EIGHT, FOUR. (COLLISION EVENT.)

fiftyone

In 1864, deposits of lead and silver were discovered in the region surrounding Groom Lake, a salt flat in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada. In the 1870s, the Groome Lead Mines Limited company financed mines throughout the area. Ownership of the region switched hands over the next few decades, but mining continued until 1918 due to the Collision Event that disrupted the mines entirely, killing many. The salt flat itself was used during World War II as an airfield runway in the 1940s, until that, too, closed down due to the next Collision Event in 1947, nearly thirty years later.

Original detection of the Collision Events is what provided the impetus for the CIA to examine the region further. If things kept falling to earth there, perhaps it would be a good spot to try and send things back up. In 1955, as part of the development of the top-secret Lockheed U2, they built a test facility near Groom Lake, attaching it directly to the collapsed mines.

Ultimately, they were worried of another Collision Event in another twenty-nine years. And another one twenty-nine years after that. And another one twenty-nine years after that. And what was more, there was evidence to suggest that there had been Collision Events in the past, too. Every few decades, the cycle repeated. Something came through the atmosphere, landed in the desert, and stayed to rot, hidden by nature. So it had gone since, our best guess, the 1400s. Ever since us white devils had made it to the New World.

Counting them up, we found the debris of forty Collision Events in all, spread across the centuries. But why? What drew them all here? That was why we built the Lockheed, and all the planes that came since. It was our attempt to find out.

—

Of course the president wouldn't tell you what happened. Do you think he'd want to admit that there was something in our country that he had absolutely, positively, no control or understanding over? No one else would tell you anything either, make no goddamn mistake. They'll defend their majestic secrets to their graves if they've got to. The truth was, we never really adapted to the presence of those crafts. We learned to hide them, and to misdirect.

Solving the problem? Forget it. The second Collision Event coincided with the Roswell brouhaha, and that wasn't entirely a coincidence. We knew that if the nutjobs found the actual problem, they'd be screaming at the top of their lungs about how God himself touched down from the heavens and condemned humanity to destruction or some bull. So we just happened to crash a nuclear surveillance balloon, and call it a weather balloon to get the juice flowing. Took a few decades, but it worked. No one knew about the real Event but us, and that was the way we liked it.

At least, almost no one. There was an old friend with the surname of Mason who actually saw the Event happen. he told me, personally, what had happened. And I... I can't really ever forget what he told me. he said it was like he had been hiking along the desert and all of a sudden, the temperature dropped by a million degrees, it felt. Like all the warmth had been sucked out of his body. And then the sun just seemed to move across the sky rather suddenly, not on its slow progression, but just jumping right to the side and then careening to the horizon. Then a huge plume of smoke and dust kicked up in the distance, and when he ran to look for it, it was as if the desert hadn't been disturbed at all. Not a stone was out of place. It was as though the earth had swallowed the sun whole, and a new one had taken its place.

he ended up drinking himself to death, I heard. Wouldn't you, if you knew that no one would ever take you seriously when you tried to tell them that the sun was fake?

—

Eighteen floors below the main complex was where we ended up tunneling into the main chasm that held the 1918 event's craft. It was right in the heart of the mine, all the ores melting together or flat-out vaporizing, and then hardening back as they cooled. What resulted was an abnormal hunk of technology trapped in the dying metals of our planet. A powerful display of opposites meeting, or, uh, colliding. To give you an idea of what these crafts were like, just picture cubes. Cubes made from smaller cubes, with geometric patterns carved inside, landing in the heart of the earth. And although we were damn sure that these were alien ships, we couldn't exactly find any aliens to go with them.

Dead? No. It wasn't that the aliens had died or anything. They hadn't been there to begin with. These were remotely-controlled craft, as we discovered in the following decades. We never put the technology inside them to much use because we simply couldn't. It was too complicated for any modern-day equipment to parse, and we couldn't even begin to reverse engineer the stuff. how do you try to crack something that uses the fabric of reality as code? What we managed to figure out was that they were definitely being controlled remotely. We'd dissected enough of the ships to figure that out. And we'd even done enough to figure out what their purpose was.

Really, we had always assumed that an alien coming to our planet would want to do something cutesy or nice, like touch down in front of a raging, frothing crowd asking to be taken to our leader so they can give us a miracle cure or a diplomatic agreement or a formal declaration of war. Some trite crap like that. Either way there'd be global pandemonium because, you know, a goddamn alien just landed on Earth. But that didn't seem to be the case with the Collision Events. As best as we could tell, it was their job to land here, in the Nevada desert, every thirty or so years, completely unmanned, explicitly so they could be left in the ground to collect data. Data on the way our world worked, on how it functioned, on what every single living thing was doing at every moment.

