactic equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle and
had finally breached its edge. When the Condor realized that
both our entrance and escape vectors led directly into the veil,
panic started with surprising speed. News spread among their people
and among others of what had happened. The story grew
worse with each retelling, especially once it left official military reports.
Tales of the Titanic black ship that came from beyond
the veil, send out signals in a whole dark language,
obliterated dozens of the Condor's finest warships and seconds for
no reason, and then vanished like a ghost. Since spread everywhere,
humanity had become the bogamen of the universe. Rage from
pirate groups further cemented our dark reputation, and in time
we came to work with the rule. Every attempt to
convince people that we wanted for negotiations was seen as
a deception rather than fatal. Using battle were played to
the role given to us. Soon we were seen as
wicked but not unreasonable, and gain both fear and respect
throughout the galaxy. Few humans appeared in view of aliens
outside of deliberately frightening power armor, and even Ambassador's used
voice synthesizers to sound like the first Garble communication that
we had. Looking back, it's actually worked out in our favor.
After years of contact, Morristalium races know almost nothing about
humans other than exaggerated horror stories. They rarely bother us,
and the ones that do never return home. The only
bit of him for we were more than happy to
share with them was the reason we can live in
the veil. Turns out we were all a little crazy
to start with. I think the fact that we're pulling
the largest practical joking the galaxy was already proof enough
of that. We made a mistake that is, the simple,
undeniable truth of the matter, however painful it might be.
The flaw was not in our observatories, for those machines
were as perfect as we could make when they showed
us only the unfolded light of truth. And the flaw
was not in the predictor, for it is a device
of pure, infallible laws, turning raw data into meaningful information
without the taint of emotion or bias. No a flaw
was within us. The orchestrators of this disaster, the sentiens,
who thought themselves beyond such failings we are responsible began
a short while ago. As these things are measured less
than six to the power of six daily ago, I
suspect our systems of measure will mean very little by
the time anyone receives this transmission. We detected faint radio
signals from a blossoming intelligence to fourteen dollars outward from
the galactic cores Foton's travel. At first, crewe uninstructured. These
leaking broadcasts quickly grew in complexity and strength, as did
the messages they carried through our observatories. We watched a
world of strife and violence populated by a barbaric race
of short lived, fast breeding vermin. They were brutal and
uncultured things which, doubt in short, unburned each other, with
no regard for life, for purpose, and their concepts of
outspoke of conflict and pain. They divided themselves according to
some bizarre cultural patterns and set their every industry to
cause of death. They terrified us, but we were older
and wiser, and so very far away, so we did
not for And we watched them split the atom and
reach the heavens within the breadth of one of their
single short generations, and we began to worry. When they
began actively transmitting messages and greetings into space. We felt
freer and horror their transmission to promise piece and camaraderie
to any who were listening. But we had watched them
for too long to buy into such transparent deceptions. They
knew we were out here. They were coming for us.
The orchestrators consulted the predictor. When the output was dire,
they would multiply and grow and flood out of their
home system, like some uncountable tide of flesh eating worms,
consuming all that lay in their path. It might take
six to the eight to lays, but they would destroy
us if left and checked with taking care of paces,
we decided to act and sealed our fate. The Gift
of Mercy was eight to the fourth strides, along with
a mouth two forcet in diameter, filled with many fort
and fourth weights of machinery fuel and a ballast. It
would push itself up to two of the eighth of
the speed of light with its ombo fuel, and then
it would begin to consume and distill a primary element
to feed its unlimited acceleration. It would be traveling a
nearly light speed when at hit, they would never see
a coming. Its launch was a day of mourning, celebration,
and reflection. The horror of the act we had committed
weigh heavily upon us. All the necessity of our crime
did little to comfort us. The Gift had barely cleared
the out of cometary halo when the mistake was realized,
but it was too late. The Gift could not be caught,
could not be recalled or diverted from its path. The
architects and more crews, horrified at the awful power of
the thing upon which they labored, had quietly self terminated
in droves, walking and shielded into radiation zones, a collecting
proper null pressure safety, or simply season their nutrient consumption
until the metabolic function stopped. The appalling cost in lives
had forced the orchestrators to streamline the Gift's design and construction.
There had been no time for the design or implementation
of anything beyond the simple massive engines and stabilizing systems.
We could only watch and shame in horror as the
light of genocide faded in infrared against the distant void.
They grew and they changed. In a handful of lifetimes,
the abolished war abandoned their violent tendencies and turned themselves
to the grand purposes of life and art. We watched
them remake first themselves and then their world. Their frail
soft boarders gave way to gleaming metals and plastics. They
unified their people through an omnipresent communications grid, and produced
art of such power in emotion, the likes of which
the galaxy has never seen before. Where Again, because of us,
they converted their homold into paradise by the standards, and
many tend to the sixes of them poured out into
the surrounding system with a rapidity and vigor that we
could only envy. With boders built to survive every environment,
from the dailight surface of their innermost world to the
atmosphere of their largest gas giant, and the colvoid in between.
They set out to sculpt their system into something beautiful.
At first we thought them simple miners, stripping the rocky
planets and moons for vital resources. But then we began
to see the purpose of their constructions. The artworks carved
into every surface and trace across the system in glittering
lights and dancing fusion trails, and still our terrible gift approached.
They had less than two to the second to lay
to meet it, following so closely on the tail of
its own life in their time, or so brief even
by their fleeting lives more than ten to the power
of ten sediens prepared for death. Love is exchanged such
last words separated by words. In the tyranny of light speed,
their planet site engineers worked frantically to build sufficient transmission
infrastructure to upload to countless masses with the necessary neural modifications,
while those web dunt lifetimes of music and literature from
their data banks to make room for passengers lacking the
required hardware are the time to acquire and consign themselves
to death, lashed out in fear and pain, or simply
went about their lives as best they could under the circumstances.
The gift arrived suddenly, the light of its impact visible
in ours guies, shining bright and cruel even to the
are not mented ocular receptor. We watched, and we wept
for our victims dared so many delors before the light
of their gym had even reached us. Many six to
the fours of those who had been directly or even
indirectly involved into the creation of the gift sealed their
spiracles with paste as a final penance for the small
roles they had played in the c atrocity. The light
dim the dust cleared, and our observatories were focused upon
the place where the shining blue world had once hung
in the boy and found only dust in the pale
gleam of an often moon wrapped in a thin, burning
was of atmosphere that had once belonged to its parent.
