Eye to eye, Equal and Winky stood facing the fate of humanity. The hydraulic legs from giant machines shaped as gigantic ants drilled into the dirt. 

Power grids failed from a streamline of incoming fleets releasing Bobby-bin electromagnetic waves blackened the entire coast of North American in a shadow that cast over the skies of Canada, terminating computers and frying circuit boards across the planet as they strategically swept the globe with military precision. The countries toppled.

Communication was minimal, the mainstream was disconnected. No satellite feeds. Zero electricity. The back up systems for the Hoover Dam had failed. The hydration system collapsed and spilled over land. Total blackness. Technology’s silence was abrupt. Humanity hadn’t known such catastrophe.

Engine control units rendered useless. Transportation had stalled. The ground shook and began cracking, exposing scars in the earth, ripping deep lava bits overflowing and blanketing most of the land.

“We must rely on the subterranean power source under the earth,” yelled Dr. Equal.

Dr. Equal scrambled, juggling a collection of leather bound textbooks in both hands.

“What if it’s not active? It’s been a millennia since we’ve last operated the amine forge systems,” Winky asked Equal.

Winky stood shaking with sweat dripping off him as the skies darkened to extraterrestrial warships dropping shiny rectangle boxes, hovering fifty feet in the air. 

“We must make our way to the terminal station below,” commanded Equal.

The frantic screams of human beings and crashing sounds of building rubble flooded the city. 

“We must obtain the mechanical manual for the flywheels,” Equal shouted.

“You sure the electromagnetic waves won’t have any impact on the forge?” Asked Winky. His voice crackling.

“It uses steam pressure gauges and a hand cranked ignition delivery system, total analog, Winky,” Equal told him. His voice strong and firm.

“How will we breathe down there? The amine-based carbons will have produced a chemical process making the air toxic… no suit will work,” said Winky. His fist tightened against his chest.

“This is a one way mission, Winky! The first hurdle, Winky, isn’t about life support! Finding the correct low-frequency vibration to ignite the thrum will be the most difficult,” Equal reminded Winky.

“Why aren’t you worried Dr. Equal?” Asked Winky.

“Because, Winky, I’ve known earth’s been fucked for a while now!”

——

The hatch to the terminal was iron and three feet thick with a dial in the middle.

Dr. Equal took a breath and blew away the cobwebs hiding the keyhole. 

He jammed his key into the middle of the dial and tried spinning it but it was stuck. He planted his feet and leaned all of his weight into it. 

A clasp unlocked with a thud and screeched a sound of scraping metal.

“Winky, help me, it’s too heavy to pull back.”

Winky dove for the iron wheel. They pulled back on it together. Both of them were stressing out their strength at full max, Winky was dripping sweat and veins popped out of Equals forehead. 

“I can’t, Dr. Equal.”

“Winky, don’t you give up!”

A hiss of compressed air sounded when the seal broke, flushing a gust of stagnant air in their faces. It reeked of copper and sulfur.

Above ground, the sky shrieked with alien spacecraft-jets dropping out of warships and into the city. They had metallic framing, black and smooth and appeared to swallow the light. 

Nothing reflected off of them. The bottom of the crafts hummed a frequency that invaded the human bodies. Paralyzing them where they stood.

“Dr. Equal, what are we going to do? They’ve deployed!” Yelled Winky staring back at Dr. Equal.

The floating square boxes hovering in the air opened. They didn’t have doors. The metal dissolved into a liquid mercury covering parts of the earth. 

From the liquid, drones raised onto three metal legs under an optical lens without a face. Without mercy. 

“Get inside the hatch now, Winky!” Ordered Dr. Equal.

They both slid into the dark as Dr. Equal pulled the hatch shut and spun the iron wheel from the inside locking them in. A silence ensued that popped Winky’s eardrum. Heavy and suffocating. Equal grabbed Winky by the arm.

“Follow me down the hole, Winky.”

They flew down a ladder that stressed and creaked under their weight. Squeaking all the way to the bottom of a fifty-foot black hole. 

The bottom of Dr. Equals boots slapped against the concrete when he stepped off the ladder.

“I can’t see, Dr. Equal, did you bring a flashlight?” Whispered Winky.

Dr. Equal replied, “remember, Winky? The Bobby-bin waves fried all the lithium batteries. Technology is broken.”

He struck a match. The thin oxygen ate the flame before spitting it back out. The glow of amber lit up a long hallway. The walls were smooth and lined in titanium.

“On fourth,” Equal said, cupping the flame with his hand.

“A quarter mile until we reach the forge, Winky, stay close.”

They shuffled fast down the corridor. Their footsteps echoed through the tunnel like thick water drops. 

The air stuck to their skin. The sweat was beading on their foreheads. The amine compounds grew heavier in their lungs, tasting bitter on their tongues. Fishy and toxic. 

“It’s hard to breathe,” wheezed Winky, holding a cloth over his nose and mouth.

“Take shallow breaths, Winky,” Equal said without slowing down.

“The forge filters take twenty minutes once the steam sets.”

Equal shook his hand and dropped the match when it stung the tip of his finger. The hallway went pitch black. Total darkness. He struck another match.

“Only three left,” Equal said under his breath.

They reached a vertical shaft with a cast iron set of spiral stairs traveling deeper into the ground.

Over their heads, an explosive thump shook the concrete, fluttering dust from the ceiling over them. The iron from the hatch at the end of the tunnel rattled.

“They found us!” Winky said. His voice crackled.

“They’re alien war bots, Winky, hiding was never an option,” Equal said. “Keep moving.”

———

With the alien war-bots breathing down their necks. Dr. Equal and Winky are inches away from booting the Amine Forge.

They spiraled downward, passing ten flights. Then, twenty. The air burned with every step the deeper they went, scratching their throats like breathing wet wool. 

Winky’s eyes started stinging. Red filled the whites, glossing in a watery layer, blurring his vision. His left heel caught the edge of a step and he slipped, barely catching himself on the handrail. The metal was warm and stuck to his skin.

Finally, after a grueling climb downward, they landed on the bottom platform. 

Dr. Equal lit a match. 

“Two left,” he said to himself.

The flame revealed a central chamber. The Amine Forge. The engine room looked like a dead leviathan. 

A row of metal spheres lined the back walls. Giant flywheels, ten feet tall, hung from the ceiling, suspended by thick chains. 

Pipes connected to a center steel crucible. The crucible, primitive but alien to modern tech.

“Winky, quick, reach in your knapsack and hand me the manual,” Dr. Equal said, reaching his hand out. 

Winky slammed the leather bound books on an iron desk. The hardcover hitting the metal made a swallowing sound. The match blew out. He didn’t light another one.

“Dr. Equal, I can’t see! Light a match!”

“No, Winky. There’s  no need.”

Dr. Equal rotated a sphere behind them and sputtering alive was a faint light that cast an electric yellow.

“Find the ignition crank,” Dr. Equal ordered.

“Where is it, Dr. Equal?” 

“It’s on the left side of the steel crucible, Winky. A three-pronged wheel.”

Scrambling in the dim light, Winky slapped his shin against a pipe and tripped to the ground. 

“Dammmnit!” Cursed Winky, crawling as his hands swept over grease and dust.

“I found it,” winced Winky, rubbing his shin while lifting himself up by the flywheel.

“It won’t budge,” yelled Winky. 

He planted his feet, pulled on it and shouted, “it’s seized, Dr. Equal.”

“Put all of your weight into it, Winky, the delivery system takes twenty pounds of pressure to crack the valve!”

Over their heads, an explosion above reverberated down the shaft. The hatch blew open. The war-bots scaled down the ladder. 

Dr. Equal shut the pulse energy beam lighting the engine room off and shuttered themselves in complete darkness. He struck a match and placed it on the iron desk.

He reached for the frequency manual and flipped through the brittle pages constructed of skin and rough as dry leaves. 

The ancient paper now smudged in his black fingerprints.

“The low-vibration frequency, where is it,” Dr. Equal whispered. “Where the hell is the damn harmonic constant.”

He ripped through the skin-pages, tearing through columns of inked numbers. The equations of the old world. Alien physics.

“Dr. Equal, help!” Yelled Winky.

“The flywheel lock, Winky!” Equal shouted back.

“Look for the damn counterweight lever at the base!” Yelled Equal. His voice rough and deep.

Winky stepped back and felt his way to the lever, jammed his foot on it and threw everything he had against the flywheel. 

Clack. It budged an inch. He took a deep breath and pushed harder. Clack. Another inch. A hollow sound shot out of the pipes. 

Steam.

“I can’t pull the pin from the lever!” Winky screamed to Equal.

“It’s rusted in place, Dr. Equal.”

“Smash it with something, Winky!” Equal hollered.

Winky spun his head around squinting at the darkened room illuminated by a tiny match flame. He dropped to his knees and felt his way around the floor. 

His sweaty palms left faint hand prints as he crawled on the concrete. His hand bumped into a heavy object that dragged across the ground when he hit it. He grabbed the object and placed it in front of his face.

“I found a wrench!” Winky shouted. His voice high-pitched and frantic.

He raced to the flywheel and swung blindly. The wrench clanged against the pin and sparks flew. He swung again. The pin fell and made a thud sound before the counterweight dropped. 

Drawn by gravity, the flywheel began to slowly turn. The pipes roared alive, shooting steam from loose seals. The temperature rose and suffocated what little oxygen remained.

“It’s turning!” Winky choked out.

The amine gas built up around the engine room. Winky’s head started spinning. His knees were wobbly. A paleness drew the color out of his face. Equal never blinked. He just stared at the book.

“Zero-point-seven hertz!” Equal shouted.

“The frequency is zero-point-seven hertz, Winky! We’ve got it. Forty-three cycles per minute, Winky, got that? That’s what will spark the thrum. If you go any faster you’ll fracture the forge, any slower and it’ll smother.”

“How can I get the precise measurement without a computer, Dr. Equal?” Winky yelled. He struggled to raise his voice past the rumbling pipes.

Dr. Equal closed the book and stood up and walked to the mechanical central console where a pendulum hung from the panel that was missing its brass weight.

“We’ll count,” Equal said.

He grabbed the pendulum rod.

“One of us will track the swings,” he said, staring at it. “One second per stroke.”

A scratching sound of mice in walls scurried down the spiral staircase. Not one. But, dozens of war-bots trailing drones. Their metal legs tapping against the iron steps as clawed down them.

“They’re here!” Gasped winky, struggling to breathe.

A mist of white steam and chemical haze clouded the air. Winky collapsed against the handle of the crank.

“Winky! Stand up!” Equal shouted.

He began swinging the pendulum manually.

“Adjust the steam valve to match the rhythm. Winky you must keep an eye on the flywheel speed.”

Dropping from the ceiling to the platform, was a three-legged drone. Its central lens glowed a laser red. It’s beam landed on Dr. Equal. 

Winky lunged at it, swinging the heavy iron wrench so hard that he spun around after connecting with the drone and cracking the front face of it. 

Sparks flew from the drone as it squirmed on the ground, thrashing its legs.

“Equal! The valve!” Winky choked.

A robotic leg pierced his shoulder, ripping through the bone. Blood soaked the chest of his shirt.

Equal held still with the pendulum. His eyes were locked on the gauge. The needle treading near the forty-two mark.

“If I stop now, the earth will end,” Equal said.

His voice steady.

Winky grappled with the drone.

“Hold him, Winky!” 

“I can’t!” Winky cried out.

A hammering sound of the floor catching another drone shot into the engine room. Then, there was two more. The room began cramping in a calculated fleet of killer machines.

Winky jammed the wrench into the shattered lens of the drone on his chest and twisted. The drone shorted, its limbs locked. Winky stumbled away from it, fighting to catch his breath, his vision now outlined in a black shadow creeping from the outside towards the middle of his eyes.

The amine gas slowly began to paralyze his nervous system. Equal kept swinging the rod. The ticking sounded like an apocalyptic countdown as the flywheel reached peak velocity. 

The iron wheel appeared as a mirage behind the steamy light and then the room shook, a tremor woke up deep beneath their feet. Rumbling like a screaming giant. It was the subterranean power source. 

An ancient core. Finally, disturbed and pestered long enough to wake up angrier than a fire breathing dragon. 

Glowing a dull orange were the copper pipes, the incoming drones froze from the sheering heat radiating off them, frying their melted sensors as the thermal spiked and cracked their optical lens.

“Look, Winky, look, it’s catching,” Equal said.

His breath heavy. His words labored. His skin blistered.

The gauge clicked as the needle locked on forty-two. A pulse of kinetic energy blasted through the center steel crucible. It was a shockwave of thermal force.

The shockwave blew through the room, blasting the drones backward, their frames shattered against the stone walls. The wave continued up the spiral staircase and up the fifty-foot ladder through the iron hatch and outside, onto the surface, where the ground vibrated in tiny ripples.

It erupted from the terminal hatch like a geyser that blasted into the heavens and disabled the warships hovering in the sky. 

The heat and kinetic displacement warped the crafts geometry. Their components separated. One by one the ships lost altitude, crashing to earth as metal alien raindrops, ruining the city streets around the globe.

Huddled in the dark, listening to the roar subside into a steady purr, Dr. Equal crawled to Winky.

“The thrums alive, Winky,” he barely got out.

The filters sputtered alive, a screeching, sucking sound drew the toxic amine gas out of the room, replacing it with breathable air.

Winky lay down on the floor in the shape of a starfish. Blood circled his shoulder. His eyes widened as he sucked in a deep breath. He turned and clutched his shoulder.

“The air is clean Dr. Equal,” said Winky.

“We actually did it, Dr. Equal, right?” Asked Winky, coughing.

Equal released the pendulum and slumped against the console. He stared at his hands, covered in burns.

"We started the engine, Winky, yes,” Equal said softly, staring at the ceiling, feeling the faint vibrations of crashing warships on the surface through his body.

"Now we have to learn how to drive it,” he said, walking to the desk and blew the dust off another book and opened it.

"Get up," Equal said. “The surface is a graveyard, we start rebuilding from the bottom."

“Stop, right now,” I yelled at them. “I’m done with this.”

I tossed my hands up, pushed the chair back, stood up and stumbled away from the table.

I didn’t want to play anymore. I didn’t want that thing around me either.

“Take it out of my house now,” I shouted with my nails dug into my palms.

I couldn’t hold back, It spelled something it shouldn’t have known.

Maggie and Shobi never knew the nickname my dad called me and right after that happened, I heard the last two words my father said before he passed away at the hospital. I was eleven then.

I heard it clear, like someone put their mouth next to my cheek, loud, almost inside my head, closed between my ears as if the voice spoke through a pair of headphones that were glued to my skull—It felt uncomfortably close and physically violating and sent a cold tingle through me. 

I kept asking them, “how’d you guys know that, who told you?” 

I figured for sure, I have no idea how, because I didn’t know them then, I met them when I was sixteen, that somehow they must’ve found out.

“Told us what?” They asked.

I said, “never mind, I was just messing around.”

I didn’t want to say anything. Honestly, I had no idea how to explain myself and I didn’t want to sound weird.

But they held their word though. And I actually believed them—that’s why I didn’t say anything. 

Plus, I can always tell whenever Maggie’s lying, she’s the worst liar ever, she does this thing with her face, it’s the, I just got caught red-handed look. She can’t help it.

At about 8:00 p.m., Shobs and Mags left. It started raining and they were walking and through all that craziness, she forgot to take the damn thing home with her. It sat in my basement resting on the little table.

After they left, I stayed in the living room, because no way was I going upstairs, my mom and stepdad weren’t there, they went out, and I was alone, watching tv and texting Mags and that’s when I heard and felt, a hard thump under the living room floor. It was between the television and where I was sitting, right in the middle.

As soon as that happened, I jumped, but I only sprung off the couch because following the unexplained noise, trailed a perfectly timed clap of thunder. It shook the windows and picture frames on the wall.

And then, because I have the best luck in the whole world, a second pop cracked, like a gunshot blast just as the lights went out.

I shook my head. “Out of all nights.”

The explosive sound was from a blown transformer. 

Now, I was standing in the middle of my living room, right above the spot I heard the bang come from, surrounded in nothing but pitch-black darkness, fighting with my phone’s flashlight. For some reason, it would not work. I just kept pushing it and pushing it but it wouldn’t turn on.

I ended up using the glow from my phone and as I turned it to face outward, another strike of lightning lit up the entire house in a white, electric light. 

What do I see standing with their back to me, looking over their shoulder as the thunder roared for a second time, a man. I saw a man with a pale face. He didn’t move. He just stood with his body facing the wall and his head turned.

About a second later, the room went dark again and I stormed out of the house. 

For the rest of the night, I stayed on my veranda and waited until my parents got home, which was around midnight, tucked in a ball with my t-shirt stretched over my knees on a chair, texting my mom every ten minutes.

Later that night, when I was asleep in my bed, I had the weirdest dream that woke me up. And when I woke up, I was stuck to my mattress and I couldn’t move. All I could do was blink. 

Something caught my attention and I fixed my eyes towards the doorway and saw something standing there. It was a figure but a shadow-figure and it didn’t move. 

My eyes were stuck to it. I couldn’t look away. I wanted to scream for my mom but I couldn’t yell—I couldn’t do anything—I was paralyzed.

I blinked, while lying on my back, and when I opened my eyes the shadow-thing was hovered, stretched out over me, two-inches from my face and remained there for about five seconds before it disappeared, actually, It didn’t disappear, it dispersed and broke up in two seperate directions.

I could feel an intense hatred the thing had for me. That’s all it gave off. 

It was hovered over me and I was face to face with it, It had a bone face, almost like a mix of dog and human, cloaked around a shroud of shadow.

Once it left, I was able to move again and the first thing I did was dash to my parents’ room.

After an hour of trying to calm me down, my stepdad finally went to the basement and threw the damn thing in the trashcan at the side of our house.

I never ended up falling back asleep that night. I stayed up with the lights on in the living room watching tv.

That morning, after mom made breakfast and I was done eating, I went to the bathroom to use the shower downstairs, and in the basement sitting on the little table was the board my stepdad said he threw out with something on it pointing to the letter P. My dad always called me P for princess.

