Why is it, when everyone abandons you, the only people left are the conspiracy theorists?

29 Days ago

 

I left work at 5pm to catch my train home.  I’d booked Friday off as I knew this weekend would be epic.  I bought fast food in the station to eat on the train.  Arriving home, I walked down the around the back into my shed.

Of course, this isn’t really a shed.  It might have the external appearance of a large one but it is more like a Tardis inside.  I’m a very keen astronomer and, after coming into a small fortune, I decided to splash out on my own personal mini-observatory. It’s all underground and my shed is the entrance. A press of a button and the floor retracts while a staircase rises from below to allow access.

When I bought it, I literally had no idea how big it was. It’s as big as my house and goes two stories underground.  It has a giant telescope underneath a domed roof but I had to get it customised to suit my garden setup.  The telescope and domed roof were modified to rise and lower and the shed roof was modified to slide back allowing a good view of the night sky.

With this beautiful piece of engineering, I am truly in astronomy heaven.

Many might think this a little pointless or extravagant but not me.  I needed this observatory.  I’ve created a piece of code that has the potential to hunt the night sky for every planet in the galaxy in just a few hours.  The cool part though is that it takes that data and pulls it into a zoomable 4D simulation.  Tonight will be the moment of truth.

I sat down, retracted the stairs, raised the roof and set the program in motion.  Then settled down to watch a couple of films as I waited the four hours it would take to complete.

The second film finished.  I checked the timer.  Two minutes.  I grabbed a bottle and a bar of chocolate from the kitchen fridge and headed back.  As I sat down a little ‘Programme Complete’ message popped up.  Excitedly impatient, I immediately ran the program’s simulation.

Suddenly, all the air around me was filled with the blue glow of a 4D hologram of the galaxy.  The hologram itself was hovering in the middle of the open space between my telescope and the mini-kitchen.

This is awesome!  I simply can’t believe the detail.  I feel like a giant omnipotent being looking down at my latest creation.  I need to see how close I can get to each star system.

I know how this should work but this was the first time.  I stood and walked to the middle of the floor, looking for our sun.  Using one hand, I slowly moved my hand across the display.  It was beautiful the way the galaxy wobbled slightly as my hand displaced it.

There you are!  I spotted the rough area of our solar system.  I pinched the cluster of stars and released my fingers, in the same way you pinch and zoom on a touch screen.  The galaxy zoomed in and I started to see the stars as they came into view.

Knowing roughly our location I carried on and managed to reach the sun and its surrounding stars however, I’ve found an anomaly.  Tiny white lines seem to criss-cross the various systems.  I was very surprised and didn’t expect to see any breaks in the display.  They are uniform but criss-cross the map.  I instantly have two thoughts but I don’t want to write them down in case I’m completely wrong and ridiculed later if I make some huge discovery and my diary goes public.

Leaving them for now, I zoomed in to our system and checked every planet.  Wow, I can’t believe the level of detail.  I need to check the asteroid belt.

Oh my days, I can see asteroids the size of a pea on here.  And the next winner of the Pulitzer prize for science is the excitedly humbled Hanson Gill from Prestwick, England.

Checking other systems, I found the level of detail to be the same.  This was the most awesome thing ever!  I could literally see every planet and what it actually looked like from above.  I found three worlds that looked similar to ours in the first hour of playing.

I was a little frustrated though as I found occasional anomalies that looked more like starships than asteroids or comets.  They were shaped like asteroids but white like comets with no trail.  Very weird.

Ok, so it’s 2am and my body wants to pass out.  I’m calling it a night but have set the programme to run twice more overnight.  This should allow me to begin the creation of a moving timeline of the galaxy and everything within.

 

19 Days Ago

 

I can’t believe I’ve been at this for over a week.  The unknown white blurry objects move at an incredible speed and they seem to use the white streaks to do it. I’ve taken the leap they must be alien spacecraft but need definitive evidence.  If true, then the white streaks are definitely wormholes of sorts.  If not wormholes, then some kind of incredibly fast travelling route.  Interestingly, one streak starts/ends behind Jupiter.  Annoying because although the program knows it’s there, I can’t point my telescope at it to check it out.

10 Days Ago

 

Ok so I’m lying on the floor, looking straight up at a zoomed in section of space.  Oh my days are the only words that come to mind.  I’d been building on my program to focus on specific pieces of data, number and movement of stars, comets and asteroids, possible planet composition with possibility of life, wormholes, space ships. That kind of thing.