Only things got worse. All evidence suggested that the ships were only getting bigger and bigger with each successive Collision Event. When we briefed Eisenhower about the whole thing, he was understandably perturbed. Wasn't it likely that these "events" (he hated the broad term we used for it, but what else could you call it? A goddamn welcoming party?) would just keep bumping up and up until we had a potential mothership on our hands? You can't just fling a tarp over a god-cube hovering over the entire state of Nevada now, can you?

Never had I ever expected to see something like this cube. But there it was. Not the size of Nevada, but twice as big as anyone in the room in any spatial dimension. We'd taken bits and pieces off of the cube for study over the months, but you could still tell what its shape was supposed to be. We didn't want a repeat of what happened to the 1889 craft, so we'd taken it slow and steady. But we were close to our real goal. It was why the government had acquired this base, why we'd spent so much time into taking apart glorified Rubik's Cubes. We were going to trace the steps of the fifty-first.

—

In 1976, the entire facility was on high alert. Ten Collision Events had passed in the twenty-one years since the CIA acquired the complex and expanded it into the megalith that stood poised to retake the skies, the depths of the earth, and whatever lay beyond the horizon. Never mind the fact that man himself had stepped foot on the Moon and found no signs of any alien life – we were still determined to carry out our mission.

Since none of the Collision Events in this intermediate period were nowhere near as huge as the ones that coincided with the twenty-nine year gap, it was only through our intervention and careful tracking that we were able to accurately detect them and then reach the crash sites. Typically, the cubes just dissolved into the ground before we could safely unearth them. This led us to believe that many other Collision Events have occurred in the past – they've just become inaccessible, eventually probably liquefying into the ground due to their small size.

That didn't help much. What also didn't help was that although the cubes were incredibly hot on their way down, they didn't show any signs of wear and tear consistent with typical re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. It was as if they simply hadn't passed through the majority of the air, and just blinked into existence some few miles above the ground before falling at top speed right into the desert. Some experiments that the xenourges had tested out did show some limited teleportation abilities on the cubes, but we were never able to get a whole ship to blink entire astronomical units in an instant.

had we ever actually managed to do such a thing, we'd have avoided the impending mess entirely. But we couldn't, so we didn't, and we tried the next best thing. Because when the only eyewitness account of one of these things landing explicitly included the sun fucking falling from the sky, and all the surveillance equipment we'd put into the air to try and see one of these in motion ended up capturing nothing but multicolored disturbance no matter how hard we ironed the kinks out of the lenses, we knew that we needed to get serious if we ever wanted a shot.

Eventually we developed a system for plotting out the big twenty-nine year Collision Events, and were pleased to see that our calculations were more or less accurate for the 1976 event. You can always tell when a Collision's coming based off of the compasses. All magnetic equipment just kinda screws itself when one of the cubes hits the sky. Our base was well-protected, but put anything outside of our field so it's in range, and you can see it happen clear as day. So we had magnetic sensors all over the place, and when we saw the obscene readings we were getting, we knew it was time. We had a LAGEOS ground station built right in our backyard, basically. Camoflauged it to look like some plane testing junk, then pointed it up to the skies and waited to see if LAGEOS could spot anything. There were two of em. Satellites designed to map out the Earth's surface, ocean floors and all, to see its precise shape. The CIA figured they could use it to get a close look at future cubes, seeing as this one was supposed to be the biggest of them all.

And sure enough, one summer day, everything fell into place.

—

Now, the past several years had been spent testing out aircraft. Aircraft that could go faster than you ever thought possible, planes designed to help us fight the commies and understand the cubes all at the same time. It was the D-21B that we were working on at the time that caught the elusive bastard. When the magnetic anomalies hit their crescendo and the top men ordered immediate launch of the planes, we wasted no goddamn time. That plane flew right out of the base so fast you could swear Satan was chasing after it.

Soon enough the D-21B was high in the sky, with a special object in tow. The trick was that the pilot had taken a cube with him on board. The xenourges had dissected what looked like its innermost core, the source that was remotely controlled. We figured that if it got into close enough range with the incoming cube, it would be activated too, and we could find the exact coordinates of wherever both cubes had come from. Well, the D-21B flew right up to the sun, and exactly as Mason described, the sun just started falling from its point in the sky. The pilot saw it happen crystal-clear; he was swearing up and down to mission control that the sky just started bending and changing color, and that the sun was getting brighter and brighter and heading towards him. Mission control ordered him to stay on course and you could tell the fucker wanted nothing more than to bail from the plane right then and there, but he held course like a hero.

When we reached the crucial moment, exactly as planned, the D-21B rolled out of the way of the incoming cube just in time, scrambling to see where it had come from. The pilot had some kind of onboard camera relaying everything to us, and his feed came back in pretty fair quality. just good enough that I could make out what I was seeing while just bad enough that my mind had trouble accepting that it was what I was seeing. The pilot was frantically describing to us a hole in reality, punched right out of the sky. The warped blue colors just impossibly curved inwards into an utter singularity filled with blinding white light. We were about to make contact. We knew it.