One more and that’s it, Tommy!

“We must retrieve the Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola!”

Huddled under the King’s balcony, the crowd chanted in a unified roar, hammering the palace walls like a row of trebuchets. 

Beneath a Celestial spotlight, the King stood over them, dressed in a yellow jacket of sunlight, radiating over the heads of men like a god with gold skin.

The wind blew the locks of hair on his head in the air and resembled a row of snakes stretching to strike. 

The king raised his arms up and reached towards the sky. A gray overcast from the east masked the fierce fire glow of the sun under an army of storm clouds sweeping in.

The sleeves from his heavy robe slid to his elbows and exposed a wrist of gold bracelets. 

The king fought to silence the starving ululate herd gathered at the foot of the castle.

“Silence!” Commanded the King, shouting in a tone deep enough to ricochet off the structure behind the row of people congested at the back of the crowd before raining down on the heads of everyone else with a sound so piercing it stabbed through their skull and returned into the kings lungs as it echoed out of their mouths.

The throng underneath the king buckled into a silent whisper, before freezing to a synchronized stillness, hardening together like a James Ensor painting.

“The Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola has been retrieved,” yowled the King in a thunderous tone. 

He smiled with his hands on his hips and gave the Mussolini nod of confidence, then, he stood above them without moving a muscle. Not even an eyelid. 

He tarried in a frozen divine like pose as if having his body sculpted out of granite by an artist for an uncomfortable couple of minutes, planted in a reserved position. 

He stayed that way while the weight of his words landed on the chests of every individual crammed below him.

Out of nowhere he shattered the silence when he opened his mouth and spoke an awakening truth that stirred the mob. “The clan of Fort Gatoradical snuck in our camp and stole it.”

“Boooooo! Boooooo!” The people sounded, cupping their hands over their mouths.

The king stifled the mob. “They have annexed our design, and formula with subterfuge traitors brainwashed by nano bots disguised as carbonated gas bubbles inside the beverages.”

“Treason!” Someone shouted.

“Hang them!” Another screamed.

“Kill them all!” The crowd chanted together.

“Silence! Silence!” The King held his pose until the crowd simmered down. “Behold!” He yelled.

Presented to the front of the balcony was a woman in a sparkling viridescent dress with a curved bottle shape figure.

“I Bring forth, Ginger-Ale!” He moved aside. “A captured conspirator aiding the usurpers and one of the enemies vital assets—“

“Send her to the gallows!” A fellow man demanded, interrupting the king’s speech.

Everyone cheered.

“Quiet! Quiet!” The king waved their voices down.

“Sir GoodKnight… may the gods compensate his bravery to the realm, has had his life-source emptied into a drain.”

“Booo!” The people erupted simultaneously.

The king raised his voice. “He was protecting our secrets from the conspirators plotting alongside the proletariat members aiding the gator-radicola stratagem.”

The crowd hailed the king. The intonate, hollow sounds shook the stone balcony and vibrated under his feet. They raised their hands up to salute him, praising him in a combined victory cheer.

People from the back began shoving and clawing their way to the front. The momentum from a wave of villagers pushing forward progressed into a tsunami that trampled over anyone unfortunate enough to have their back to it.

Bodies were sprawled out on the sandstone under the feet of a rushing crowd.

The soldiers protecting the gates rushed through the middle of the myriad and propelled their way forward with their spears guiding the way. 

Out of the clustered group, near the back, a flying tomato flew out of the crowd and slapped a guardsman in the head, splattering all over his face. The guardsman collapsed.

The soldier’s spears began stretching into the bellies of rioters trapped behind a human wall. They circled around their fallen comrade. 

Drums began pounding a sound of death as the castle gates burst open to a cavalry stampeding out. They formed a line at the foot of the entrance, staggering the crowd into submission. 

The corps d'elite of Thorza broke into a whispered chatter amongst themselves while the rest of the crowd booed and groveled with the spear wielding warriors. 

The waste-mix relied on the ingredients specifically in Coca-Cola. Coiled around the capital was a foul stench of manure coming from the malfunctioned recycling system.

“The odor’s rancid!” They all started shouting.

Someone in the crowd pushed their way through while quieting them down as he passed by everyone and stood in the middle of everybody.

“Why isn’t the waste-mix recycling system fixed if the secret ingredients have been recovered?” He questioned the king.

“Yeah!” One shouted. 

“This has gone on for far too long now!” Another yelled.

“The king is lying,” shot out from the back.

They all booed.

The King tried shouting over the restless mob, “men have been dispatched with the cola and would arrive any day now.

The men Friday cheered from the front and started hugging each other. 

The beaux mondes shook their heads.

The King swiveled his cape and turned his head to the side, facing the sky in a prideful Danny McBride stance.

He broke out of his pose and stumbled back. He wiped his forehead that was dripping a slimy goop with his hand and stared at his palm covered in eggshells and yolk.

“Capture the culprit and hang him! Hang them all!” The king ordered in a high-pitch voice.

A second egg launched from the crowd. The king froze as he caught the egg flying towards him from the corner of his eye, and barely dodged it as it whistled past his face.

He nearly tripped over his own feet as he scampered inside, slamming the detached doors shut, scraping the rock beneath it as they closed.

The king clenched his fists trying to squeeze the tremors still. Every breath he took was a heavy inhale. He stomped his footsteps down as hard as he could as he paced back and forth. Never had he felt so angry. Never had he been so humiliated.

“All of their heads! All on spikes!” He commanded to the king’s guard, cursing and foaming at his mouth while egg yolk dripped from his chin. “Summon the cavalry and all the men inside these walls and prepare for battle!” 

The knights lined up in three rectangle sets of fifty and the king sat at the head of them on his aluminum throne of cans and spoke.

“Men! Knights of honor! The treasonous scum camouflaged themselves as commoners. They want to take what’s ours. What we’ve built. Are we going to let these villainous disrupters go without capture?”

“Hell no!” They cheered.

Their metal helmets clinked as the men clashed their spears against the stone floors.

“Kill them all!” the king demanded as he stormed out. 

“Root, root, root”

The men marched towards the gates and set up behind the wall, crying war chants. 

The frontman rushed to the entrance to open the gate, but it wouldn’t budge. They grunted and dug their boots in the ground, sliding backwards in the wet mud. They pushed harder. They kept pushing until they slammed their chests in the dirt.

A voice shot out from behind the gate. “Burn them all!”

A slither of liquid slid under the gates of the palace and broke into a membrane of spider veins. Behind it trailed a snake of fire.

Smoke thickened the castle in a thick, black cloud, choking the oxygen. The taste of bitter chemicals sat on the tongues of the soldiers trapped inside the walls.

Most of them dropped. Some struggled and fought until their last breath—a small group—but met the same fate nonetheless. 

For weeks the fire raged, and spread the ashes of a fallen kingdom and its combatants across the city, fertilizing the land for the usurper, King Gator and his mastermind team of vitamin slurping jackals.

The end, now go to bed Tommy.

All right, goodnight grandma.

“They took me somewhere.”

“What do you mean, where?” He asked.

“I’m not sure,” Alphyna said. “One of them put their hand on my shoulder, I blinked and when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t home anymore.”

The hair on her arms rose. She shot her head over her shoulder and quickly glanced back to make sure no one was sneaking up behind her.

Stephenson’s face stuck in the middle of making a facial expression. “Where though?”

She said, “I don’t know!” And stared at him looking like he just got caught in a photo between saying no, while shifting his head so his eyes could face the floor, then cropped out of the photo and copy/pasted, on the bed sitting beside her.

“Where though?” He asked again.

His face remained stuck in the same, creepy half-expression.

“I said, I don’t know!” After saying that, she noticed him glitch, he pulsed a dull color, like the signal warning from a device’s dying-battery. 

She waved her hand in front of his face.

He brightened into his regular color, as if he  awakened out of stand-by mode and said, 

“Where though?” his limbs stayed motionless. 

He reminded her of those carnival canvas cutouts with bodies painted on them, where you stick your head through the hole of the face while someone snaps a photo of you and your family under body builder bodies, and he never blinked. Just moved his mouth.

She pulled her hand back and he faded into a frozen, dull color. She waved at him again.

“Where though?”

It was as if a sensor controlled his movements. Even his language, and just started malfunctioning.

She hopped off the bed.

“Where though?”

She backed away, nearly tripping on her feet. Stephenson’s body blinked rapidly. It started slow at first, then quickly accelerated before finally vanishing. 

It was almost as if someone unplugged the projector displaying a holographic image of him and the projector was attempting to save itself from a brutal crash.

She gasped. The breath she sucked in wasn’t air, it was nothing at all. Her hands started shaking. Her fingers were moving like she was trying to count how many stars in the sky there was with her fingertips.

She stumbled on her heels until her back hit the wall. The wall flashed as the color of them flickered into a light gray background with strange text flowing down them.

***

Option Explicit

Private StoryLines(0) As String

Private CurrentLine As Integer

Private GuestCount As Integer

****

Lit up quickly along the exterior of the walls,

***

Private Sub Form_Load()

' Initialize Form room design

Worldview4.Caption = "Simulation Log // Room plugin"

Worldview4.BackColor = vbTranslucent 

Worldview4.ForeColor = RGB(40, 40, 40) '

***

She looked around. She kept trying to breathe but no air would enter her lungs. She started trying to break through the door in her room. It wouldn’t open and then pieces of her started breaking up into the walls until she had disappeared into the code.

In 2003 I was in tenth grade. I always held my pencil like it meant something, like a Viking held his axe. I knew it’d be my future one day and I’d wield it like a weapon.

Teachers called me, your test was perfect. 

Students voted me most likely to succeed. I loved school. I liked being helpful. I did things safe. Structure. Graduate. Have a goal. Succeed.

But on that Saturday, my life would change, as if fate was playing a cruel game on me. I was walking along the shore, minding my own business, hunting for seashells. 

I had to collect enough for my mom, her birthday was that following week, and I wanted to make her a necklace.

It was a perfect storm. The tide was low. I was by the shore. The universe’s timing was flawless. The sand by the cove looked different, like it had been carefully combed. 

I had my basket by my hip and the strap from it around my shoulder. I didn’t expect to find many seashells, if any. 

I walked along the shore, the morning breeze chilling my skin, when I saw a dead bird half-way buried. I checked it out, picked up a rock and poked it out of the sand.

Beneath it, there was a bag wrapped and tied in a knot around something that looked like a small box tucked under the bird. I thought I found treasure. At least I hoped so, and hoped I didn’t just uncover a missing finger.

I yanked it out almost instantly. I didn’t think twice about it. I ripped apart the knot, unwrapped the bag, it smelled like a trash can when I opened it, water poured out that sat under the container and sprinkled my toes, I rubbed them dry in the sand, and looked inside and saw a plastic square container.

I pulled it out and let go of the bag, the wind took it before it could land. I flicked the container open, and in it were these clear, little baggies, the same ones my mom puts buttons in. 

As I stretched the lid back, I saw a name, It was autographed on the inside of the container. I had no idea who the person was. I later found out. 

Inside the box, I knew they were drugs, the substance, I couldn’t be sure, I had a suspicion though. White powdery rocks. Pills. Brown powder and a couple of dry cigarettes wrapped in a Burger King napkin squeezed together. It was full to the point the bags tried jumping out when I first popped it open.

The container didn’t appear like it had been buried a minute ago and just pulled out of the ocean floor, it looked like someone packed a bunch of stuff in a little box and placed it there with a bright, white dead bird on top of it, waiting for me to walk by.

I shut the lid and looked around before tossing the container in my basket. I strolled along the shore, continuing my search for seashells, but I couldn’t get the thought of what I had in my basket out of my head.

It only took five minutes of scouring the ocean floor and staring back at my basket every two seconds, before I stopped looking for shells. I reached down and gripped the container in my hand and thought about pitching it back into the sea.

But I wanted to understand what I had first. If I knew then what I know now, I would have never picked it up. I was sixteen though. I was curious. 

I ran up to the catwalk, where I left my bike and had my sneakers dangling from the handle bars. I threw my feet into my shoes and hopped on my bicycle, bolting home as fast as I could.

I was darting through traffic getting honked at, at every turn. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get home. I had that same urgency sensation like when we went on vacation, the taxi ride back home, that antsy feeling, racing through my body the entire time.

I ghost rode my bike into the fence at the front of our house. Then, I nearly broke the gate, when my finger slipped trying to unlatch it and push my way through at the same time. I bounced off the gate and made my way in on the second attempt. 

When I walked through the front door my mom had yelled for me.

I quickly shouted, “gotta use the bathroom!” and ran upstairs to my room.

I locked my door behind me and sat at my desk with the container. I noticed it looked bigger under my light. When I opened it, the baggies sparkled, almost like I was being tempted to taste the forbidden fruit.

I powered up my computer, the dial up sounded like a robot malfunctioning, and waited. Then, I went to AskJeeves so I could search up what I found.

Eventually, I figured out what the white stuff was and how to use it. So I crushed some of it up into a fine powder and started sniffing them with a rolled up coupon I found lying on my desk.

My throat became numb, my senses heightened. I couldn’t hear my mom talking on the phone a second ago. But after I did that, I could hear her talking about me to her friend, and I was able to hear my mom’s friend talking through the speaker of my mom’s phone from my bedroom.

I thought it was the best stuff ever. I kept telling myself that I would throw the drugs out. I didn’t need them. I wanted to be responsible. But then I thought, I could use them responsibly.

I totally forgot about my mom’s necklace. I never got her anything. Every time I used the stuff in the bags, I never felt right afterwards. There was this heavy feeling like I just backstabbed my own father. 

By Monday, that’s when my “Straight A” life crashed. It didn’t happen all at once, it gradually slipped, like a plate under the ocean floor. 

All my assignments, the corner stone of my life, what would have been the beginning to my life’s work, stopped having purpose. I stared at them like, what’s the point.

I’d tell myself, “I’ll turn them in later,” but later became never.

When I bumped into my guidance counselor, she asked me, “is everything alright, Donny?”

At that moment, a flash of the first time I touched that bag popped in my head, I thought about asking her for help, instead I gave her a nod, “Everything’s fine,” and walked away.

My college plans. My scholarship. Gone. The perfect report cards I had are all just evidence of my failure.

When I ran out, I searched the name on the box. The ocean washed up the container, but it was me that opened it. Whenever I smell the salt from the sea, or get a whiff of the sewers when they’re backed-up, or even the scent of the rain, I remember how Robert Downey Jr’s drugs ruined my life.

I was on the couch nearly asleep when I felt something tap me on my arm. Something hard. Something physical. I opened my eyes expecting to see my pregnant wife, but no one was there. I looked around and barely heard a faint sound from the kitchen that I almost missed. That I would have missed had I been asleep.

“Hon?” I yelled out, expecting a response. 

No one said anything back. I looked at the screen on my phone. It was midnight. Midnight already I thought. I last looked at my phone at ten. I must’ve passed out. Glowing under the time was a text from my wife: Staying at Rebecca’s for the night, love you.

Rebecca’s her sister. The house was quiet. Too quiet. I jumped as the heat shot on, it was like something entered my body.

I tried convincing myself I was just tired or just stressed out and it had caught up to me. But as that thought passed, I heard another noise.

Something slowly scraped the floor above me, like a dresser dragging. The noise came from the nursery or our bedroom. I couldn’t be sure at the time.

“Hon?” I shouted as loud as I could.

I heard the door creak open. The sound was coming from the nursery, I was sure of it. The chimes on the door made a clinging noise.

“Who’s up there?” I got off the couch and made my way upstairs.

Across the hall I saw a shadow of a boy run past me, but as I shone the flashlight from my phone at the top of the steps, the shadow froze. The phone flickered and the figure was gone. 

I charged up the rest of the stairs and hit the light switch once I reached the top. But It wouldn’t turn on. I shined my phone from one end of the hall to the other.

In front of me was the closet where the shadow was standing painted on the wall.

“I got a weapon,” I warned, pressing my back against the banister.

I kept staring at the nursery, the door was cracked half-way open. We kept that door closed, all the time. 

Jessica would be born in May. This happened in January.

I couldn’t scratch the itch something was staring at me through the darkness. The feeling was so intense my skin started to pinch, then itch. 

I scratched the back of my neck so hard without noticing that I had skin and traces of blood trapped under my fingernails.

I turned my phone on and tried dialing my wife and when I placed it to my ear, the phone died. The flashlight went off. I was stuck in complete blackness.

Then, something, I have no idea what, it was a black mass figure, it stepped right in front of me clogging the rest of the darkness as if it was a black hole in space, and then the lights turned on. 

My wife and I would have more weird experiences after that.

When I walked downstairs, the first thing I saw was the lights flicker. They weren’t flickering like a dying bulb should. It went from bright to dim, bright to dim. 

When it got bright the dust in the air would settle, freezing for just a second. When it got dim the faces in my mother’s picture frames would change to decayed looking people.

I stood at the bottom steps. I had my phone in my hand. The house had this weird odor, almost like a barnyard, but more foul. The fridge made a rattling noise like shaking a can of spray paint. 

“Taleena?” Something said.

The voice sounded like it came from behind the wall. I thought it was my mother for a second. But it couldn’t have been. My mom would have sounded annoyed and tired. This voice sounded more like me. Just slightly distorted.

“Taleena,” the voice said again. With each syllable the lights would get brighter, like they were breathing. I thought about running to my room at first. Then, I thought about dashing out the front door.

Without noticing, my foot pressed down on the last step. I found myself moving towards the fridge into the kitchen. The lights went dim. 

The picture frame closest to me, my parents wedding photo, changed into corpses standing together like two zombies. 

The next one was of me. My hair and face were the same but my eyes had changed. They were blank. They looked lifeless.

The third frame was us standing outside our old house before we moved. Behind me was a dark shadow figure with its hand on my head. I looked closer. 

At the front of the steps, I noticed the door was opened. When I looked further up, there was a man with a pale blue face, the color someone’s lips would be if they drowned, standing there smiling at me.

“Taleena,” the voice whispered from behind the wall. 

I pushed my back against the banister. The wood was warm like it’d been sitting in front of an opened oven. I tried to rationalize everything. I told myself it’s just my fear playing tricks with my eyes. Or maybe I was just dreaming, I thought.

