292: Episode 292 | "The Backrooms Have Security Now. I’m One of Them." + 3 Other Scary Stories

The year was 2001.

The transmission came in perfect English and garbled not by mispronunciation, but static.

A man's voice implored our agency, and in fact all space agencies, to send their best and brightest up into space.

They implored us to travel out and meet them at the farthest reach of the farthest galaxy known to us, and the message, it came along with coordinates setting the messenger's location at the edge of the known universe.

It seemed by any stretch of the sane imagination to be a hoax, but our best minds and our finest technology returned the same results time and time again.

The message was indeed transmitted to our station from deep space.

It was not an Earth-originating communication.

Looking back now, I realize NASA's brightest minds were not conducting countless tests for the sake of verifying the transmission's authenticity, but because they were hoping that it would be proven inauthentic.

We were terrified.

That was the plain and simple truth of it.

I was not but a lowly engineer, privy only to the barest information pertaining to the transmission, and I was terrified too.

The thought of a transmission spoken in fluent and perfectly enunciated English as if from a human rather than an alien tongue, it filled my gut with dread.

In science fiction, such a notion was exciting, but the reality of this transmission was quite the opposite.

It raised questions, and a list seemingly unending as scientists and politicians and various global experts in various fields all lent their minds to the task at hand.

There is no doubt that we were going to answer the call, of course, and investigate the coordinates given to us, but would we send out a team of humans as our mysterious messenger had requested? We knew nothing about the intentions of the individual or the collective behind the message.

Their message had been left vague and intentionally so, which rang alarms for many.

Dr. Leslie Prescott headed what came to be known as the Apollo 98 Project, which would send a moderately large team of scientists on one of humanity's most cutting-edge vessels out to the given coordinates in order to meet with the messenger.

Those individuals would have to be volunteers, given no assurances could be made about the safety of the contact with this messenger, but they would be hailed as heroes in this monumental new chapter in humanity's history, contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.

I signed up for the mission.

What did I have to tie me to Earth as a young man of 21 years old, orphaned in his youth and with no girlfriend, real friends, or living relatives? This was my chance to be remembered.

Otherwise, I would have died alone a few decades down the line, my name dying in a flash.

It was a morbid reason to sign up for the mission, but Dr. Prescott's propaganda had worked charm on me.

I wanted to be part of humanity's legacy.

I wanted to be remembered, and being one of the 57 crew members of the Apollo 98 vessel, I would be remembered forever, and by far more people than would have ever remembered me if I would stayed on Earth, slaving away in a mid-level engineering role at NASA.

Alongside training us for the mission, NASA began constructing its ship, working with an independent contractor known as DozenMinus, which for decades had been developing technologies, if for not centuries, ahead of modern science.

The year was 2001.

The transmission came in perfect English and garbled not by mispronunciation, but static.

A man's voice implored our agency, and in fact all space agencies, to send their best and brightest up into space.

They implored us to travel out and meet them at the farthest reach of the farthest galaxy known to us, and the message, it came along with coordinates setting the messenger's location at the edge of the known universe.

It seemed by any stretch of the sane imagination to be a hoax, but our best minds and our finest technology returned the same results time and time again.

The message was indeed transmitted to our station from deep space.

It was not an Earth-originating communication.

Looking back now, I realize NASA's brightest minds were not conducting countless tests for the sake of verifying the transmission's authenticity, but because they were hoping that it would be proven inauthentic.

We were terrified.

That was the plain and simple truth of it.

I was not but a lowly engineer, privy only to the barest information pertaining to the transmission, and I was terrified too.

The thought of a transmission spoken in fluent and perfectly enunciated English as if from a human rather than an alien tongue, it filled my gut with dread.

In science fiction, such a notion was exciting, but the reality of this transmission was quite the opposite.

It raised questions, and a list seemingly unending as scientists and politicians and various global experts in various fields all lent their minds to the task at hand.

There is no doubt that we were going to answer the call, of course, and investigate the coordinates given to us, but would we send out a team of humans as our mysterious messenger had requested? We knew nothing about the intentions of the individual or the collective behind the message.

Their message had been left vague and intentionally so, which rang alarms for many.

Dr. Leslie Prescott headed what came to be known as the Apollo 98 Project, which would send a moderately large team of scientists on one of humanity's most cutting-edge vessels out to the given coordinates in order to meet with the messenger.

Those individuals would have to be volunteers, given no assurances could be made about the safety of the contact with this messenger, but they would be hailed as heroes in this monumental new chapter in humanity's history, contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.

I signed up for the mission.

What did I have to tie me to Earth as a young man of 21 years old, orphaned in his youth and with no girlfriend, real friends, or living relatives? This was my chance to be remembered.

Otherwise, I would have died alone a few decades down the line, my name dying in a flash.

It was a morbid reason to sign up for the mission, but Dr. Prescott's propaganda had worked charm on me.

I wanted to be part of humanity's legacy.

I wanted to be remembered, and being one of the 57 crew members of the Apollo 98 vessel, I would be remembered forever, and by far more people than would have ever remembered me if I would stayed on Earth, slaving away in a mid-level engineering role at NASA.

Alongside training us for the mission, NASA began constructing its ship, working with an independent contractor known as DozenMinus, which for decades had been developing technologies, if for not centuries, ahead of modern science.