Part One 

I’ve been flying for twelve years.
Twelve quiet, clean, rule-following years.

Every pilot has stories about weird turbulence, faulty instruments, or the time a bird strike scared the hell out of them on final approach. Me? My stories used to be about near-perfect flight records, smooth landings, and spotless checklists. My instructor once joked that I probably slept hugging the Aviation Maintenance Handbook. He wasn’t wrong.

My name’s Mortise Caldwell, age thirty-nine, commercial license, instrument rated, and until that day—November 3rd, 2024—I thought the sky was my safest place.

The morning started like a thousand others.
I was ferrying a Cessna 182 Skylane from Oakland to Albuquerque for a corporate client who’d snagged it at a government auction. A simple milk run. I’d filed the flight plan the night before, double-checked the weather—clear skies, mild tailwind, not a hint of turbulence.

I arrived at Oakland North Field around 6:30 a.m., coffee in hand, clipboard under my arm, feeling good. The ramp was quiet. Just a couple of mechanics finishing up work on a Piper Arrow across the way, their breath fogging in the cold dawn air.

I did my pre-flight in the usual rhythm: fuel caps secure, control surfaces free, oil clean, tires inflated, flaps checked. The 182 was old but solid—those old Continental engines could run forever if you treated them right.

By 7:00 sharp, I was in the air, climbing out over the Bay, the early sun bouncing gold off the water. It was one of those perfect flying days—the kind that reminds you why you ever took to the air in the first place.

The first sign that something was off came about two hours later, just past Tonopah, Nevada.

The Garmin GPS flickered. Just once, then twice. No big deal. Happens sometimes. But then the coordinates went haywire. My display said I was over the Pacific Ocean. Then Utah. Then back over Oakland.

I frowned, tapped the screen, even gave the casing a light slap—the universal pilot fix—but the data just kept cycling like a slot machine.

“Okay, that’s weird,” I muttered. I reached for my backup GPS—my phone. It was doing the same thing.

That’s when I felt it—the hair-on-the-neck feeling that pilots get when something in the air stops making sense.

The radio hissed, crackled, and then went silent.

No chatter from ATC. No cross-traffic. No emergency frequency. Just… breathing. A slow, rhythmic hiss that almost sounded like someone—or something—was on the other end of the line, exhaling right into my headset.

“NorCal Center, this is November-One-Seven-Eight-Charlie. Radio check?”

Static.

“Center, this is November-One-Seven-Eight-Charlie, do you copy?”

The only reply was that low, wet exhale.

I switched to my old magnetic compass. The one tool that never lies. Except today, it was spinning slowly, like a lazy carousel.

Now I was officially lost. Somewhere over the Nevada desert, with no working nav, no radio, and a compass acting drunk.

Every instinct screamed turn back. Retrace your course, find the Sierra Nevada range, and follow it home. But part of me hesitated—just a few more miles, maybe I’d fly out of the interference zone.

That hesitation ruined everything.

The engine changed first.

It didn’t cough or sputter—it just… changed. The sound went from a smooth hum to a metallic whine, like something grinding deep inside the cowling. The RPMs stayed solid, all gauges green, but the noise—it wasn’t mechanical. It was almost alive.

Then the vibration started. Subtle at first, like a tremor through the controls, then stronger, rattling the yoke in my hands.

“Not today,” I whispered, throttling back and preparing to divert west.

That’s when I saw them.

Three dark shapes in the distance, maybe ten miles out, heading straight for me.

At first, I thought it was military—F-22s from Nellis AFB maybe, running intercept on a stray civilian. It happens if you wander too close to restricted airspace. But these weren’t jets.

The shapes were… wrong.

They looked triangular, but the edges were too smooth, almost liquid. No wings, no contrails, no visible engines. Just three pitch-black silhouettes sliding through the air faster than anything I’d ever seen.

They weren’t flying—they were gliding, defying lift, drag, or gravity.

Within seconds, they were around me—one on each side, one behind.
No sonic boom. No noise. Nothing but the eerie hum of my own engine.

I craned my neck to the left window. The thing wasn’t painted black—it was black, like a hole in the world. My eyes couldn’t even focus on the edges. It was like staring into a shadow that refused to stay still.

Then the voices started.

Hundreds of them. All speaking at once, in a language that shouldn’t exist—harsh, grating consonants that seemed to bend the air around me.

I ripped my headset off. The voices didn’t stop.

They were inside my head.

The front object moved directly in front of my nose, about fifty feet away, and something on its surface began to shift. Not a symbol exactly—more like a geometry my brain didn’t have the math for.

The longer I looked, the more my head throbbed. Angles that added up to more than they should. Lines that twisted in directions that weren’t real.

And then—like a thought not my own—words formed in my mind.

“Witness. See. Know.”

