The air was stifling and hot. Sweat beaded my skin, rolling down the back of my neck and dripping against the cool tiles below. Despite the unpleasant humidity, I couldn’t risk opening any windows. I couldn’t do anything that would give away my presence. After all, who was to say what might be lurking outside. Even if I couldn’t be seen, I could be heard, smelled, touched. It was too much of a risk.
Instead, I reached up and ran my hand over the back of my neck, wiping away the sweat. My hair stuck to the side of my face, my skin damp. It was uncomfortable, but not as bad as the gnawing hunger in my stomach. I only had so many rations left, and I couldn’t waste them. One meal a day. That’s what I was down to.
How much longer would I have to hide here? Did they even know where I was? If they couldn’t see me, would they still be able to track me? I didn’t know. Nothing made sense. Nothing had made sense since that day.
The day the aliens came.
It had been like any other spring day; cool and drizzling, with brief spells of sunshine that did little to ward off the remnants of the winter chill. Nobody had been prepared for what was coming. Nobody could have expected the world to be breached by lifeforms beyond our own in only a matter of hours.
I’d been in the lab that day, as any other day, when we got the call. Something was happening in the stratosphere above. Movement that shouldn’t be there. Unidentified phenomena approaching the Earth at a rapid rate. We didn’t know how many of them there were at the time. In the shadows, we’d been preparing for this day – for the possibility of alien life – for centuries, and yet nothing we had anticipated would help us deal with their arrival.
When they came, we could do nothing.
They appeared among us as wraiths. Immaterial, abstract lifeforms, like drifting clouds of pulsing light. They had no faces, no limbs or appendages, they weren’t human in appearance, or like anything else we’d seen before. They were something different altogether, something unknown, extraterrestrial. They had sentience but no concrete bodily form. They were fragile, delicate things that seemed to flow with the wind. But that made them impervious to harm, indestructible in a sense. We could barely touch them. The feeling of one passing by was akin to a damp breeze on your skin, too ethereal to properly grasp.
When they came, every scientific and technological mind around the world was devoted to understanding and communicating with these alien visitors. Before we could do anything, we had to determine their reason for coming here, whether it be peaceful or a threat to humanity itself.
Panic and chaos quickly ensued once the public got word of the invasion. News outlets across the globe began to spread reports of ‘strange, ghost-like creatures’ appearing among us, supposedly come from outer space. People cried about the end of the world, that the day had come when the Earth was no longer their own. Shops were raided for supplies, people locked themselves in their homes, everyone with a weapon prepared to defend their family and friends.
But there was no need. These aliens were no threat to us. They left us completely alone.
Scientists were baffled by these creatures who seemed to have no physical body, and yet some form of intelligence. They had the infrastructure and technology to travel to Earth, and yet they had no form of communication or interaction – with each other or humans. They were nothing more than ghosts, drifting through the world, searching for some purpose that we could never hope to understand.
Why did they come here? What did they want? Any and all attempts at communicating went down in failure. They responded to no stimuli we presented them with, and showed no interest in the state of our affairs. Any attempt to capture one of them was unsuccessful, for their wraith-like bodies could pass through anything. Even when faced with weapons, they did not react. It was impossible for us to determine anything about these lifeforms. Despite all of our technological advancement and the combined geniuses of our minds, we were completely and hopelessly baffled by them.
As the weeks, and then months, went by, nothing changed. Every attempt and experiment determined to interact with these beings was futile. We knew no more about them than we did on the day of their arrival. They needed no sustenance, no sleep. They did not interact with each other. It was hard to believe that they had any biological or sentient configuration at all. Their brains or organs were not visible even within their ghostly bodies, yet they had the presence of something on the threshold of the living and the unliving.
When it became clear they had no ill intent towards us, people’s panic slowly began to recede. They posed no threat to daily life, and people gradually got used to them being there.
But one problem was quickly becoming clear: they were increasing in number. Whether more were appearing from outer space, or they were somehow multiplying themselves, we couldn’t determine. But as the months passed, more and more of them seemed to crowd our streets.
Humanity once again proved their ability to adapt. Work and life gradually began to return to normal. With no means of communicating or interact with these alien forms, we had no choice but to simply accept their presence among us. It appeared they were here to stay.
But as their numbers began to grow, a new problem presented itself: visual pollution. With their immaterial bodies clustering and bleeding together, they began to create obscuring mists that covered streets and open areas, like a suffocating fog of dampness.