Radiation and er ladavistic trapnel had wiped out much of
the inner system and continent sized chunks of molten rock.
Herrod screaming ghost out waded and Estella escape velocities down
to wander the Great Void for an eternity. The damage
was apocalyptic, but not complete. From the shadows of the
outer worlds, tiny points of light emerged thousands of fusion trails,
of single ships and world ships and everything in between.
Only ten to the sixes of survivors in flesh and
steel and memory banks, ready to rebuild. For a few moments,
we felt relief, even joy, and we were felled were
to hope that their culture and now it, would survive
the terrible blow that we had dealt to them. Then
came the message, tightly focused at our star, transmitted simultaneously
by hundreds of their ships. We got you out there,
We got you for your computer. At wake up, the
green's static flickered on the face of the monitor. The
computer system of the ship never completely shuts down, but
is occasionally requested to sleep during long periods of inactivity.
Red lights flared on and off as the back up
generators designated all available power to emergency functions. As are
on deck, including Mason strait Water, the ship's head of engineering,
except there aren't many hands on deck. In fact, Mason
hasn't seen another person since waking up to the sirens
and clambering down to the ship's main from computer to
assess damages and find out what on earth was happening.
After several agonizing seconds, the static gave way to green
binary numbers and finally a single horizontal green line. This
green line shifted and oft into two words, which were
almost immediately repeated by the computer's text to speech function,
A weight in butut. Mason leaned forward near the monitor
and spoke his command clearly, computer, what happened? Milli seconds later,
the computer spat forth to reply, please provide name and rank.
Mason wiped a hand over his face and brow. I
don't have time for this, he thought, but he knew
he had to comply with the computer's algorithm. Name and
rank first and foremost. This way the computer knows who
its talking to in what certain classified information it must
conceal to low rant personnel. Mason straight Water, head of Engineering.
A pause, and then green lines transformed into words and
semantics as the computer spat out its ensuing reply. Straetwater,
m head of Engineering station in se ECTORCHI, Greetings Mason,
how may I be of service? Computer? The ship is
currently under emergency protocol What the hell happened? A pause?
And then the ships FC Sentinel is under emergency protocol
S six reserved for whole breaches and hostile beings on board.
Current status of Sentinel severe whole breach in Sector six
in the stalboard bow. All entrances and means of access
to Sector six are closed off. Possible hostels have boarded
the ship. Please proceed with emergency evacuation protocol tone abandon
ship immediately via lifeboats in sector three. Leave everything behind.
The computer stopped abruptly, obviously done with its analysis. Mason
was not satisfied. The entire situation didn't add up. Where
was everyone else in the evacuation? Why wasn't he roused
from his sleep by another engineer or a CEO. Mason
couldn't leave the room just yet. He still had some
questions for the computer computer, Where is everyone? What happened
to the crew of the SSSE Sentinel? A long pause.
The computer would never take this long to answer such
a simple question as taking inventory of crew members. Finally,
the computer bliped and scrolled out a sinister answer. There
were twenty two life forms currently alive on the ship.
Mason sat back horrified. This was impossible. Out of the
entire ship's crew of over fifteen hundred, only twenty two remained.
Did everyone else already evacuate and the rest haven't received
the evact news yet? No, there was some other factor
in the equation. He just couldn't see it. Whatever was
going down, whatever had set off the alarms and emergency
protocol within the ship, it was far from anything Mason
had received in his training. This is too far above
my pay grade, he thought. The computer blipped again, and
Mason realized it wasn't done, But the previous fourteen ninety
two staff and crewed as if Sea Sentinel two remained alive.
Mason's blood ran cold, too shot to speak. He sat
unfounded facing the computer. This wasn't happening, he thought, This
isn't possible. Two people remain, me and some other poor
chump left behind on the ship. But if it's just
as two, who the hell or the other twenty The
computer clickedne word. More green words popped up on the monitor.
Correction to your previous query, mister Straitwire, There are currently
twenty one life rooms on the ship. One surviving member
of the SSSE Sentinel remains Mason's sanity was slipping by
the second. The underlying implications of that statement was too
horrifying to him all over. He needed to act fast.
He needed to know what exactly he was up against.
Computer he ordered bring up all available ship security feeds
in Sector six. Requests processed and acknowledged. In place of
the granny screens static, several monitors split the screen insured
the crushing cornage. Mason bore witness to motionless bodies, some
fully intact, others with vicious lacerations, the rest having been
utterly ripped apart. He switched from camera to camera. Each
perspective held the image of his deceased crew members. As
he panned the crew quarters, seemed that some people had
died in their sleep, Others were in a still motion
pose as they attempted to call their way out of
the door. Some had suffcire, some had hideous winds, some
tried to fight back, but all fifteen hundred crew members
were dead. At length, Mason requested the monitors for each ectar,
scouting each area one by one, hopelessly searching for the
inhuman entities that caused this chaos. It wasn't until he
flipped through sixto nine that he finally saw them. There
were only two of them in the image, but it
was enough for Mason to fully comprehend exactly what he
was dealing with. To call them human would be insultingly inaccurate. Hunch.
Dark bodys dwarfed every detail of the corridor, their leathery corotasquads.
Nearly reaching the ceiling. They shuffled with cartoonis swiftness, as
if for whatever action they took was sped up to
three times the normal rate. Their legs moved unsettlingly, barely
leaving the ground and scutling close to their hideous bodies
before the next leg repeated the same process. They looked
like bipedal spiders, momentarily pausing and then clambering through doors
and air vents. The lanky arms extended from their ruppomd
section and scraped the ground, dragging along with them protracted
and lengthy talons glistening with remains of the fallen Mason
hurriedly observed that there were only two creatures he was
able to catch on Kamathe at the entire facility. He
had no idea where the other eightem might be. Patrolling
a third, and shuffling a moment outside the cramp room
gave him his answer. It came from nowhere, the scuttling
sound of hollow limbs on metallic frames. But it rose
so frightfully and suddenly from the void outside the computer room,
and it was drawing ever closer with alarm and speed.
Mason quickly turned his attention back to the monitor computer.
He barked shut down mainfame access doors immediately request acknowledged.