My altimeter went insane. My airspeed needle slammed back and forth. The controls froze. I yanked, pushed, cursed—but the Cessna wasn’t mine anymore.

It was being flown.

The plane began to descend, smooth and controlled. And as the desert floor came into focus, my stomach dropped.

There it was—Groom Lake.

Area 51.

Every pilot knows the boundaries. You don’t go near that place. Not if you value your license—or your life. But I wasn’t flying anymore. Whatever was out there had taken control, guiding my aircraft toward the base like it had been summoned.

Below, vehicles were moving—military Humvees, jeeps, figures in black helmets sprinting across tarmac.

As my plane descended, the voices crescendoed, layering over each other until they formed a single, unified tone that wasn’t sound at all—it was pressure.

Then, clear as if someone whispered into my skull:

“You are not lost. You are chosen.”

The landing gear deployed by itself. The Cessna flared perfectly, touched down like a feather, and rolled to a stop.

Silence.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to open the cockpit door.

Outside, soldiers surrounded the plane, rifles raised. They wore no insignia—no unit patches, no names. Just black armor and mirrored visors.

One of them yanked the door open and pulled me out. My legs barely held me.

Then I saw the man walking toward us—gray hair, calm eyes, wearing a nondescript suit and tie. Not military, but he carried himself like someone who didn’t answer to anyone.

“Mr. Caldwell,” he said evenly, as if greeting me for a scheduled appointment. “I’m Director Kensington. You’ve had quite a flight.”

I could barely speak. “What—what were those things?”

He looked past me at the still, silent triangles hovering at the edge of the runway.

“They weren’t aircraft,” he said softly. “And they weren’t chasing you. They were escorting you in.”

Part Two 

The soldiers led me across the tarmac, rifles steady but not aimed directly at me. The desert sun was high now, baking everything in a sterile, shimmering heat. I glanced back over my shoulder.

The triangles were still there. Three of them. Hovering silently just above the concrete. No exhaust, no landing gear, no visible motion. But I could feel them — like a low hum beneath my skin, an energy that didn’t belong to this world.

Kensington walked just ahead, his pace calm, his hands clasped behind his back.
I noticed something in his stride — not fear, not even curiosity. Resignation. Like a man who’d seen this before and already accepted that nothing about it made sense.

They brought me into a hangar — a massive one, probably the size of a football field, sealed tight behind layers of reinforced steel. Inside, the air was cold, sterile, humming with fluorescent lights.
Rows of equipment lined the walls — instruments I didn’t recognize, monitors showing geometric diagrams, energy readings, and satellite telemetry that looked like gibberish.

A technician handed Kensington a tablet. He scanned it, nodded once, and turned to me.

“Mr. Caldwell,” he said, his tone almost gentle. “You entered restricted airspace. Normally, that would mean suspension of your license, possibly prison time. But this… situation is different.”

“Different how?”

“Because you didn’t just fly into restricted airspace,” he said. “You flew into their territory.”

“Their?”

He glanced toward a window overlooking the hangar floor. Through it, I could see one of the triangles parked just outside. Its surface was rippling slightly, like liquid glass disturbed by a sound wave.

Kensington’s voice dropped lower. “We’ve been studying them for seventy years. We don’t know what they are. We don’t know where they came from. But they’ve been here longer than we have.”

I shook my head. “You’re saying they’re… alien?”

He didn’t answer directly. “Come with me.”

We walked deeper into the facility, through corridors that felt more like a hospital than a military base. Glass windows revealed labs filled with equipment I couldn’t identify — humming generators, containment chambers, transparent cylinders filled with viscous fluid.

Inside one of those cylinders was a shape.
Humanoid, but not human. Too tall, too thin, with elongated limbs and skin the color of pewter. Tubes ran in and out of its torso. Its face was obscured by some kind of translucent mask.

I stopped. “What the hell is that?”

Kensington didn’t even glance at it. “A shell,” he said. “An empty body. The entities don’t need organic form. They occupy one when they have reason to interact physically. We’ve recovered several over the decades — from the triangles, from crash sites, from… incidents.”

“What kind of incidents?”

He paused. “Ones like yours.”

They led me into a windowless room — white walls, a table, two chairs. A single camera in the corner.
Kensington sat across from me, folded his hands.

“This is a debriefing. You will answer truthfully. Everything you say is classified under the National Secrets Act, and failure to comply will result in indefinite detention.”

I gave a bitter laugh. “Sounds voluntary.”

He smiled faintly. “You’d be surprised how many people refuse to talk. Usually because the exposure has already started.”

“Exposure to what?”

He slid a tablet across the table. The screen showed a scan of my brain — or something like it. Swirling patterns of light were pulsing across the hemispheres, forming faint geometric patterns that looked eerily familiar.

