It’s been a long time now. Somewhere along the lines of eight months since I posted this here.
I’ve been advised, rightfully so, not to talk about what has transpired until 2031. But right now I feel like a bird in a cage left in the basement of a recently deceased owner. There’s a good chance I wont even live until 2031. So here goes.
Shortly after I made my initial post I was on high alert for any indication that the agents knew it was me who leaked the info online. I figured they’d publicly act like it didn’t exist and that was fine, but I had no idea if they’d be able to trace everything back to me. I had planned a fake passport and an emergency exit with one of my last remaining connections at work. I had planned a live feed camera to record the event if it ever came to pass. I had planned to do my best to not go as quietly as everyone around me was.
Instead I woke up without control of my own body.
I didn’t even notice at first. I got up, did my morning routine, checked everything I wanted to check, and left for work. At first it was little things. Brushing for precisely two minutes, driving with just a little more precision, my math coming just a little faster than usual. The biggest change? Usually when you’re afraid of something your body reacts. Even the most practiced actors give some indication, and usually we’re able to at least determine the emotional reaction to a threat. That instinct was gone. An agent walked by and I felt nothing. It was as if the agent was just another coworker.
Thinking this was odd I tried to move towards the bathroom to think, but I didn’t. I just didn’t. My muscles didn’t contract or expand. I wasn’t being held down or anything. Any command I sent to my body simply didn’t register and suddenly my brain was separated from it, watching helplessly as I casually conversed about my work with that aforementioned last contact. My body didn’t even act like I wasn’t in the situation I was in. It brought up concerns about the agents, ensured my backdoor was still open, even hinted at the destruction of my ISS buddy’s house. It was then I noticed one last detail. The tree leaves outside were absent despite it being spring, and the ties of the agents were invisible to me.
I panicked, screaming out for even a door or wall to appear in my mind’s eye so that I may pound on it. My perfectly imitated actions removed, even the pulsating of my heart was no longer my own. Slipping away into madness seemed so easy in the moment, frighteningly easy looking back on it. And that’s what I did, at least until I was stabbed in the back by a needle and dragged kicking into a janitorial closet. My screams were muffled by several hands, yet more arms wrapping around me as I lashed out in blind rage. I’ve never been a violent person, but let me tell you. In that moment punching someone square in the jaw of my own volition felt godly.
Coming to my senses I realized that I had nailed the janitor. Two other people were restraining me. One was the kid that’d been recently hired. The same one I’d been talking to about the load to and from the ISS. The other was an agent, but his sunglasses had been removed and his expression was not one of complacency but the hardest deadliest stare I’d ever receiving. His eyes told me everything and I immediately stopped resisting. The story I heard afterwards shocked me to the core.
The kid and the janitor were related, grandpa and grandson I think. Both were extreme conspiracy theorists. And when I say that I mean straight up flat earth, aliens are real, we live in a simulation stuff. Apparently the janitor took up his post over a decade ago to try and figure out if anything fishy was going on, and once this whole fiasco kicked off his grandson schmoozed his way into working here. Don’t know how he pulled it off but I suspect that conspiracy insanity only bolstered his intellect like, like a blood hound catching wind of a sent. Being the guy who did all the calculations on what went to the ISS, he had access to all of it.
They were transporting an assortment of things. A few weapons, strange color-based test cards, but most notably a few containers of green liquid. That same green liquid was the stuff injected into my back to bring me back, but there was a limited supply. The agent, who was now typically going by ‘Smith’, picked up the threads of the story.
Smith had been assigned here due to an arising emergency on the ISS. The situation started with one of the astronauts starting to act strange, asking several questions of the crew that would have already been known like: “Why are we here?”, “Who are you?” and “What is that?” in reference to Earth. It had become extremely obvious that the crew-mate wasn’t acting like themselves at all, but being highly trained professionals the astronauts kept calm and contacted base. What ensued was a string of experiments and a line of questioning that aimed to both figure out what had possessed the man and bring their friend back. It didn’t work.