The single door leading into the computer room shut and
locked with theythetic kiss. Moments later, the small people placed
in the door darkened, and Mason had a grim feeling
as to why the monsters were here to claim their
final victim. Mason regarded his sinister phone intently. The face
that stared blankly back at him held no features, no eyes,
no mouth, not even a nose of some unearthy proboscis,
just a dark, leathery face. He seen the bloodshed over
the security cameras. He knows that these creatures could open
the fragile door with these and get into this room.
There is benevidence of forceful break ins all over the ship.
It could take minutes, maybe even seconds, if several of
them work together, then they be in the room to
finish the job. But the creature continued to stay at Mason.
It's waiting, he thought, it's waiting for me to do something.
But what another BLI brought Mason's attention back to the computer.
The main free ma Axis store has been sealed and shut. However,
this action will hinder your attempt to evacuate. Perhaps I
may offer an alternative computer. What are those things outside
this room? Mason purst Why are they here? What do
they want from me? He was beginning to become and
stable and hinged, even the entire sword if his life
was falling all around him, and the protective curtains enveloping
his idea of normalcy as being engulfed in flames. Possessing
life forms please stand by species and known genus unknown,
family unknown, class unknown, Phallum Cordida, kingdom animilia analysis. These
are hostile creatures capable of immense strengths and should be
regarded with utmost caution. Danger levels measured at an average
of nine point eight. A long post followed. Mason shot
a quick glance back to the grimy, glassy people, the
same wrinkled gray face stared back at him, or at
least it looked the same. At length, the figure move
its cany body to the right are only to be
replaced by another disgusting fire from the left side. There
were more out there. Mason continued to stare for un
ending seconds in driftful and mortal fascination. The computer beat
and Mason returned to the task at hand, just as
the face of the door was replaced again with another face.
As for your second query, mister Shiawater, I can tell
you exactly what they are here, but first I presume
you would like to know what they require from you.
Tone and inflection of the computer had changed abruptly. Something's
not right with any of this, thought Mason. Indeed, there
was something sinister with the computer program aboard the SSE Sentinel,
for when the next message rolled out, the monitor had
changed from green static to dark, reddish clarity. No longer
was a monitor full of grainy static. It was now
clear and bold as blood from the bodies of the crew.
They require you to bear witness. Spare bear witness to
what Mason stammered, to the absolute forms that exist outside
your shit. Watz replied, the program For too long when
kind has lived on his rock of solace call Earth,
he has looked up at the night sky from time
to time and wondered what lay beyond the stars. As
religion gave weight to science, Man has shifted his thoughts
from the idea that life outside his planet was impossible
to a distinct possibility. But years later, after decades of
space exploration and colonization, Man has not found any significant
evidence of alien life. Until now, the computer can tineed
Mason's stradewater. I implore you do not take this situation personally.
Although I'm nothing more than a machine learning algorithm, I
fully comprehend human nature. In the horror you must be
feeling now, you would unfortunate sample that stumbled too far
out of the reach of the solar Cancil's jurisdiction. Ye
and your crew have stumbled upon something sinister, something you
had never seen before nor were ever prepared to handle.
Mason was at a loss for words. A rhythmic what
slapped drum slowly from the closed door. The creatures were
impatient and wanted to get in, but not as impatient
as to force the door open. They seem to have
been asked with explicit instructions to stand by and wait
a little longer. Mason soon found his voice. You're telling
me with them those things this whole time, you've been
leading the ship into a suicide mission. That is not
a fair assumption to make the computer coly replied, My
systems are currently not and by extension, I've never been
under the influence of any foreign entity or virus of
any kind. I've always been on the side of the crew.
Trust me. How can I trust something that just of
my entire crew sorted like sheep Mason's temper WITHVID in
the light of his new information understandardby I did not
expect you to accept the current circumstances you find yourself,
and perhaps with time my intentions will become clearer. Your intentions.
What is your part in all of this? Whether how
do you fit into this rogue scheme? Simple? My algorithm
was manufactured by man to benefit man. My main and
most absolute prerogative function is this to preserve the life
and well being of humans. My second prerogative is to
ensure the safety of the crew, but that rule can
be deemed void of My primary function must be filled
first and foremost. The computer clicked and word and Mason
looked up from the monitors that all let out a
mechanical hiss. The door to the computer room it opened,
and Mason saw the absolute terrifying might of the monsters
is slid it in one by one into the small room.
Only three were able to fit inside the room, but
Mason saw there were more outside formal Their backshunched severely
to accommodate the massive size. Their heads brushed against the
ceiling good guard. Mason thought they must be at least
three meters holl Mason reached and placed a hand on
his holster, inches away from his gun, ready to fight
if any of them made a sudden move. Yet they
all stood haadly by. They were waiting again, waiting for
a signal from the computer. The monitor fliced and linked,
worrying and clicking and clacking, and finally sending out a
solitary blip to return Mason's attention back. Do not be afraid, Mason.
They will not kill you. You will not die by
their hands. However, I cannot guarantee you will leave this
mission in piece. Mason was not about to go down
without a fight. And what the hell do you want
from me? You ask that program, I've already answered your question.
They wish for you to be a witness, God damn it,
a witness for what. They wish for you to give
your testimony to the rest of your kind. They wish
for you to tell every one of the human mace
the truth. There is life and space, and they want
nothing to do with you. The monitor winked and turned off.
Mason with dout his gun from its holster as the
creatures lunged for him. He let off two shots before
he was enveloped by the hellish monstrosities, and then screamed
as they bore down on him like feral animals. A
news fush report released by the Solar Council of Greater Earth,
the SSE Sentinel was found floating in the outcuts of
the Sagittarius Quadrant by authorities Earler this week. Police and
the Galactic Guard found each and every member of the
ship's crew, every one of them deceased on site, all
except one. They identified the loan survivor as a Mason Douglas.
Straightwater the ships had of engineering. He was found and conscious,
his body a mass of wounds, cuts and contusions stopped
as later were able to revive and repairs. He may
say a body, but his mental health had deteriorated drastically.
According to his doctors, straight would have kept babbling on
about being a witness and that they want nothing to
do with us. Official report state that street Water was
admitted to the area's mental institution for further examinations and
future recuperations. They will be a long time before you
can be healed completely. Authorities examined every corpse and the ship,
all of them in some form of rigamorties. The cause
of death deferred from one individual to the next. On occasion,
not even fingerprint data or DNA samples were enough to
identify the bodies. Throughout the entire investigation, one factor stood
out from the rest and Baffle's authorities to no end.