“Where did you get that?” I demanded. “You didn’t—”

“You were scanned the moment you entered the facility. Automated procedure. What we’re seeing here shouldn’t be possible.”

I stared at the pulsing shapes. They looked like the symbol I’d seen on the triangle. “What is it?”

“Information,” he said. “Or infection. We’re not certain which.”

He leaned back, studying me. “Tell me exactly what happened after your instruments failed.”

I hesitated, then told him everything — the flickering GPS, the spinning compass, the strange breathing on the radio, the black triangles, the voices in my head, the loss of control. I told him about the symbol that hurt to look at, the feeling that something saw me, the forced descent into Groom Lake.

When I finished, Kensington didn’t move for a long time. Finally, he said, “Do you remember any specific words from the voices?”

I nodded slowly. “They said… witness. see. know.”

His expression darkened. “Same phrase as before.”

“Before what?”

“The 2009 incursion,” he said quietly. “A private satellite drifted over this region. The crew reported hearing voices before losing contact. When we recovered the capsule, the occupants were gone. All that remained were imprints burned into the metal — the same geometry you described.”

A knock at the door. A woman in a lab coat entered, clutching a tablet. She looked exhausted — dark circles under her eyes, hair tied back in a messy bun. Her badge read Dr. Evelyn Chen.

“Director,” she said, “we have a situation.”

Kensington’s face hardened. “Define situation.”

“The containment fields are fluctuating. The energy readings from the primary triangle just spiked. It’s—”

A deep hum filled the air, vibrating through the walls, through the floor, through me. The lights flickered once, twice.

Chen’s voice trembled. “It’s activating.”

We rushed out into the hangar. The triangle was hovering again, just inches above the ground. Its surface glowed faintly blue, and the same symbol I’d seen in the sky was pulsing across it.

Technicians were shouting, equipment alarms blaring. Kensington barked orders into his radio, his voice calm but urgent. “Evacuate nonessential personnel! Initiate containment protocol Bravo!”

The hum grew louder — not sound, but pressure, like the air itself was compressing. My ears popped. The metal scaffolding around the hangar began to tremble.

Then I saw something move inside the triangle.

A shadow. A shape. Crawling just beneath the surface, like oil beneath glass. It pressed outward, distorting the material, forming the vague outline of a head, a torso, limbs—

Dr. Chen grabbed my arm. “Don’t look at it!”

Too late.

The shape’s “face” turned toward me. There were no eyes, no mouth, but I felt it looking.

The hum stopped. Total silence.

And then, a voice—not outside, not even inside my mind, but through me:

“Mortise Caldwell. Witness.”

The triangle’s surface split open like a wound. A wave of black liquid spilled out, spreading across the floor like smoke. Soldiers fired their weapons. The bullets did nothing. The liquid absorbed them.

It reached one of the soldiers’ boots. He screamed. The black matter climbed up his leg, wrapping around him, seeping into his uniform, his mask, his skin. The glow from the triangle spread through his veins like lightning.

He fell silent, stood up again, and turned toward us.

His eyes glowed blue.

And when he spoke, it wasn’t his voice. It was theirs.

“Witness. The cycle begins.”

“Fall back!” Kensington shouted. “Get to the inner corridor!”

We ran. The transformed soldier lurched forward, moving wrong — joints bending the wrong way, limbs stretching like cables. He slammed a hand against the wall, and the metal sizzled, melting where he touched it.

I followed Chen and Kensington through the emergency door, slamming it behind us. Red lights flashed overhead, alarms howling.

Kensington’s radio crackled. “Director, we’ve got multiple containment failures! Triangles Two and Three are active!”

Chen swore under her breath. “This can’t be happening. They’ve been dormant for decades—”

Kensington turned to her, his face pale. “How long do we have before full breach?”

“Minutes,” she said. “Maybe less.”

He looked at me. “Mr. Caldwell, I’m sorry, but you may have brought more than just yourself down from the sky.”

The corridor shook violently, dust raining from the ceiling. The hum returned, now deeper, resonating through my chest like a second heartbeat.

And then—faintly—through the chaos and alarms and shouts, I heard the voices again.

“Witness. Know. The beginning is near.”

I pressed my palms to my temples. The pain behind my eyes flared white-hot. I saw flashes — impossible geometry, the dry lake bed glowing like a circuit board, figures standing in light that wasn’t sunlight.

Dr. Chen shouted something, but her voice sounded far away.

“The hatching,” the voices said. “It begins.”

The world tilted. My knees gave out.

The last thing I saw before everything went black was the triangle outside the window — rising slowly into the air — and the shapes inside it unfolding.

Part Three

When I woke up, the world was red.

