Through out my life I have been fascinated by space and aliens. I studied for years to begin to work at SETI and I spent everyday of my life pouring over radio transmissions, telescope imagery, star light charts, and yet I found nothing.
I remember one night, an old women decades of work with nothing to show drifting to sleep. I started to dream, but no this wasn’t a dream, it felt to real I could feel everything and there was no haze, I counted my fingers, this was real. I looked up and saw a metallic being, circular, with spikes around it. I came towards it and it asked me “what is one wish you want, anything is possible.” I pondered for a few minutes and I came to an idea “show me a museum, a museum of all life in the universe.” I barely bit of the last word before I felt my surroundings change. I was transported to a large white field like the Arctic with a large black building in front of me. I walked up the steps and opened the door. It was a long dark hall, on either there were two doors with a light above it. I walked up to one of the doors and it read “Earth” my heart sank a little bit, there were only to places with life in the whole universe? It couldn’t be. I walked into the earth exhibit. I couldn’t believe it! It was filled with thousands of lifeforms it was vibrant and beautiful.
I spent what felt like months in there learning of different species and I even could learn about different earth cultures. After a while I stepped out and walked into the other exhibit. This one was different, it was dark and cold. There were only a handful of lifeforms in there. Walking through I got to the only intelligent species. It felt familiar, it was them those metal balls that brought me here. I left the exhibit slightly scared, but as I stepped out into the hallway I looked around since I forgot if the door was to the left or right, but I noticed something. There were other exhibits, hundreds, maybe thousands, they were all just dark.
I looked back at the earth exhibit. The light that once illuminated it flickered on and off, on and off, on and off, until it finally went black. I stepped back into the alien exhibit with my heart pounding and when I turned around I saw those same creatures. I asked them angrily is they did this if they were why the museum was dark, if they were why earth is gone. They simply stated with no malice in its one eye “you choked your planet and screamed into the void, we just put you out of your misery.”
I woke up after that in a hospital bed, my only granddaughter by my bedside with a long line of unknown letters on my arm. I told her, the nurse, the doctors, my son, but no one believes me. But I know what I saw. Every night I asked to be wheeled out to look at the stars. I don’t do it because I want to look at the beauty, I’m just waiting for the lightbulb to go out.