Soon after the funding went through to get the astronauts everything they needed contact with the ISS was lost. It flew off it’s trajectory and started to fly around the night sky with no regard for momentum or the thrust and maneuvering needed to make the twists and turns it was making. Supernatural reports started to pop up everywhere. It was pieced together that this ‘thing’ was inhabiting people’s bodies and controlling them for an unknown purpose. In secret a national state of emergency was declared and agents like smith were dispatched everywhere armed with what little data the astronauts had sent back to identify a possession. An obliviousness to the color green and a lack of understanding about, well, how anything worked.
It was deemed that an alien entity of some kind was to blame and the work to contain it had been extensive and ripe with turmoil. It soon became evident to the agents that with every passing possession the entity became more and more able to cover it’s tracks and hide. And eventually each interview became grounds for the entity to study the agents right back. Soon Smith found himself playing his part perfectly while stuck in his own body like I was. It was pain that brought him back. Pain inflicted on him by the conspiracy crew. Apparently the sensation was quite the surprise to the entity and it recoiled, in a manner of speaking, when any of its hosts were injured.
Someone had figured this out before even these people had, as the green liquid was starting to burn through my veins. At first a small jab is enough to release you, it was explained to me, but the entity adapts to the pain in turn. The liquid would gradually increase the amount my blood boiled to keep my actions my own, but I was on a time limit. At some point the pain would be to much, or the entity would catch up. Just looking at Smith’s clenched hands and strained brow I could tell he was feeling it already.
I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t the guy who went up in the shuttle with nerves of steel. I did math. Luckily everyone else did. The top floors were completely occupied by the entities puppets now, and while Smith had been controlled he saw his colleagues constructing something. Given that everyone didn’t have long left as it was and information was limited, they had resolved to get up there and figure out what was going on once and for all. They roped me in because not only did I have higher clearance, but I’d been working here for a very long time and might have some insights to give as they went. That wasn’t going to protect us though. Smith had learned the hard way that the entity knew when it had lost control and also knew how to send agents after him. The big green-screen sheet the conspiracy crew had commandeered, however, would.
Yes. That was the plan. Cloak ourselves in a greenscreen and make our way up like a band of fake youtube vloggers. I realize now in hindsight that there’s an element of comedy to that, but all I could feel in the moment was the steady slow progression as we bobbed and weaved between people and objects like we had an invisibility cloak. Worst part was that, unlike an invisibility cloak, you can’t see through a greenscreen. We had to do everything by ear and what we could see at our feet. Smith and I managed to navigate us farther than anyone would have ever believed possible, landing ourselves on entrance to the top floor. The green liquid was starting to make me feel like my internal organs were being scolded, making every step stomach-churning. I think what got me to that point was knowing that Smith was in twice as much pain, but had yet to break. Though having only met briefly, I’d come to admire his grit. But then disaster struck.
I have to give credit where credit is due to the conspiracy duo. It’s very likely none of us would have even broken free of this thing had they not decided to indulge in the crazy fantasies in their heads. Well, a crazy fantasy that we now lived. But freaking out after dropping your tinfoil hat due to fear of possession right next to an agent was a stupid move. We covered the janitor’s mouth swiftly, and for a moment everyone on the floor stopped moving. You could have heard a pin drop, but what broke the silence was a flurry of violence.
Knowing we were caught, Smith threw off the green-screen and slapped the nearby agent in the face to at least momentarily free him. That agent was consumed by the same rage I had been, and while he lashed out Smith re-engaged his earpiece and announced to any free agents that the entity had control of the building and that pain could break the spell. Everything erupted into chaos. I would learn later that the revelation had caused excessive discord on the lower floors as the entity drew guns on the free agents. One moment you’re sharing a cup of coffee with your pal, the next that pal shoves a gun in your face. We didn’t get that treatment. Everyone on this floor was controlled, and therefore we were subject to a hail of gunfire.
It only took one bullet from Smith. The first controlled agent to be hit lashed out against the one closest to him, then that agent the next until a cascade of freshly shot suits lined the ground. It all happened so quickly I barely had time to register that I’d been shot myself. The janitor was laying in a pool of blood covering the kid and Smith was clutching his chest where over ten holes had been opened. The pain from the green liquid had reached a point where getting shot was only a little bit worse, and now that hiding was no longer life-or-death we all started to groan and scream. The mere thought that the entity was attempting to claw its way back in was enough for me to take action.
