Sord in Prosperity - Hope Beyond the Apocalypse

EP. 121 - ZERO-THIRTY-FOUR

"OKAY," HE NODDED. "GUESS we're this far. It was a typical day. Nothing special. Spring morning. Some of us were on duty monitoring. Some of us doing paperwork. Others were watching TV or in their bunks. I was up early that morning. Oh, and I forgot maybe the most important point."

"Which was?" Luna wondered, leaning forward to savor his next sentence.

"Before that day, we'd had reports. Like, a lot of reports. My senior officers had blown them off. Attributed them to group-think or mass psychology of observations. I can't recall, but there's some psychological mumbo-jumbo about people getting convinced they're seeing things just because others said they saw it, even though it never really happened. Mass hallucination, maybe. But some of these reports were from friends who worked at other command centers like mine. These were buds I'd get together with on occasion, though most were located hundreds of miles away. Hey, we all suffered the same ailments of being caged-in underground. Like I said, some of them did go bat-shit, and your only mode of sanity was talking with those dudes."

"So what were the reports?" I asked.

His hands whitened as he clenched them on the glass tabletop. "Sightings. I don't know how to tell you. Disks. Flying over the missile sites. Hovering over them. Flying around them. Staying there while you took pictures. Big ones. Small ones. Shit, I'm not even sure our analysts could tell you how big they all were. I mean, usually contrasted against a forest of trees? It's not like we had one of those liquor store robber yardsticks out there to measure the height of a hovering disk checking out our silo. And it's not like the disks were always consistently shaped. Some were reported to be like that awesome UFO on 'The Day the Earth Stood Still.' Others were like what you'd see in Flash Gordon or other movies. Lights. No lights. Slow. Fast. Wobbling. Steady. It was as if a whole menagerie of different alien species with their various spacecraft were taking their turns scoping it all out."

"Scoping what all out?" Luna asked. Each of us at the table wondered that same question.

"The obvious," he stated flatly. "Are we humans capable of blowing ourselves up thoroughly? Are the warheads stable? What electronics are we using? What fail-safe mechanisms are in place? What kind of fuel is in the rocket? Will we use this shit against them if they invade Earth? Will we poison the planet with them if they land here and set up shop? Geez, you can only imagine what they'd think of us."

"They'd think we're assholes for storing weapons that could, in one hellish hour, annihilate our species and waste the planet," I interjected.

He shrugged. "No shit. First, you wonder if what you're hearing has any truth to it. Then you hear enough similar stuff, from enough places, from enough good people in whispered conversations, and you wonder why these beings don't just accelerate the process. I mean, if we're so hell bent on defending our countries against each other and so paranoid. Shit, I could go on, but I won't. Humans generally, excepting this table and a handful of others, are short-sighted imbeciles. If we roast humanity one very bad day in a self-inflicted nuclear oven, it's because of that innate stupidity."

"I hope we don't 'roast ourselves,' Thomas," Luna pleaded. "But we haven't gotten to the point of your own experience, right? You can't have described all of this just to say others like you saw these things, and you are only divulging their experiences. I'm guessing you had your own?"

"Oh, I had my own. Sorry to drone on. Just that you needed the background for context. Only a few minutes more. I know some of us need to get going."

"Everyone okay to stay a few more minutes?" Luna inquired.

We all were drooling for more and nodded our heads in unison.

"So, nothing exciting is happening that morning, then all of a sudden, alarm bells start going off like nobody's business. You see, we had multiple alarms at every site, and they were set up to independently trip. You might have a movement alarm. An alarm for air pressure changes. One for weight, like a nut or pine cone falling on top or around the perimeter. Another for sound or smoke. In this case, at site zero-thirty-four, those bells and whistles started sounding off simultaneously as if somebody intentionally tripped them all."