A couple days ago, I ran the program, looking at the movement of the starships.  I was hoping to use this to see if it matched my thoughts on planetary life in the systems they visited.  Tonight, I spotted something a little alarming.  Six of the ships had made their way to the system closest to the other side of the Jupiter wormhole.

I reversed the program movement, spotting they were all elsewhere in systems spread across the galaxy but a week ago changed course, moving to this system.  Were they coming to Earth? Would they invade or make contact? Had they found out I knew about them and were coming for me?  So many thoughts in my head, I can barely sleep.

 

6 Days Ago

 

Ok so the six ships hadn’t moved since they reached the system.  Maybe it was just some sort of inter-galactic issue in the system that happened to put ours in easy reach.  None had used our portal previously so there’s no reason to think they know we exist.

So, I’ve turned my attention to cataloguing the number of planets that might be habitable.  I finished a few hours ago and the numbers are staggering.  I even cross-checked the data against the movement of the starships and found they actually visited many of these worlds in the short time I’d been monitoring.

 

Yesterday

 

I’ve got to tell someone.  Anyone who’ll listen.  We have imminent visitors from another part of the galaxy.  But who?

Three days ago, I published a scientific paper on my work and released my program for all to see. I posted it to every single scientific and astronomy forum I could.  I even released mobile apps of the program to every app store available.

This is different.  I ran the data overnight and the ships were gone.  All six had vanished.  Not knowing if they’d been destroyed or were on the move, I ran it again.  This time I found them hiding in the asteroid belt of our system.

The good news is I’ve discovered objects inside wormholes are invisible to my programme.  The bad news is we could be about to be invaded and I was the only person on the planet who knew.

I posted on the same sites as before hoping to warn everyone.

Damn NASA, why did you have to publish your own report on my findings saying it’s a computer program simulation, probably created using real time data?  they said it was a great base game engine but nothing more.  That one sentence has damaged my credibility and I don’t have time to fight back.  The aliens will be here and people need to know.

Why is it, when everyone abandons you, the only people left are the conspiracy theorists?

Being honest, I’m beginning to wonder if I caused this in some way.  Did my scan of the night sky somehow alert these aliens to my presence?  What would happen when they arrived? This was an angry world and I certainly didn’t want to be the cause of an interstellar war?

I guess I’ll just keep running the program and track them across the system.

 

Now

 

Come on you aliens, where are you?  I know you’re in orbit somewhere but it seems you’re particularly elusive.  I know from my program I’m looking right at you.  Maybe you’re cloaked in some way?  Actually, that might explain why you’re a white glow and if I can pick up your cloak.  Maybe that’s why you’re here. Because I found you.

“There!  There you are you little rascal!”  I just found a slight shimmer and a slight wobble in a section of the sky, “your cloak isn’t perfect my friend.  I see you!”  He quickly took a digital image so he had an outline of one of the ships.

Very pleased but worried for the planet, I sat down.  Feeling pins and needles in my fingers, I looked down and was scared when I saw them slowly disappearing in a blue haze.  This wasn’t good.  I watched in shock as my body slowly disappeared into the haze.  The last thing I saw was my observatory also beginning to disappear.

 

 

“Data purge complete sir.”  The technician said to his commander.

“Excellent.  That was the closest one yet.  If it wasn’t for their own space agency debunking him, we might have had a serious crisis on our hands.  Inform the other ships to stand down.  The sleeper is safe and we are in control of the situation.  We will stay on to complete the purge and re-deposit.”  The commander left the technician to work and went back to the bridge.”

 

The Next Day

 

Oh my, my head hurts. Waking up after a heavy night is not good for the soul, especially on a work night.  Oh well, guess it’s work from home day today.  Will have to catch up with the boys again soon, I can never understand why I can’t remember a thing.

 

10 Days after

I have a diary that I write everything in, including this one but I just found 7 identical diaries hidden in a box, buried in the garden.  I’ve opened them all and every word is in my hand-writing but I couldn’t have written them as I don’t recall any of the events written about.  What on Earth is going on?

 

 

Mark Johnson pulled up outside Hanson’s house in his vintage VW Campervan.  “This is the origin of the IP address signal from two weeks ago people.  Be prepared.  The sleeper may not realise anything is amiss…