Among Us

Yesterday, conspiracy theorists around the world were given the gift of a lifetime: Pentagon- verified videos of three unidentified flying objects. Of course, no one actually knows what these are, but many herald them as evidence of extraterrestrial surveillance of our world.

I agree. I've never told anyone this, and if it was ever found out that I shared it, I don't know what would happen to me. But it's important that someone knows, because I think they're trying to stop me, and the fate of the world may one day rest on this information. So listen closely:

NASA Ames research center is a sprawling campus of myriad concrete, windowless buildings, build in the 1960s to guard our space program from Soviet espionage and interference. This, conveniently, also hides us from the public eye despite the location in the center of Silicon Valley. When I was there, I worked in the synthetic biology and human systems lab — a cold, grey slab of stone that is closest to the airfield, furthest from the road, and my dorm was on the adjacent air force base, right next to the end of the airfield and the stripped metal frame of a massive hanger that looks as if it's the ribcage of a steel giant.

The first thing they tell you when you arrive is don't drink the water, don't go on the airfield at night, don't go into the empty and abandoned dorms, and — whatever you do — don't walk towards the colored lights in the distance. Don't look at the colored lights in the distance. Close your blinds, turn over, and go back to sleep. It's for your own good.

But, on some nights, the lights would shine even through the blackout curtains, swirling, scintillating, burning an image onto the back of my retina that seemed almost alive, and had I not shared the room with a light sleeper, I might've followed them even earlier than I did.

I listened, though. I didn't want to get in trouble, didn't want to lose the job. And, honestly, there was something unnerving about them, something unnerving about the thudding we could hear at night, echoing like labored footsteps, something almost sliding along the floor of the abandoned rooms around us. The buzzing, the humming, the almost conversational clicking at a frequency just below that of the wind was just the pipes; just the old building settling; just the frantic speculation of my insomniac mind. The odd paths in the dust outside our steps some mornings, leading from the edge of the landing strip to the stairs, were just oddly shaped suitcases, dragged bikes, dropped shopping bags. The roar of planes coming in to land was only that loud because we were so close.

"There is nothing abnormal here. There is nothing wrong." I told myself this every night as I lay awake, my mind playing terrifying tricks on me, back to the window, not seeing the swirling lights, not seeing the outlined silhouettes moving closer, close ...

But one day I was in my lab too late. The campus closed, the 9 PM California night fell, and as I left the building, I heard hushed voices coming from the propped door of the human research building next door. This is only surprising because this building houses nothing but human centrifuges, designed to test our short and long term resilience to hypergravity, but they've all been decommissioned and out of use since before the last shuttle flight 10 years ago.

I wish I could tell you I walked away, but you all know me too well. Breathing slowly, silently, with my heart pounding so hard I could feel my pulse in my temples and in my neck — so hard I was afraid you could hear it — I crept towards the open door and slipped into a darkened hallway that echoed with voices speaking a language I could neither recognize nor understand. Pausing, I reached down to slip off my shoes, my now-bare feet making no sound as I moved slowly down the cold linoleum floor. Following the rising voices and what initially looked like flashes of camera shutters, I made it about 100 meters down the hallway before it made a sharp turn and I found myself suddenly exposed on a catwalk. Looking down at the space that should house largest human centrifuge, a structure that I knew was 50 meters across, I saw nothing but silver and chrome and spitting lights throwing shadows on the wall there were terrifying not because they were inhuman, but because they were almost human, almost normal, but distorted like the cloth dolls of a sadistic puppeteer. And the voices — oh, God, the voices. They were so loud, seemed so ... familiar ... and yet I still couldn't understand a word though it felt like they were being spoken directly into my skull. Stumbling back into the shadows, it took everything in me to maintain my slow, silent, controlled walk out of the building so nothing would hear me.

As soon as I hit the dirt outside, I ran. I ran all the damn way home.

The lights were unimaginably bright that night, and I didn't sleep for a minute. But in the more natural sunshine of the next day, I managed to convince myself everything was okay. In fact, I almost forgot about everything that had happened the night before when, at lunch, one of the astronauts sat down with the group of us interns and asked us how we were doing. Starstruck, we began peppering her with questions, but — for me — something didn't sit right.

I didn't realize why I recognized her voice until, as I was leaving, I turned to ask her why she kept wanting to go back to space – to the moon, even to mars — despite the danger, despite the isolation, despite how much is still unknown.

Eyes slightly too open, smiling slightly too wide, she turned to me and, with a voice that has haunted my nightmares ever since, replied, "it feels, in a way, like going home."