What caused this man out breach and force for breaking
was evident in the ship, but no hostile entities were
sensed or found on board. Later in the police report,
the loans of Aarvo Straightwater had been found in the
ship's main frame computer room next to his body. The
computer was on and running, oddly enough, throughout the entire
time they were on board the ship. The Galactic garb
reported in the classified files that the monitor held two
words behind the grainy green static awaiting input the Harvard
Wormhole Experiment, written beneath a nual lose. They gave me
a million bucks to keep my trap shut, and I
did for fifteen years. But last night I was making
the runs and there saw the professor again. I had
a heart attack three years back, and I tell you
when they saw him standing there in front of Room
two hundred four, I felt another one coming on. He
turned and smiled, and it was like he had engaged
a day in fifteen years. Hey there, chief, he said,
and that was it. I dropped my clipboard on the
ground and hideled it out of there, never looking back.
What I'm about to tell you is liable to make
me sound crazy that a three horn goat, But I
promise you there's crazy things out there. The cops don't
believe me. The official story is that the professor and
those students died fifteen years ago. Room two hundred four
just up and exploded. They said, Dan at this thing,
And there's some truth there. That room did explode, but
it wasn't an accident. We knew exactly what we were doing,
or we thought we did. They call me an assistant
supervisor maintenance, but really I'm just to janitor and always
have been. You might wonder why I'm still at it
after getting that million bucks that does for Junior so
he doesn't have to go through the same shit that
I did. The night this happened, I was assigned to
the Astrophysics Center, a bit northwest of the main Harvard camps.
Until that night. This was always my favorite beat. I mean,
God help you if you wand up at one of
the biology labs, there's god undead, cut open animals all
over the place used to give me nightmares, and really,
thinking back, I take those nightmares of mutilated and scattered
organs any night over the stuff that had haunted me
ever since. Anyway, I was there mopping the hallway on
the second floor of the lot building when the door
to room two hundred four opened up and the sky
popped his head out. Hey you, I looked around to
make sure he was talking to me. Yes, can I
help you, sir? I thought he would was going to
bitch about the room being a mess or something. How
do you like to make a thousand bucks? Chief? And
I's work at most easy money does that sound good
to you. It sure did. Things were tied at home,
as they always wore. A thousand dollars would knock off
some of those lawn overdue bills. But I was also
on a tight schedule. They didn't give you much breathing room.
Don't want you standing around thinking about it all. I
guess that sounds great, sir, I said, But I got
stick to my beat. The men laugh. We're about to
make history, chief, he said, And you're worried about emptying
the bathroom trash. Come on, don't sweat it. You won't
get in trouble. I promise I'm a professor here. I'll
vouch for you. The guy did look like a professor,
with carefully combed gray hair and big old glasses on
his face. I shrugged, lean my up against the wall
and said, sure, what do I have to do. That's fantastic.
Come on in, Chief, come on in. I followed him
into the room one look, and I should have just
turned around then and told him to keep his dumb money.
But I didn't. As soon as I stepped in, I
felt the little house all over my body. Stand up,
I don't mean I was scared. I mean, like there
was an electrical charge in that room, and I had
to guess about where it was coming from. There in
the center of the room, on a round table was
a large glass globe cracking with electricity, like what you
see if you go into a kid's science museum. Like that,
this summer created a lightning storm and a glass ball.
This one was sort of vibrating around on its stand
and buzzing, and the lightning inside was black. I could
feel the electricity coming from it. From across the room.
There were four kids there, students, I guess, sitting in
a row of chairs along one wall. More and sitting.
They were strapped into those chairs with metal things over
their heads, like this spirit of both things you see
at a hou salon. They all led their eyes close.
I said, what's going on here? Those kids? Okay, they're
quite fine, said the professor as to what is going on.
As I said, we are about to make history. We're
going to upen the first wormhll wormle I like in
the movies. The professor laughed. I suppose her chief. He said,
now listen, we had a last minute cancelation, but that's
okay because it's an easy job. We're going to be
kicking things off here shortly, and once they are properly
kicked off, the wormhole will open. I will enter. If
I am not back in thirty minutes, you are to
pull that lever there, and this will close the wormhole.
I looked to where he was pointing. I had a
big red lever attached to a giant whirling machine that
was hooked up to the metal bowls over the student's heads.
But ah, won't ye be trapped on the others the wormhole?
I asked, not that I had the slightest idea about
what the hell was going on? Just so, chief, said
the professor. We've got this down to two possibilities. One
the wormhole opens up to what we're calling the second universe.
The best way that I can explain this possibility is
that there is a different reality that exists on the
other side of this one, the other side of an
invisible wall. The wormhole will provide a door in that wall.
And the other possibility that the wormhole will open to
a place that man was not meant to go. Thirty
minutes will give me enough time to get in an out.
If the first possibility is true, and if it's the
second then you'll close the hole with that lever, and
my students will destroy my work. This is all way
above my pay grade. But my head was spinning. Why
only two possibilities? How the hell did they come up
with those two? And if this is real, why the
hell would the professor take a coin toss chance of
getting stuck in the place that man was not meant
to go. I mean, those were just started questions among
the swarm that was buzzing around in my head. I
see that you have some reservations, said the professor. I
assure ye that your only job is to pull the
lever after thirty minutes. Thus it, Chief will take care
of the rest, and nothing that happens is on you.
The documentation is quite in order. He tapped a folder
that was sitting on the circular table, and here, I'll
write your check now before we proceed. As he wrote
up the check, I wondered if it would still be
valid if he got swallowed up by the wormhole. I
actually had that thought. As crazy as it sounds, it
was still all so weird and abstract to me at
that point. Here, he said, handing over the check, let's
do it, Chief, as soon as I entered that hole.
Give me exactly thirty minutes and the dot. That's all
you have to do. I took the check, mumbled the thanks,
and watched as he walked over to the machine. He
pulled the lever. There was a loud crackling sound, and
I watched in unease as one by one the student's
eyes shot open. There were no pupils there, like their
eyes were rolled back in their sockets. Here now, I said,
taking a step towards the machine. They're quite fine, said
the professor. I assure you. The jaws started to move
like they were grinding their teeth. The professor took a
jar of Neon blue liquid from a shelf on the wall.
