The Meteorite.
The crash site was sealed off within twelve hours of the crash.
What had started as a local curiosity—a thunderous rumble, a streak of violet fire across the dawn sky—quickly escalated to national emergency status. By the time dawn bled into morning, the hillside near Harrington Valley was no longer a stretch of wind-swept grasses and moss-covered stones. Now, it was a perimeter—cordoned off by armed forces, crawling with hazmat teams, and humming with drones that sliced silently through the air.
Satellite images had already been scrubbed. Any amateur videos uploaded were flagged and swiftly removed. The blackout was clean, professional, surgical.
Beneath the temporary scaffolding of a white-tented mobile lab, the meteorite rested—jagged and eerily smooth at once, like molten glass frozen mid-flow. It pulsed faintly under the tarps, a glow that defied natural explanation: not luminescence, not reflection, but something else. Something inward.
A week later, Dr. Maureen Albrecht, lead geophysicist for the European Science Consortium, leaned over the object in her bio-shield suit, breath fogging her visor despite the filtered oxygen. "It's not from the asteroid belt," she murmured. "The composition… it's too organized."
"Organized?" a voice asked beside her. Colonel Rahman, head of site security, tilted his helmet slightly, standing next to Dr. Amara Sinclair, the mineral composition consultant.
Maureen nodded slowly. "Not random. Not chaotic. This mineral alignment was engineered—or maybe it grew itself. It's self-repeating, almost crystalline, but recursive. Like it's… responding."
She left the thought unspoken.
But Dr. Amara didn't hesitate.
"Like it's waiting."
Week Two.
Inside the subterranean research facility hastily repurposed beneath Site 0143, top minds from across the globe gathered in silence. The room was long and low, lit only by the sterile white of LED panels and the flickering readouts of rapidly-adapted instruments.
Monitors scrolled streams of alien data. Linguistic algorithms failed to classify the patterns. Magnetic field readings fluctuated in rhythmic bursts, like heartbeats—if heartbeats had geometric precision.
Dr. Nikos Savvas, a theoretical physicist from Athens, stared at the data printout with increasing agitation. "It's not noise," he said to no one in particular. "It's a sequence. The problem is, we're not listening on the right channel."
At the same time, Dr. Aisha Pennington from Oxford isolated a sound-frequency anomaly—something embedded deep within the mineral lattice of the meteorite. The audio file she pulled up was nothing like the rumbling or static she expected. It was… musical.
Not music as humans composed it. But rhythm, tone, and intentional shifts. Like a coded lullaby.
She turned to Nikos. "You think it's a message?"
"No," he said grimly. "I think it's a lock."
While the scientists battled the unknown, the politicians circled like sharks scenting blood.
Three different intelligence agencies had independently labeled the object as a "potential technological artifact." The term "weapon" was used only in classified briefings—never in public. But the implications spread fast.
By week five, international tensions flared.
The UN Security Council convened in emergency session, citing global security concerns. China accused the United States of concealing the artifact's true origin. The UK denied involvement but deployed naval forces near Iceland "for observation." Russia, as always, remained silent, but their long-range surveillance satellites repositioned over the North Atlantic.
What no one admitted aloud: this meteorite might not be a meteorite at all.
In hidden corners of military bunkers, contingency plans were drafted. If the object or energy proved communicative or controlled—who would control it? If it responded to energy—who would feed it first? If it opened—who would survive?
On the seventh week, something changed.
The meteorite, previously inert except for its faint hum and glow, emitted a pulse of rhythmic low-frequency energy. Thirty-six researchers on-site collapsed instantly. None died—but each reported identical hallucinations upon waking.
"I saw a room," one whispered. "Not a place I've ever been. But I remembered it anyway."
"A room filled with mirrors," said another. "But none of them showed me."
Galaxies.
Worlds.
Ruins.
They were never the same—but only after threes
Dr. Maureen Albrecht demanded the recordings of all biometric readouts during the event. What she found chilled her: during the pulse, the brain waves of each of all three victims synchronized perfectly. For three hundred and thirty-three seconds, their minds were operating as one.
Not connected by a machine.
Linked by the meteorite.
Maureen stared at the specimen for a long time that evening. Its surface now bore strange indentations—like symbols, shifting too subtly to photograph.
It was evolving—or was it changing
Week Eight
Despite weeks of exhaustive analysis, the object at Site 0143 remained impenetrable to understanding.