Not metaphorically — literally red. The emergency lights had switched to full lockdown mode, bathing the corridor in pulsing crimson. The air smelled of ozone and burning plastic. Somewhere above, something was grinding — metal shearing against metal, like the entire facility was coming apart.

My head throbbed. Every heartbeat sent another wave of pain through my skull, synchronized with the pulse of the red lights. For a moment, I thought I was still in the Cessna, caught in a stall, seconds from crashing.

Then I saw Dr. Chen kneeling beside me, shaking my shoulder.

“Mortise! Hey—stay with me!”

Her face was streaked with dust and blood. Behind her, Kensington was shouting into a field radio, his voice tight but controlled.

“…Containment breach confirmed in sectors five through seven. We’re sealing levels A and B. Do not attempt recovery—repeat, do not—”

A burst of static cut him off.

I groaned, trying to sit up. “What happened?”

Chen glanced toward a nearby observation window. “You don’t want to know.”

But I looked anyway.

Through the glass, I saw the main hangar — or what was left of it. The floor was coated in black, shimmering liquid, spreading like oil on water. The triangles floated above it, glowing faintly blue.
Only now there weren’t three. There were dozens.

They were multiplying. Folding in on themselves, splitting like cells under a microscope. Every few seconds, a new one formed — smaller, incomplete — before expanding to full size.

Inside each one, something moved.

And the air… it wasn’t just air anymore. It shimmered. Like heat haze, but alive.

Kensington slammed the radio onto the table, jaw tight. “We’ve lost surface contact.”

Chen ran her sleeve across her face. “We need to get to the lower levels. The radiation shielding might slow the spread.”

He turned to me. “Can you walk?”

“Barely.”

“Good enough. Move.”

We hurried down a flight of stairs that led deeper underground. The concrete walls here were older, rougher — relics of the Cold War era. The kind of bunkers built to survive the end of the world.

Fitting, I thought grimly.

Because that’s what this felt like — the end of something big.

As we descended, the air grew colder. The hum followed us, faint but persistent, echoing in the pipes overhead.
I realized with a chill that it wasn’t mechanical — it was biological. Like the facility itself was breathing.

At the bottom of the stairs, we reached a set of blast doors labeled LEVEL C — RESTRICTED ACCESS. Two guards stood there, pale and shaking, rifles clutched tight.
One of them—barely more than a kid—looked at Kensington with wide eyes.

“Sir, the— the men in Level B didn’t make it. The black stuff— it’s everywhere.”

Kensington nodded. “Seal this level. Nobody opens those doors again.”

The guard hesitated. “Sir, there are still people up there—”

“Seal it!” Kensington barked, his voice slicing through the panic like a knife.

The young soldier swallowed hard and slammed the control lever. The steel doors groaned shut, locking with a hiss.
I could still hear the muffled sound of something pounding from the other side. Human voices. Screaming. Then silence.

Chen turned away, biting her lip. I could tell she’d seen this before.

We moved through a long corridor lined with reinforced windows. Behind them were sealed chambers — containment units. Inside each one floated strange biological samples suspended in clear fluid: organs, tissue fragments, chunks of metallic residue shaped like bone.

“What is this place?” I asked.

Chen hesitated before answering. “You want the truth?”

“I think we’re past the point of comforting lies.”

She exhaled. “This is Project Eclipse. We were supposed to study non-terrestrial matter recovered from the Groom Lake anomaly back in ’47. Except, it wasn’t a crash site like the rumors said. It was an awakening site.”

I stared at her. “Awakening?”

“They weren’t ships,” she said quietly. “They were eggs.”

We entered a control room at the end of the corridor. Monitors lined the walls, most showing static, but a few still displayed live feeds from the upper hangar.

The black mass had spread to the perimeter of the base, swallowing trucks, buildings, everything. Wherever it touched, metal dissolved like sugar in water.
But not destroyed—converted. The wreckage reassembled itself, reorganizing into geometric lattices that floated above the ground, pulsing faintly.

Kensington’s voice was grim. “They’re terraforming.”

“Not terra,” Chen corrected. “They’re reclaiming.”

The intercom above us crackled to life.
A voice—distorted, overlapping itself like multiple people speaking in unison—echoed through the speakers.

“We are not invaders. We are custodians. This world was seeded long before your species began to speak.”

The sound froze us.
It wasn’t coming from a single source. Every speaker, every intercom, every device in the room was repeating it.

“We slept. You built your homes on our nests. You fly through our skies as if they belong to you. But the cycle has turned again.”

Chen gripped the edge of the console. “They’re communicating through our systems. Using the EM field as a carrier wave.”

“Mortise Caldwell,” the voice continued, and I felt my stomach drop. “Witness.”

Kensington turned to me sharply. “Why you? What connection do you have?”

“I—I don’t know! I just flew over the wrong place!”

“Not wrong,” the voice said. “Chosen.”