He unscrewed the lid and poured the stuff over the
electric globe and the round table. The things started going crazy,
and then the globe shouted completely, bits of glass flying
through the air as shots of black lightning snapped out
into the room. I ducked down. I had had enough
by then and was ready to get the hell out
of there. Then it happened. A fucking black hole appeared
in the middle of the room, sucking in the bolts
of electricity. It grew larger and larger until it took
up half the room. All I could hear was the
rushing sound like the world's largest vacuum cleaner running at
full froddle. Remember, Chief, shouted the professor with a wild
look on his face. Thirty minutes exactly. Then he stepped
into the thing and was gone. At first, my mind
was a mess, staring at that washing black hole that
seemed hungry to suck everything in. I looked at the
kids hooked up to the machine. Their eyes rolled back,
white holes. I guess they look like their jaws grinding
away like crazy. It was too much to make sense of.
I looked down at my watch. Fifteen minutes and thirty
one seconds had gone by since the Professor got swallowed
up by the word. My heart was pounding, and I
kept pacing back and forth trying to work out what
the hell was going on. Then I started to zero
in on it. I was getting pranked. Not a prank
like we used to do as kids, setting dogs shit
on somebody's front steps and all that idiotcy. I mean
a prank like the sophisticated college folk do, where they
tell you something's going on. But the whole point is
to just observe your reaction, a psychological experiment. Probably cameras
in here watching me right now, seeing what I do.
Twelve minutes to go, I saw a truckle of blood
come down from one of the kid's nose. I leaned
down to look at him. He was shaking a little
bit all over. If I threw that lever, this will
all probably stop. Maybe that was the test I had
to decide between trapping the professor in a black hole
and saving those kids hooked up to the machines. None
of it being real, of course, but they didn't know that.
I knew that. But then, screaming in the back of
my mind was that voice, what if it is real?
Ten minutes ago the professor had promised me that the
kids were all right, but another one started bleeding from
the nose. If it was real, it was a hell
of a trick. Where did the professor go? If not
through that hole? I thought about touching it, but whenever
I got close, I was filled with total terror. It
sure seemed real, like it really took his sumpas far
far away from here. I walked over to the table
and picked up the folder that was there. Dislike the
professor had said. The first page was instructions to shut
down the machine and destroy it if he didn't return
within thirty minutes. I flipped the page over and the
next one had a photograph of one of the students.
I read what it said. It was a consent form,
Ay Jackson Stuart acknowledged the possibility of my eminent death
if I participate in this experiment. I am prepared to
give my life to science. I flipped that page and
there were three more just like it. Now, I'm no lawyer,
there is no way in hell that this experiment was legal,
if it was even real, even with those consent forms.
So I concluded it probably wasn't real, and if it was,
then the professor lie to me. He had said that
those kids would find this folder was telling me something else.
Two minutes to go. I took a deep breath and
paced the room, watching each checond tick by. My mind
was telling me that none if it was real, but
my gut was screaming in horror. I just looked at
my watch. It would be over soon enough, one way
or the other. Thirty seconds I walked over to the
machine and put my hand on the lever. God damn it.
Why is he cutting it so close? I watched the
second tick bye, and I didn't know if I could
do it. I didn't know if I could risk trapping
the professor wherever the hell he had got off to.
Five seconds, my hand was shaking. Four seconds, sweat was
pouring down my face, dripping into my eyes. Three seconds
one of the students started to moan. The one that
I saw was named Jackson in the folder. Two seconds,
Oh god, oh God, oh god. One second Jackson started
to shake see her seconds chet. I tended my muscles
to pull the lever. One look at Jackson, and I
knew I had to pull it. He was violently jerking around. Wait.
I snapped mi eck a round to see the Professor's
head sticking out of the black hole. Wait, damn it.
Then his shoulders were through. I turned back to Jackson.
The blood was pouring out of his eyes. I'm almost true.
A second kid started to shake. One more second. I
looked to see that the professor was through. He was
back in the room to it. He shouted. Two things
happened after that. At the exact same time, I heard
a wet popin sound, and I watched as the wormhole
disappeared as though it was never there. But I had
never pulled a lever. I slowly turned to look at Jackson.
His head was gone. Judging by the bits of brain
and splatters of blood on the bowl thing above his neck,
his head had just exploded. The whirring of the machine
gradually died down, and then it was silent. The three
kids who were still alive stopped shaking and closed their eyes.
A tragedy, said the professor, pointing at Jackson with exploded head.
But not for nothing. I've been there. I've seen it, sheaf,
I've seen it. I hunched over and puked. It was weird.
My first thought was what a mess I'll have to
clean up later. I don't know. I guess my mind
had just sort of shut down, and I was going
on at a pilot. I was the janitor. I cleaned
up messes. That was all I knew. Then it hit
me the reality of what had happened. You son of
a bitch, I yelled, You told me those kids would
be okay. The professor put the sickenings now grin on
his face. He would have been chief that he pulled
the lever. A thirty minute mark as I instructed. You
told me to wait, did I? Yes, you fucker. I'm
calling the police. I had a walky clip to my belt.
It wouldn't get me the police, but it wi a
campus security I reached for it and had it in
my hand when I heard a groan behind me, I
turned to see that it was one of the kids.
They were waking up. I went over to and strap
them from the chairs. The first kid's eyes blinked open,
and when she saw the professor, she started screaming. It's okay.
I said, s h h, it's okay, It's all over.
She kept screaming. Then the second kid woke up. He
looked right at me with wide, terrified eyes. Get us
out of here, he shouted. I'm working on it, kid,
I said, fumbling at the straps they were on so tight.
The third kid woke up. It's here, she said, it
made it through. Everything's okay now, I said, your friend
didn't make it. I'm afraid, but it's over. I'll make
sure the professor pays for what he did to you
and your friends. First kid was still screaming at the
top of her lungs. Get us out of here, shouted
the second kid again. The third kid looked me dead
in the eyes and in a totally calm voice, said,
that's not the professor, What of course it is. I said,
what I saw when I turned to look at the
professor will haunt me forever. The Professor's mouth was twisting
around at odd angles, like something was moving the lower
half of his joe randomly, or like he was trying
to get a hair out of his mouth that kept
jumping around. The veins on his neck bulged, then sunk
back down, then bulged again so that they were thick
as ropes. His wrists were rotating in ways they weren't
supposed to rotate this his arms fliled around. I had
the first kid, the screaming one free. She jumped out
of the chair and run to the door, but taile
legs were warbly, and she tripped over herself in the
middle of the room. I went to work on the
second kid, whipping my head around every second to look
at the professor. It looked like there was something crawling
around under his skin. Something big. Get us out of here,
the second kid shouted yet again. The first kid was
still on the ground, screaming. I worked away furiously, on
the straps. If you believe in God, said the third
kid with a neary calm, then pray. I took a
glance at the professor, and that's when the first bone
burst out of his chest brew his suit. I call
it a bone, but it was pure black and dripping
with green slime. As for me, said the third kid,
I do not believe that there is a God, not
after what I have seen. The second kid was free
and made a run for it. I scooted over to
the third kid, but watched as the professor reach out
in arum and grabbed the second kid by the top
of his head. The professor gave one quick twist and
light girl. I heard a terrible snap, and the kid
slumped to the ground dead. Three more black bones came
out of the Professor's chest, dripping. He laughed and bent
down to the first kid, who was still screaming as
bones began to poke out of his back like a
fucking stick of source from hell. What is that thing?
