[Undisclosed location.]
[June 24, 19XX]
[Audio recording of General XXXXX X.
XXXXXX, U.S. Army, retired.]
So, this conversation, the notes you're
taking right now, it's all classified to hell and back. No one gets
to know any of this until long after we're both... after you're dead.
This... this is so the people who need to know, the men and women who
stand on the wall. So they never forget.
The voice sounds
like a man in his prime.
Let's start at the beginning.
Papers rustle.
It was naive, perhaps, to not think of
who might be out there, in the vast gulfs between the stars. To not
think of who might be listening. Over the course of decades, as we
transitioned from telegrams and railways to radio and television, we
inadvertently lit a beacon. A beacon that drew ancient, hungry eyes
to our quiet little world. The flickering candlelight of a new
civilization drew them, like moths to a flame, racing not to their
destruction, but to ours.
Dr. Rice wrote that. She was always the
smartest of us, even before. Always had a way with words.
Intelligence gathered later in the war
would tell us that they began mobilizing far earlier than we could
have imagined. The Szipher had spun a web of listening devices
through the galaxy, ever listening for the birth of a new industrial
species. Best we can tell, they had been culling civilizations since
before the Ice Age here on Earth. As early as 1924, they had heard
us, and begun to scheme.
For us, it all
began in 1947.
There is an
audible gasp of surprise on the tape, presumably from the note-taker.
That's right. In New Mexico, a little
town called Roswell. It was barely more than a wide spot in the road
back then, just another speck on the map near a run-down Army Air
Field. I never did learn why they chose that spot for the Test, but
it was their first mistake. The first of far too few, in my opinion.
The speaker stops for nearly a minute
before being resuming, possibly having been prompted by the
note-taker.
First, it wasn't a ship. We all thought
it was, of course, but we eventually figured out it was a torpedo of
sorts. Unmanned, so get those visions of alien dissection out of your
head. That comes later.
Far from finding bodies, we found
something truly strange. The Test. It was carefully packed into
several crates made of some unknown plastic-like material. Light as a
feather but tough as nails.
The Test was a series of eight
cylinders, the end of each marked with alien text and symbols. The
eggheads quickly figured out that the symbols corresponded with
various universal constants; gravity, radiation decay, electrical
resistance and the like. They figured it was a test to see if we were
smart enough to bother talking to. If we could put it together, we
were clever monkeys.
It was the greatest discovery in human
history. Definitive proof we were not alone. Alien life existed, and
wanted to talk to us. All we had to do was assemble a puzzle. So we
did. Naively, foolishly, idiotically, we completed the cylinder.
Dr. Nakamura, Airman Epps, Dr, Horchel,
and Lt. Cruz died immediately. On the whole, of those of us who were
in that room, they were the lucky ones. Airman Jones and Commander
Stewart died within hours. Dr. Lewis lingered in a coma for two
months before passing. I changed, in that chaotic instant, though I
didn't know how until later. So did Dr. Rice, thank God.
Another prolonged pause.
The cylinder hummed to life with an
eerie green glow. A strange... warbling sort of noise seemed to come
from the air around us. The glow grew in intensity and the air
crackled with power. Pustules of distortion appeared in the air as
the space before us began to rot. Ectoplasm oozed from wounds in the
stuff of space-time, and then the air tore like a rotten cloth.
By the violent application of arcane
science, the space above the cylinder was linked to some other place,
far across the galaxy. The visual distortion of two overlaid places
Something waddled into view. It looked
for all the world like a telescope, but it was clearly alive. It
shuffled on squat, ungainly legs and a nictating eyelid blinked
idiotically at us from within the wound in space. It turned slowly,
getting a clear view of the whole chamber, from the sealed airlock
door to the vaulting concrete ceiling and across the viewing gallery,
where sat a gaggle of stupefied goldbricks and senators.
Shaking off the shock caused by the
total breakdown of reality before me, I drew my sidearm and fired a
three rounds into the beast. It dropped to its haunches and green,
brackish, fluid spattered the far wall of the chamber. A tether of
some kind, looped around one of the beast's feet, was pulled taut and
the body of the lens-beast was dragged from view. Strange sounds
emanated from the breach and alien words clawed at my mind, daring me
to understand them.
Ectoplasm flowed from the healthy space
above the portal and the conjoined space-time began to heal. In a
matter of moments, all was as it had been. The cylinder lay charred
and smoking, its delicate circuits ruined beyond recognition. Airman
Jones screamed and screamed, his mind shattered. Commander Stewart
was curled into a fetal ball, muttering the Lord's Prayer.
We were at war.
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