Chapter 1
I took a deep breath of the crisp night air and looked up at the stars that twinkled like glittery freckles in the night sky. The pearly moon lit up the midnight-blue sky and cast a beautiful glow over all the land that surrounded my farmhouse. The earth was dry from a lack of rainfall over the last few days, but it felt like the grass in the field and the trees in the surrounding woodlands were drinking in the moonlight instead.
The leaves rustled quietly in the light, warm breeze that drifted along, and the freshness of the Kansas countryside was always a welcome change from the city where I had lived my whole life until a few weeks ago. I took a moment to appreciate how lucky I was to have been able to retire at fifty-five after thirty-five years of driving trucks and decades of running my own company. Then being able to sell it for enough money to buy this home that was so out of the way in this gorgeous and undisturbed countryside.
“You’re living the dream, Will Ryder,” I said aloud to myself.
I closed the window once I was sure there weren’t any raccoons going through the garbage and rambled back into my quaint living room. It was a typical man cave space, with a TV in the corner, a couch with a permanent crease on one of the cushions because I always sat in the same spot, and a couple of cardboard boxes in the corner that I had yet to unpack even though I have been here a month and a half already. The game show host cracked some awful jokes at the contestants’ expense, and I realized that I wasn’t even sure what exactly it was that I had been watching because I had been in such a world of my own while looking out of the window.
I decided I was thirsty and turned to make my way into the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror I had hung on the wall in the hall, and I sighed when I saw the graying hair, the wrinkles, and the tiredness in my eyes. To be fair, I wasn’t doing too bad for fifty-five lookswise, but that over half a century of aging sure had started to rear its head over the last couple of years.
Since there wasn’t anything I could do to slow the clock, I turned away from the mirror and made my way to the sink. My kitchen was a typical farmhouse kitchen with large slate tiles, wooden counters, and beams that ran across the ceiling. It felt like a home the first time I’d walked inside, and I’d had a tough time not pulling out my checkbook right there on the spot.
And now, it was really my home, and about as different from the places I’d lived in and around the city for the last fifty-five years. I felt a moment of pride as I grabbed my glass out of the cupboard and turned on the cold tap. When the glass was full, I set it on the counter, and even though I had told myself not to eat any more chips that night, I bent down to check if I had another bag stashed away somewhere. Luckily, I did, so I grabbed the chips and stood up.
Suddenly, I started to shake. For a moment, I thought I was having a low blood sugar moment after standing up too fast, but then my vision focused on the glass of water on the counter in front of me, and I realized that it had started to shake as well. The surface of the water began to ripple, and then the glass itself started to bounce across the counter. Was this an earthquake? It wasn’t common to get them in Kansas, was it?
I put the chips down as I grabbed the counter and looked around as some of the larger pieces of furniture began to move as well and groaned as I imagined all of the mess that was about to be made. I hadn’t gotten around to screwing a lot of the shelves to the wall yet, and I had a feeling that a lot of my stuff was about to end up in a heap on the floor.
I jumped when the glass smashed against the tiles and sent water and shards of glass across the floor. I skirted around the mess, made my way to the doorway, and then carefully stepped out into the hall.
That was when I heard it. A loud ‘whoosh’ sound overhead, like an aircraft had just flown dangerously low over my house, although I was very sure that my home was nowhere near a flight path. This wasn’t an earthquake, this was something else.
I was about to walk into the living room when there was an enormous thud outside that shook my house again and nearly knocked me to the floor. I caught myself on the doorframe and then made my way into my utility room at the back of the house. Everything had finally stopped shaking, and although I knew it wasn’t a good idea to go near windows when there was a possible earthquake happening, I ran over to the nearest one and peered into the darkness.
Only, it wasn’t so dark.
There was a clump of trees across the field directly behind my house, but they weren’t as intact as they had been just moments ago. I could see that a couple of the trees had been knocked over and the tops of others had been snapped like twigs while flames flickered on the ground. I couldn’t see much more from this distance, and for a moment, I stood there and debated what I should do. What the hell was that out there? Had a private plane fallen out of the sky? Was someone over there that needed help?
“Damn it,” I said as soon as that thought crossed my mind. “Now I have to go out and check.”
I ran into the kitchen, wrenched open one of the cupboards, and grabbed the fire extinguisher and the flashlight that I kept for emergencies. Then, I went out into the hall, pulled the back door open, and stepped out into the night.