Specialists from Brazil, Japan, Nigeria, and Sweden pored over the data, each bringing world-class methodologies and tools. And yet, consensus eluded them. Only one fact drew unanimous agreement: the object defied the known laws of physics.
Thermal imaging returned inconsistent results. The object radiated no stable temperature—sometimes colder than liquid nitrogen, sometimes warmer than the human body, fluctuating without external stimulus.
Isotopic analysis uncovered elements that bore no terrestrial signature. One compound mirrored a theoretical isotope proposed in a 1973 Russian particle physics paper—then dismissed as impossible.
Its surface altered at microscopic levels every twenty-four hours. At first, they suspected corrosion or environmental degradation, but the changes followed Earth's axial rotation precisely. It wasn't eroding. It was recalibrating.
Then came the silence.
4th Day. 15:16.
Without warning, every digital system within a 500-meter radius collapsed. It wasn't a surge. It wasn't a crash.
It was absence.
Cameras. Scanners. Smart pads. Even wristwatches. All blinked dead for exactly 3.3 seconds—then rebooted as if nothing had happened. No damage. No corrupted logs. But every device bore a missing slice of time. Just—gone.
A void in the record.
The footage jumped from 15:15:58 to 15:16:01. Nothing in between.
Security scrambled to verify if it was sabotage. Electromagnetic shielding was intact. Power grids held. Nothing explained the drop.
Worse, a faint echo of the phenomenon touched nearby cities. Flickering lights. Glitches. Minor outages. The official explanation attributed it to a regional thunderstorm. News networks were fed lines about lightning interference.
But Dr. Aisha Pennington wasn't satisfied.
Because for the first time, the meteorite's pulse—an internal rhythm that had continued since Day One—stopped.
Not slowed.
It changed.
How?
She stared at the silent monitors and whispered into her mic: "Inform Amara."
A new message blinked onto Principal Amara's restricted console at 16:12:
Antium samples exhibiting abnormal resonance behavior. Increased volatility in magnetic response. Recommend classified containment.
She frowned. The Antium core had been stable until now. But something—or someone—had triggered a spike in activity.
She tapped a note to herself:
Check proximity logs near Eastern Perimeter.
The private feed, buried beneath the school's public broadcast, flickered to life. It was a channel reserved for the Watchers and government liaisons only.
METEORITE UPDATE:
Researchers at Site 03 report increased instability in mineral samples. A temporary blackout has been imposed on public findings until the Defense Commission completes review. Potential resonance anomalies to be investigated further.
Surveillance teams are advised to flag irregular power spikes near academic installations.
Back to the Pool
Cough. Cough.
The harsh rasp shattered the thick silence.
The air was heavy with moisture, tinged faintly by chlorine and something sharper—the metallic tang of adrenaline and panic. Night cloaked the pool area in shadows, barely pierced by flickering amber lights that cast long, wavering silhouettes across the slick tiles and the still, trembling water.
Ripples danced restlessly on the surface, stirred moments before by a body dragged from the depths.
The world felt distant, muffled—like submerged sound trapped beneath a fogged veil. The cold bit through soaked skin, reaching into chilled bones numb with exhaustion.
Nearby, voices whispered urgently, mingling with faint crackles of static radios.
Figures moved at the edge of vision—silent watchers swathed in dark jackets, their eyes sharp and unblinking, scanning the scene.
A heavy, clammy hand gripped him beneath the arms, hauling him upward. The water's weight pulled hard, dragging at limbs too cold, too stiff to resist.
The pull was slow and unforgiving—until suddenly, breath broke free through clenched teeth.
Cough. Cough.
Wet, desperate gasps ripped from his throat as lungs convulsed to expel the weight of water that had filled them like cold, crushing lead.
His vision fluttered open, wavering against the dim glow, struggling to focus on blurred shapes and shifting shadows.
Faces loomed faintly, distorted by haze.
Voices urged him on, distant but insistent.
One voice—gruff and clipped—cut clearly through the fog.
"Stay with us. Keep breathing."
The cold clawed deeper as his vision swam. Something sharp pressed into his ribs—steady, insistent pressure meant to coax life back into a body slipping toward the edge.
He coughed again, wet and rattling, chest heaving as his lungs fought for precious air.
Slowly, the world sharpened around him.
The wet fabric clung to his skin like a second, cold layer. The sterile scent of antiseptic hovered nearby. Rough tile pressed into his cheek. The weight of watching eyes—expectant, patient—bore down.
He was alive.
But the night was far from over.
Because—
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING...