They’ve come here before. We’ve ignored them, covered it up, made it sound ludicrous. Men in black suits and dark glasses. Stories make us sound so helpless, so desperately animalistic—unable to fend them off in any way. But that’s not the truth of it. Space travel is perilous, and delicate. Guns are nothing like that.
We never captured all of them—we killed most of them. A few were alive. We kept them prisoner, made them learn our language with threats of violence if they didn’t comply. They were saint-like in their behavior. Kind. Long-lived. Brimming with universal knowledge, which some of them shared. Soon even the most corrupted of the doctors began wincing when they experimented on them.
None of them made it, but we never knew why. They started dying a year into their stay, after wasting away on surprisingly brittle skeletons. A new offshoot of an old species, one of them had said. A month before they died, they stopped talking; stopped responding to any kind of query, even if beaten. The doctors were perplexed, and the upper brass was pissed. But nothing could be done.
When they died, their corpses were burned, after a lot of DNA and biological samples were taken. There were no graves, no words said. It was like a goldfish had died and was flushed, without ceremony, down the toilet.
Their ship, mostly ruined but with some computer elements still functioning, was locked into a vault deep underground. Where no one would find it or go looking—the vault was marked as storage for nuclear waste. When mankind was more advanced, the brass decried, the ship would be brought back up and studied; for now, no one could make heads or tails. A few scientists, marked as “janitors” on official documents, stayed in the facility to monitor the thing. It became their life.
The conspiracies started up. Aliens, coming to visit earth, being hushed by the government.
But they really had no idea whatsoever of the extent.
(Source: velvetdemon.net)
