2 YEARS AGO
Before midnight on the fifteenth of May, the landscape surrounding a large lake in the middle of North America was serenely quiet and calm. A half moon waited high in the cloudless sky to bathe the world in an even but somewhat dim white glow, painting the trees and grassy shore surrounding the mountain lake in that glow. A few animals wandered the area while insects livened the night with noise.
A few minutes later, just after midnight, a massive shadow suddenly cut a swath for several miles of silent mountains and valleys over the land.
Where it originated from was the large pristine but dark lake that now bore a massive reflection of a dark gray metallic structure. A few seconds ago, nothing had existed here, but now there was suddenly a shock wave of displaced air that spread out in all directions from the structure's sudden appearance.
The structure was almost as big around as the lake at its base and slowly tapered for at least a hundred stories up into the air with a round top floor that was only a few hundred square feet in size. There were no discernible windows on the tower but there were thick lines of light and color inscribed into the surface of the tower. Most of these lines traversed wildly about the surface of the tower in dark reds or purples or oranges but in between then were characters and images of green and blue and yellow and dark gold in color.
Out over the water in Oceania, over the Siberian desert, in the mountains of north India, on the meridian of Greenwich, between the coasts of china and japan, in the heart of Antarctica, above the rain forests of Brazil, in the plains of Uganda. Everywhere in the world, giant towers of unknown origin began appearing out of the blue with little less than an hour between them.
At first only a few people were around to see the towers appearing but after a few hours with more appearing during the day the world and internet soon came alive with pictures and videos of these towers. News station, police, and even military helicopters and aircraft soon filled the air around these towers while massive quarantine camps for studying the structures were built. For the first few days every person on the planet was wondering the same thing.
'What the hell are these things?'
People frequently speculated about aliens, saying these towers were command centers for taking over the planet and had been brought here through wormholes and other quantum technology. It was hard to refute these claims considering the towers were said to give off insane energy readings of unknown elements. However, the towers never did anything but hover in the air while glowing eerily.
There were no occupants who came out of the towers, no strange announcements or declarations of war in electronic or physical means, there were not even any discernible way to get inside the towers. After the first week things almost started calming down as speculations turned to talk of research opportunities and the like. People already wanted to profit off of these foreign anomalies.
When that first week ended, though, the entire world began to change.
At first it was just reports of destabilizing energy levels around the towers but then satellites began picking up those same foreign energy readings from all around the world. Some people thought more towers were about to appear and the alien invasion was beginning. Quite the contrary, though, the new energy spikes around the world were said to be too small to support a tower's presence or function- as if they even knew what that was.
After three days of these energy spikes cropping up all around the world, the first spike took shape. Instead of a tower forming, the first spike to stabilize became a large and bizarre wall of watery light. Even though the light was transparent and various different colors of gray and blue, one could only see a murky fog within its depths instead of seeing through it. That first spike was almost immediately quarantines by the US military while the other world nations began doing the same as some formed in their countries.
After another day of stabilizing spikes there turned out to be dozens of these strange light walls just in North America while a few hundred appeared all over the world in total. While the government was quick to try and contain all of their locations it was impossible to beat the curious civilians and their smart phones from getting to most of them. Videos from all over the world flooded the internet with random people playing with the light walls poking them with objects.
The most notable discovery was that, when pushing a stick through the light wall the stick simply disappeared instead of coming out of the other side. Even throwing a rock at the lights yielded no results except for the rock to simply disappear. Then, finally, some drunk kid in Russia took a video of himself sticking his hand in a light wall and pulling it back out.
Shit hit the fan after somebody brave or dumb enough to do so finally tested the portals with their own body. People would start sticking their cameras in to take a short video of murky nothingness. When their phones and cameras could not record anything of use, one person actually stuck their head in the light. He quickly withdrew on camera screaming and crying and running away from the light.
That should have been the first sign to the public that these things were not to be played with, but after that personal was hospitalized and taken into custody by the authorities it was impossible to find out what they saw. So, of course, more people stuck their heads in. Each and every one of them ended up hospitalized or arrested, but not before their videos went up.
Few people around the world actually saw the 'same' thing but all of them were similar. Some people claim to have seen dark underground caves with faintly glowing crystals and shadows that moved or even approached them, some people say they saw forests and jungles in which strange giant insects and other animals prowled about, and some people say they even saw what looked like underdeveloped settlements in these strange places.
One of the few things they all had in common was the fact that as soon as somebody poked their head through and something on the other side took notice of them… that something on the other side would start making its way over. With a quickness. These stories were somewhat hard to believe but the world governments were all treating the light walls with extreme seriousness.
Eventually, though, the governments were forced to take next-level action after three days of finding and containing these so-called portals. Once the camps and compounds were constructed, they sent in the first hazmat suited soldier wearing a wench vest tethered to a small crane. For the sake of transparency to its people, America was one of the few governments to allow media coverage of a few portals with the 'lowest' energy readings.