Except just then the audio transmissions bursted with static, blocking out almost everything else. We heard snatches of the pilot screaming and cursing. he was yelling about how the cube was getting pulled back into the hole, and it was taking the plane with him. Mission control ordered the poor bastard to change course immediately, to eject from the craft, to do anything at all to escape. But it was too late, and they knew it was too late, you could tell in the tone of their voices. We all watched the plane pass through the event horizon and blink out of existence. You bet your ass all of us went up to look for him, to try and find any shred of the plane, or the pilot. But we couldn't find even the smallest scrap. The biggest cube we'd ever seen landed just north of the facility as predicted, and the D-21B was gone. That should have been the end of the story right there. We'd lost contact with a cube and our experimental aircraft through some swirly energy tube, and that was that. But then – and I know how utterly stupid this sounds – something big happened.

—

Running into the mission control room came the xenourges, who were all yelling about the cubes we had in containment, saying that they were all "waking up," in a sense. The leading theory had been that the cubes were most active while they were falling to earth, and then when they hit dirt and started collecting data, they entered some kind of stasis mode. The closest we'd come to activating them again was by doing the limited teleporting experiments. If the pilot passing through that portal lit all of them up again, we could be in for some serious containment breaches.

Throughout the next couple of minutes, the xenourges began transporting the cubes into mission control and making sure they were locked up so we could see them. Their seams and edges were lighting up and shining, and some of the biggest ones started glowing, too. One of the xenourges must've wheeled a cube too close to mission control, though, because all the equipment started shrieking discordantly. All the cubes started following suit. When the noises eventually calmed down some, we realized that it started taking patterns and distinctive sounds, and then we recognized the pilot's fractured, distorted voice.

Officials swarmed into mission control from all points in the facility, eager to see us make what we presumed would be first contact after all. Mission control scrambled to the audio stations, trying to debug them patch into the frequency of the cubes by hooking up to one of them directly. We almost blew out the entire power grid, but we managed thanks to some backup generators. God bless ya, backup generators. When we finally established connection with the pilot he told us that he'd entered a blank white void full of shimmering sunbeams. We had no idea what the hell he was talking about, and assumed he was delusional until every cube started shining so bright you could swear there were fifty suns all around us. Someone had the idea to tell the pilot to yell "STOP," and when he did, the cubes shut off again, going back to glowing moderately.

Gradually we figured out that whatever the pilot did, or was doing, was messing with the cubes somehow, probably because he'd taken one of them back to its origin point. We asked him where he was going, and he said that the cube was still leading him "to the source." And at this point every cube began blinking in random colors at once, like a light show at a concert or some shit. We asked him, "to the source of what," because obviously. And his one-word, completely reverent reply was...

"Everything." The cubes kept on blinking.

Our quality of mission control's contact with the pilot started dropping severely because of how bad the interference was getting, but in a last-ditch effort to communicate, one of us asked him to ask for a portal back to Earth, and he started ranting about how he didn't want to come back, because everything was perfect and fine right where he was here in the vertex of infinity, and how we could all join him too if we listened to the word. And all the cubes were blinking and glowing in this elaborate ritual, and the last question anyone asked him was how, ExACTLY, we could join him.

Moments before the pilot slipped into what I can only assume is timeless infinity, he told us that one day we could join him in kaleidoscopic anarchy, if we made absolutely certain to keep watch over our base, our country, and the world, and to make sure we recorded all possible anomalies that could threaten to disturb total incalculable order. It was our job, to keep watch. All of us. And then he went dark, and the cubes did too.

—

Endings are nasty sons of bitches. They leave you unsatisfied more often than not, leave you wanting more. But that, truly, was that. 1976 marked the the last Collision Event we ever recorded. The cubes stopped coming in, pretty much. Whatever the pilot did must have satiated them. We never got to see an alien face to face, if there was one in whatever sunlit void the pilot preached about. We gave him a hero's medal, made sure to tell his family, the works. We kept the cubes in top-secret storage in case we needed them again.

To be blunt, we all felt like crap. The general feeling was that we'd blown our shot at true first contact by not keeping connections going for longer, or by not sending more people in. But our work didn't stop just because no more cubes fell from the sky. Not one bit. The government effectively subdivided us into two teams. The one that would work on what they perceived to be wholly rational ideas – designing and redesigning airplanes and stealth missiles and the latest technology to keep us ahead in the arms race – and the one that would cut themselves off from humanity entirely – devoting themselves to the word of the fifty-first cube and making sure that the world would never be besieged by anything abnormal again.

Really, ever since that day those decades ago, that's what we've been doing. Working in the heart of the earth, dispatching teams across the globe to fix any errors, to right any wrongs. We remain a watchful eye in this world and whatever other worlds exist beyond that sun-kissed eternity. And although the stream of cubes stopped decades ago, we've managed to squeeze more information from them than we ever thought possible just through our experiments. We've captured thousands of anomalies in our quest to keep the world secure, controlled, and protected.

You may always find shelter under the watchful eye of The 51st.