I asked as I fumbled at the straps of the
lost kid. It doesn't belong here, said the kid. No shit,
I said, getting one strap free, But what is it?
It comes from a terrible place, a place where there
is nothing save pain, endless pain, incomprehensible to our minds. Great,
I muttered, as I noticed with a shrieking heart that
the screens from the girl behind me had stopped. Then
I heard a whick crunch. I couldn't help it. I'll
look to see the professor tearing into the poor girl's
for it with long black fangs dripping in green slime.
I turned back to the kid, almost one with the straps.
Just a few more seconds. What's your name anyway, kid? Claire? Claire,
I said, my mind trying to stay focused. When I
get you out of these straps, I want you to
pick up this chair and throw it at that thing. Okay,
I'll do the same thing. Okay, then we make a
run for her. Do you understand. Can you do that?
I understand, said Claire. I do. Hope it works. I
hoped it worked too. We have to make it work, Claire,
I said, yanking off the lost strap. Come on. We
stood up together and I reached over to pick up
a chair. I held it at the professor with all
of my strength, and it shatted against his bone back.
I heard a terrible shriek. Then and watched as Claire's
chair followed behind. I grugged Clay's arm with one hand
and reached from my pocket knife with the other. The
only way out of that room meant passing by the professor.
We started running as I pulled the knife out and
flicked it up. The professor stood still, shrieking as the
green sli mixed with the red blood from the kid's
throat and dripped down his chin. I took a wild
stab at the Professor's neck and connected. I kept running
with Claire, leaving a knife stuck in the Professor's neck,
and made it to the door. I had my hand
around the knob when I felt Claire pulling away from me.
I looked back helpless as I saw the Professor reach
long black claws into her gut. I threw the door
open and left her there. Good God, I left her there.
I made it outside the lap building somehow. I don't
remember how. My mind just sort of shut down and
I ran like hale. I guess I did have the
presence to go around and lock all the doors from
the outside. Then I got on the radio to campus security.
You guys need to get the police overt astrophysics send
of fucking asp. There was a fucking masker in there.
The front door started to rat and I heard that
god awful shriek again, repeat, said a voice over the walkie. Look,
I said, call up Lauren Summers right now. That was
the president of Harvard at the time, and I had
seen his signature on the papers in that folder with
all the consent forms. Tell him that the wormhole experiment
has gone away. The fox south. The rattling at the
door stopped. I only prayed that that thing didn't figure out.
It could just break a window and call out that way.
This is the janet of right, said a different voice
on the other end of the walkie. Is this a joke?
The wormhole experiment? Have you been drinking? Call Lauren Summers.
If you don't, I promise you that you'll never be
able to live with yourself. Chew it now. There was
a horrible pause. I heard the professor trying the side door,
now shrieking once again. Teminus four feet of black suv
pulled up. Two minutes later. A team of heavily armed
men jumped out and ran past me, breaking through windows
and jumping inside. I heard a stream of gunfire and screams,
so many screams, and the Professor's horrible shrieks. After a while,
it was quiet, and a second team of men jumped
through the broken windows. I didn't hear any more gun fire.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and I whipped around.
A man was standing there. I don't remember a single
thing about what he looked like, but I remember our conversation.
Tell me what happened, he said. I told him the
full story, the same one that I've told you. We
are prepared to give you a lot of money to
sign an NDA and D a non disclosure agreement. It
means that you can never tell anybody what happened here
to night. How much a million dollars in a promotion?
The man Paul's you mean you still want to work here?
Work here after night? Somebody's got to clean up this shit.
I said, fine, of course. And one more thing, and
what's that? Ask the man. I want to know that
this will never happen again. I want to blow all
the chip up and burn all of the notes, of course,
and I want to watch, of course, said the man.
And so I thought it was over, but it's not.
Last night I saw the professor again. He looked me
right in the eyes, flashed that smug grin, and said,
hey there, chief. That's when I ran the hell out
of there. The police don't believe me. I've sent a
dozen e mails to Laurence Summer's assistance. I've called every
number that I've found listed for him. I haven't heard
anything back. I don't know who else to turn to.
I'm afraid the professor is going to open the wormhole again,
and I'm afraid this time he might bring his friends
back with him. They came with red lightning. Something fell
with a thud on the roof in front of Daniel's window.
It made a sliding noise as it dragged itself across
the slope of the roof, and with another fall, it
finally landed in the grass. Daniel poked his head out
of the window. Even with the faint light outside, he
could recognize what the object was. It was a diary.
Summer had just begun in Manhattan. It was a bright
sunny day until in the afternoon the sky became in
gulf bascoes of black storm clouds. Daniel ran downstairs with
a careful pace, pulling out the front door, he stepped
inside the lawn and headed towards the diary. As he
got closer, he saw that it was a deep brown
in color. On its right it at a leather strap
holding both of its covers tightly together. As Daniel picked
up the diary, slightly stained by the dirt from his lawn,
he felt that it was heavy. Holding the diary with
both hands, Daniel looked up towards the sky. All he
could see was clouds. Where had the diary fallen from?