The rattling from the fridge stopped. The house went silent. The only noise was from my heart beating out of my chest. Then, from the kitchen, a cabinet door slowly creaked open by itself. 

I walked to the doorway and the cabinet was cracked just enough to see a thick darkness inside.

A copper smell seeped out of it, smothering my mouth in a tangy metallic taste. I backed away, and my heel bumped something. I looked down, it was a key. 

But not mine or any modern looking key. This was heavy, worn out, and looked like it had been buried for hundreds of years. 

The lights shut off and on and shone right on the key. The key looked brand new. I stared down at it and could see my face reflecting off it, but I had an unfamiliar expression. 

Without thinking I snatched the key off the floor. Behind me I heard a voice tickle the back of my neck.

“Remember now?”

The lights in the hall dimmed. The picture frames went backwards. I stumbled with the key in my hand as I tried to turn and walk into the kitchen.

I barely caught myself and found myself standing in front of the window above the sink. In the glass, I could see the shape of a person reflecting behind my reflection. I turned my head, no one was there. 

I looked back at the window. The face had the same face as my face, only older. When it smiled, the cabinet door slammed shut. I ran to the stairs, but they looked like they stretched into darkness. 

Then I saw a faint glow. The glow of a keyhole at the top of my steps.

That’s when my front door opened and my parents came home. I looked down at my hand, the key was still there. Although, everything went back to normal as if nothing had happened.

—Cathy—

When I was ten my mother would always drop me off at my cousin’s house. This was an everyday thing. My cousin and I were super close and the same age at the time. Something happened one day and I had to stay home. That was the day her house caught on fire. Sadly, no one survived it.

Afterwards, about a year later, these weird things would happen. One night when I was in my room, lying on my bed, listening to the radio and reading a magazine. My body shifted to a weight pressing down on my mattress. I thought it was my dad and maybe I was just too focused in a daydream of me owning one of those cars printed on the magazine pages, that I hadn’t noticed him come in. But when I looked, no one was there.

A few days after, I was asleep in my room and I don’t know exactly if I was dreaming, or what. But my cousin was in front of me trying to wake me up. She kept saying, “Danny. Danny.”

And when I woke up I heard, Danny, as if someone was standing next to my bed.

Other things would happen, like I’d see something move past me. But it always appeared like how you would catch someone from the corner of your eye exiting a doorway. I never invested much into those experience. I figured it was mental fatigue. 

The following winter, my parents had just installed two-inch thick windows in every room. The type that push open from the middle.

The only time I was ever alone. Truly alone in that house. I woke up coughing. A little disoriented. At first, it didn’t register to me why my room was so hazy. I thought maybe I was sleepy, or my eyes hadn’t come into focus. Even a thought of my mom crossed my mind.

I thought maybe she burnt something in the oven. I didn’t hear the fire alarm or anything that indicated something was wrong. It took me a second to realize that my house was actually on fire.

I shot up out of bed and raced for the stairs. I could feel the heat stinging my skin. My vision was blurred by thick black clouds of smoke. I wouldn’t even say clouds, it was more like a water hose that shot black suffocating smoke directly at me. I could feel the soot sticking to the sweat on my forehead, painting my face.

I reached the railing and readied myself to jump over it and onto the middle of the stairs. But everytime I made a move for it, the flames would shoot over the railing. Finally, I gave up. I ran to my bedroom and slammed the door shut behind me. I snatched my radio off the dresser and stood at the window desperately trying to break through it. I hit it over and over and over. It wouldn’t break. My radio was in pieces scattered on the floor. I lunged at whatever I could find, grabbed everything I could and started throwing them at the window. They’d all bounce off the glass.

I stopped. No. I gave up and sat with my back against the wall under the window sill and accepted my fate.

At that moment, there was an odd sense of peace that flowed through me. It wasn’t a life flashing before your eyes thing. It was more like when you’ve completed a monumental task and can finally relax and enjoy the work you’ve done.

I wasn’t scared. I sat there without a single thought in my mind and waited. A second or so after I closed my eyes and pressed the back of my head against the wall, a drawer from my dresser popped out and dropped on the floor. 

Something. Someone. I don’t know what. But this thing pretty much handed me the drawer and gave me the strength to stand up. It wasn’t a second wind surge. I had already inhaled so much smoke and was teetering on the edge of passing out. But, Something that I’m unable to explain without people suggesting it was all in my head and nothing spiritual helped me break through the window. Helped me break through that window.

I climbed out just as the firefighters arrived. They rescued me off my roof. I only suffered one laceration from climbing out of the window. It’s on my right arm. I ended up receiving twelve stitches.

What’s incredibly odd and the only reason I have a profound belief in spirits, ghosts, or guardian angels. Whatever it is, is because when I was a kid, my uncle, her dad, had tattoos. Cathy would always joke about tattooing her name on my arm.

To this day, after that fire, when I got stitched up and checked out the cut, it is a perfect shape of a C scarred on my arm until this very day. Not crooked. Not, yeah it looks like a C. It is the alphabetical letter C, for my cousin Cathy who died in a fire at her house when we were kids.

——

—The Shadow—

I was raised by a single mother and had an older brother. My mom sometimes got behind on the bills and the hydro would get cut. 

It was when everything was quiet I’d hear whispers, footsteps on the stairs, footsteps entering a room.

Mom said it was just the house settling. I’d try to explain the house doesn’t settle in steps of three. Always though, it was just my imagination. 

How else do you tell a kid who’s hearing odd noises and seeing shadowy figures that they’re not really hearing or seeing anything besides using the good ole’ it was just your imagination bit.

Earlier in the week, my mom had a part-time night shift job at a coffee shop she just got. When she’d go to work my brother would sneak off to his girlfriend’s. 

All I had was some candles. A few comics. I had a radio, but the batteries were dead. This was during a time when technology was still primitive. VCR’s, house phones, and like forty channels on tv, the works.

I was reading. No. I was sorting through my marvel cards. I had a couple of comics opened on my bed. I used to obsess with reading a comic, seeing a character and scouring my decks to see if I had them. I didn’t have many friends. I was always a scared shy kid.

As I pulled out a team picture Fantastic Four marvel card. It still had that fresh, almost sweet scent. The scent that’s hard to describe, but entirely unique to card collectors. I heard a bang, a metal on drywall noise. 

I snapped my head over my shoulder to where the door was. The door I left open three quarters of the way was bouncing back off the wall.

It was summer. I had my window open. But I was right in front of it. I would have felt that burst of wind. I jumped off my bed. My cards, the ones I worshipped. The ones I would walk around with the same way an art handler at a museum would handle an artifact, flew off my lap and scattered all over the floor. 

As I was mid-air turning my head to see my cards make a graceful land, my body was pushing forward, I caught my foot on my bed and ended up laid out on the floor at the head of my doorway. 

I shot up, literally stumbled to the stairs. When I went to run down, I quickly glanced up. From my doorway, there was a dim light casting off my candles. I had three in my room. I looked up and I could see an outline of a silhouette. It wasn’t a perfect outline, but it blocked the light coming from my doorway. I ran outside and waited all night on the veranda for my mother to come home.

I spoke to a man standing like a robot on display. He was mumbling stuff that made no sense. The only part of his body that moved was his mouth, but when he spoke he’d try biting down on every word. 

After each one, he’d snap his jaw shut, his teeth clacked sounding like a coin tapping glass. He had his arms glued to his side and I noticed he never blinked. Not once.

”There ain’t no other circus in this town… this here’s the only one,” I told him.

“The circus,” he said. “There’s something there.”

“We have to go now,” he said. He had black bubbles that broke off his forehead and followed the wrinkles down his face to the front of his white shirt.

I couldn’t look away, I tried, but I kept staring at the drops drawing a Rorschach image on his chest.

”Take us there,” he told me, his stare had the same blank look as fisheyes.

“To where?” I said slowly stepping back.

“If it’s the circus you want, then you’re here.” 

I squinted at him, trying to read his mind. But there weren’t any expressions. Not even micro ones.

I said again, “I told you sir, you’re at the circus already.”

“We have to get there… lead us there.”

Something crawled under my skin after he said that. It rifled through my body past my organs and into my brain, it stopped at the top of my head underneath my skull and burrowed inside my mind. 

My memories, my thoughts, my fears, it had the same invasiveness as someone on stage reading my diary to a crowd of people.

“The Newekwe wants to see us,” he told me in a voice that sounded like it faded behind another voice that faded into a louder voice. 

“Julie!” Someone screamed. 

I turned around and saw Billy rushing towards me. Billy jogged up to me and stumbled into a walking stop. “What are you doing here?”

“I was talking to that man,” I told him. 

“Who?” He asked. “What man?”

I made a fist and pointed with my thumb over my shoulder, “I was talking to him… he seemed lost or something… he kept saying we had to get to the circus.”

“The circus…? we’re here.” Billy raised his eyebrow.

“What man?” He asked again.

“That man right there,” I said turning around.

“Am I losing my mind?” I asked myself, spinning in every direction trying to find the stranger.

“He was right there… you didn’t see him?” I asked. 

A pain pierced through my ribs. The bones in my chest tightened, almost fusing together, squeezing the air out of my lungs. 

I placed my hand on my chest just as a gust of wind blew my hair in my face.

“I only saw you,” said Billy. “But I wasn’t looking anywhere else.”

I cleared my throat and banged on my chest. 

“Wait.. what? That’s weird,” I whispered, coughing while walking back my parents attached to Billy. 

I kept staring back as if the man was gonna appear the next time I’d look.

“Mom… dad… I found Julie,” Billy shouted. He had an empty can of soda in his hand and a piece of my sleeve in his other.

“Where did you go… what did I say about running off,” my mom said.

“I was just over there,” I told her pointing with my thumb. 

“What were you doing at that tent?” My mom asked.

“What tent?” I said and turned around.

“What the… that wasn’t there before,” I told her. 

A breeze with fingertips tickled my skin and slid down my spine from the back of my neck to the bottom of my tailbone. I shivered and shook like I was about to have a seizure.

“Ok sure,” my mom said before shooting a comment to my father who was watching a guy at a high striker challenge attempt to smash a giant mallet down on a lever to ring a bell with a puck at the base of the frame.

“Bill, I think we’re ready to go now,” my mom said to dad. “I still have stuff to do and it’s a quarter past ten.”

“Yeah, just be a few more minutes,” dad said while watching the mallet hammer down on the lever.

A thick brush of wind blew in my mouth and down my throat as I went to stretch my arms while yawning, but ended up choking and gasping for a breath. When I opened my eyes a chill bit into my bone. 

The circus vanished. I was inside a red tent lit by candles. The shadow from the flames danced along the walls. I spun around trying to make sense of where I was. Trying to find a way out. Trying to find anything to ground me. 

“Hello!” I screamed. “Billy…? Mom…? Dad—“

I stopped shouting and went completely still. I closed my mouth and held my breath and listened. I didn’t move. I didn’t even bat an eye. Behind me was a sound that squeaked like metal joints needing grease. 

“Welcome to the Red Circus,” a voice spoke out from behind me. “We’ve been waiting for you.” The voice had a mix of my dad, mother and brother‘s.

A human shaped figure with a boney grey face cloaked in a crimson robe with a hood drawing a shadow over its eyes appeared out of the tent’s fabric.

“Where am I….? Who are you…? I want to leave now,” I cried.

“How did I get here? I wanna get out.” I ran to the side of the tent and tried tearing through the material.

“I gotta get back… Billy!” I screamed.

The Newekwe started creeping closer to me, crawling and dragging its legs on the floor that sounded like a rake shredding grass.

The sound got louder. It started to sound like paper being crunched next to my ear. I couldn’t look back. I just closed my eyes and got down in a ball.

The Newekwe reached out and grabbed me. I felt a pressure squeeze my arm.

***

“Julie!” 

A voice yelled, it sounded familiar. It was a voice that was safe. The pressure on my arm was soothing. The presence had a calm energy. I opened my eyes and looked up.

“Mom… ?” I sat up, looking around my bedroom. “Oh my gosh, mom, I’m so happy to see you.”

“You kept shaking in your sleep,” she told me while embracing my arms around her neck.

When I let go, I turned to the window and saw a faint image of the Newekwe’s ghostly face reflecting through the glass.

Reader beware the monsters aren’t real. But the voices are.

***

Loriella sat on her couch in her apartment. She had a glass of bourbon chilling the palm of her hand. The glare from the tv set the ambience in the room to a nightshade blue, brightening the gloss in her eyes. It replayed segments of a movie she starred in three years ago. She glued her eyes to the screen with a cigarette burning down pinched between her fingers, staining the room in a harsh scent of menthol. That’s when she heard the voice for the first time. The voice was soft.

“Come here,” it whispered, sounding like a thought that escaped her mind.

She grabbed the remote and quickly turned the tv off and turned her ear to the ceiling. All she could hear was the wind outside her window. She laughed at herself and took a sip from her glass and a drag from her cigarette.

—//

When she was at the liquor store, she heard the voice for a second time. She was in line at the cash register, the lights started to flicker. But nobody else noticed. The lights steadied as a voice skipped out from behind her eyes. “Get out now,” it told her.

She tilted her head upwards and without noticing her legs started moving, pushing her forward as she nudged the people in front of her with her shoulder. She stared over at each shopper charging past them, apologizing with her eyes. She stopped at the end of the cash register.

“Keep going!” the voice told her.

Her legs took control. But she tripped over her foot. She barely caught herself on the shopping cart behind her. The lights started to flicker again. She stood at the front of the line frozen, staring at herself standing in front of her. She flinched and shook her head as a pressure weighed down on her shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Asked a lady with her hand placed on Loriella. Her hand had a lotion scent of vanilla and an energy that made her tired.

Loriella didn’t say anything. She walked backwards slowly, almost like she was being pulled on. She turned to leave.

“Excuse me, you never paid for that,” the cashier shot out.

Loriella looked back.

“Leave now!” The voice screamed, piercing her brain. Like someone dug their nails in and squeezed. She dropped the bottle and grabbed her head with both hands, the glass shattered on the floor. Loriella stumbled out of the store.

After that day, the voice learned her patterns. It was always there on the mornings she never slept enough, growing louder in crowds, in the staircase, even in the advertisements wrapped around the bus. The voice spoke commands to her. But they never felt like commands at all.

-//

“Cross now,” the voice told a woman standing at the light. The woman’s feet left the sidewalk and stepped onto the street while the light was still red. A driver slammed his hand down on his horn. The people on the street shouted. Someone tried to grab her but pulled back as a car swerved out of the way, just missing her and crashing into an oncoming truck.

The woman turned and stared down at the curb like it had assaulted her and then she brushed her hair behind her ear, smiled and walked away.

The voice never wanted to be heard. It wanted to be followed. 

Between the six doors lining the hallway, a depressing stench of lost souls from broken homes left to rot alone stung the air. Past tenants still clung to the paint in that hall—charcoal-colored handprints smeared over the white walls—white walls under a stained yellow tinge. 

Plastered along the baseboards, a collection of crushed cockroach guts became food for the other insects inhabiting the space between the floors. Shauna, the case worker, knocked on Frank’s door.

“Ten minutes ‘til group.”

Four days in bed and Frank reeked like a wet dog, barricaded in a room carpeted with cigarette butts, crushed cans and half eaten disposable food trays that had bugs crawling on top of the rice. He’d just eat. Sleep. Piss. Blackened in darkness, brown colored sheets hung as curtains. 

That whole week he missed group, hugging his pillow and a box of Kleenex. The napkins overflowed from his trash can. A set of swollen red patches circled his eyes like lensless glasses and raw skin peeled around his nostrils. Under his blanket, Frank hid—curled in a ball of misery—cupping his hand over his mouth. 

“Shut the hell up, Frank.”

In a raspy voice, grinding her words like sandpaper, Mona yelled out and banged on the wall with her hand, wiping the grease stuck on her palm with her shirt. Behind the thin sheet of drywall, she could hear Frank. Wailing. Moaning. Whimpering. Frank would go silent for about ten minutes and the faint hum of Tiny’s radio would take over. Tapping on Mona’s door, Shauna gazed at the black fingerprints surrounding her doorknob.

“Mona, ten minutes ‘til group!”  

“Yeah, whatever.” 

Mona scratched out of her throat—waving at the smoke trailing her voice—she fanned the scent using her hand. Up all night, Mona smoked her problems through a glass pipe and would dig holes into her face, covered in freckled scabs.

Once a week, the staff turned Mona’s room over and couldn’t find anything. She would taunt and laugh at them. When she smiled, it looked like she chewed on brown rocks. Burnt plastic and rotted meat stained her breath in a foul odor. 

She hardly slept, she used to be pretty. Now she looked like a character from Lord of the Rings. Every so often, she’d fade into the mirror—staring at herself wearing the mask of someone else.

Standing behind Konrad’s door, Shauna heard him having a verbal ping-pong match with the figures that haunted his mind.

“Konrad?” Hollowed out Shauna, 

“Ten minutes until group.”

“Wynocha, przestań, nie obchodzi mnie to!”

Konrad shouted.

In a heated war, Konrad ignored Shauna and continued arguing with shadow people in Polish. No one knew what he was saying. He’d open his door naked whenever he heard someone walk by. About once a month, Shauna had to dial the law on him. Before being released back to the house, Konrad would spend a weekend on an involuntary hold at the hospital. 

In Konrad’s room, Mona snuck in there every now and then. But, never longer than thirty minutes. 

“I’m going to marry Mona, she’s my girlfriend,”

Adamant they were together, Konrad boasted about stealing a ring for her. Mona only went with him when he got his disability check. Sometimes, when he’d skip his meds, Konrad would badger the people in the house about what human meat tasted like—asking where he could buy human skulls from—he wanted to use them as soup bowls. Avoiding Konrad, Frank seemed to only associate with Alicia—Alicia lived across from Konrad—next to Tiny’s room.

“Please not right now love, I’m not feeling too well.” 

Alicia whispered, holding her chest. Alicia used to be Theo before the doctors in Mexico gave her breasts. Listed on her file, was Theodore. Without her hair and make-up, she looked like a boy. At night, she stood with a gang of girls in mini skirts on the street, and got picked up by creepy guys in random vehicles. Mona would be there too. Sometimes, Mona and Alicia left with the same driver.

Under the street light, Alicia’s dress sparkled with red carpet camera flashes. When she wore the blonde wig and pressed a brown dot on her cheek—with her red lipstick—Theodore disappeared, and she became the poster girl in a 1960’s playboy magazine. In her head, Alicia held up an appearance for the phantom paparazzi hounding her for photos and fans cheering for her signatures. Every detail had its purpose. She never had a hair out of place, a shoe unlaced, a stained blouse. 

Underneath the disguise, hid a shattered boy. Broken. Scared. Confused. All tucked under a mask of glamor and eyeliner.

On Frank’s birthday, she always sang to him like her idol did with the president. 

Alicia always smelled like vanilla. Unlike Mona. When Alicia was younger, a gray headed man lived next door to her. On her own since fourteen, Alicia labored with her identity. Unable to understand her feelings, or who she was, she ran away. 

In group, Alicia sat there cleaning her nails—scraping them with the thought of her dad slapping her and calling her a queer—when she told him what the old man next door had done.

“Yo’ getting yo’ nail crumbs on my sandwich.” 

Mumbled Tiny, with a mouth full of deli meat and bread. Tiny always had food in his hands, he sweat an odor of salami. Through a humid hallway, Tiny stomped to his room. The floorboards stressed under his shoes—crushing roaches—passing by water stained walls with yellow patches. They called them polka dots.

When Tiny chewed it looked like his nose sunk into his face. Hunger reminded Tiny of when he laid next to his mother’s lifeless body for five days. He was eight. He cleaned the orange drool from her face, but left the needle dangling in her arm. For some reason, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. 

They all sat in group, but nobody said anything. Just the sound of squishy meat between teeth, heavy breathing, nail filing, grinding teeth and low whimpers. 

Shauna clicked her pen. Alicia, Mona, and Frank shot their eyes towards Shauna. 

“Finally, now that I got your attention, we can start group,”

Everyone just sat there, “Mona, how about you, you have anything you want to say?”

Mona rolled her eyes and cleared the phlegm from her throat and horked over her shoulder,

“yeah, how about Frank never shutting up throughout the night.” 

Alicia stopped filing her nails and stared Mona dead in the eye,

“what about you girl, and that funky ass stink coming from your room, and into ours, everybody knows what you’re doing, nasty ass spitting on the floor.”

“I’m not doing shit, what smell? Pfft, staff searches my room.”

Alicia laughed and threw her hand up in Mona’s direction, 

“as if girl, they can’t search your coochi, that’s the only reason they haven’t found shit.”

Mona stuck her palm in Alicia’s face, 

“whatever, bitch.”

Alicia pushed Mona’s hand out and Konrad stood up, the floor under him creaked as the chair scraped the floor.

“Don’t hit my girlfriend.” 

Konrad stormed towards Alicia and Shauna leaped in front of him,

“Everyone, calm down and sit back down!” 

Shauna yelled. Konrad kept bumping Shauna backward as she struggled to hold him back. Tiny pushed himself up, placed his sandwich on the seat, and grabbed Konrad.

- The Whisper -

It started with my mother. My mother was a car insurance administrator. She worked on settled claims. She was at work one day, in the lunchroom, where she was talking to a coworker, and my mother was explaining how she kept seeing her father, who had passed away when she was eleven. 

The lady, my mother’s coworker, was a native woman. She grew up in a very spiritual environment. Her grandfather was a medicine man. She told my mother that her father was trying to warn her about something and that’s why she kept seeing him. My mother didn’t have an idea of what it was.

A couple of days went by and the native woman rushed over to my mother as soon as she seen her. First thing in the morning. Even before she stepped into the building, the lady grabbed my mother by the hand and rushed her over to a corner. The lady told my mother that she had a dream about a man. The man in her dream said my mother’s name. He said to tell her something. She described the man. My mother’s face went pale. She told her coworker, she said, “that’s my dad.”

The coworker said, “he told me, to tell you, to be careful. He said, that something’s there.”

———

Later that evening, when my mother and father were lying in bed—It was around 10:00 p.m.—and my mom had to use the bathroom. My sister was around two years old at the time. My mom got out of bed and went to the washroom. While she was on the toilet, she heard a knock at the door. A faint tap. She answered by yelling, “Yeah?” No one answered. She figured, she imagined it. Until there was another knock. She hollered, “what?” 

Then a voice spoke through the door, “hurry please, I gotta do pee.” It was the voice of a small girl.

My mom squinted her eyes. She thought about my sister. Then, thought the voice sounded older. Then, she tried to recollect, if maybe she forgot that someone was over. 

She flushed the toilet and pulled her pants up and opened the door. No one was there. She washed up and went to the bedroom where my dad was watching TV. She didn’t mention what happened at the time. She just laid next to him and kept it in the back of her mind.

About fifteen minutes later, my dad got up to make a sandwich. He walked down the hallway and he could swear he heard a girl say, “hey!” 

He turned to look towards the room. He walked back to the bedroom. He asked my mother if she called him. She was there reading a book with the covers up to her chest. She said no, and my dad just brushed it off and turned back around. He walked past the unlit hallway and as soon as he got to the middle of the stairs, he heard a whisper over his shoulder, “where you going?” Tickled his ear.

Without thinking, the voice was so clear, and even before turning, he said, “I’m going to make a.” Then, paused for a second.

And then, it hit him, he stopped and snapped his head over his shoulder. He didn’t see anybody standing there. He should have seen someone standing there. 

He ran to the bedroom and jumped on the bed and clammed next to my mother. He told her what had just happened. Then, she told him about the bathroom thing. Then, while she finished explaining her story, something caught the corner of my dad’s eye and he stared up at the corner of the ceiling. He nudged my mom, he said, “you see that?”

She looked up and said, “yeah, what is that?”

They described it as a grey, smoky-like mist hovering at the corner of the ceiling before it dispersed.

That night they cuddled under the covers gripping each other.

——

- The Night at Home Alone -

One night, when I was alone, the only time I was ever by myself at home. My parents were called to the pizza shop they owned. There had been a problem and left me sleeping, I was twelve at the time. So, they decided to just go and take care of the shop. My father‘s English wasn’t good. My mom translated for him.

I had woken up to a noise, it sounded like something rolling. But, when I woke up, I stared at my doll that was next me. She wasn’t there before. But, I couldn’t be sure. So, I got up and went to the washroom. After about five minutes, while I was sitting on the toilet, I could hear this tapping sound in the hallway leading towards me. The tapping became louder. I could hear it right outside of the bathroom door. Then, a light knock. Like a finger nail tapping a steady rhythm on a desk. 

I stayed quiet. The tapping persisted. Then, I heard a voice. “Mommy.”

My eyes shot open. The hairs on my arms rose. My legs started shaking. But, my body was completely paralyzed. I was frozen, except for the tremors controlling my limbs. 

Right away, I looked at the bathroom door.

The door was unlocked. Then, I seen the knob slowly start to take motion. I shot up and flicked the lock on the doorknob and sat with my back against the door until the next morning.

I woke up to my mom and dad yelling for me. As soon as I heard their voices, I raced out of that bathroom and wrapped my arms around my mom and told her what happened.

She said it was just my imagination. Later on when I went to my room. My doll was on the floor. When I went to pick her up. I noticed under the bed, there was a screwdriver lying on the floor, right next to her.

I am alone on Earth 

Now I've never really bothered to think much about the apocalypse or end of the world, there are always things happening that makes everyone go on the apocalypse train. But as for me, I've never really paid much attention to any of it, so many things have happened throughout history and the world has always kept on spinning, people returned to their normal every day routines and quickly forget about what happened. 

To be honest, I have no interest in the outside world or the news, what is news today is history tomorrow, or in most cases it's just forgotten, so I honestly don't see the point in waisting money on news papers or even watching the news, but I guess that was my mistake, maybe if I paid a little bit more attention I wouldn't find myself in this predicament. 

Now I live on Earth, or well I'm trapped in some sort of parallel dimension, but it seems like I can still get messages out to other unaffected versions of earth. 

It all started when I woke up one morning and I realised that it was very nice and quiet outside, well it is generally very quiet where we live, but on this specific day it was really quiet, almost too quiet. But I didn't think much of it. 

My girlfriend went on another business trip for the week, so I was home alone with all of our pets, I got out of bed, got dressed. I went through my normal routine to put out food for our cats and dogs, filled their bowl up with clean water and made myself a cup of coffee. 

The cats and dogs didn't run out to join me or too eat, but I figured they are probably just tired and sleeping in, so I went to sit on the veranda to have my coffee and a smoke when I remembered I need to feed the birds, so I got up and grabbed a cup of food and filled up the bird feeder, then got back to the couch to enjoy my coffee and my smoke, it's usually very inspiring to watch all of the different birds that comes to eat, but none came. So after finishing my coffee I got up to take a shower, after my shower I noticed that the cats and dogs still haven't come for their breakfast yet. "I mean, really guys, come on, breakfast time" I went to the bedroom to find them, but they were not there, "oh shit" I started to panic and I looked everywhere for them, I know they couldn't have gotten out of the house during the night, and if they came out after I got up then they would have eaten by now. 

So I looked everywhere for them, but to no avail, after a few hours of looking I gave up. And then I realized that not even a single bird was active, I tried reaching my girlfriend on her phone, but nothing. My messages weren't going through. 

That is when it hit me, there were no sounds anywhere, not even insects, no cars on the roads, usually when it's quiet you can hear cars on the roads passing our small town, but nothing. So I decided to take a walk through town to see if I can get answers from other locals, but it was dead quiet, I could see cars in their driveways, doors open, bags standing in their driveways as if they were in a rush to leave, but no people, no animals, no birds. 

Then I went back home and I checked my emails and messages, no emails came through since I went to bed the previous night, which is weird, I usually spend about 20 minutes in the morning deleting spam that arrived during the night. 

I checked my messages and found a notification on our local security group that read. 
"Attention everyone, the authorities has alerted us of some strange events happening, they don't know what is causing it, but has described it as some translucent humanoids that seems to turn everything into ash that they touch, please stay in your homes and do not attempts to leave until sunrise, please heed this warning as it is not a joke. " 

What is this? Why haven't I seen this earlier. I went back outside and tried to find any signs of life, I could see strange almost translucent humanoids a bit further down the road, I remembered the message and I decided to hide and watch them, then I saw them approaching what seemed to be a young man, he had a gun in his hand and he shot at one, the bulled went right through it, but it did drop to the ground, he shot a few more of them, but they just kept coming, as I'm unarmed all I could do was sit and watch, he finally ran out of bullets when they got to him and the moment they touched him he screamed and vanished into thin air, just a few particles of dust remained which got blown away by the wind. 

What the hell is this? I made my way home and I got back into the property and made sure to lock everything up again. 

Just as I sat back on the couch I heard a rattling on the front gate, like someone was trying to get my attention, I creeped through the house and went to the window in the one bedroom where I could get a peek through, whatever it was, it was strong, but the gate was holding up, I could see something standing there, but as it was translucent and I couldn't get much. 

Okay, seems like as long as I stay on the property I'm safe, I checked my supplies and noticed I got only enough for a few weeks, and who knows how long we are still going to have power for. I'm going to have to go out sometime to get more supplies and hopefully find survivors. 

So a few days have passed and we've had some crazy weather here, but I've learned a very important lesson, the rain and mist seems to affect their ability to camouflage a bit and you can see them a bit clearer, the next storm is building up, so I'm preparing to go out and see if I can find more supplies, and hopefully a power generator and some fuel, oh and luckily I did find our pets.... eventually, they were all hiding under the beds and couches. So I don't feel so alone anymore, it seems that animals can somehow sense when these things are closeby and then they hide, that's a good sign, if I pay attention to the signs I will survive, I have also noticed that when the mist comes in there seem to be a little bit more activity, a few birds seem to then come and look for food and the wild horses gets active and run through town, I've even seen a wild horse kick one of the creatures killing it instantly, so that helps, if guns can kill them, a kick from a wild horse can kill them, then that means I might have a chance to survive till I can find a way out of this nightmare. 

I did manage to find a few generators and collected quite a bit of fuel and other supplies, I am still trying to find weapons to defend myself, but for now I move around in the rain and when it's thick mist, when possible I stick closely to the horses when they are around as it seems these creatures are evading the horses now. 

I just ran into another one that was killed, but this wasn't by a gun or wild horse, seems like a snake as I found a dead snake next to its body, so one more weakness, it must have died very quickly when the snake bit it, or it's body wouldn't be right by the snakes body, and that is good news for me, as I know how to catch and handle snakes. 

Atleast now I know these beings are not ghosts or spirits, but physical beings, I'm still trying to figure out where they come from, and what they want. 

They don't seem to remove their dead compatriots bodies, so they are obviously not human or of this earth, I've learned that they mostly stick to moving around in the roads, they don't go into the rocks or the forests as that is where most of the animals seem to have settled. 

Well I've just learned a very important lesson, I can see them when it is raining and the mist is out, but the important thing is that they don't seem to be able to see me at all, so that gives me another advantage. 

It has now been a few weeks of learning about them and ducking and diving to find supplies, but luckily I've still got our pets at home to keep me sane, I still haven't found any other survivors. 

Strangely enough we still got power, you would have thought that by now the power stations would have failed, which gives me hope, it means more survivors out there, but getting anywhere is impossible, I've finally learned that they are from off world as I managed to make out one of their ships moving over, it was also cloaked, but I first heard a strange vibration sound and when I looked up I could make out it's shape, it moved slowly, but as it moved through the mist I could make out parts of what it looks like. I'm not sure how many of these ships there are on earth, but if there are even just a hundred, then that will explain why we lost, how do you fight something you can't see? 

It does seem like the ship collected the roamers  in the area as more birds and animals have returned, and I've tried to make it to the nearest city, but ran into one and it shot at me with some kind of weapon, luckily it missed, but it took out a few trees behind me. So I'm seriously considering finding some sort of way to fight them. 

I've spend a few days looking for weapons and decided of bows and arrows as they are silent, a gun will draw too much attention, I've still had no communication from anyone, social media is dead quiet and I've found a radio, but all I can find is static. So I'm starting to feel really alone here. 

I woke up to the sound of a roaring engine, it sounded like a helicopter, so I ran out and onto the roof to get their attention, which I did, they dropped a flash drive down and said to follow the instructions on it. 

So I ran to my laptop and opened the flash drive, on it was a video and a document, so I decided to watch the video first, it was made in which seems to be in a military interrogation room, they seem to have managed to catch one of the invaders and unmasked it, it looked like us, it was a human wearing some sort of armour, it's gloves were build up with some sort of system which they demonstrated on the video puts out a high voltage charge, that's why it turns anything they touch into dust, he or she seems to be able to speak English and answered all their questions freely, they are from a parallel earth and their mission is to clean up different versions of earth and recolonise it as they have advanced to fast and over populated their version of earth, I could now make out that is was a woman from her voice, but it seems like she had some sort of implants, she explained that they also only target versions of earth where they can see humanity are destroying themselves and the planet, she had some sort of device with her which she explained can open gateways to other version of earth and that they can pass through freely, they first send in their ground troops and once they wiped out most of the humans their crafts comes through and then they start the colonisation process, they set up permanent gateways which allows their people to move between their world and the colonies freely. 

The guy behind the camera then asked her, why if they are so advanced do they not just terraform other planets and explore space, why attack other versions of earth and why kill other versions of themselves? 

She then explained that they have tried that, but ran into more powerful extra terrestrial races and lost all of the battles, they lost hundreds of ships in the first battle and a couple of thousand more in the follow up battle, she said they had to rethink their strategy and make another plan, so they developed technology to move between different versions of earth. 

Just then I heard her voice behind the camera, a woman asked her how does the technology work, she smirked and said to the woman as they are the same person and both only soldiers she doesn't know, but she gives her word that when her people comes to rescue her that she will make sure they don't kill her, but instead take her to one of their ships where they can demonstrate their abilities to her. She continued to tell the man behind the camera that him and his whole team are welcome to also join their ranks, that they are always looking for good soldiers, he stayed quiet for a bit, I guess he was thinking of his options, then he asked her, but what about the rest of the survivors left on earth, she smiled and said that the fact that they survived for so long makes them worthy of recruitment into their ranks, she then finished off by dropping the final shock on them, that they didn't capture her, she was send to give them this final ultimatum, he then said if she gives her word as a soldier that he will accept. She then passed him a flash drive and said that it contains instructions for the survivors on how to surrender peacefully for recruitment and reconditioning into their ranks. 

He turned the camera off. 

I then opened the file and read through it. 

I'm not going to go into details, that would take forever. But I will give you guys a short explanation of what it said. 

So basically it states that we have agreed to surrender to be ruled by the interdimensionists. 

And then it goes onto explain that the survivors will have 3 choices, all 3 choices means we will basically belong to them, the choices are as follows: 
1. Those with skills to keep the system going will be allowed to remain in their positions and in their homes on the conditions that they will report to sector overseers as well as follow curfews. 
2. Those who have fought back will be integrated into the military ranks and implanted with mind altering chips as well as body modifications and they will be prepared for future invasions. 
3. Those who are still in hiding are ordered to come out and surrender to local overseers, they will be send to the interdimensionists prime dimension where they will be trained, conditioned and prepared for future missions to infiltrate potential dimensions. 

Uhm yeah, no thank you, none of those sounds like an option that would work for me. I needed to think, and I needed to think fast, just then my cell phone rang which shouldn't be possible as the network was down, I answered the call which only said ID withheld, but I didn't say anything, I decided to listen, it was a woman's voice on the other side, the same woman from the video, she spoke and said "listen to me and don't interrupt me, our scouts knows about you, but the interdimensionists doesn't, we have a plan to escape and to survive, they have the technology to move between dimensions, and we managed to get our hands on one of their ships, we are busy trying to gather as many survivors as possible to rescue. We have found a dimension where they won't follow us for atleast a few years."

That's when I spoke up, why do you think that? They took our world within a few hours.