My first stop was the old barn that was right next to my house. The flames were spreading quickly from the crash site, and it was possible that there could be some sharp debris too, depending on what had fallen, so I grabbed a pair of heavy-duty gloves from the workbench in my barn to protect my hands. Once they were on, I left the barn again and started to make my way across the field toward the flattened trees.
The dry ground was flat and cracked underfoot, and the dried grass crunched under my shoes. However, as I got closer to the trees and the small flames, I could see a large groove had been cut deep into the soil. Clearly, something had hit the ground and skidded along into the trees, and that was what had caused the deep mark that I was currently following.
My heart was beating hard, and my mouth was dry, and I held out the flashlight and the extinguisher in front of me, almost more for protection than anything else. I had a weird feeling about this, like I was walking toward danger, and I didn’t like it. But, if there was someone out there that needed my help, then I couldn’t just leave them there.
I still couldn’t see what had fallen out of the sky, so I inched closer to the treeline, where the flames were the hottest. But the fire was still contained to a small area, and I quickly put it out with the extinguisher before it could spread.
Once I was sure there were no more smoldering embers, I chucked the fire extinguisher aside in case I had to carry someone out of the wreckage. I now had only my flashlight to guide me, and I pointed it toward the track in the soil. But as I shone it down into the track, I frowned. The groove didn’t seem to be anywhere near big enough to be a plane, so what the hell had made all of this mess?
The smoke filled my nose and made my eyes tear up a bit, and I was starting to wish I’d grabbed my safety glasses and a mask as well. For a moment, I stopped and looked around just to check if any of my neighbors were coming to investigate as well. But I doubted that anyone was awake at two AM like I was, and even if they were, my neighbors were far enough away that they might not have even noticed anything.
It looked like I was on my own, which didn’t help how uneasy I felt one bit. My jaw was clenched, my shoulders were hunched and tense, my muscles twitched, and my breathing was shallow. I didn’t like this. I had moved to the country to relax, not to be disturbed by strange, midnight occurrences like this one. The trees creaked around me, and I jumped every time the wind whistled past me. I took some deep breaths to calm my nerves, but I couldn’t stop myself from shaking.
“Hello?” I called out, and I immediately felt stupid for doing so, since that was what got people in horror movies killed.
It was pretty much rule number one when it came to not getting killed, actually. Don’t announce your presence to whatever it is that’s hiding from you in the dark.
But I couldn’t stop wondering if there was someone here that was hurt. It was possible, and I had to make sure that no one had been involved in a crash, though what they had been flying had been a lot smaller than a plane. Were those jetpacks that guy had developed available to the public yet?
Finally, as I stepped between two trees, I saw the large, dark mass up ahead. It was still smoking, literally, and the earth around it looked charred in the flashlight’s beam. As I got closer, I realized that I was looking at an enormous rock, or rather, a space rock. This was, without a doubt, a meteorite.
“No way,” I whispered as I crept closer to it.
It was about half the size of an average car and had a smooth surface. A few spots glinted in the beam from the flashlight, but most of it was just dull and gray. Small cracks spiderwebbed from a large fissure that ran down the center of the rock, and a small wisp of smoke still drifted up from the crevice.
As I walked around it, I noticed how deeply it had burrowed into the ground, which meant the thing was pretty dense. I’d heard about meteorite crashes before and watched a few videos, but usually the big ones broke up in the atmosphere. The pieces that survived to crash into the ground were a few inches wide at best. There was no doubt this one would get a lot of attention, and I had no doubt that at least a few news crews would be out once word got around.
“So much for my peace and quiet,” I sighed.
I still had my gloves on, so I reached out to touch it. Despite the heavy fabric, I could still feel the rough surface under my palm. I couldn’t believe it. I was touching an actual meteorite right now. It was surreal, and I felt all of the breath get sucked out of my lungs in pure awe.
But that moment of excitement quickly turned to concern when there was a loud cracking sound, or more of a splintering. I threw myself back and watched as the large fissure began to grow until the whole thing split in half and each side fell away from the other.
“Holy mother of…” I muttered to myself.
When nothing else happened for several minutes, I carefully inched back to the rock and pointed the flashlight toward whatever was inside the meteor. There was an indentation in the center that looked like it had once held something, and when I leaned in closer, I saw something glint in the beam of light. A million visions of some kind of alien leaping out and eating my face filled my mind, but curiosity won out, and I actually bent down for a closer look.