The entire world could see a single soldier in armored gear filling a foil suit and carrying a large rifle. His wench vest was loaded with two different magazines for the rifle and the shotgun attachment under its barrel, but strapped around either thigh were five-seven handguns paired with large bayonets. Despite the fact that they would start reeling the man in once they started firing, he looked like a one man army.
This particular portal had already been 'scouted' by some poor sap who stuck his head in to look around. The entire world already knew this light wall lead to an underground cavern with a few branching tunnels sporting glowing crystals and dark moving bodies. Most electronics that sent and received information did not function properly in close proximity to the gates so not much more scouting could be done.
Just the local news cameras and other media outlets had to remain fifty yards back from the gate for decent video quality.
Simple electronics like the high-powered flashlight attached to the side of the soldier's gun still worked, though, and it shone straight on the moving curtain of light as if it were a motionless sheet of glass. You could tell the light was hitting it but there was nowhere for it to actually land on. Then the soldier started moving forward.
Up until then the reporters had been quietly commenting and questioning on the soldier and current events. Now, as the soldier took their first steps after receiving the order from command, the only thing that could be heard was the low whine of the crane's wench letting out slowly. The tension in the air was so thick it was probably hard to breathe for everyone there.
Once the soldier slowly disappeared through the portal so that only the cabling behind them remained, time seemed to crawl forward so that seconds became minutes and minutes became hours. After almost a full minute of the wench letting out, the soldier on the other side must have stopped walking because the wench stopped whining. Then, after a few more moments the whining of the wench started once more.
This time, though, it was reeling in the line at a steady pace.
Less that fifteen seconds later, the wench was dragging the soldier out while they were in the middle of unloading their shotgun under-barrel into the portal. Once their upper body was back on home soil they simply tossed the gun aside and drew one of their handguns to start firing into the portal. Then, as the soldier started rising up in the air from the crane wench he continued to reload and unload his handgun into the portal while shouting orders and information within his helmets.
Soldiers in a combination of normal and hazmat uniforms began crowding the cameras at that point, forcing the broadcasts to come to an end. The fact that the soldier had returned safe from the portal and nothing had followed them out was good for speculation, but they wanted to keep the actual details contained before they were confirmed. To avoid a panic and all that.
Of course that would only hold out for a few days until shit hit the fan all over again. As suddenly as their energy readings had spiked and appeared the portals scattered around the world began spiking and destabilizing all over again. Many of them, like the portal that led to caves on the news, had been fire bombed and loaded with explosives where possible to destroy everything inside.
However, there were still more than a hundred portals around the world where such brute force tactics would not work. Some portals opened out the wide open plains and other outdoor areas that could not be collapsed. Now, those portals we changing by becoming darker and darker until they appeared like a thin sheet of black glass on the internet.
Then, finally, things from the other sides started coming through to our side.
All of the portals that had destabilized once again stabilized over the course of a few hours all around the world and then the creatures reportedly seen on the other sides of the portals began coming out. Most of them were large and vicious beasts not unlike our own animals and insects, but there were a few with almost humanoid creatures that bore weapons and vocally roared orders in different 'languages'.
People died. By the thousands. Even though almost all of the portals were contained by the governments the beasts that came out ate bullets and small explosives one after another before finally succumbing to the layering damages. Entire quarantine bases were ruined overnight and anywhere near civilization was soon evacuated.
It took several days before the situation was once again under control and the creatures that had escaped were hunted down. When the last creatures from a portal were killed, the portals would simply fade away as if nothing had happened. Leaving behind only the ruins of small bases and the remains of soldiers and civilians in their wakes.
At the end of the third week since the appearance of the towers, numerous towns and cities around the world had been ravaged by otherworldly creatures and peoples. Tens of thousands of civilians alone were killed and entire cities were leveled by air raids. Nobody in the world would ever think about posting videos of sticking their heads in a portal again.
However, only a couple of weeks later there was another wave of alien energy spikes.
Some of these spikes were multiple times larger than the first wave while others were so small they went unnoticed. Among these spikes were things and people that had already been here.
A middle school student who gets into a fight ended up setting the clothes and hair of another boy on fire just by punching them. A street sign that somehow survived a bombing reportedly glows at night with a golden light that supposedly helped people recover from injuries. A police dog that was tracking down escaped portal creatures doubled in size on video and fought off a pair of giant spider-like creatures.
Stories like these both proven and unfounded flooded the media and internet, leading the world governments to start turning their attention to the places the portals opened up. After a few days of study and testing, it was found that people, animals, and random objects were giving off the same energy readings as the towers and portals even though they were much smaller signatures.
Although, it became clear that any person with a readable energy signature was physically, mentally, or just healthily superior to somebody without the alien energy.
*