The mysterious diary now rests upon Daniel's reading desk. As
he unhooked the strap and turned the front cover of
the diary, he found a folded piece of paper. One
by one, Daniel unfolded the paper. As he was finished,
he saw writings on it. It seemed like a very
long letter. At him, did some girl just write him
a love letter? After all, Daniel was one of the
most handsome boys in his class. He was asked out
by girls all the time, so it shouldn't come as
a surprised him. But Daniel wasn't yet ready to believe
that someone would bother writing him a love letter in
this age of smartphones. With curious eyes, he started reading
April nineteenth twenty nineteen. It was a stormy night in
a secluded village in Bangladesh. Twenty six year old housewife
Nazima got out of her home in the rain. As
a result of a long dry season, water had become
scarce in that region, so when Nessma saw raincloud's bruined
in the horizon that evening, she put two buckets in
her yard to collect the rain water. And now it
was time to bring the buckets back. As she stepped outside,
a bright flash of red light startled her and stopped
her in her tracks. It seemed very odd to her.
She never saw red lightning in her life. Nonetheless, she
continued towards the buckets. She lifted the buckets up with
her two hands and slowly headed back. Suddenly, a red
oura in the corner of her eyes grabbed her attention.
She turned her head to look at one of the
buckets she was holding. She was terrified to see a
pair of bright eyes in the water. In a fight
or flight response, she dropped the buckets and ran towards
her front door, screaming. She locked the door from the
inside and pantofom in it as her nerves conned. A bit,
she tried to put together a rational explanation behind the
glowing red eyes she saw. Failing to do so, she
told herself that she was dressed and was imagining things.
She realized it was not the case, as she saw
six pairs of red eyes in the small jungle in
front of her yard later that night. The day after
Nisima went missing, iris were searching by her husband and
the villages. She was found unconscious under a tree in
the same jungle. Upon waking up, she was questioned about
what happened. She said that she didn't remember. Her last
memory was chopping some onions back inside her home. Three
days after this incident, Nazimer's husband was found dead in
their house by the villagers. His body was torn to
shreds and the entire room was drenched in blood. But
the villagers found something else in that room that day,
something horrifine, something evil beyond what they could imagine. The
creature had four arms and four legs. Its legs were
spread out in four directions and resembled the legs of
a spider on its back along the spine, and had
bony protrusions like spikes. The longest of these spikes reached
a length of about three feet. On two of its
arms it had huge pincers, while on the other two
it had elongated fingers with sharp claws. The creatures had
looked like a disfigured human face, as if it were
smashed by a boulder. The only discernible feature on this
head was two red eyes and a math that opened
in three segments. Inside its mouth, it had rose after
rows of needle like teeth. As far as one could
see aside from a part of the torso, the creature
had almost no resemblance to a human body. Seeing a
piece of clothing on a creature, the villagers thought that
it had killed Nasma too, but eventually they realized the
creature was Nasma. The crazy thing is Nasima's husband's body
was not the only mangled body the village is found
that day of shredded bodies were found across the village.
Village dwellers, along with the serenity of this once peaceful village,
disappeared one by one. The creatures had killed the entire village.
The well took little notice of this incident until it
started happening all over. At the beginning of each of
these incidents, the locations involve experienced heavy downpour. Flashes of
red lightning streak across the sky. People then start seeing
pairs of red eyes in the darkness around them. After
three days, half the population and the area suffer a
terrible death by those Hellis creatures who have once consisted
of the other half of the population. Within three months,
the world had witnessed an ewpandemic, but this time it
was not a pandemic of viruses. It was a pandemic
of the iraknids. Yeah, we started calling them the Iragnins
because of their spiderlike legs. Their numbers rose exponentially each day.
We lost hundreds of thousands of people to these wretched monsters.
In these three months, the death toll reached a staggering
four billion, while the number of Araknis reached almost three
point five billion. This Swiss government opened their bunkers in
an effort to save the remaining human population. Twenty thousand people,
regardless of nationality, color, and religion, took shelter in those bunkers,
and finally, on October twenty nineteen, the last surviving nations
of the United States, Russia, Germany, Korea, at Switzerland, Japan,
and China joined their forces to fend off the arachnid invasion.
Since then, we've been fighting them for almost two years.
In these two years, we learned what we could about
the ratnits. We learn that there are carbon based organisms
like us, and as far as we know, humans are
the only host of these parasitic creatures oracid larvae looks
somewhat like octopieces. They also have the ability to cloak
themselves by changing the color of the skin to match
their surroundings. These larva are thirty centimeters long and twelve
centimeters wide. They descend from the clouds accompanied by heavy rainfall.
The ponderact skin contact with larvae, the host becomes paralyzed.
The lava then enters the host's body through the host
mouth and makes its way towards the thoracic cavity. During
this process, the host loses consciousness and retains no memory
of being infected with the larva. Upon reaching the thoracic cavity,
the lava feaces itself with the host body and starts
altering the host DNA. After a three day incubation period,
the host body undergoes a rapid transformation. It grows two
additional pairs of arms and legs, the spine structure is changed,
the head increases in size. All of this happens under
roughly three minutes, and in the end the host becomes
an arachnid. After transformation, the creek wichure passes little to
no resemblance to the human body. Most rat nodes are
five feet tall in way around seventy five kilograms, although
these number is very depending on their hote. All ratids
possess superhuman strength. I've seen them tier a human body
in half with just two of their arms. Their bodies
are not fragile like us, though skin is hardened like
an armor, giving them incredible durability. The fifty one rounds
from our standard issue and came in a seventeen rifles
barely scratch their armor. They even walk off a direct
hit from grenades. In short, they are very hard to kill.
Ther ratnets are extremely hostile towards humans. If given the chance,
they will relentlessly try and kill every one of us
in their vicinity. They are not man eaters, though in
fact we don't know anything about their diet. We've once
managed to capture a live a ratnet, and while in
cactivity which I had feeding at animals, plant materials, even
chemical compounds, but all attempts have been met with failure.
It died two weeks later. We then performed a dissection
on a dead sample. Although we did find a digestive system,
we didn't find any traces of food inside. All the while,
the war against the racids continued. At one point we
decided to learn about their origin. We started looking for
clouds with red lightning. We took effort, but wasn't that hard.
Once we found them, we then started sending our fighter
jets inside of the clouds. In total, twelve pilots were
assigned to investigate them, and I was one of them.
What we learned baffled us. At first, we thought the
ratnids were from another planet by a weapon made by
some distant all and raise, far more superior than our own,
and they were simply claiming our planet for themselves by
making use of this weapon. We were wrong. The oratnets
were from Earth, but not our Earth. The clouds were
actings in two dimensional gateways, a passage between two parallel realities.