There was an object inside, and despite every horror movie I’d ever seen, I reached inside to pick it up. It was a metal orb, just over a foot wide, and it was surprisingly light. I had expected it to be heavy, so when I picked it up with ease, I almost fell backward onto my ass.
“Geez, wouldn’t the aliens love to see that,” I chuckled. “They probably have a whole show about stupid humans falling on their asses in surprise.”
But a quick glance of the area didn’t reveal any small green men with video cameras, so I turned to study the thing I’d just pulled from the wreckage. It was surprisingly cool, though I supposed the meteorite must have absorbed most of the heat of re-entry.
My hands started to quiver, which made it hard to focus the light on the orb and almost impossible to see much more detail. But I didn’t need to see anything else to know that whatever it was, it wasn’t something that had been carved by nature. I felt my excitement start to prickle again, and after another quick check for aliens or nosy neighbors, I darted back across the field to the barn.
I closed the door behind me and then turned on the bare light bulb that hung over my workbench. The area around the bench was drenched in light, and I held my breath as I carefully set the strange object on top of the scratched wood.
“Wow,” I gasped as I looked down at the orb that I had pulled from the meteorite crash site.
It was some kind of metal… semi-spherical, metallic thing. I couldn’t tell if it was whole or something that had broken off of a larger object, but it was definitely something that had been made by, well… someone. Maybe it was a piece of a rocket that had been encased in rock while it was in space? Or maybe it was a pure element that didn’t exist on Earth? Or maybe it was some leftover alien technology from before the Earth even existed? The possibilities were endless.
There were no markings on the sphere, though it did have a flat spot which I assumed was the bottom. In fact, it sort of reminded me of one of those Amazon devices, and I felt a wave of disappointment at the thought that it was an Amazon drone that had crashed in my yard and all I’d really recovered was someone else’s new Alexa device.
“Alexa,” I said loudly. “What time is it?”
But no blue lights appeared around the bottom of the thing, and no friendly voice announced the time.
“Okay,” I declared. “So, not an Alexa.”
I wondered where it had come from, how far it had traveled, and why the hell it had landed in my backyard. I was pretty sure that nothing this exciting had ever happened to me in all my fifty-five years living on this planet. I had lived a normal, fulfilling life and had just gone into early retirement, but it wasn’t like my existence was exactly memorable compared to others, and I liked it that way.
But now this insane thing had just happened to me, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do going forward. I felt totally at a loss for ideas. Action heroes in films always seemed to know what they should do whenever there was an alien invasion or a war or something equally crazy, but I wasn’t like that at all. I wasn’t an action hero, I was an ex-truck driver from Wichita, Kansas who had zero idea of what he should do with the giant meteorite that had just crash-landed in his field, let alone any idea what to do with the weird metal thing he had in his barn.
I quickly pinched myself on the arm to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, and then, satisfied, I pondered as to what I should do next. I was transfixed by the object even though I had no clue what it was, and the urge to touch it again started to eat at my brain.
I ran my gloved hand over its smooth surface and was amazed at how cool it felt. I picked it up again carefully and rolled it in my gloved hands as I studied it for any sort of markings, but the bright light in the barn only confirmed what I’d noticed in the field. I wondered then if there had been another piece in the meteorite that I had missed, or maybe that had fallen out along the way, but I didn’t think my nerves could take another visit to the field just yet.
Should I call someone? Was that a thing people did when meteors landed in their backyard? It wasn’t like they advertised what number you were supposed to dial when that happened, though if there was one, I was sure I could find it on Google.
Even if I did call someone, I wasn’t sure anyone would accept my story was true and not just the drunk ramblings of a lonely man. The thing was enormous as far as meteorites went, and yet, it hadn’t really caused that much damage. Any decent scientist would probably scoff at my tale.
Then again, I’d seen something on the TV about NASA monitoring objects that hit the atmosphere, so maybe someone, somewhere, already knew about it. If that were true, did that mean I should expect a visit from a group of scientists in the morning? Would they poke around the crash site and then haul the whole thing away?
The idea that they would just haul the thing away started to tick me off. I don’t know why that made me so angry, but I knew that I had to keep it if I could. Especially the orb that sat in the middle of my workbench again. It felt really important that I keep that little basketball of metal all to myself.
