Harold Grey sat in a dimly lit control room of the Pentagon. His finger danced over the keyboard, analyzing data and signals rapidly. He noticed something as he was searching through stations through the galactic of space. Something strange. Control Station 3C on planet Iprium was quiet – too quiet. No signals have been sent from there for almost 3 hours. A soft hum vibrated from the walls, the only sound in an otherwise still and sterile environment. Harold had gotten used to the solitude, but tonight, something felt different, almost eerie.
Ignoring the quiet humming of the walls, Harold kept digging, trying to find even the slightest of signals from 3C. It started as a faint anomaly in the signal spectrum – a strange pulse that wasn’t there before. At first, it was barely noticeable, like the static that occasionally rattled the communication channels. Harold was about to dismiss it as background noise when the pulse returned. Stronger. Consistent. It repeated in a deliberate pattern, like a heartbeat that demanded attention.
He sat up straight, fully attentive. His fingers hover over the keyboard. He put on headphones and listened to this signal with noise cancellation. It wasn’t just any interference, but something purposeful. A signal. A call. Harold realized that the signal was scrambled. It was a puzzle left solely for Harold to find.
Harold accessed the station’s signal filters, isolating the noise. It was encrypted-complex, layered with several fail-safes that indicated whoever sent it didn’t want to be found. He frowned. He had seen encrypted signals before- anomaly bursts, stray messages from deep space, even a hacker that had put cat sounds into the Pentagon files with 5 layers of safety… this felt different. It felt scary. He doesn’t know whether this is a prank or if it’s life or death. Whatever it was, protocol calls for encrypted messages to be decrypted and sent to the President.
Harold began his journey of finding the purpose of this message. The message seemed to be old. Very old. The timestamp buried deep in the code suggested it had been transmitted nearly four centuries ago. Yet, despite the age, the signal appeared to be arriving in real-time, like a message from the past…or perhaps from the future.
Harold started sweating profusely as if he had acquired diaphoresis while decrypting the message. There was no reason a signal from that era should be reaching her now. The technology of that time had long been obsolete, and the galaxy had moved on. It didn’t make sense.
Harold typed in a few commands, decrypting the message and translating it to English. His computer flashed the bright red words:
“Warning: The End is Coming. The Future is Lost. Find the Source. Before It Finds You.”
A chill crawled up his spine.
Harold stared at the screen, his heart pounding in his chest. The words lingered before him as if mocking the very air he breathed. “The End is Coming. The Future is Lost. Find the Source. Before It Finds You.” Each syllable seemed to carry the weight of a thousand unanswered questions. His mind raced, searching for meaning, trying to make sense of a message that made no logical sense.
He leaned back in his chair, hand on his forehead, thinking. His brain was fogged, the implications of the message crashing against his thoughts in frequencies of waves. This wasn’t just an old transmission. It was an urgent warning, a cry for help, sent from a time long ago. Or was it from the future? His eyes darted to the timestamp on the file: nearly four centuries ago. A voice from the distant future, or perhaps the distant past reaching him now in the present.
Harold tried to process the message methodically, but the urgency of it gnawed at him. “Find the Source. Before It Finds You.” Who or what was “It”? What source? The message offered no answers – only riddles.
His fingers moved quickly as he traced the signal’s origin, which came from Iprium, specifically Station 3C. But the station was silent, offline with no explanation in the logs. Something was off.
Panic began to rise. Whatever this was, it wasn’t normal.
Harold pushed forward, typing rapidly, tracing the signal’s trajectory deeper. Suddenly, an unexpected alert: an unregistered ID had accessed the system. Someone – or something – had gained access.
The screen flickered, showing a burst of data – symbols, and codes, shifting in an unfamiliar pattern. Then a new message flashed:
“This is the Last Message: Harold Grey, you’ve been chosen. The End is near. You cannot escape.”
This wasn’t a glitch. Whoever – or whatever – was behind this had targeted him, and they were getting closer. The walls hummed louder and louder almost torturing Harold. He couldn’t handle it anymore.
Harold disconnected from the system, ready to deliver this message to the president, but the message lingered in his thoughts. A warning from the past… or the future? Time, space, and reality were blurring, and he realized the source of the message was far closer than he’d anticipated.
The end had already begun.
Aarav's World 