Legends have warned us in times gone by,
Danger can fall on us from the sky,
Fire and rain, and hail, stone and flame,
And gods without mercy, and plagues without name.
Minus Ten and Counting - Sentries
Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not.
Both possibilities are equally terrifying.
For so long, Mankind has looked to the stars o’er above and wondered what might be out there.
What strange and alien worlds there are, and what life might be upon them.
And so our voices carried on waves of invisible light reached out, ‘Hello!’, they said, ‘We are here.’
And so our robotic children, sent in our stead for they were so much stronger and long lived than us, said ‘Hello!’, and carried a map for others to find us.
And the vastness of space did not reply, but still our ears yearned to hear that unfamiliar voice from afar.
And the children we had sent to the stars dutifully drifted through Nothing, with our maps and best wishes upon them.
‘That’s weird,’ murmured a bleary eyed Skywatch technician, named Walker, squinting at their screen.
‘Skywatch’ is a colliqual term for the Deep Space Tracking and Observation program.
Run by a international effort under the UN as part of an initiative to maintain transparency about international space operations and track any celestial objects which might pose a threat to Earth itself.
Skywatch is considered to be largely unimportant in the wake of geopolitical events.
‘What’s weird?’ asked Johannsen, leaning over to look at the data on their workstation.
‘Check out these images we just pulled from the Very Large array.’ He tapped at his keyboard, bringing up a few images.
‘I don’t see anything weird.’ Johannsen said, peering at his terminal. ‘Wait. There’s some distortion. Are we looking at instrumentation failure?’
‘No, I don’t think so … here’s the next three images taken by the VLTA.’ He pronounced the acronym ‘Veeltah’, ‘If it was instrument failure, it’d stay in the same quad since it’d be the same telescope … but it’s moving.’
‘Moving? Are you seriously saying something’s bending light? Gotta be a bad joke. Knock it off.’ Johannsen rolled their chair back over to their workstation.
‘I sorta wish it was April, Jo. What could even be …’
‘… You really are serious, huh? I ‘unno. Only people we know who’re out near Jupiter are the Chinese. Maybe they’re playing with exotic matter again.’
‘We’d’ve picked up the explosion if they were.’ Walker mused, reaching to rub at his eyes. ‘I mean, an Alcuberrie drive would be the most logical thing.’
‘If impossible.’ Johannsen quipped.
‘What could it be, then, aliens?’ Walker laughed. ‘Maybe it is just instrumentation. Probably is. When was the last time we did a recaliberation cycle on the VLTA?’
‘It’s been a few months.’ Johannsen replied, turning back to her workstation. ‘I’ll get a work order open with Maintenance.’
The current state of geopolitics, and by extension inter-solar politics meant that most occurances in the Outer solar system were considered the byproducts of experimentation.
Attempts to create and harness exotic matter while chasing the fabled ‘warp drive’ had been born and sputtered out of existence a few times, with interest from First World nations largely fading before theory could be put into practice.
Most nations had agreed to limit high-energy particle physics experiments to the outer reaches of the Solar System, more out of an abundance of caution than any particular interest in cooperating.
This agreement only came into effect after the first exotic matter experiments on the Moon went disaterously wrong, resulting in a humanitarian crisis and subsequent unprecedented cooperation between all nations to avert the consequences.
Their efforts in space had largely been focused on the the claiming - and development - of their colonies and space fleets. The primary competing powers were the North American Space Compact (NASC) and the South American Aerospace Accord (S3A).
The People’s Republic of China was a solitary power that rivaled both of those states on their own, and the last but still potent competitor was the International Space Exploration Organization, based in Africa.
Out in deep space, at the very edges of the Solar System, a curious event was occuring.
Space was folding in on itself as a superdense object was slowly compressed by means Mankind could barely even concieve.
Light bent around the object from it’s immense gravitational pull - it had been sitting here, absorbing light and mass for the past five years. Listening. Waiting.
Finally, when the time came,
The object blinked out of being, and a thin rip in the fabric of the world appeared in it’s place.
From which emerged a small, long, thin spire with engines upon on end, brilliant radiators glimmering brightly as it’s engines pushed out a plume of superheated plasma.
It’s angular, spindly architecture was - wholly - alien.
They had heard our song, They had heard our cries, And now they had come.