Accidents were rife on roads and in public areas, drivers and pedestrians unable to see oncoming traffic because of the dense cluster of bodies in their way. Reports of technology malfunctioning in their presence also began to surface, though we were never able to determine if this was true or not. The main issue came in hospitals; treatment rooms flooded with these wraiths, causing fatal accidents on the operating tables. Although they never harmed us directly, it was clear that they were becoming a problem.
The rising death toll began to cause a new wave of panic, and scientists began to once again search for answers.
Before the aliens came, I was part of a team researching the effects of radio waves and sound waves on human bodies. Some of my more controversial theories had been entirely rejected by the board in the past, but after the arrival of the aliens, I dug out my old papers to re-review. I’d been working on a series of experiments that involved manipulating brain waves through sound and frequency not usually heard by the human ear. Although I’d been condemned from human testing for some of my more outlandish hypotheses, the results I’d garnered in the past had proven interesting.
So, after months of sleepless nights, pouring every second of my day into my research, I finally came to a solution. I had developed a sound frequency that should, theoretically speaking, make the extraterrestrial beings invisible to the human eye. Because of their unusual biological structure, I had managed to create a signal that would block out the visual receptors that fed such information to the brain, thus rendering them invisible to us.
I proposed my hypotheses to the board of scientists I worked under, and despite some scepticism, my idea was accepted. Nobody had come close to any other kind of solution, and the situation had grown desperate. They were willing to try anything.
Over the next few days, I worked with dozens of other scientists and physicists to create a platform from which I could broadcast the signal across the globe, thereby rendering the aliens invisible to the human eye, and returning the world to some semblance of normality.
With all of my preparations complete, it was finally time to commence the broadcast. Despite all of my setbacks and the critics who had rebuked my theories, my hard work would finally come to fruition for the better of the world.
Only, that isn’t what happened.
Something had gone wrong along the way. A single miscalculation, a flaw in the signal, some kind of variable I hadn’t factored into my hypothesis. Whatever it was, it meant my calculations were incorrect.
Because what became invisible to the human eye wasn’t the aliens who had invaded our planet, but humans themselves.
Across the entire world, people simply vanished. They could still be heard and felt and touched, but they couldn’t be seen. The signal completely erased our ability to see other people.
Chaos immediately spread across the globe. Mass panic and hysteria drove the masses. Nobody knew what was happening, nobody knew what to do. All of a sudden, everyone they knew had disappeared, become unseen to the human eye.
The only time humans became visible again was upon death. Bodies began to litter the streets, spreading disease and more panic. Hospitals were overrun with panicked patients, unable to get the treatment they needed. Death stained everything.
And in the midst of it all, I had no choice but to run. They blamed me for the failure, for the destruction of humanity. I told them there was no way to undo the signal or reverse its effects, but they wouldn’t listen. They came after me, forcing me to fix the mistakes I had made. But I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do. The damage was irreversible.
I managed to escape the lab, but the world outside was even worse. Rife with danger and disorder. People were trampled by invisible crowds; the streets became a roadblock of crashed cars and mangled bodies. Nowhere was safe amid the chaos. I had to find somewhere to hide, somewhere they wouldn’t find me. Because once they did, my life was over.
And now I was here. An abandoned research facility in the middle of nowhere. The place had been locked up, empty for years, rife with dust and cobwebs when I’d broken inside. I thought I would be safe here, somewhere they wouldn’t be able to find me.
It had only been two weeks since I fled here, but I was already running out of food and the air was smothering. Even so, it was too dangerous to leave. I didn’t know who was out there, unseen, waiting for me to make a move. It was too much of a risk.
I was trapped here, in this stifling prison. Hungry, tired, scared. But what could I do? There was no way to fix what I’d done. This was the end of everything as we knew it. I’d brought this mess upon myself, upon the world, but how could I have known the consequences? I thought I’d been helping humanity, but instead I’d condemned it. There was no going back now.
Something thumped against the door on my right, and I froze, my heart pounding in my throat. A single bead of sweat rolled down my neck, hitting the floor.
I waited, listening, but heard nothing else. Maybe it had just been the wind. An echo of something far away.
As the silence drew on, the tension fled from my shoulders. It was probably nothing. After all, there was no way anyone could have known I was here. I had left no trace behind, nothing by which I could be tracked. I was fine as long as-
Something scraped against the outside of the door, a metallic screech that bore under my skin.
I lifted my eyes, hardly able to breathe. Dust caught my throat. Another bead of sweat dripped again the floor.
Slowly, the door handle began to turn.