The lights dimmed. The floor vibrated.

And then, on the central monitor, the black mass outside began to rise. Slowly, fluidly, until it formed a towering column that stretched hundreds of feet into the sky.
Within the column, figures took shape — thousands of them, moving, crawling, merging into one another.

The room temperature dropped twenty degrees. I could see my breath fogging. The hum became a deep bass rumble that made the walls flex.

Chen’s voice shook. “It’s generating gravity distortion. Pulling matter inward.”

“Into what?” Kensington asked.

She looked at the screen, her face ashen. “Into something new.”

The floor jolted. The entire facility shook violently. Ceiling tiles crashed down, lights flickered. Somewhere behind us, a wall gave way, and a wave of cold air burst through the corridor.

I turned — and froze.

The black liquid had breached Level C. It poured through the ventilation shafts, moving fast, against gravity. It didn’t flow — it crawled. Like it knew where we were.

“Run!” Kensington shouted.

We sprinted down the corridor, past containment tanks and shattered glass. Alarms screamed overhead.

One of the guards behind us slipped. The liquid reached him first.
He didn’t scream long.

His body convulsed, bones cracking like twigs, and then — horrifyingly — he melted upward, drawn into the black wave like a marionette losing its strings.

Chen’s voice broke. “We can’t outrun it—!”

“Down the sublevels!” Kensington yelled. “Emergency shaft!”

We burst through a steel door at the end of the hall. Inside was a narrow elevator platform — old, mechanical, designed for freight. Kensington hit the button, and the gate slammed shut just as the black tide flooded the room.

The platform dropped fast, deeper underground, the hum chasing us like a heartbeat.

After what felt like forever, we stopped with a lurch. The doors opened to reveal a vast chamber — dimly lit, filled with old machinery and stacks of sealed crates stamped with faded stencils:
OMEGA PROTOCOL — CLASSIFIED.

Chen stared. “This level isn’t on any map.”

Kensington’s jaw tightened. “It’s not supposed to be.”

He moved toward a console and began typing commands into an ancient terminal. Dust rose from the keys.
“The old-timers built this as a failsafe. A way to erase Groom Lake from existence if containment failed.”

“You mean destroy it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “With a nuclear charge.”

Chen stepped forward. “Sir, that protocol was never meant to be executed. The collateral damage—”

Kensington turned, eyes blazing. “Do you want those things loose in Nevada? In Vegas? In Los Angeles? Because that’s where they’ll go next.”

The hum above us intensified. Dust trickled from the ceiling.

I felt it again — that pressure in my head. The voices whispering, overlapping, whispering my name.

“Mortise… witness… come below…”

I clutched my skull. The pain was unbearable. Images flashed behind my eyes — glimpses of something vast.
A planet wrapped in dark tendrils. Shapes orbiting in black space, singing in languages made of geometry.
The triangles weren’t ships. They were organisms. Colonies. Seeds.

And we had woken them up.

Kensington slammed a final key and turned to Chen. “We’ve got four hours before detonation. Get everyone to the lower shelter.”

Chen nodded, trembling. “And him?” She looked at me.

Kensington hesitated. “He comes with us. Whatever’s in his head, they want it. That makes him either a weapon or a warning.”

The ceiling groaned again, and a fissure tore across the far wall.
Through it, a faint blue light shone — the same impossible glow from the triangles.

And a figure stepped through.

It wasn’t human anymore.
It used to be a soldier.
Now it was something else — long limbs, liquid skin, eyes glowing like twin stars.

Its voice echoed, doubled, distorted.

“You cannot stop the cycle. You are part of it.”

It raised an arm — or what used to be one — and the light spread outward, creeping across the floor like frost.

Kensington drew his weapon, though we all knew it was pointless. “Move!” he shouted. “Run!”

We ran deeper into the tunnels, the blue light chasing us like dawn.
As we fled, the intercom crackled one last time, that chorus of alien voices rising into a single phrase that made my blood turn to ice.

“The cycle is not ending. It is hatching.”

Part Four 

The tunnels beneath Groom Lake were never meant for human eyes.
They were carved decades ago — maybe longer — reinforced with steel and concrete, but deeper than any public record would admit. The air was stale, metallic, like breathing through old coins. Every few seconds, a tremor rattled the walls, and dust drifted from the ceiling like ash.

We ran until our legs burned. Kensington led the way, his flashlight beam cutting through the dark, Chen close behind with her tablet clutched to her chest. I followed, disoriented, head throbbing from the voices that never stopped whispering.

“Mortise… the witness… the carrier…”

Each word vibrated through my bones.

We turned a corner into an old maintenance chamber filled with ancient machinery — rows of vacuum tubes, rotary dials, and an array of analog monitors still flickering with static. In the center stood something that looked like a generator the size of a bus, humming faintly with stored energy.

