Thirty days.
The countdown has started, North America shivers under the shadow of a massive alien spacecraft, and humanity is hurtling toward an unknown future that lurks at the end of the timer. Somewhere, somehow, the heroes are making their plan...
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HARRISONBURG, VIRGINIA, USA August 31, AFTER
The Waffle House quiets as the scribe opens the door and steps inside. Heads turn and lights flicker, and the 24/7 restaurant finally pauses. Someone whispers something to someone else, but there's no reply. Even the music in the overhead speakers takes a breather between songs.
A hostess breaks the silence, breezing by the scribe to say, "Pick a seat."
The scribe takes a seat at the counter and pretends to look over the Waffle House menu. He knows what he'll order. He ate here many times before, especially in the days leading up to the mysterious craft's final countdown. In fact, it used to hover right above this very Waffle House only a few weeks ago.
"Nice weather today," the scribe says to the customer seated next to him. The customer slides down to the other end of the counter.
The restaurant resumes its chaotic hum, and a server approaches the scribe with the vacant look in her eyes that everyone carries around these days. The odds are 50-50 that she'll be overly friendly or outright hostile. There isn't an in between anymore. Everyone processes what happened in their own way, and almost no one talks about it. In five years' time, the scribe supposes, all manner of conspiracy theories will claim an event everyone on Earth experienced never happened.
Thankfully, the server gushes with friendliness, adjusted for a Waffle House. She asks the scribe, "Whatcha want?"
"What's good here?" the scribe says, more out of conversation than curiosity.
"I ain't got time to make decisions for you. You came in hungry, didn't you? Pick something," the server says.
After he places an order he'll ignore later, the scribe pulls out a pen and a notebook. Someone needs to write down what happened to them as a testament. It's not to make money or to brag, the scribe tells himself, but for the sake of understanding. No one understands what happened after the countdown, or why the craft appeared in the first place, or what any of it means. Maybe, someone in the future will, but only if there's something to consider.
"Why do I have to write it? My experience is so strange," the scribe asks himself under his breath. The ocean of vacant eyes in the Waffle House settles his doubts. The world is still too rattled to commit to remembering, floating like amoebic automatons. Stimulus-response. Stimulus-response. Hungry-eat. Eat-pay. Pay-leave. Leave-sleep. Sleep-shit. Shit-hungry. Repeat.
The scribe puts pen to paper and starts to write.
***
Ch. 1, Verse 1 – THEY don't believe HIM anymore. THE OBJEKT, that baffling and beautiful bullet in the sky—that was the sky—is gone now. Finished with its countdown from 30, it simply vanished the morning of August 31. It took with it so much, and left even more, but mainly—to the chosen few people known as THEM or THEY or TheY, since the last letter of the alphabet was forbidden to THEM—it took THEIR belief in HIM. However, it was not always that way, and it is of incredible importance that you understand why.