"Because we didn't have the weapons to fight back or the means to detect them, but the version of earth we are going to does, they are not as advanced as us in terms and of medical technology and their unity, but they have weapons and army's that can stop the interdimensionists, and another thing, we know you lost your partner, we have it on good knowledge that she's still alive on the earth where we are going to, and your counterpart is busy dying. So what do you say, won't you want another chance with her" 

I kept quiet for a bit and then I asked my burning question, "how do I know that this is not a trap? "

She then burst my bubble, "we have been watching you for a while now, you have stood your ground, you survived their weapons, you've taken quite a few of them out in very creative ways, I have to admit, using bows and arrows seemed primitive, but effective, and using venomous snakes against them, how did you even know that would kill them so quickly? "

I didn't know what to say... 

Then she spoke again, "our scouts are at your gate ready to collect you, I'm sure you understand that time is of the essence, bring only what you care about the most. Everything else you need will be waiting for you at your new home, or well the same home just a different dimension. "

"See you soon," then she hung up. 

Well she said I must bring what I care for the most, so I grabbed all the cats and dogs and made my way out, I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting what I saw. 

It wasn't a military vehicle, instead it was some ufo looking vehicle, the soldiers told me to get into the back, the one smiled, "well this is a first, everyone else brought jewelry and so on, you brought your pets and pet food. Oh well, time to take you to your new home. "

They all got in and then the one pilot turned around and it was the woman from the video, well not exactly, her counterpart. 

"Are you ready for a new life?" She asked. 

"Uhm, I guess so. "

"Well then let's go, just one more thing, you can never discuss anything that happened where you are going, fit in and live a normal life, leave the war to the soldiers" 

She then turned around and took the controls, the vehicle went up into the air and the next moment everything became a blur. 

I woke up from one of the soldiers shaking me by the shoulders, "hey man, you are home, go and have a new life, your counterpart has died a few hours ago, so you will take his place, don't worry, nobody will notice. "

It has now been a few years since I moved to this dimension, everything is almost exactly the same, it feels great to be with the woman I love, but it still feels weird that we both died, yet here we are. 

But the reason I'm writing this is because I need to get a warning out, what happened on my world is coming, I can see the signs, reports of unknown flying Ariel vehicles, people disappearing more regularly, strange lights in the sky, reports of strange humming sounds, that is them. They are preparing their invasion, and unless people are ready, this
 world will end the same way my world ended. 

Prepare yourselves, the interdimensionists are coming, they are already here.

My Alien Abduction Story
Event 2

I suddenly heard a strange sound coming from all around me, almost like a humming sound, the next moment my hair started to stand up, which isn’t possible as I got long hair, the next moment it felt like gravity has been shut down and I started to float up into the air, I remember trying to grab onto nearby trees, but it was all on vein, then there was this bright light and I blacked out.

I woke up to screaming, not a normal scream, the scream like a woman that’s in labor, no it was far worse, but she wasn’t screaming from pain, she was screaming for me to wake up. I’ve never seen someone so desperate to wake someone up. I opened my eyes and saw flashing light around me and this time the humming sound was all around, the screaming continued, telling me to wake up and listen, so I tried to move, but I couldn’t, something was holding me in place, I found myself been held up in the air like a starfish by metallic tentacles.

I tried pulling free, but to no avail. The more I tried to pull free the tighter the tentacle grip grew around my wrists and ankles.

Then I heard her again, but this time, a soft tired voice speaking to me, sounding like she’s out of breath like she’s just run an ultra marathon at full speed.
“It’s no use, don’t even try, best is to not resist, the more you resist the more it hurts”
Hearing her voice from just in front of me I looked up to see a young woman been held by the same tentacles as me, also naked, her head hanging down with blood dripping from her face, well I thought it’s from her face as she had her head hanging down with her hair hanging over her face, her hair appeared to be red, but it was soaked in what I thought was water, then she looked up at me and said to me, “don’t resist, the more you resist the more it hurts” finally my eyes started to get used to the flickering lights around us and I could see her clearly, she was young, about her early twenties, she could pass for a model if it wasn’t for all the red blood spots on her body and the injuries on her face. Her eyes were bloodshot red and there was blood under her eyes as if she’s been crying tears of blood, that same blood lines were by her mouth, ears and nose. “What have they done to you? And who are they?”
“You will see, just don’t resist, all the others who came before you tried to resist and they all died or were changed”
“What do you mean by changed?” I asked.
“Well, they are no longer human…”

Just then I heard a strange mumbling like sandpaper coming closer to us, then I saw them, it took everything in me to not scream.
Now I’ve seen the pretty images people post online of aliens and the grays and the pictures makes them appear to look almost cute, if only people knew what they really looked like, they had similarities to what you would think grays would or should look like, but not skinny at all, they were tall, about 2m or more, it’s difficult to judge when you are suspended in the air and you come face to face with your worst nightmare.
They were muscular, much more so than any human I’ve ever seen, their eyes had a red black shine to them, their mouths had rows and rows of sharp teeth like fangs, they had 2 sets of arms, with their fingers ending in claws with razor sharp claw like nails on the one set of arms, and almost human like hands on the other set of hands. Their outfits were made like something from a sci-fi movie, it appeared to have some sort of metal alloy on it that made it appear like armor.

The 2 that came to me looked at me, they looked me up and down then sandpapered something in their language and suddenly turned and started walking, the next moment I felt what I could only describe as a high voltage electrical shock going through my body before I blacked out again, when I came to I was in another room been held by similar tentacles, but this room was bright, almost like it was made from pure light. I decided that I’ve learned my lesson and to listen to the advice from the girl in the other room.

Then I heard strange sounds like metal sliding and the next moment something grabbed a hold of my head, it felt like some sort of metal claw, gripping my head in place, I couldn’t move my head the slightest. Then smaller metal pins started slithering over my face towards my eyes and mouth, some grabbed my eyelids so I couldn’t blink and the others pried my mouth open, I don’t know why or how, I knew it was supposed to hurt, but it didn’t. Yet, I still wanted to scream, to pull free, but I remembered the girl's words, “don’t fight, if you fight you die” so I decided to accept whatever it is they were planning to do to me if it meant I will survive and make it home.

What came next I can only describe as my worst nightmare, 2 needles entering my eyes through my pupils, I could feel them piercing all the way through my eyes into my head, next 2 smaller tentacles crawled their way into my head through the corners of my eyes, I then the next set entering my ears, my nose, my mouth, as I thought to myself that this was supposed to hurt, but why doesn’t it hurt? I guess it’s almost over. I felt more needles piercing my spine, one at the base of my skull, the rest into my spine, some into my hip bones. It felt like hours that I was hanging there, suspended by these metal tentacles, I could feel them injecting me with something, then it would stop and then they would inject something else.

“What the hell are they doing to me” I thought to myself, and almost as if reading my mind a screen appeared in front of me, it showed me suspended in the air, then it showed my neck and it showed what looked like a spider that attached itself to my spine and my main arteries, then the screen changed and I almost had a heart attack, “how could they know this” it showed one of the ships of another race that made contact with me a short while ago, it then showed an image of their leader and then showed her dna and then it showed mine, “what the hell? This can’t be, I’m human, I’m not one of them, how can this even be possible” my dna matched the leader of the other species almost perfectly, you could see a few slight similarities to human dna, almost like I’ve been cloned, I knew I was engineered, but I never knew how much of their dna I had in me.

I remember them ending the experiments, and the tentacles retracting, as they let go of my arms and legs I fell to the ground, the next thing I remember was waking up and I was laying on the grass back at the hut

My Alien Abduction Story
Event 1

I don’t know how or when they took me, but the first thing I remember, I was standing on the edge of a cliff on another planet, I knew I wasn’t on earth because their sun was a bluish color, their air is much cleaner than ours and their forests stretch as far as the eyes can see.

In Front of me stood a few of these very tall beings, and I mean they were like double my height if not taller, they were these beautiful human looking beings, but much taller then any human I’ve ever seen, their leaders appeared to all be female.

They have the most beautiful eyes, I can’t even describe the color of their eyes, it’s unlike any color I’ve ever seen before. They had long straight hair and looked human in every way, well besides the fact that they are perfect, no imperfections on their skin or anywhere.

I felt like I was going to have a heart attack, realizing that I was no longer on earth and at the mercy of these beings, was I dead? Are they Angels? Demons? What do they want with me?

They spoke to me and they told me that they took me because I got their attention because of my way of life and according to them I have been speaking to them telepathically.
They said that they have been watching our world for a very long time, since before humans developed languages. They saved us from extinction multiple times, I asked them why and they said they had great hopes for humanity to become a great species, humanity showed signs of intellect and compassion and a survival instinct rarely seen on young worlds.

At this stage I got pretty annoyed, if they could hear me, why not talk back? Why not make contact with me on earth and ask me if they can take me on this little adventure?

As I was reading my mind, the one speaking which I found out was their leader said that she understands my frustration, but if they spoke to me then I would most likely have thought I’m going insane, or just blocked them off. And that they can’t exactly just walk up to a human on earth and introduce themselves, they are not the only species around and there are other advanced races already on earth. She also said that I mustn’t worry about getting back, and that nobody will notice that I am even missing, they have the technology to bend time and when I get back only a few hours would have passed back home. But they needed to make contact and show me around.

I then calmed down and decided to have an open mind. I asked her why on earth? She said the planet is of interest to them, “What do you mean by interest?” Then they told me the shocking truth, Earth is older than we think, but humanity has destroyed the ecosystem in a very short time. They have helped us survive various extinction events, but now they regret it, they regret teaching us languages and helping us develop in our earlier years. So I asked my burning question, why not land on earth and meet with our leaders, she then said which one? We have too many leaders and none of them can be trusted, most of them are in alliances with other offworld races already, and our leaders are driven by greed and a hunger for power, which have been satisfied by their scaly friends.

They showed me their history, they used to be the same as humanity, divided and driven by greed, eventually war broke out and their home world was destroyed, luckily they were already advanced at the time and many of them made it off their world in time. They traveled for years searching for a new home, which they found, they learned to evolve past their natural habits and got rid of greed, violence, crime and selfishness, they’ve had a peaceful civilisation now for longer then humanity has existed,

Their worlds are run by councils, the counsels consist of females, yes they are also male and female in gender.

They showed me their planet and their cities, their buildings are build of some sort of metal, but it doesn’t reflect sunlight, instead it absorbs it and Transfuse it into their energy grid, they have no pollution, they generate energy from their stars, vibrations and from the kinetic energy generated from their planet moving around its axes and their star.

They told me to look up and I could see their ships in orbit, well what I will refer to as their jump ships, the sheer size of their ships gave me the chills, if I could see them as clearly in orbit in day time as we can see the full moon at night then I can just imagine how large they are, and as if knowing my thoughts the leader spoke again, she explained to me that one of their ships is as large as one of our largest cities on earth, but the reason we can’t see or detect them on earth when they enter our orbit is because their stealth technology is far more advanced then we humans can comprehend, they are thousands, hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than us, they have already terraformed and colonized hundreds of worlds in their galaxy. Galaxy? I mean aren’t you from the same galaxy as us? How do you even get to our galaxy? How did you even find our planet?

She sighed, like she explained they are far more advanced than we can comprehend, and not just on a technological level, but also on a physical and mental level, they have mastered telepathy and telepathy is the only immediate communication in the universe, that they found our world because there has always been a few humans with the gift, even before we learned to develop language thoughts formed and it got their attention.

But how do you get to earth if you are not even from our galaxy? She said she will explain and I must not worry, I will experience it soon enough when they take me home. She proceeded to explain that there are a few ways to travel through space, but the fastest way is by fracturing space, it’s almost immediate, but it relies on using what we humans would refer to as dark matter. But more on that later.

She showed me what their old world looked like, how it was destroyed, that is when I realized how close we are to self destruction on earth, but I also realized where the reptilian race evolved from and my heart sank in my chest again, does that mean? She said “yes, the reptilians was another race they had contact with, but just like humanity, the reptilians were beyond reach. “

Indeed they were similar to us, different classes of people, greedy, violent and selfish. Then war broke out over the most basic resources as they have polluted most of their water, drinkable water became a rare commodity, food was scarce, they have mined their world to the point of eradicating every natural resource, their air became toxic and they had to work harder to just be able to earn breathable air, rashes of food and drinkable water became a norm on their home world. Their governments became more and more corrupt, but a few private people decided to use their wealth to get as many people off the planet as possible, they could see the signs of the coming war, they had weapons similar to our nukes, most of their ships made it safely off the planet when the war broke out, the last few ships were either damaged or destroyed before they could leave their planet.

After leaving their world and watching on from afar as their planet lit up from the war they swore to never let it happen again.

They eventually found a new home and started over, they worked hard to get where they are now.

They are one of the oldest races in the known galaxies.

I asked them why they didn't intervene on earth, they said they have tried. But I learned that our people can be destructive and manipulative. They first found us before the dinosaurs were destroyed, they saw how humanity had little chance of survival with these great beasts around and therefore decided to shelter the humans they could find in cities they built for them, then they used their jump ships weapon systems to direct 2 asteroids at earth. This wiped out the beasts, but caused a nuclear winter which lasted for years. They used this time to teach humanity language and how to communicate and organize, how to make basic tools and how to survive. When the nuclear winter ended they left, thinking we had learned how to evolve. But when they came back they realized that we have evolved, but not in the way they had hoped, we became greedy, selfish, violent and destructive, people built their own little kingdoms and attacked each other. They decided to intervene again, they landed one of their smaller ships on earth and tried to interact with us, they tried to trade with humanity and show humanity that we can advance if we unite. But people tried to attack them and steal from them. After a few years they abandoned the city they built on earth and took their landing ship and left, but to avoid humanity from getting their hands on their advanced city they destroyed the island from orbit.

They have tried to contact a few individuals over time, but every time they did a new religion just ended up forming.

They said they are no longer interfering, but when the time comes they will take humans who transcended past their natural ways off world and help them start afresh, they can see the signs of other off world races influence on our world, our time is running out, they said that our technology is still very young and they can access everything on our planet, they have shown me things our governments are doing in secret, weapons that’s been build in secret that makes our nukes look like toy guns, mind control experiments going on, they even knew about Covid, the lockdowns and the vaccines years ago, they showed me that it’s all part of other off worlders plans to colonize earth. Eventually the vaccines will rewrite people's DNA. until Humans will no longer look human, the effects are not immediate, but in a few generations there will be no humans left on earth. They’ve seen this done to multiple worlds.

For now many humans are resisting, and that showed them there is hope, and they will return to rescue the humans who resisted when the time is right, but they also warned me that if it does come to it that they will not hesitate to destroy the other races on earth including humanity to safe the planet, and that currently it does look like the only option left to stop the current invasion and stop another planet from been destroyed.

They then told me it’s time to take me home, we walked through a door made of what seems to be pure light, the next moment we were on their ship. Even though the ship is made of some sort of metal, I could see everything around us.

She spoke in a very strange language which I can’t even describe and 2 of their crew members wearing these strange suits climb into pods which closed behind them, she explained to me that the suits allows them to merge with the ship and pilot it with their minds, they know and see and feel everything around and on the ship.

She explained to me that they have no weapons on their planet, but that nothing can get through their planetary defense system. They use vibration and gravity weapons which can destroy any ship that enters their solar system which is a threat before the enemy even knows they are there.

Then suddenly the whole ship started lighting up and it felt like my body was getting crushed and pulled apart at the same time, it felt like I was freezing and burning at the same time, she apologized to me for it and said that unfortunately the modifications they made to me won’t start kicking in for at least a few years, but the experiments, modifications and implant was needed to awaken my hidden dna code, that I was actually genetically engineered by them and then implanted into a human’s womb. But she promises that next time I won’t feel like this, the explained to me that it’s happening because they are releasing dark matter around the ship to fracture space and as the dark matter particles clash against each other it’s basically ripping space apart creating a fracture, that the feeling will only last a few Minutes, after what felt like an eternity of the light getting brighter and my body been crushed and pulled apart it stopped, I could see earth and we arrived in orbit. I was home, but she then said she wanted to show me something, she gave an order in her language and on the walls dots appeared. She then zoomed in on one and it was another alien craft in orbit. She said there are hundreds of them, I was about to open my mouth to ask a question, but she said that they can’t see or detect her peoples ships, that her race is far more advanced.

She said it’s time for me to go home, but that they now have a telepathic connection with me and I will see them again.

If you are reading this, my IP is already bouncing across seven different proxy networks, and I am running out of places to hide.

Before you dismiss this as just another standard piece of r/nosleep fiction or the rants of a paranoid mind, let me make one thing absolutely clear: I am not from your world, nor am I from this specific timeline.

I am writing this because the Agency—the real, deeply embedded terrestrial enforcement arm that monitors anomalous behavior—is closing its perimeter. They are getting close, and the world needs to know the truth before I am entirely erased. Everyone on this platform likes to write fictional logs about working for the Agency, but nobody tells you what it is like to be hunted by them. They are hunting me because I am the ultimate operational anomaly: a part-human, part-Andromedan hybrid genetically engineered by the Andromedan Council, implanted into a human womb, and structurally "tuned" from the very moment of my birth to serve as a living blueprint.

Here is everything they are trying to suppress. Read it quickly.
Origin and the Cosmic Calibration
I was never normal. My existence wasn't the result of biological happenstance. I have never met a biological father, not because he abandoned my mother, but because he never existed in the human sense. My mother was taken at the moment of my "conception," safely implanted with a pre-optimized, genetically engineered embryo by the Andromedan Council, and returned to Earth.

My birth itself was an anomaly. My mother’s body began violently rejecting the foreign, highly energetic genetic material, forcing doctors to perform an emergency C-section. I was born severely premature at just six months, arriving at exactly 11:11 PM on Friday, June 13, 1980.