I probably should have been worried about radiation or toxic fumes, but none of that seemed important. In fact, the more I stared at the object, the more I wanted to touch it with my bare fingertips. It was another strange urge that I couldn’t explain, and despite the alarms going off in the back of my head, I slowly pulled the gloves from my hands.
I reached out and my bare hand hovered over the surface, just inches from it. If I dropped my hand now, I could say I had touched an extraterrestrial object. It would be a story I could tell over and over again every time I went into town, and I could probably get free coffees for life out of it at the diner.
“Okay, let’s think about this,” I said as I pulled my hand back. “Do I really want to do this? This is the kind of thing that always turns out badly for normal guys like me.”
I picked up my gloves and inspected them, but the object hadn’t burned through them or left any residue. I put one down and then chucked the other one at the sphere. I leapt back from it in case it reacted, but it just sat there as inanimate as it had been before. I don’t know why I thought lasers would suddenly start shooting at the glove since the damn thing hadn’t done anything since I’d picked it up, though I was also a bit disappointed that something didn’t happen.
I turned the light off to see if it would glow, but nothing happened, so I turned the light back on and tried to formulate my next test. I poked it with a crowbar, rubbed it with a microfiber cloth to see if any grooves or buttons appeared, and even poured a bit of water on it to see if it would react. But the orb remained still and silent, and I sighed in frustration.
“Okay, Will, you’re being ridiculous now,” I huffed. “Did you really think it would do something?”
My self-talk reassured me, so I reached out with both hands and placed them carefully on top before I could stop myself again. Just a few fingertips to start with, but the metal remained cool to the touch, and I couldn’t sense any sort of electrical pulse in the thing. I took a deep breath, placed both hands flat against the surface, and then closed my eyes so I could focus on any vibrations from the sphere. I stayed like that for several minutes, but there were no signs of life.
“Really?” I sighed as I stepped away. “Nothing? Damn.”
I stared at the object as if that might trigger something, but when it still wouldn’t react, I shook my head and started to gather my gloves and flashlight. Maybe I’d missed an important piece in the wreckage, something that would somehow activate the sphere…
As I turned away from the object, the barn was filled with a blinding golden light. I threw my hands up in front of my eyes, and then I tried to squint between my fingers to see what the hell was happening. Details were washed away by the glow, but I could hear a humming sound coming from the object. The humming started to get louder and louder, and I heard some kind of machinery start to click and clunk into place.
“Oh, crap,” I gasped as I started to back away from the object. “What the hell have I done?”
And there it was. I was about to become the schmuck who destroyed the planet because he couldn’t resist messing around with alien technology.
Could I stop it? I had no idea what it was even doing, and even though my eyes had adjusted, it was still nearly impossible to see anything. I knew I probably needed to call someone in authority, preferably before the thing blew up, so I started to feel my way toward the door.
But once I found the door, I found I couldn’t leave. Something about what was happening compelled me to stay. Maybe it was awe, wonder, or some other instinct, though I wasn’t sure. I just couldn’t stop looking at the sphere or the light that came from it.
Oh, God, I thought to myself, was it some sort of alien mind-control technology?
The humming sound was nearly deafening by then, and some of the old boards had started to shake. There was a very good chance that the old barn was about to collapse on top of me, and I cursed myself for bringing the orb into the barn.
Just as suddenly as it had all started, the light vanished and the humming stopped. It took a moment for my eyes to readjust, but once they did, everything looked the same as it had before the sphere had done… whatever it had done.
For a moment, I wondered if I had just hallucinated the strange light, but before I could make good on my escape from the barn, a small golden circle of light about the size of a hole-punch hole flickered on top of the object. I edged forward, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing on my workbench.
I felt myself start to relax as I walked back to the bench. Somehow, I knew it wasn’t a threat, though I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do next. I stopped in front of the sphere and waited for something else to happen.
A moment later, an inch-long piece of the surface slid down smoothly and revealed a dark hole beneath it. I held my breath and waited for something to emerge, like some slithering alien or a clawed hand, but that was apparently it for this part of the show.
“What the hell are you?” I muttered.
I jumped again as the whirring sound returned, but only for a few seconds. And then it did the last thing I had expected it to do.
It spoke.
“Hello, Will Ryder,” it said in a feminine, yet rather mechanical, voice. “It is nice to meet you.”