I told the kid to get out of there and began to stumble my way forward, Smith just behind me. No. I don’t know how he kept moving. It’ll forever remain a mystery to me.
At this point I was seeing the building through tears, but I saw it well enough. Parts of the walls and electrical wiring had been removed and re-allocated into the center of the floor where more entity-controlled people were. These were my bosses, their bosses, and probably their bosses after that. Along with them were many of my friends and colleges that had gone missing. All of them were hunched over desks scribbling nonsense or sorting out materials from crates onto the floor. I recognized the crates as being destined for the ISS, now repurposed. The most striking thing, however, was in the center of all of it.
It was like some kind of sickly and slimy black net pulled into a ball-shape, wiggling and writhing as it floating in the air. Inside the net portion was a series of black shapes and nothing else.
What this thing was started to click for me, but what happened next only cemented my thought.
Smith stomped forward with the rage of a dying man. With nothing to loose he leveled his weapon at the entity and screamed out his demand for it to release all it had possessed. When there was no answer, he opened fire. Or at least he tried. After two clicks of his handgun Smith quickly went to reload, only to realize that he didn’t have a clip in the gun in the first place. Or a clip on his belt for that matter. The handgun suddenly vanished from his hand, and then Smith started to follow suit. I say started because it’s important to point out how he went.
It was like layers of him were being deleted all at once. First his skin, his muscle, his bones, and finally his nervous system, all stolen from reality. Smith didn’t stop screaming until the last vestige of his body had been taken, his voice ringing from every direction at once before fading away.
Two emotions surfaced within me. First, of course, was the paralyzing realization that I knew the general concept of what this entity was now. The second was the paralyzing fear of that concept.
When we draw a stick figure on a piece of paper we don’t think much of it. It doesn’t think much of us either, as if it were to be alive it couldn’t comprehend our existence. It knows up, down, left, right, but forwards and backwards? The stick figure couldn’t leap into the third dimension without assistance from a human. It had been long been theorized that there was a forth dimension. Not time of course, don’t get confused, I’m talking about a fourth spacial dimension. I’d studied the fourth dimension and what it could possibly look like as a hobby along with every other scientifically related thing I’d come across on my path to NASA. How I’d seen Smith vanish lined up almost one-to-one what passing into the fourth dimension could look like, a theory made manifest. I, standing in that room and in unbelievable pain, was that stick figure. A stick figure that could not comprehend the dimensions around me, or the entity that now stared down at my page free to erase me at will. I had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, in that moment I felt I only had one option. I ran at the small portion of itself that the entity had made known at the center of the room. And then I touched it.
It’s… Extremely hard to visualize for you what happened next. I was both falling an ascending through a plane of fractal contradiction. Light flashed in unknown angles and sound reverberated through my head. In my mind I knew I had just launched myself into the fourth dimension in a fit of fear, and I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with not only that but everything around me. I saw… Things. Black amalgamations of concept itself. I could only sense the eyes now falling upon me as the structure of reality itself closed in around my very being. Then a second presence.
I found myself the subject of communication, like something had stuck a spike in my head and fed me crude binary code. Then I found myself in Australia.
The sun was rising above the ocean next to the beach I had appeared on. The word-like feelings of a fourth-dimensional entity still processing in my head. Roughly, it was an apology, and a scolding of a younger entity. My eyes were forced to gently glance at an anthill a few meters away. Then I looked up, now in control of my eyes, and saw a blazing comet falling from the sky. The ISS had fallen out of orbit and was burning up in-atmosphere.
Officially NASA is still business as usual until 2031 when the ISS officially gets decommissioned. But I’ll never come to terms with the reality I now find myself in. We were ants played with by a malicious child from beyond our understanding. Nothing but toys in a fleeting moment of boredom for it, a terrifying national emergency costing hundreds of lives for us. And the worst part? It could happen again at any moment. The fourth dimension exists, and we are powerless to stop it.