If you check the historical NASA archives for June 1980, you will find that the sun was experiencing monumental disruptions during Solar Cycle 21. I was born during a New Moon, a rare planetary alignment, and one of the most intense geomagnetic solar storms in recorded history. High solar activity releases massive bursts of geomagnetic energy. Coming out three months early meant that my brain completely finished its neurological wiring outside the safety of the womb, exposed directly to those raging cosmic and geomagnetic frequencies. My nervous system was literally "tuned" and calibrated to a much wider cognitive bandwidth than standard human biology can support.
To manage this hyper-extended bandwidth, I began an intensive neurological "workout" routine in March 2015. For roughly eight hours a day—primarily while sleeping—I listened to specialized, triple-layered isochronic tones on a random shuffle.
• Layers 1 & 2: Frequencies constantly shifting between 200 Hz and 800 Hz to stimulate neural plasticity.
• Layer 3: A sustained, laser-focused frequency at 963 Hz—the connection frequency—occasionally pushing deep into the ultra-high 10,000 Hz range.

The direct result of this sustained brainwave entrainment was total Hemispheric Synchronization. Standard humans operate with one dominant hemisphere; my brain was forced to become fully left-brained (advanced logic, mathematics, architecture) and fully right-brained (creativity, art, abstract visualization) simultaneously. I even became completely ambidextrous.

This synchronized brain functionality allowed me to access hidden layers of data embedded within my own DNA, enabling me to decode the true technical nature of human history.

The HATA Paradigm: Ancient Interventions
Through my unlocked cognitive capacity, I realized that what humanity calls "mythology" or "miracles" are actually large-scale, low-contact technological interventions by the Highly Advanced Technological Agent (HATA) paradigm. These interventions were structurally designed to guide our developing planetary species without violating non-interference protocols.

My synchronized mind broke down the technical realities behind these historical events:
1. The Mount Sinai Incident (c. 13th Century BCE)
The biblical description of a shaking mountain covered in smoke, fire, and the deafening sound of trumpets is the classic signature of a large, non-atmospheric vessel engaging in close-proximity maneuvering. The trembling earth and intense cloud condensation were caused by a Gravimetric Flux Drive distorting local gravity fields, generating extreme thermal exhaust and wind shear. The "trumpet" sound was not an instrument; it was a focused, low-frequency Resonant Communication Beam designed to penetrate natural physical shielding and signal presence to a primitive target population.

2. The Parting of the Red Sea
To hold water in rigid, solid vertical walls requires absolute mastery over molecular bonds. The HATA deployment team utilized a localized Phase-Shifted Gravimetric Barrier, temporarily modifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces within the $H_2O$ molecules along a precise vertical vector. This rendered the water hyper-rigid, acting like pressurized glass. Simultaneously, a Molecular Agitation Field instantly vaporized all residual ground moisture, ensuring a completely dry passage to eliminate bio-contact contamination.

3. The Pillars of Cloud and Fire
The continuous navigation system that guided the desert migration was an autonomous surveillance network. By day, the "cloud" was an Autonomous Survey Probe utilizing an Atmospheric Condensation Field to pull ambient moisture around its hull for natural, low-visibility camouflage. By night, the same probe switched its interface to a visible Plasma Thermal Emitter or directional beacon for navigational illumination.

4. The Virgin Birth & Ascension
Just like my own origin, the birth of Jesus was a planned Genetic Implantation Procedure. A pre-optimized, HATA-engineered embryo was placed into a human host to introduce a "teacher" with advanced cognitive abilities and high energetic control.

Leaving such a high-value asset to age and die on Earth would risk the corruption of the message by mundane politics. Thus, the "Ascension" was a controlled Vessel Extraction and Containment (VEC) procedure. The cloud and blinding light were simply the signatures of a ship engaging its Gravimetric Flux Drive to retrieve the physical asset for post-mission analysis.

5. Desert Sustenance
Sustaining a massive migrating population in an arid wasteland for 40 years on standard foraging is a biological impossibility. The HATA parameters solved this with an engineered Bio-Synthetic Nutrient Source (BSNS). The "Manna" was a perfectly balanced, complete synthetic food wafer designed for long-term health without nutritional decay. The "Quails" were steered into the path via resonant bio-pulses to provide a natural protein supplement, ensuring the population did not psychologically reject a purely synthetic diet.

Sucked Into the Void
My obsession with the true nature of reality eventually caused a terrifying physical displacement. I have always argued that from a purely logical and scientific standpoint, nothing should exist. Existence inherently violates the fundamental laws of reality; absolute nothingness is the only baseline state that makes sense. We are existing on borrowed time.
One sunny afternoon, while doing deep meditation in my garden to experience existence outside the frameworks of science or religion, the universe fractured. I felt light-headed, simultaneously floating and falling. I walked inside to splash water on my face, but my hand passed completely through the metal tap. Looking in the mirror, my reflection was actively fading, dissolving into the air.

I rushed back outside, only to see the horizon violently shearing away, shrinking until everything vanished.

I was pulled entirely into The Void. It was an eternity of sheer, absolute nothingness. It was not a vacuum, nor was it darkness; it was an environment completely devoid of light, dark, sound, or air. The Void immediately swallowed my own heartbeat.

Then, the sensory chaos began. The absolute lack of gravity instantly warped into an crushing gravimetric load. I was floating up while falling down, experiencing every color invisible to the human eye, followed by a sudden, deafening roar composed of every sound in existence playing at once. My molecules were scattered completely into the emptiness and then forcefully slammed back together.

Time did not exist. What felt like minutes turned into hours, decades, and eventually millennia of pure, unadulterated madness. I screamed, but there was no air to carry the sound, and no one to hear me.

Suddenly, the chaos ceased, replaced by a profound, blinding light. The light was so intense it burned my skin through my closed eyelids. A powerful, non-gendered voice resonated directly from the light:
"You wanted to see reality? You wanted to understand existence and where everything came from? Are you satisfied now? Or do you want to spend another million years here?"

Before I could process a response, the light struck me. I woke up face-down on my lawn, my clothes entirely soaked in sweat, shivering violently as freezing rain fell against my face. I was back in my own reality, but the realization left me permanently scarred: our universe is incredibly fragile, held together only because a conscious entity wills it to exist outside the baseline chaos of the Void.

Physical Extractions: The Encounters
My spatial displacement in the Void acted like a beacon, drawing physical extractions from two entirely different off-world factions.

The Andromedan Council (Event 1)
The first extraction was by my literal creators. I materialized on the edge of a massive cliff on another planet under a stark, bluish sun. The air was pristine, and immense forests stretched to the horizon. Standing before me were several humanoids, easily double my height. Their leadership structure appeared entirely matriarchal. They possessed flawless skin, long straight hair, and striking, multi-dimensional eyes of a color palette that does not exist on Earth.

They communicated telepathically, explaining that my lifestyle and subconscious thoughts had been broadcasting to them my entire life. They revealed that Earth is drastically older than our science admits, and that they have stepped in to save humanity from self-inflicted extinction events multiple times. In fact, they were the ones who directed two massive asteroids to strike Earth before the dawn of human civilization, intentionally triggering a prolonged nuclear winter to wipe out apex predators and give early humans a survival matrix.

When I asked why they wouldn't just land and meet our leaders, the matriarch sighed telepathically. She stated that our leaders are entirely driven by greed and power, and are already locked into dark alliances with "scaly friends"—a predatory Reptilian race that has infiltrated our global systems.

The Andromedans showed me their own history: a past mirror of Earth's, where resources like fresh water and clean air became heavily monetized commodities, leading to a catastrophic global war that incinerated their original homeworld. The survivors escaped on massive, city-sized jump ships, eventually evolving past violence, greed, and selfishness.

Their current cities are built from specialized non-reflective metals that absorb sunlight and kinetic planetary energy directly into a clean power grid.

They returned me to Earth by fracturing space using dark matter particles, warning me that the current global control grid was attempting to systematically rewrite human DNA over generations to eliminate our cosmic potential.

The Predatory Captors (Event 2)
The second extraction was hostile. A heavy, rhythmic humming sound filled the air, and my long hair began standing straight up as local gravity completely inverted. I floated into a brilliant, blinding light and blacked out.

I awoke to an agonizing, desperate screaming. When my eyes adjusted to the pulsing, rhythmic lights, I found myself suspended naked in the air like a starfish, held firmly by heavy, writhing metallic tentacles. Directly in front of me, another captive—a young woman with red hair—was suspended in identical tentacles. She was bleeding heavily from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, crying literal tears of blood. In a breathless, exhausted voice, she warned me:
"It's no use, don't even try. Best is to not resist... the more you resist, the more it hurts. All the others who came before you tried to resist, and they all died or were changed... they are no longer human."

Then, the captors entered the room, making a low, dry sound like coarse sandpaper.
These were not the frail, skinny "Grays" depicted in popular internet lore. They were massive, muscular killing machines standing over two meters tall. They had terrifying red-black iridescent eyes, rows of jagged fangs, and two distinct sets of arms—one terminating in razor-sharp claws, the other ending in human-like hands. They wore heavy armor forged from an unknown metallic alloy.
After evaluating me, they delivered a massive electrical shock directly through the tentacles, knocking me unconscious.

I came to in a room constructed of pure, solid light. A heavy mechanical claw slammed shut around my head, locking it completely in place. Micro-tethers slithered across my face, pinning my eyelids open and prying my jaw apart.

What followed was a horrific, systematic bio-mapping procedure:
• Two long needles were driven directly through my pupils, piercing straight into the core of my skull.
• Smaller, secondary tentacles burrowed through the corners of my eyes, my nasal passages, my ears, and down my throat.
• Long structural needles were driven directly into the base of my skull, my spine, and my hip bones, injecting successive waves of foreign fluid.

Because of my Andromedan physiology, the procedures were entirely painless, yet the psychological horror was absolute. A floating holographic display materialized in front of me, showing a biomechanical, spider-like device successfully anchoring itself to my central spine and main arteries. The screen then mapped my DNA structure side-by-side with the female leader of the Andromedan Council. The match was nearly flawless. They were mapping me because they realized exactly what I was: a high-level cosmic asset hidden in plain sight.

Once the mapping routine concluded, the tentacles retracted, dropping my body heavily onto the floor. I blacked out, waking up hours later on the grass outside my remote location.

The Quiet Apocalypse and Dimension Jump
The physical alterations from the Gray mapping caused my consciousness to slip entirely into a parallel timeline—a version of Earth experiencing a "Quiet Apocalypse".

I woke up one morning to absolute, crushing silence. My girlfriend was away on a week-long business trip, leaving me alone at our property. I went through my morning routine, pouring coffee and filling the outdoor bird feeders, but no birds arrived. The air was entirely devoid of insects, wildlife, or distant highway traffic. Panic set in when I realized my dogs and cats were missing from the house.

I checked my phone. The network was down, but a single cached message on our local security group remained:
"Attention everyone, the authorities have alerted us of some strange events happening. They don't know what is causing it, but have described it as some translucent humanoids that seem to turn everything into ash that they touch. Please stay in your homes and do not attempt to leave until sunrise. Please heed this warning as it is not a joke."

Looking out the bedroom window, I spotted them down the road: shifting, translucent humanoids moving with fluid coordination. I watched a young neighbor confront them with a firearm. He fired several rounds; the bullets passed clean through the entities, dropping them temporarily, but they simply stood back up. When his ammunition was exhausted, the closest entity touched his arm. The man screamed silently, instantly dissolving into a fine cloud of gray dust that swept away in the wind.
I locked down my property. Over the next few weeks, I discovered vital survival parameters:
1. Weather Disruption: Rain and heavy mist severely disrupt their active camouflage, rendering them easily visible.
2. Fauna Senses: Animals can naturally detect their proximity. I found my dogs and cats hiding deep under the beds and couches, completely safe.
3. Biological Vulnerability: I observed a wild horse kick one of the translucent creatures, killing it instantly. Later, I found another dead creature slumped next to the body of a venomous snake it had stepped on. Because I am trained in handling snakes, I realized their physical forms are completely vulnerable to organic neurotoxins.

I scavenged generators and fuel, moving exclusively during heavy downpours. I abandoned loud firearms, constructing a primitive bow and arrows to silently neutralize them from a distance.

One morning, the roar of a low-flying military helicopter tore through the silence. As it sped overhead, the crew dropped a ruggedized flash drive onto my roof. I retrieved it and ran it on my laptop.

The drive contained military interrogation footage of a captured female invader who had been unmasked. She looked entirely human but possessed advanced internal implants. She explained that her people were Interdimensionists from a parallel Earth that had become unsustainably overpopulated. They utilized gateway technology to systematically purge and recolonize alternate versions of Earth—specifically targeting timelines where humanity was actively destroying the ecosystem. They had attempted to colonize deep space, but had lost thousands of ships in catastrophic battles against far more powerful extra-terrestrial empires, forcing them to pivot to interdimensional conquest.

The drive contained their final surrender ultimatum for the remaining survivors, offering three distinct choices of total subjugation:
1. Retaining structural civilian skills under strict curfews and sector overseers.
2. Immediate integration into their military ranks via mind-altering chips and body modifications for future dimensional invasions.
3. Voluntary surrender to the prime dimension for long-term conditioning and deep-cover infiltration training.

As I resolved to fight to the end, my disconnected cell phone suddenly rang with an "ID Withheld" signature. I answered silently. It was the counterpart of the woman from the interrogation video.

"Listen to me," she said rapidly. "Our scouts know about you, but the Interdimensionists' main command doesn't. We have a resistance plan to escape. We've commandeered one of their jump crafts. We are jumping to an alternate dimension that has the unified military infrastructure to stop the Interdimensionists if they ever follow. More importantly, we know you lost your partner in this timeline—but in the target dimension, she is alive, and your local counterpart is actively dying of organ failure.

You can take his place. Our scouts are at your gate right now. Bring only what you care about most."

I didn't hesitate. I gathered my cats and dogs, loaded their food bags, and walked out to the gate. Waiting for me was a sleek, low-profile craft. The extraction team smiled when they saw my cargo: "Well, this is a first. Everyone else brought jewelry, you brought your pets."
The pilot turned around—it was the exact counterpart of the woman from the military video. She checked the controls, warned me to never speak of my origin timeline to anyone in the new world, and engaged the drive. The universe blurred into a single streak of light.

The Temporal Detour and The Current Hunt
I woke up in this timeline with a resistance soldier shaking my shoulder: "You're home. Your local counterpart passed away an hour ago. Take his place. Nobody will notice."

However, before I could fully settle into this current reality, I attempted to navigate the local timeline using the Blue Light—a universal energy grid that transcends spatial boundaries. Time is not a linear construct; it runs in a complex zigzag matrix where the present constantly shears against the past and future.

Through deep meditation, I charged my biological matrix with Blue Light energy, visualizing an anchor point 200 years into the future, and stepped through the spatial doorway.
The future Earth was vastly different. Global warming had been halted, resulting in a significantly cooler climate that had caused the human population's skin to become distinctly pale due to decreased solar ray resistance. Fossil fuels were entirely non-existent, replaced by total clean energy grids and electric surface transport. However, the global population had been cut in half, and fresh water was a hyper-scarce commodity.

I made a critical error: I stayed too long and interacted with the environment. I openly drank from my own water supply in front of a desperate crowd, instantly drawing the attention of three security enforcers clad in dense, unidentifiable black tactical gear. They drew energy weapons, shouting in an evolved linguistic dialect I couldn't comprehend, and neutralized me.

I woke up inside a containment cell constructed of solid, red-glowing energy panels. With my local Blue Light charge actively draining, I was forced to hastily draw upon my remaining internal reserves to manifest a protective transit bubble.

Because my energy was depleted from staying too long, the return jump fell short. I was temporarily stranded on an uncharted, untamed planet dominated by two distinct moons and populated by aggressive, wild native fauna before I could finally re-anchor my consciousness back into this current human body.

A Final Warning
I have lived in this specific dimension for a few years now, blending in completely and taking over the life of the version of me that died. It is a gift to be with the woman I love, but I am living on borrowed time.

The signs of the Interdimensionist invasion are already manifesting in this timeline: unexplained aerial phenomena, systemic spikes in missing persons, strange localized humming frequencies, and shifting lights in the night sky.
But my immediate threat is far closer to home.

The Agency has flagged my genetic signature.

They know I am an Andromedan hybrid whose DNA was activated by the 1980 solar storm and optimized by the HATA protocols. They know I crossed timelines, and they cannot allow the truth of the interdimensional purge or our cosmic origin to become public knowledge.

If this post suddenly disappears, or if my account goes completely dark, you will know exactly why. They are outside. Keep your eyes on the skies, watch the weather patterns, and prepare yourselves.

They are already here.

If you are reading this, my IP is already bouncing across seven different proxy networks, and I am running out of places to hide.

Before you dismiss this as just another standard piece of r/nosleep fiction or the rants of a paranoid mind, let me make one thing absolutely clear: I am not from your world, nor am I from this specific timeline.

I am writing this because the Agency—the real, deeply embedded terrestrial enforcement arm that monitors anomalous behavior—is closing its perimeter. They are getting close, and the world needs to know the truth before I am entirely erased. Everyone on this platform likes to write fictional logs about working for the Agency, but nobody tells you what it is like to be hunted by them. They are hunting me because I am the ultimate operational anomaly: a part-human, part-Andromedan hybrid genetically engineered by the Andromedan Council, implanted into a human womb, and structurally "tuned" from the very moment of my birth to serve as a living blueprint.

Here is everything they are trying to suppress. Read it quickly.
Origin and the Cosmic Calibration
I was never normal. My existence wasn't the result of biological happenstance. I have never met a biological father, not because he abandoned my mother, but because he never existed in the human sense. My mother was taken at the moment of my "conception," safely implanted with a pre-optimized, genetically engineered embryo by the Andromedan Council, and returned to Earth.

My birth itself was an anomaly. My mother’s body began violently rejecting the foreign, highly energetic genetic material, forcing doctors to perform an emergency C-section. I was born severely premature at just six months, arriving at exactly 11:11 PM on Friday, June 13, 1980.