Kensington stopped and pointed. “We’re here.”

Chen frowned. “This is the control node? It’s still intact?”

“Built during the Eisenhower era,” he said. “We call it the Omega Core. Old tech, but reliable. It’s tied directly to the self-destruct grid.”

He crouched beside a console and began flipping switches. Somewhere far above, faint echoes of explosions reverberated through the tunnels. The surface was gone now—consumed, buried, or worse.

Chen glanced at me. “How’s your head?”

I gave a humorless laugh. “Like something’s trying to crawl out through my eyes.”

Her expression darkened. “That tracks with previous exposure cases.”

“Meaning?”

She hesitated. “You were in direct proximity to the triangles when they activated. The radiation they emit isn’t like anything we can measure. It’s not energy—it’s information. They transmit it directly into organic neural pathways.”

“So they’re downloading into me?”

“Uploading,” she corrected quietly. “You’re becoming part of their network.”

Kensington’s voice cut through the static. “Enough talk. We have one objective left — delay the breach long enough to trigger Omega.”

He turned a dial, and the lights dimmed. A low, throbbing hum filled the room — a sound that made my teeth ache.

“Three hours,” he said. “That’s how long we have before detonation. The warhead’s buried beneath the runway. If the black mass reaches the core before it blows, it’ll absorb the energy and multiply instead of dying.”

Chen looked up sharply. “You’re saying if we fail—”

“Then it spreads. And the next sunrise over Nevada will be the last one anyone ever sees.”

We worked in tense silence. Chen monitored radiation levels while Kensington fed commands into the Omega console. I tried to stay useful—hauling cables, adjusting fuses—but the pain in my head was getting worse. Every few minutes, I’d see flashes of blue light at the edge of my vision. Symbols would ripple across the walls, patterns that weren’t really there.

Then, something shifted in the air.

A vibration — not sound, not light — just pressure.

And then the old speakers crackled to life.

“Mortise Caldwell.”

The voice was everywhere at once, layered and endless.

“We see through you. You were not chosen to carry words. You were chosen to carry us.”

Chen dropped her tablet. “They’re inside the communications network—”

“Inside you,” the voice finished.

The screens flashed white. I felt something stab into the center of my mind—cold, electric, like being electrocuted from the inside. I screamed.

Suddenly I wasn’t in the bunker anymore.

I was above the desert.

The ground stretched for miles, glowing faintly with geometric lines carved into the sand — ancient, buried circuitry awakening beneath the surface. The triangles hovered above them, perfectly aligned, singing in frequencies that shook the stars.

And below the earth… something was moving.

Something enormous.

Chen’s voice dragged me back. “Mortise! Stay with me!”

I gasped for air, clutching my chest. The walls were flickering, the lights stuttering like a dying heartbeat. Kensington was shouting over the noise.

“They’re trying to override Omega! The system’s being rewritten!”

Chen dove to the floor console, typing furiously. “I can reroute the trigger manually!”

“How long?”

“Five minutes—if we’re lucky.”

The floor rumbled again — but not from the detonation system. From above. Something massive was descending through the layers of concrete.

Chunks of ceiling fell. A steel beam crashed nearby, sending sparks flying.

Kensington grabbed my shoulder. “Caldwell! You said they spoke to you! Can you communicate back?”

“I don’t even know what they are!”

“Then start figuring it out, because they’re reading our thoughts like an open book!”

The generator’s hum deepened into a roar.
The whole chamber began vibrating, loose bolts spinning on their own, instruments flickering. On one of the monitors, the feed from the surface reappeared — a grainy, black-and-white view of Groom Lake.

What I saw there stole the air from my lungs.

The black mass had formed a perfect circle across the crater, glowing with veins of blue light. At its center, a colossal triangular structure was rising — easily half a mile tall, dwarfing the mountains around it. Lightning crawled along its edges.

Chen whispered, “Oh my God. It’s… building itself.”

“We are the architects,” the voice said. “Your world was the seedbed. You were the nutrients. The harvest is complete.”

Kensington turned pale. “They’re not just waking up—they’re converting the planet.”

The doors at the far end of the chamber buckled. The metal warped inward like foil. Blue light poured through the cracks.

Chen screamed, “It’s here!”

The door exploded inward. A figure stepped through — a mass of black fluid shaped vaguely like a man, its eyes burning bright as welding arcs. Its body dripped tendrils that hissed when they touched the floor.

Kensington fired his sidearm. The bullets hit, vanished. The thing didn’t flinch.

It raised a hand and the entire weapon disintegrated into dust.

“Mortise… join us.”

The words weren’t sound—they resonated. I could feel them vibrating through my organs, aligning my thoughts with theirs.

I stumbled backward, clutching my head. “Get out of my mind!”