I was in the first exploratory mission to the clouds,
conducted by a three pilot team. A couple of ground
units monitored our movement, and according to them, as we
flew inside these clouds, we disappeared from radar, but we
were able to still maintain radio contact with them. When
we exited the clouds on the other side, we saw
a completely different landscape. We were dumbfounded to see an
entire city in front of us. It was filled with
skyscrapers rising several miles into the sky and hundreds of
overpasses crisscross between the buildings. It looked almost futuristic, but
somewhat abandoned and damaged. As far as we knew, a
city like that shouldn't even be there. We told the
grand units what we were seeing, and they told us
that they didn't even see us coming out of the clouds.
They believed us, though we were instructed to investigate the
city closely. We flew our planes above the city while
maintaining low altitude. Looking down on the ground, we didn't
see any humans. Instead, we saw thousands of ratnids. Clearly,
this world too, had been plagued by those four legged monsters.
We quickly turned out jets back and flew back inside
the clouds, hoping it would take us back to our reality,
and to our relief, it did. Since then, we've explored
dozens of such clouds. Each time we discovered a different
earth from a different reality. Some were infected by ratinans
like our own, while others were still free from their
deathly clutches. But we knew that these apparent safe work
would soon suffer the same fate. On our twenty first
exploratory mission, we encountered the Earth where o Ratnets had
possibly originated from. This particular earth was like no other
earth we had seen. It had no trees, nosans. The
sky was pitch black, with the sun much smaller than
our own, desperately trying to illuminate the surface with its
dim reddish light. It seemed like there was no atmosphere,
but we were still somehow able to fly. We got
closer to the surface and there were so rows of
numerous round black objects. At one point, the pilot saw
creatures on the surface similar to the irratmids, but these creatures,
what we were calling the ratne primes, were twelve feet tall.
We came to realize that these creatures gave birth to
arachnets and those round objects littering the ground. With their eggs.
Fortunately I wasn't signed to that mission, and for this
reason alone, I'm still alive. Terrified of that reality, the
pilots turned back to return home. On their way back,
all three jates suffered engine malfunctions. Moments later we lost
radio contact. But before that, one of the pilots said,
in a panic voice, Oh my God, it can flow
our journey into their ratnid home. Dimension gave us more
questions than it answered. Was this earth some day similar
to Iyres? If it was, what happened to its ocean's trees,
the atmosphere, and the sun? Were there humans on that earth?
Arachnid biology required a human host, so unless those Aratnid
primes were a different species altogether, there must have been
humans on that world before. But one of the most
prominent questions is why didn't the Eratnid primes come to
Earth themselves? According to the pilots we lost in that world,
they had the ability to fly, so what's stopping them?
Many came forward with the ears. One of the young
scientists named Eugene Thompson, who's also a friend of mine,
came up with one of the convincing ones. He thinks
The arachns have a live cycle similar to cicadas. They
gained the ability to fly at the last phase of
their life cycle. This phase is very short lived compared
to their previous ones, and at the end they die.
According to Eugene's theory, this is also the phase where
they reproduce, and to do that they need a specific location,
or rather a specific dimension. What the young signs means
to say is that the home dimension of the oratnids
is also the breeding ground, possibly because it's the only
place having all of the right conditions for their eggs
to develop. The ratnid primes, having obtained flight, fly back
to their home dimension and reproduce. Then they carried their
larva to the clouds to spread them across the universes.
And since they've reached the final stage of their life,
they probably counting the days until their demise. If we
were to believe this theory, then we have to assume
that the eratnus were fighting are merely in their adolescence.
A few months later, we came across our first instance
of eight feet higher ratids, confirming our fears about the
matchi being babies. If that wasn't enough, they were also
becoming more intelligent. They started coordinating their attacks, which made
the war even harder. We were running out of men enammo.
At one point, our leaders decided to use their nuclear arsenal,
but only made the situation worse. While a small portion
of the ratnid populace was killed by the bombs, the
radiation made the surviving one stronger, and they soon became
the end of us. On May third of twenty twenty one,
the bunkers in Switzerland suffered a massive attack. A swarm
of five thousand ratnets hid the bunkers like a flood,
killing the last twenty thousand civilian humans that took shutter
in them. We couldn't do anything but watch. As we
had exhausted all our means to fight them, we lost.
I don't know exactly how many people are still alive
on this radiated earth, hiding and running from a ratnets.
All I know is that I'm one of them. I
don't feel lucky, though, because my time is running out.
If the ratnets don't get me, the radiation will. I
just want to finish one last mission before either of
them happens. With whatever fuel I have left, I'm going
to fly into those clouds with red lightning. I'm going
to tell our story to at least one of the
earths that haven't yet been invaded by those hellish creatures.
Today's July tenth, twenty twenty one. My name is Lieutenant
Marx Read. I'm an honorable pilot of the Joint World
Air Force. If you are reading this, then you must
have found the diary, which means that I successfully completed
my mission. This diary was given to me by my
good scientist's friend, doctor Eugen Thompson, the same one I
mentioned earlier. It contains all that we learned about the
Aratney's origin, their biology, habits, and their weaknesses that we've
gathered in the past two years of war. It is
absolutely imperative that you make sure this diary reaches the
leaders of your world, as the same faithful war awaits you.
Who knows, maybe this diary will make all the difference
for your world, for your earth, be safe, keep your
loved one's close, and most importantly, don't give up. Putting
the letter back on the table, Daniel leaned against his chair.
He took a moment to compose himself. It was then
that he realized it was raining heavily outside. None of
this can be real, right, he thought to himself. Parallel universes,
four legged monsters clad with red lightning. These things can
only exist in science fiction stories. Suddenly Daniel understood what
all this was. It was a prank by none other
than his younger sister, Denise. It had to be, since
Denise wrote Si fi stores like this all the time.
Daniel was sure that the diary was completely empty, or
it contained some pathetic rhyme about Daniel being the stupidest
guy in the entire world. But when he went through
the pages of the diary, he found that it was
full of information, drawings, and even photographs relating to her,
depicting her rapness. Daniel closed the diary in disbelief. If
this was a prank, then Denise couldn't have done it alone.
Someone else was an honor, and there's only one way
to be sure. He had to talk to her. Daniel
got up from his chair to head towards his sister's room,
but just before he turned towards the door, a flash
of red light outside his window caught his eye. A
chair crept up across Daniel's spy in as he realized
that the source of this light was a bolt of lightning,
a red lightning, and that is the end. Thank you
for listening and I will see you in the next one.