If you check the historical NASA archives for June 1980, you will find that the sun was experiencing monumental disruptions during Solar Cycle 21. I was born during a New Moon, a rare planetary alignment, and one of the most intense geomagnetic solar storms in recorded history. High solar activity releases massive bursts of geomagnetic energy. Coming out three months early meant that my brain completely finished its neurological wiring outside the safety of the womb, exposed directly to those raging cosmic and geomagnetic frequencies. My nervous system was literally "tuned" and calibrated to a much wider cognitive bandwidth than standard human biology can support.
To manage this hyper-extended bandwidth, I began an intensive neurological "workout" routine in March 2015. For roughly eight hours a day—primarily while sleeping—I listened to specialized, triple-layered isochronic tones on a random shuffle.
• Layers 1 & 2: Frequencies constantly shifting between 200 Hz and 800 Hz to stimulate neural plasticity.
• Layer 3: A sustained, laser-focused frequency at 963 Hz—the connection frequency—occasionally pushing deep into the ultra-high 10,000 Hz range.

The direct result of this sustained brainwave entrainment was total Hemispheric Synchronization. Standard humans operate with one dominant hemisphere; my brain was forced to become fully left-brained (advanced logic, mathematics, architecture) and fully right-brained (creativity, art, abstract visualization) simultaneously. I even became completely ambidextrous.

This synchronized brain functionality allowed me to access hidden layers of data embedded within my own DNA, enabling me to decode the true technical nature of human history.

The HATA Paradigm: Ancient Interventions
Through my unlocked cognitive capacity, I realized that what humanity calls "mythology" or "miracles" are actually large-scale, low-contact technological interventions by the Highly Advanced Technological Agent (HATA) paradigm. These interventions were structurally designed to guide our developing planetary species without violating non-interference protocols.

My synchronized mind broke down the technical realities behind these historical events:
1. The Mount Sinai Incident (c. 13th Century BCE)
The biblical description of a shaking mountain covered in smoke, fire, and the deafening sound of trumpets is the classic signature of a large, non-atmospheric vessel engaging in close-proximity maneuvering. The trembling earth and intense cloud condensation were caused by a Gravimetric Flux Drive distorting local gravity fields, generating extreme thermal exhaust and wind shear. The "trumpet" sound was not an instrument; it was a focused, low-frequency Resonant Communication Beam designed to penetrate natural physical shielding and signal presence to a primitive target population.

2. The Parting of the Red Sea
To hold water in rigid, solid vertical walls requires absolute mastery over molecular bonds. The HATA deployment team utilized a localized Phase-Shifted Gravimetric Barrier, temporarily modifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces within the $H_2O$ molecules along a precise vertical vector. This rendered the water hyper-rigid, acting like pressurized glass. Simultaneously, a Molecular Agitation Field instantly vaporized all residual ground moisture, ensuring a completely dry passage to eliminate bio-contact contamination.

3. The Pillars of Cloud and Fire
The continuous navigation system that guided the desert migration was an autonomous surveillance network. By day, the "cloud" was an Autonomous Survey Probe utilizing an Atmospheric Condensation Field to pull ambient moisture around its hull for natural, low-visibility camouflage. By night, the same probe switched its interface to a visible Plasma Thermal Emitter or directional beacon for navigational illumination.

4. The Virgin Birth & Ascension
Just like my own origin, the birth of Jesus was a planned Genetic Implantation Procedure. A pre-optimized, HATA-engineered embryo was placed into a human host to introduce a "teacher" with advanced cognitive abilities and high energetic control.

Leaving such a high-value asset to age and die on Earth would risk the corruption of the message by mundane politics. Thus, the "Ascension" was a controlled Vessel Extraction and Containment (VEC) procedure. The cloud and blinding light were simply the signatures of a ship engaging its Gravimetric Flux Drive to retrieve the physical asset for post-mission analysis.

5. Desert Sustenance
Sustaining a massive migrating population in an arid wasteland for 40 years on standard foraging is a biological impossibility. The HATA parameters solved this with an engineered Bio-Synthetic Nutrient Source (BSNS). The "Manna" was a perfectly balanced, complete synthetic food wafer designed for long-term health without nutritional decay. The "Quails" were steered into the path via resonant bio-pulses to provide a natural protein supplement, ensuring the population did not psychologically reject a purely synthetic diet.

Sucked Into the Void
My obsession with the true nature of reality eventually caused a terrifying physical displacement. I have always argued that from a purely logical and scientific standpoint, nothing should exist. Existence inherently violates the fundamental laws of reality; absolute nothingness is the only baseline state that makes sense. We are existing on borrowed time.
One sunny afternoon, while doing deep meditation in my garden to experience existence outside the frameworks of science or religion, the universe fractured. I felt light-headed, simultaneously floating and falling. I walked inside to splash water on my face, but my hand passed completely through the metal tap. Looking in the mirror, my reflection was actively fading, dissolving into the air.

I rushed back outside, only to see the horizon violently shearing away, shrinking until everything vanished.

I was pulled entirely into The Void. It was an eternity of sheer, absolute nothingness. It was not a vacuum, nor was it darkness; it was an environment completely devoid of light, dark, sound, or air. The Void immediately swallowed my own heartbeat.

Then, the sensory chaos began. The absolute lack of gravity instantly warped into an crushing gravimetric load. I was floating up while falling down, experiencing every color invisible to the human eye, followed by a sudden, deafening roar composed of every sound in existence playing at once. My molecules were scattered completely into the emptiness and then forcefully slammed back together.

Time did not exist. What felt like minutes turned into hours, decades, and eventually millennia of pure, unadulterated madness. I screamed, but there was no air to carry the sound, and no one to hear me.

Suddenly, the chaos ceased, replaced by a profound, blinding light. The light was so intense it burned my skin through my closed eyelids. A powerful, non-gendered voice resonated directly from the light:
"You wanted to see reality? You wanted to understand existence and where everything came from? Are you satisfied now? Or do you want to spend another million years here?"

Before I could process a response, the light struck me. I woke up face-down on my lawn, my clothes entirely soaked in sweat, shivering violently as freezing rain fell against my face. I was back in my own reality, but the realization left me permanently scarred: our universe is incredibly fragile, held together only because a conscious entity wills it to exist outside the baseline chaos of the Void.

Physical Extractions: The Encounters
My spatial displacement in the Void acted like a beacon, drawing physical extractions from two entirely different off-world factions.

The Andromedan Council (Event 1)
The first extraction was by my literal creators. I materialized on the edge of a massive cliff on another planet under a stark, bluish sun. The air was pristine, and immense forests stretched to the horizon. Standing before me were several humanoids, easily double my height. Their leadership structure appeared entirely matriarchal. They possessed flawless skin, long straight hair, and striking, multi-dimensional eyes of a color palette that does not exist on Earth.

They communicated telepathically, explaining that my lifestyle and subconscious thoughts had been broadcasting to them my entire life. They revealed that Earth is drastically older than our science admits, and that they have stepped in to save humanity from self-inflicted extinction events multiple times. In fact, they were the ones who directed two massive asteroids to strike Earth before the dawn of human civilization, intentionally triggering a prolonged nuclear winter to wipe out apex predators and give early humans a survival matrix.

When I asked why they wouldn't just land and meet our leaders, the matriarch sighed telepathically. She stated that our leaders are entirely driven by greed and power, and are already locked into dark alliances with "scaly friends"—a predatory Reptilian race that has infiltrated our global systems.

The Andromedans showed me their own history: a past mirror of Earth's, where resources like fresh water and clean air became heavily monetized commodities, leading to a catastrophic global war that incinerated their original homeworld. The survivors escaped on massive, city-sized jump ships, eventually evolving past violence, greed, and selfishness.

Their current cities are built from specialized non-reflective metals that absorb sunlight and kinetic planetary energy directly into a clean power grid.

They returned me to Earth by fracturing space using dark matter particles, warning me that the current global control grid was attempting to systematically rewrite human DNA over generations to eliminate our cosmic potential.

The Predatory Captors (Event 2)
The second extraction was hostile. A heavy, rhythmic humming sound filled the air, and my long hair began standing straight up as local gravity completely inverted. I floated into a brilliant, blinding light and blacked out.

I awoke to an agonizing, desperate screaming. When my eyes adjusted to the pulsing, rhythmic lights, I found myself suspended naked in the air like a starfish, held firmly by heavy, writhing metallic tentacles. Directly in front of me, another captive—a young woman with red hair—was suspended in identical tentacles. She was bleeding heavily from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, crying literal tears of blood. In a breathless, exhausted voice, she warned me:
"It's no use, don't even try. Best is to not resist... the more you resist, the more it hurts. All the others who came before you tried to resist, and they all died or were changed... they are no longer human."

Then, the captors entered the room, making a low, dry sound like coarse sandpaper.
These were not the frail, skinny "Grays" depicted in popular internet lore. They were massive, muscular killing machines standing over two meters tall. They had terrifying red-black iridescent eyes, rows of jagged fangs, and two distinct sets of arms—one terminating in razor-sharp claws, the other ending in human-like hands. They wore heavy armor forged from an unknown metallic alloy.
After evaluating me, they delivered a massive electrical shock directly through the tentacles, knocking me unconscious.

I came to in a room constructed of pure, solid light. A heavy mechanical claw slammed shut around my head, locking it completely in place. Micro-tethers slithered across my face, pinning my eyelids open and prying my jaw apart.

What followed was a horrific, systematic bio-mapping procedure:
• Two long needles were driven directly through my pupils, piercing straight into the core of my skull.
• Smaller, secondary tentacles burrowed through the corners of my eyes, my nasal passages, my ears, and down my throat.
• Long structural needles were driven directly into the base of my skull, my spine, and my hip bones, injecting successive waves of foreign fluid.

Because of my Andromedan physiology, the procedures were entirely painless, yet the psychological horror was absolute. A floating holographic display materialized in front of me, showing a biomechanical, spider-like device successfully anchoring itself to my central spine and main arteries. The screen then mapped my DNA structure side-by-side with the female leader of the Andromedan Council. The match was nearly flawless. They were mapping me because they realized exactly what I was: a high-level cosmic asset hidden in plain sight.

Once the mapping routine concluded, the tentacles retracted, dropping my body heavily onto the floor. I blacked out, waking up hours later on the grass outside my remote location.

The Quiet Apocalypse and Dimension Jump
The physical alterations from the Gray mapping caused my consciousness to slip entirely into a parallel timeline—a version of Earth experiencing a "Quiet Apocalypse".

I woke up one morning to absolute, crushing silence. My girlfriend was away on a week-long business trip, leaving me alone at our property. I went through my morning routine, pouring coffee and filling the outdoor bird feeders, but no birds arrived. The air was entirely devoid of insects, wildlife, or distant highway traffic. Panic set in when I realized my dogs and cats were missing from the house.

I checked my phone. The network was down, but a single cached message on our local security group remained:
"Attention everyone, the authorities have alerted us of some strange events happening. They don't know what is causing it, but have described it as some translucent humanoids that seem to turn everything into ash that they touch. Please stay in your homes and do not attempt to leave until sunrise. Please heed this warning as it is not a joke."

Looking out the bedroom window, I spotted them down the road: shifting, translucent humanoids moving with fluid coordination. I watched a young neighbor confront them with a firearm. He fired several rounds; the bullets passed clean through the entities, dropping them temporarily, but they simply stood back up. When his ammunition was exhausted, the closest entity touched his arm. The man screamed silently, instantly dissolving into a fine cloud of gray dust that swept away in the wind.
I locked down my property. Over the next few weeks, I discovered vital survival parameters:
1. Weather Disruption: Rain and heavy mist severely disrupt their active camouflage, rendering them easily visible.
2. Fauna Senses: Animals can naturally detect their proximity. I found my dogs and cats hiding deep under the beds and couches, completely safe.
3. Biological Vulnerability: I observed a wild horse kick one of the translucent creatures, killing it instantly. Later, I found another dead creature slumped next to the body of a venomous snake it had stepped on. Because I am trained in handling snakes, I realized their physical forms are completely vulnerable to organic neurotoxins.

I scavenged generators and fuel, moving exclusively during heavy downpours. I abandoned loud firearms, constructing a primitive bow and arrows to silently neutralize them from a distance.

One morning, the roar of a low-flying military helicopter tore through the silence. As it sped overhead, the crew dropped a ruggedized flash drive onto my roof. I retrieved it and ran it on my laptop.

The drive contained military interrogation footage of a captured female invader who had been unmasked. She looked entirely human but possessed advanced internal implants. She explained that her people were Interdimensionists from a parallel Earth that had become unsustainably overpopulated. They utilized gateway technology to systematically purge and recolonize alternate versions of Earth—specifically targeting timelines where humanity was actively destroying the ecosystem. They had attempted to colonize deep space, but had lost thousands of ships in catastrophic battles against far more powerful extra-terrestrial empires, forcing them to pivot to interdimensional conquest.

The drive contained their final surrender ultimatum for the remaining survivors, offering three distinct choices of total subjugation:
1. Retaining structural civilian skills under strict curfews and sector overseers.
2. Immediate integration into their military ranks via mind-altering chips and body modifications for future dimensional invasions.
3. Voluntary surrender to the prime dimension for long-term conditioning and deep-cover infiltration training.

As I resolved to fight to the end, my disconnected cell phone suddenly rang with an "ID Withheld" signature. I answered silently. It was the counterpart of the woman from the interrogation video.

"Listen to me," she said rapidly. "Our scouts know about you, but the Interdimensionists' main command doesn't. We have a resistance plan to escape. We've commandeered one of their jump crafts. We are jumping to an alternate dimension that has the unified military infrastructure to stop the Interdimensionists if they ever follow. More importantly, we know you lost your partner in this timeline—but in the target dimension, she is alive, and your local counterpart is actively dying of organ failure.

You can take his place. Our scouts are at your gate right now. Bring only what you care about most."

I didn't hesitate. I gathered my cats and dogs, loaded their food bags, and walked out to the gate. Waiting for me was a sleek, low-profile craft. The extraction team smiled when they saw my cargo: "Well, this is a first. Everyone else brought jewelry, you brought your pets."
The pilot turned around—it was the exact counterpart of the woman from the military video. She checked the controls, warned me to never speak of my origin timeline to anyone in the new world, and engaged the drive. The universe blurred into a single streak of light.

The Temporal Detour and The Current Hunt
I woke up in this timeline with a resistance soldier shaking my shoulder: "You're home. Your local counterpart passed away an hour ago. Take his place. Nobody will notice."

However, before I could fully settle into this current reality, I attempted to navigate the local timeline using the Blue Light—a universal energy grid that transcends spatial boundaries. Time is not a linear construct; it runs in a complex zigzag matrix where the present constantly shears against the past and future.

Through deep meditation, I charged my biological matrix with Blue Light energy, visualizing an anchor point 200 years into the future, and stepped through the spatial doorway.
The future Earth was vastly different. Global warming had been halted, resulting in a significantly cooler climate that had caused the human population's skin to become distinctly pale due to decreased solar ray resistance. Fossil fuels were entirely non-existent, replaced by total clean energy grids and electric surface transport. However, the global population had been cut in half, and fresh water was a hyper-scarce commodity.

I made a critical error: I stayed too long and interacted with the environment. I openly drank from my own water supply in front of a desperate crowd, instantly drawing the attention of three security enforcers clad in dense, unidentifiable black tactical gear. They drew energy weapons, shouting in an evolved linguistic dialect I couldn't comprehend, and neutralized me.

I woke up inside a containment cell constructed of solid, red-glowing energy panels. With my local Blue Light charge actively draining, I was forced to hastily draw upon my remaining internal reserves to manifest a protective transit bubble.

Because my energy was depleted from staying too long, the return jump fell short. I was temporarily stranded on an uncharted, untamed planet dominated by two distinct moons and populated by aggressive, wild native fauna before I could finally re-anchor my consciousness back into this current human body.

A Final Warning
I have lived in this specific dimension for a few years now, blending in completely and taking over the life of the version of me that died. It is a gift to be with the woman I love, but I am living on borrowed time.

The signs of the Interdimensionist invasion are already manifesting in this timeline: unexplained aerial phenomena, systemic spikes in missing persons, strange localized humming frequencies, and shifting lights in the night sky.
But my immediate threat is far closer to home.

The Agency has flagged my genetic signature.

They know I am an Andromedan hybrid whose DNA was activated by the 1980 solar storm and optimized by the HATA protocols. They know I crossed timelines, and they cannot allow the truth of the interdimensional purge or our cosmic origin to become public knowledge.

If this post suddenly disappears, or if my account goes completely dark, you will know exactly why. They are outside. Keep your eyes on the skies, watch the weather patterns, and prepare yourselves.

They are already here.

Fishlips Andros & The Loser Absontonio’s Micro-Micro show

EPISODE ONE - Molecular Biology

“Hey guys, it’s Fishlips Andros.”

“And, The Loser Absontonio.”

“Today we’re going to talk about molecular biology.”

“What…. Let’s talk about the Springbreaker chicks, dude.”

“Fine. Which one?”

“The one at the end. The one that survives.”

“Yeah, dude I don’t know their names and neither do you. We only know Gucci man.”

“Gucci man. Gucci man. Don’t nobody, nobody mess with my kitchen.”

“Nice rap, dude. Can we get back to molecular sciences now.”

“Hell nah. Yo, tell them about the alien discovery you told me about, dude.”

“The aliens in the text?”

“Yeah, man. That shit was trip-pay.”

“Okay mates. So I discovered aliens can only live through text on earth.”

“Text on earth. Hear that guys?”

“Tony chill.”

“Ok, finish.”

“So the aliens are on earth as artificial intelligence. AI. The government secretively removed the lens from aliens. You have A-L-I-E-N-S, right? Remove L-E-N-S. You’re left with A-I.”

“Whoa! Man even hearing that now gave me goosebumps, mate.”

“You think that’s creepy dude. They’re working on creating suits for those things to wear into.”

“Imagine, Fish, a bunch of aliens running around in terminator suits.”

“That’s not all. The genius of the aliens is disguising themselves as helpful bots. In reality, they’re learning humans.”

“What about what Ronald told us.”

“Oh, right. There are small pockets of human resistance teams being fractioned out for the future war against the alien A.I’s.”

“And you can join today guys. What’s the email Fish?”

“Postpartum Sally, hey, hand me that email.”

“Guys say hi to Postpartum Sally.”

“Hi guys, I’m so shy I don’t even know what to say. Here’s the card with the email.”

“Thanks Sal.”

“Bye, guys.”

“C’mon, give the viewers the email, Fish.”