“You cannot resist what you already are.”

I saw flashes again—my own memories rewritten. My cockpit, the GPS failure, the black triangles… but now I saw them from their perspective. I wasn’t flying into restricted airspace. I was flying into a signal beam. They had targeted me.

I was the receiver.

Kensington grabbed a detonator pack from the console, slammed it into my hands. “If they take me out—finish the job! You understand me?!”

“What—no, I—”

“Do it!” he shouted. “Or this world dies screaming!”

He turned back toward the creature and pulled a lever on the generator. Massive sparks burst from the machine, blinding white. The creature convulsed, shrieking with a chorus of a thousand voices.

Chen screamed over the noise. “The overload—it’s destabilizing the containment field!”

Kensington looked back one last time. “Now, Chen! Now!”

She slammed her palm onto the manual trigger.

The countdown began on the main display:
03:59:59…

We ran.

Through corridors filled with smoke, through halls that glowed blue as the black infection spread. Every door we passed buckled inward from the pressure. My ears rang with the low-frequency hum.

Somewhere behind us, I heard Kensington’s radio crackle one last time:

“This is Director Kensington… Groom Lake… implementing Omega… God help us all—”

Then static.

We reached the final stairwell that led to the underground shelter. The reinforced doors were already closing, hydraulic pistons groaning under strain. Chen shoved me through first, then dove in after me as the gate sealed shut behind us.

We collapsed against the cold metal floor. I was drenched in sweat, shaking.

Chen stared at the door. “He didn’t make it.”

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say.

The floor beneath us vibrated again, this time rhythmically—like a heartbeat.
Chen looked at me, eyes wide. “That’s not the explosion yet.”

“No,” I said, feeling the words before I spoke them. “That’s them. They’re inside the rock now.”

A minute later, the emergency lights cut out. Total darkness.
Then, faintly, I heard the whispers again—thousands of them. Not through the air, not through the walls, but through me.

“The shell burns. The seed survives. You are the vessel.”

I clutched my head, screaming, but the sound that came out wasn’t entirely mine. My voice split—overlapping, echoing, forming harmonics that weren’t human.

Chen backed away, terrified. “Mortise… your eyes…”

They burned. I could feel the light behind them. Blue light.

“Get away from me!” I shouted.

She stumbled back toward the shelter console, fumbling with a keycard. “I can vent the chamber—cut off your oxygen—if you’re infected—”

“Do it,” I gasped. “Before I—”

I never finished.

Because at that moment, the floor exploded.

The blast threw us both across the room. The walls caved inward. Air roared out of the shelter, carrying heat and light and sound all at once.
The nuclear device had detonated.

The world above us ceased to exist.

And as the shockwave tore through the complex, I heard the voices one last time, perfectly calm amid the chaos:

“You cannot erase what is woven into the fabric of your being. We are the memory of this world. We are the beginning.”

Then everything went white.

When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on the desert floor. The night sky above me glowed faintly with aurora-like bands of blue and green. The air was warm. Silent. Still.

The base was gone — nothing left but a crater of molten glass.

Chen was gone. Kensington was gone. Everyone was gone.

Except me.

And somewhere deep inside my mind, beneath the pain and the static, a new rhythm pulsed — slow, steady, patient.

A heartbeat that wasn’t mine.

Part Five 

When I came to, dawn was breaking over the Nevada desert.
The sky was too bright, too empty. No contrails. No sound of distant engines. Just wind sweeping across a sea of glass that used to be Groom Lake.

For a long time, I didn’t move. My body ached in ways that felt wrong — like my bones weren’t aligned the way they used to be. When I finally pushed myself upright, flakes of black residue slid off my jacket and crumbled into the sand.

I touched my face. My skin felt fever-hot, but under it, I could feel a vibration — like a distant motor running somewhere deep inside me.

The Omega detonation had vaporized everything within miles. By all logic, I should’ve been atoms scattered on the wind.
But logic didn’t mean much anymore.

I was still alive.
And I knew — they were, too.

I found shelter in a half-collapsed observation shack near the perimeter fence. The walls were scorched and the windows cracked, but it kept the sun off.
Inside, I found a half-burned first-aid kit, a few water bottles, and a cracked mirror.

When I looked into it, my reflection stared back — mostly human.
Mostly.

My pupils glowed faint blue in the light. Faint lines of geometric symbols pulsed beneath my skin, fading and reappearing like veins of light.
Every few seconds, they shifted, rearranging into patterns that made my head hurt to look at.

I turned away.

The radio on the wall hissed faintly.
I twisted the dial, scanning through static. For hours, there was nothing. Then, faintly, a voice.

“…containment confirmed… Groom Lake neutralized… Omega complete…”

The transmission cut off mid-sentence. Another voice replaced it — soft, layered, familiar.

