From the Journal of
Steven Keys- June 8, 2019
We are getting
nowhere. Okay, that isn’t quite fair. Every day that passes, we get a better
idea of who the Omegans are and what their society is like. Our intelligence
provides us with a clearer picture of their movements and their numbers. If
we’d have known half this shit a year ago, we might have found a way to stop
these bastards. Though realistically, there was very little chance they
wouldn’t have achieved a landing of some sort. At this point, I’d estimate that
we’ll need at least five to ten years in order to build ourselves up to a point
where we truly stand a chance of beating them back.
In the meantime, some
of the reports have been pretty gruesome. Even though they’ve stopped firing
meteors at us, they’re doing a solid job of wiping us out when they land. Shock
troops hit the ground running, firing on every living thing in their path. The
worldwide death toll right now has moved passed 200 million. That’s so
staggering that I can’t even truly comprehend it.
Yet weirdly, I am
feeling a sense of peace and calm. I wake up in the morning, stretch, eat a
light breakfast, drink a cup of coffee, and go to work. In the middle of all
this, I have achieved normalcy and a routine. Crazy! On the mornings where
Yumiko has stayed over, we lay together and enjoy the quiet as the sun rises. For
just a little while, we forget. It is wonderful.
Then I get moving and
remind myself that I am a linguistics professor living and working on a secret
Japanese island, trying to find out why aliens have invaded the Earth and what
they are doing here. After that, I take a moment to regain my sanity, and then
I get back to it.
From the Journal of
Steven Keys- June 9, 2019
All the credit goes to
Pettit. My favorite frog sociologist (as he said to me “I’m the only ‘frog’
sociologist you know. I’d best be your favorite, cochon.”) was looking over the
morning intelligence report while the rest of us yawned and scratched our
asses. None of us had paid much attention to it when we read it. Thankfully, we
have diverse interests.
“They’re digging in
the wilds of Puerto Rico. Huh,” he said. We
all just sort of looked at each other and shrugged. “Ah,” he continued, “I was
just remembering taking holiday there. Had a crazy experience.” Shareen laughed
and asked if it was weed or mushrooms, but Pettit begged off. “Non. Mes amis,
we saw a UFO. I swear to you, this thing hovered over San Juan and then moved off into the distance
and vanished. It was quite mysterious. Though now it seems rather trite in the
grand scheme of things.”
I’m sure if we had
footage, you’d be able to see all of our jaws dropping at once, probably in
slow motion. Heads swiveled slowly as we looked at each other in amazement.
Pradeep spoke first,
and I think he spoke for all of us. “Mother. Fucker. What if they were here
before?”
“What if they left
something behind?” Yumiko asked softly.
We huddled on that
one, immediately calling up any data we had on UFO sightings, but it was clear
that what was readily available was not enough. We asked for a meeting with the
Colonel, and when we told him what we wanted, he seemed a bit skeptical.
However, after explaining it to him, he agreed to try and get what we asked
for. We’ll see what happens.
From the Journal of
Steven Keys- June 18, 2019
It’s taken us almost a
full week, but the data the Colonel was able to get us has started to make sense.
There were a surprising number of unexplainable incidents over the past hundred
years, almost one actual UFO for every one that can be disproved. We started
building that map next to the map of the Omegans’ movements and landings, and
after a while we could start to pick up a pattern with certain locations. We
can attribute almost thirty percent of the “real” UFOs to places they are at in
force right now. As a group we have decided to call that statistically
significant.
So now we’re waiting
for the Colonel to see if he can get us more intel about those particular
incidents. I have no idea what we’ll discover, but at least we’re making
headway into something.
From the Journal of
Steven Keys- June 20, 2019
Walked into the room
this morning to a stunning sight: six large crates. In them we found eyewitness
reports from civilians, military personnel, and commercial pilots; telemetry
data; classified photos; Presidential orders; an autopsy report; and debris.
Holy mother of God.
I’m glad we shut the
door before we started looking at the stuff, because frankly our decorum was
not great. For us, it was Christmas morning. A jackpot of goodies just dropped
in our laps.
There may have been
shouting and whooping.
The autopsy,
interestingly, was not of a fully grown Omegan, at least not from what we could
tell. That’s something we’ll have to come back to later, I think. Instead, we
divvied up the reports, photos, and debris and got started.
I was reading reports,
mostly. To be honest, after a while it got boring. People saw stuff, had no
idea what it was, and couldn’t catch it. Same thing over and over. But it does
seem from the descriptions that what were being seen in most of these cases was
indeed were Omegan ships. Smaller craft, more maneuverable, but Omegan all the
same. Just as I was about to take a break and stretch my legs, though, it got a
little interesting elsewhere. Pradeep called me over to look at the debris.
“Professor Steve? How
about a little linguistics help?”
He had my immediate
attention. Parsing out the Omegan language is something I would love to be able
to do on a grand level. My first thought was about how I could use whatever I
was about to see, but what he showed me was pretty bizarre. Pradeep handed me a
piece of jagged metal. Its surface was smooth and shiny, with some small
scoring, and on the flip side it had a number of symbols that I recognized from
my time on the ship in orbit. “Definitely our bad guys,” I told him, and handed
it back to him.
He nodded and took it
back from me. “That’s what I thought, too.” Reaching down, he picked up a
second piece of metal. Showing it to me, he then placed it next to the first
one, and I could see that they fit together. “Obviously two pieces of the same
whole.” I was starting to get confused, which I think he could see. He flipped
over the second piece and handed it to me. My confusion grew immediately.
“I don’t understand,”
I told him.
“Does that look
familiar to you?” he asked. I nodded weakly. There was damage obscuring some of
it, but having worked in my field for a long time, and having lived in an area
that focused on Native American history pretty heavily, I had no doubt in my
mind about what I was seeing.
“This,” I told him,
“appears to be written in Cherokee.”
Pradeep swallowed
hard. “What does it say?”
I looked at it again,
tilting the piece around to catch every angle of lighting I could. Finally, I
realized I was just delaying the inevitable.
“Deep, I could give
you a full, ridiculous translation, but the gist of it is this: what we have
here is an invitation of sorts.”
“To what?”
“The afterlife.”
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