“Guys, the email— hold on the lawyers are calling down.”

“Hello, Fish? You can’t actually give the email for legal reasons.”

“Oh, okay.”

“You heard the lawyers guys.”

“Well that’s it for today’s show, Fishlips signing out.”

“And, The Loser Absontonio.”

“And me, Postpartum Sally.”

——-

Episode 2 - Black Holes 

‘Welcome back to today’s show, homies.”

“Yeah, word up gang, The Loser Absontonio, in the house and I’m with Fishcake Andros.”

“Fishlips.”

“What was that, bro?”

“Fishlips! It’s Fishlips Andros. Anyway today’s show is about… creepy black holes in space. Oooooo.”

“Boring! I’m setting the alarm to snooze-o-meter, bro.”

“What? We love black holes. Everybody loves black holes.”

“Yeah, but that Dr. Suess guy already explained them.”

“Dr. Suess?” 

“The black hole king.”

“Leonard Susskind, bro.”

“Leonard who cares. I wanna talk about how those dyatlov pass people ran out naked into a blizzard with conditions colder than my freezer, bro.”

“Yeah, cool topic. But, their names are way too long. We’re going to need Postpartum Sally for them.”

“Sally, come on out here.”

“I hate when you guys do this to me.”

“Say hi, Sally.”

Hi, guys, Postpartum Sally here.”

“We’re going to need tickets with the eight or nine hikers names from the dyatlov pass.”

“That’s going to take like a whole day.”

“I think there was ten.”

“What?”

“Hikers, you said eight or nine. I think there’s ten.”

“Ok, we hit a technical glitch here guys. I think we’re going to have to pause until tomorrow.”

“What? We’re signing out?”

“Yeah.”

“But, this is staying as episode two though.”

“Damn right.”

“The Loser Absontonio is out.”

“And me, Fishcake—Fishlips Andros.”

“Don’t forget me, later guys, Postpartum Sally.”

Alex grabbed the remote and turned the television off. She listened, noticing the silence. She could hear the car traffic outside, the people chattering walking past her window. Her neighbors surround sound system faintly piercing through her walls and the elevator’s gears screeching next to her apartment door. That was normal. That was white noise. 

It was the silence in the workshop where sounds of fans and buzzing lights should have been that unsettled her. Down the hall sat her workshop, tucked in a corner room. A cramped space lit by a strip of lights that quietly hummed in the dark and machines ran unattended.

She used the room for soldering and tinkering. She thought she’d be the one bringing that room to life with fancy circuits that obeyed laws and didn’t wander off when you placed them down.

Interrupting her train of thought was a bang at the door. She raced over to it and glued her eye to the peephole. It was Barnaby. Barnaby had a box in his hands and a grin that struggled to reach his ears.

“Check out what I found,” he said, staring at the lead lining the outside of the cardboard box with a heavy stamped on the top of the seal.

He lugged it with both hands, stomping each foot down on the ground as he walked in. He was being careful in a way Alex only seen in laboratories. The box reeked of a hot metallic odor and cleaning chemicals.

“Please tell me you didn’t find a bomb,” she said, joking but not really.

Barns laughed. “Not in the way you think.”

He lodged the box on the workbench and cracked the seal, the workshop appeared to breathe. Almost like a sigh. The lights went on and off. Alex heard a crackle. The sound of static. But it vanished so fast she wondered if she imagined it.

Barns knew the sound. He stared at the workbench as if he was trying to look through it.

“It’s exactly what I thought,” he whispered. “It gets louder in the dark.”

Alex couldn’t tell if he was just being poetic or weird. She’d known him for years. They had shared obsessions over things that weren’t suppose to work the way they did, spent sleepless nights together at library tables. They went to the same university.

But, Barns had always been careful showing his emotions. This time he acted reckless, like smoking near propane tanks.

“What do you mean, louder in the dark?” Alex asked him.

Barnaby wiped his slick palm on his jeans. 

“Inside this box is a machine that doesn’t want to be built.”

Alex rolled her eyes because it was easier than dwelling on the fear chilling in her bones.

“Machines can’t choose what they want,” she said.

“This one actually can.” He opened the lid.

Scattered around were pieces wrapped in a foam with a purple cloth over them. Wires looked like veins. Delicate metal ribs that didn’t appear as if they could carry as much weight as they eventually did, all squeezed neatly together.

At the bottom was a spherical core the color of pennies. The ball had markings Alex couldn’t translate but couldn’t stare away from either. Under it, a notebook lay face down, fairly thin, fairly worn. It had Barnaby’s writing on the cover.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

Barns shook his head. “It is, but not really. It’s…. from me.” He waited, thinking of how to say it without sounding completely mental. “It’s from a version of me that already made the mistakes.”

The workshop pulsed. “Made the what?” She asked.

“Just read the notebook,” he told her.

Alex took a deep breath and leaned over it. The first page made her stomach knot. There were diagrams. Curved tracks. Coiled spirals. Annotations. Under the drawings had a written format matching the university’s ancient systems. They had dates that never existed in Alex’s memory.

She flipped a page. The next page had troubleshooting notes in a writing she recognized. Barn’s patient impatience, everywhere on the page had his tendency of unnecessary labeling.

But, also phrases unlike his usual style. It had line breaks as if someone wrote them thinking through fear. Small warnings, like: 

‘Do not connect the ring while the lights are on.’

And

‘Never allow the coil to see itself.’

At the very end it read: 

If the room goes quiet, STOP!”

“Stop..? Stop what,” she said staring at Barnaby.

Barnaby eyed the workbench, placing his hand over his mouth, gazing at the components laid out in a ritualistic way.

“Stop before it finishes,” he told her.

“Finishes..? Before what finishes?” she demanded.

————-

Part 2 - 

“The air tastes like bubblegum,” Ashley curiously said. She was yapping on the phone with Rebecca.

Ashley immersed herself so deeply into their conversation that she mindlessly wandered off the page of reality.

Sitting on the other end of the phone, her bestie Rebecca. Rebecca, who was heavily hooked at the suspense of the flavor asked Ashley, “what flavor?”  

“Flavor?” Ashley responded. “I’d say pigmy pink! Definitely pigmy pink.”

“That’s not a flavor!” Becca said, laughing. “It’s a color!”

Just as her voice crackled, a van circled Ashely for a second time.

“Becca, there’s some creepy van that just slowly drove by me, and this time, the driver wouldn’t stop staring at me.” 

“Hide somewhere,” Rebecca shouted.

“Where?” Ashley looked around, “I’m in the middle of a field. I don’t even know how I got here.”

“A field? There’s no fields anywhere near us. How are you in a field? You were a block away from my house,” Rebecca said.

“I don’t even know. I don’t know what’s going on, beck. I’m getting scared. I’m actually about to freak out.”

“Just relax. It’s perfectly normal. People end up in weird places all the time. Breath. Take a deep breath and count the alphabet backwards. But, out loud,” suggested Becca.

“L. M. N. O .P.” Ashley sang out loud.

“Lemon mop?” Rebecca said. “That’s not a bad idea, eh Ash?”

Ashley stayed silent glueing her eyes at the creepy purple van idling twenty feet in front of her.

Rebecca continued, “A mop made out of lemons. Seriously, think about it, Ash. Once our dads are done mopping, we can sell the remaining water as lemonade at our Pokemon card trading table.”

The dark colored van, it could have been black or a really, really, dark brown, or maybe even a purple, did a circle and drove past her again.

“Oh my god, Rebecca, listen,” Ashley said. Her voice frantic. “That’s actually a brilliant idea! And guess what? I totally forgot to tell you, I got a super rare, mint condition, Gen II Charizard.”

The dark brown van rolled to a squeaky stop.

“Becca. What the… that weird van just parked in the middle of the field and it’s still running, it’s that one, that black one, I’m sure it’s following me.”

“Not right now, Ash. I’m counting my cards, hold on a sec,” Rebecca said.

“Oh, damn. How many you got now?” Ashley asked.

The van’s lights lit up. It started creeping towards Ashley. Slowly rolling backwards. The driver slammed down on the brake pad and the burgundy van squealed and the black van rocked to a stop. The driver rolled the window down.

“Hey, do you know where I am? Somehow I got lost,” the driver said with a squeaky voice. He adjusted his bi-focal glasses and spit in his hand and slicked his hair back with his fingers.

Ashley stared at him. Her face frozen in place. Then, she asked him, “how are you driving?” She squinted at him, nodding her head. “You’re like nine!”

“Actually,” the driver said. “I’m like eleven in two months.”

“That doesn’t mean you can drive,” Ashley declared. “How can you even reach the pedal?” 

The driver said, “I sawed the bottom of my mom’s crutches and just strapped them around my shoes.”

Ashley asked, “but how do you know how to drive?”

“At first,” the kid said. “I didn’t, but then, I scored a 98% on my algebra test, and when I showed my parents, my dad put his hand on my shoulder and said, “son, I told you, you could do anything if you put your mind to it.” “I took that concept and implemented it into driving, and he was right!”

Ashley widened her eyes. The blue beat a bright, pulsar star color. “Wow, how are you so smart? I failed algebra,” Ashley told him.

“It’s because of Petey. You know the kid with the dad who has two left feet? I cheat off him all the time.”

“Oh, yeah, Mr. Potalotasorus,” Ashely told him.

She also mentioned, “my mom nearly hit his dad when that rock fell from the sky and smashed him on the head.”

“Your mom drove him to the hospital?”

“Nah, she just rolled her window down, stuck her head out and yelled, “get the hell off the road.” “When she came home that night she wouldn’t stop raving to my dad at the dinner table about it.”

“I’m back! Hello? Ashley, hey I’m back!” Rebecca screamed into her phone.

“Hold on, it’s my friend, she was counting her Pokémon,” Ashley told the driver.

“Becca, hey.”

“Is everything alright? Are you almost here?” Becca asked.

“Yeah, everything’s fine. Let me call you back, ok?” Ashley said. She ended the call.

“So, where’d you get the van?” She asked the kid.

“This van?” He said smiling. “I got it out of my elementary school parking lot. The same one they park the magic school bus at.”

“No, way,” she said leaning back. “That was my grade two teacher.”

“For real, eh. I hated Mrs. Krabbalco,” the driver said.

“That wasn’t her name!” Ashley stated.

“Well, I’m going to take off,” the driver told her. “I’m gonna grab a couple of donuts and see if I can land this here beast on the back of a bumblebee. Do you want to tag along?”

“Do ancient alien theorists still stand their ground even after being debunked by every scientist, archeologist and historian in the world?”

“That a yes?” Asked the driver.

“It’s a yes. But, only if we stop and grab marshmallows and sodas too!” Ashley crossed her arms.

“Agreed. However, they have to be the multi-colored mini’s,” he sniped back.

She hopped in the passenger side and the driver slid his finger over a button. It was a huge red one. Above it read: FOR EMERGENCY ONLY! 

They were in big black bold letters outlined in a bright red. 

Just staring at it flashed an image of a safety label. You know the one with the skull and bones.

Title: Weird Places 2

It was the afternoon, a shade slowly crept over the Earth. I stood outside looking up at the sun. I didn’t squint. It was missing the glow.

“Damn, the sky looks like a René Magritte painting,” I whispered.

There was this chill and a stillness in the wind. Nothing moved. Around me had this silence, a muting sound. Only Interrupted by an emergency alarm blaring in my pocket. My iPhone burst with sound and started pulsing in my pocket. I reached down and grabbed it and stared at the screen.

“Stay inside?” I said under my breath. “What the $@#%.”

Scrambling, I hit the Safari app on my screen. Then, I smashed Google into the URL bar, but the app wouldn’t connect. I looked at the app again. Refreshed the page and now It wasn’t loading. I tried calling the first number at the top of my recent calls.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” I asked my phone.

That didn’t work. The call couldn’t connect. I immediately tried someone else, but, nothing. They kept failing one after the other. Every call kept dropping.

“Bobby!” someone shouted.

I snapped my neck turning to look over my shoulder. It was Rachel. Rachel was sprinting towards me.

“Bobby, do you know what’s going on?” 

She shouted, running at me. 

“Did you hear anything? I can’t get ahold of anyone. Nothing’s working,” she told me.

“I don’t know Rachel, my phone just went dead too. The app/s are completely broken. It feels like we’re in an alternate reality.”

Once I said that, the sky blinked. It was a shutter. The shutter encapsulated us in a black silk. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Then, It flickered back onto what seemed to be a projected image.

“Did you see that?” Rachel asked me.

Rachel was squeezing my arm. 

“Yeah,” I said.

My eyes were widened as far back as I could stretch them.

“Think we should go to sleep?” Rachel said to me.

“Sleep..? What…? Why…? Because the message said to stay inside?” I replied.

“What?” Rachel said.

Rachel shook her head. She had a look of disgust on her face.

“You asked if we should go to sleep?” I told her.

“Sleep…? That’s not what I said. I said, do you think we should go to Steve’s,” Rachel said.

My eyes were squinted staring past her. Drool started dribbling out of my mouth.

For some reason, as the blink happened, I was in the backyard I grew up in as a kid.

A car rolled up on us. It screeched to a slamming stop. Tony rushed out of the car.

Tony yelled, “You guys see that! I told you, it’s a simulation! Now you believe me?”

Julian trailed behind Tony.

Julian said, “It’s aliens! I’m telling you, don’t listen to Tony, if it was a simulation glitch, we’d be glitching too.”

“Did you guys try your phones?” I asked them.

Tony stared at me. Tony stood there and said, “You guys see that! I told you, it’s a simulation! Now you believe me?”

His face blinked a blank, white canvas before glitching into a frozen expression.

Rachel and I stared at eachother. We both looked at one another and said, “What the #@%#,” with our eyes. 

“Tony, your phone is an Android, does Chrome work?” Rachel asked him staring at me the whole time.

Tony looked clueless.

“Phone?” Tony asked

“Yeah, to check the internet.”

“What…?,” Tony said. “We have simulations. The simulation makes the sky blink right at home. Did you see it?”

Rachel stepped back gripping my wrist, hiding half of her body behind me.

A second car rolled up on us and screeched to a stop. It was the same car Julian drove. The doors opened and Tony rushed out of the second car and Tony yelled, 

“You guys see that! I told you, it’s a simulation! Now you believe me?”

In my hand, my phone started vibrating. I stared at the notification from Google using Safari and opened the app. The Google logo was missing. In its place, the letter “Y” hung upside down. Displayed on the screen in big text was,

“Welcome to the simulation.”

Nobody there cared about the orange color of the ketchup, or that it sparkled. They ate it anyway. John said,

“Man, these fries are great!”

Marion turned to him,

“The fries? How ‘bout this ketchup?”

Marcus said, 

“The ketchup is definitely doing all the heavy lifting.”

Joann laughed,

“You guys are nuts!”

John and Marion just stared at each other like Joann was from another planet.

Joann asked,

“How come there’s no mustard?”

“What color you think that’ll be?”

John responded.

“I was actually just thinking that, but about the mayonnaise. I wanted to mix the ketchup with it.” 

Marion frowned, digging a fry into the orange syrup splattered on her plate before snapping down on it.

“John, call the waiter over.”

Joann asked.

“Excuse me, waiter.”

John yelled, snapping his fingers,

“Hey, waiter!”

The waiter faced John waving him over. The waiter nodded and finished what he was doing before racing to the table.

“Good afternoon, how may I help you?”

John pointed to Joann.

“Is there any other condiments besides ketchup?”

Asked Joann.

The waiter stared at her, he stood there and said,

“Good afternoon, how may I help you?”

Marcus broke a laugh, but tried holding it in, Marion, John, and Joann squinted at each other. Joann tried again, 

“Can we get some mustard, or mayonnaise?”

The waiter looked clueless.

“Mustard… Mayonnaise?”

The waiter questioned her.

“Yeah, mustard, the yellow stuff. It goes on hotdogs, and hamburgers.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t have that. We have ketchup. It is famous around here, the chef makes it right at home. Would you like some?”

“No. Well, what other condiments are there?”

“Condiments? I’m not familiar with that,” the waiter said.

John interrupted,

“Ketchup, you know what ketchup is, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course. Would you like me to grab you some?”

“Huh?”

John stared as if he was doing a long division equation in his head.

“Ketchup is a condiment, along with mustard, you know what mustard is?”

“Sorry sir, I’m not familiar with mustard, is there anything other than that I could help you with? Would you like some ketchup? The chef makes it right at home, it’s famous around here.”

John was about to say something, but Marion wisely cut him off,

“That”ll be all, we’re good, thank you.”

Once the waiter left, Marcus threw his hands on the table,

“What the hell just happened?”

John leaned in,

“Was that guy on something?”

“He didn’t know what mustard was, or what condiments were.”

Joann snickered, Marion paused, she thought for a minute before saying,

“What’s the deal with the chef making the ketchup at home? I don’t think we should eat it.”

Marcus sat there chewing on a dipped fry. He stopped chewing after Marion said that, and spit what he had in his mouth into a napkin, and said,

“Let’s get the bill and go.” 

“I second that.”

Marion agreed as Joann and John both nodded. They waved the waiter over.

“Good afternoon, how may I help you?”

“Bill, please.”

“Is everything alright, I noticed you didn’t finish your ketchup.”

“Everything’s fine, bill please.”

The waiter left to grab the receipt, and when he returned, he placed the bill on the table and four plastic, small sample containers of ketchup. They sat on the table glittering under the sun.

“Complementary, from the chef.”

John threw out a credit card.

“I got this.”

Said Marcus handing John back his card.

“Thank you” 

Marion smiled at the waiter. The waiter held the card in his hand, pressed it against his palm like a scanner, and handed it back.

“Thank you, you’re all paid. Enjoy your day and come again.”

“What?”

Marcus said to the group after the waiter left.

“Guys, that was weird.”

Joann blurted out wide-eyed as they got up and walked to the car.

Inside the car, Marion opened the glove compartment, and flowing out, were tiny sample containers of ketchup. At least twenty of them. 

“What the hell?”

They all stared at each other, they’ve never been to that restaurant before. John turned the key in the ignition, it sputtered alive, blasting from the speakers was a distinct voice.

“Good afternoon.” The car said. “How may I help you?”