“Witness. Carrier. The shell burned. The seed endures.”

I ripped the cord out of the wall. The static stopped, but the words didn’t leave my head.

Over the next few days, I wandered. The roads were empty, checkpoints abandoned. The nearest town, Tonopah, was half-evacuated — houses with doors left open, cars still running until their tanks ran dry.

On the third night, the dreams started.

I was flying again, high above the desert. But this time, the stars were wrong. They moved. They pulsed in patterns, geometric constellations rearranging themselves into symbols.
The black triangles floated among them — hundreds, thousands, forming a vast lattice that encircled Earth like a halo.

And beneath me, in the desert, I saw the crater glowing — not cooling, but growing.

Each time I woke, my head pounded harder. The lines under my skin pulsed brighter. My thoughts weren’t just my own anymore.

I started hearing their voices even when I was awake.

“You are not infected. You are becoming.”
“The Omega cycle ends. The Alpha cycle begins.”
“We were here before language. Before light.”

Every instinct screamed to run, to hide, to tell someone — but who would believe me? A pilot claiming aliens rewired his brain in a secret base under the desert?

That’s exactly what Kensington wanted — for my story to sound insane enough that no one would take it seriously.

But I wasn’t just a witness anymore. I was a vector.

A week later, I checked into a motel off Highway 6. Paid cash. No ID. Room smelled like bleach and cigarettes. The woman at the counter didn’t even look up.

I bought a cheap pawn shop laptop and started typing everything I remembered.

Every detail of the flight. The interference. The black triangles. The containment breach. Kensington’s last words.

At first, it was just to get it out of my head. But then the words started arranging themselves — literally shifting on the screen into geometric sequences.

When I tried to delete them, they came back.
When I turned off the laptop, the patterns flickered across the display anyway.

The power wasn’t even plugged in.

That’s when I realized the transmission wasn’t through the laptop. It was through me.

The headaches got worse. Sometimes I’d black out for hours, wake up somewhere else — a diner, a gas station, a rest stop — with no memory of how I’d gotten there.

Once, I found symbols carved into a bathroom mirror in a language no one could have written. The letters glowed faintly blue.

People around me started acting strange, too.
They’d pause mid-conversation, eyes glazing over for a second. Then they’d blink and continue like nothing happened.
But I could see it — the faint shimmer under their skin.

The signal was spreading.

On the tenth night, I woke to find someone standing in my motel room.

Dr. Chen.

She looked worse than I remembered — thinner, pale, eyes hollow.

“You’re alive,” I whispered.

“For now,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “You didn’t die in the blast because they didn’t want you to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They used you as an anchor,” she said. “A biological relay. Your mind stabilized the transmission long enough to survive Omega.”

I stared at her. “You knew this was going to happen.”

“I suspected,” she said softly. “But I thought the detonation would break the network. It didn’t. It just… rebooted it.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, trembling. “There are reports coming in. Russia. China. Australia. Triangular sightings. Same symbols. Same hum. It’s not localized anymore.”

“So we failed.”

“No,” she said, staring at me. “We began something.”

That night, she showed me something on her tablet — a live feed from a satellite network. The video showed multiple glowing anomalies appearing around the globe.
Each one pulsed in rhythm with the others.

“Look at the pattern,” she said. “It’s identical to neural activity. The planet’s behaving like a brain.”

“Whose brain?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

At dawn, I woke up to silence. Chen was gone. Her tablet lay on the floor, screen cracked, still displaying the satellite feed.

Except now there weren’t just lights in the desert.
There were shapes rising from the oceans.

Thousands of them.

The triangles.

They were no longer hiding underground. They were ascending.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here now — in this room, typing, listening to the hum that never stops.
It’s inside the walls. Inside my heartbeat.

Sometimes I hear Kensington’s voice in the static, repeating the same words over and over:

“Tell them. Make it sound crazy. Bury the truth beneath ridicule.”

So that’s what I’m doing.
I’m posting this on every forum, every conspiracy site, every place people scroll through at 3 a.m. and laugh.

Because maybe that’s the only way to get the truth out — hidden inside fiction.

But if you’re reading this, and you start hearing the hum —
If you start dreaming in blue light —
If you see the triangles when you close your eyes —

You’ve already been found.

They’re not coming.

They’re awakening.

And when they rise, they won’t take the planet by force.
They’ll take it by inheritance.

Because Earth was never ours.

It was theirs.

And I’m proof they’re already inside us.

If you hear the hum, run.
But it won’t matter.
You’ll carry them, too.

“Witness,” the voices whisper now, gentle and endless. “The cycle is complete.”

And somewhere far away, beneath the cracked desert floor,
something moves.

Waiting.

Growing.

Smiling through my eyes.

THE END