Chapter 2: Buried Truths

Director Morrison arrived in eight minutes, not ten. Sarah had never seen him move that fast.

“Show me,” he said, no preamble, no small talk.

Sarah pulled up the signal analysis. Morrison’s face went from skeptical to pale in the time it took the message to repeat three times.

WE REMEMBER

“How long has it been transmitting?” His voice was steady, but Sarah noticed his hand gripping the edge of the console.

“Forty-three minutes. The pattern suggests it started the moment we began actively listening to that particular frequency range.”

“That’s impossible. There’s no way they could know we—” He stopped. “Unless they’ve been waiting. Listening for us.”

Sarah pulled up a second screen. “There’s more. The signal contains embedded data. It took me twenty minutes to isolate it, but…” She hesitated. “Sir, it’s coordinates. Specific locations. On Earth.”

Morrison leaned closer. “What kind of locations?”

“Archaeological sites. But not the famous ones. These are… obscure. Places that haven’t been excavated yet. Places most people have never heard of.”

Sarah highlighted the first set of coordinates. “Northern Canada, permafrost region. We’ve never dug there. No reason to.”

She moved to the next. “Deep ocean trench in the Pacific. Unexplored.”

“Antarctic ice shelf, three kilometers deep.”

“Sahara Desert, under two hundred meters of sand.”

Morrison was shaking his head. “What are they telling us to find?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s been buried for a very long time.”

The computer beeped again. New data decoded from the signal.

This time, it wasn’t coordinates. It was a date.

December 21, 2025.

Three weeks from now.

And beneath the date, a single word that made Sarah’s heart stop:

DEADLINE

Morrison grabbed the phone on Sarah’s desk. “I need to speak to the Joint Chiefs. Now.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Sarah, I want every frequency monitored. If this signal changes, I want to know immediately.”

“Sir, what about the Mars colony? The excavation site? We need to know what they found—”

“The Mars mission is classified. Need-to-know only.”

“With respect, sir, I think I need to know.”

Morrison met her eyes. The man who’d spent thirty years searching for intelligent life suddenly looked very old.

“They found a door,” he said quietly. “Buried under two kilometers of Martian rock. A door that shouldn’t exist. Made from materials we can’t identify. With symbols we can’t read.”

“And?”

“Three days before the colony went dark, they opened it.”

Sarah felt the room tilt.

“What was inside?”

Morrison’s laugh was hollow. “We don’t know. The last transmission we received was a single message: ‘It’s not a door. It’s a warning.’”

The signal changed.

Both of them froze, staring at Sarah’s monitor.

The message was no longer WE REMEMBER.

Now it read: THEY ARE COMING

And every coordinate on Earth began to pulse with a new signal—a countdown.

Twenty-one days.

Fifteen hours.

Forty-three minutes.

Whatever deadline the signal was warning about, it wasn’t just a date.

It was an arrival.

Sarah pulled up the global map, overlaying all the coordinates. The pattern made her blood run cold.

The locations formed a perfect geometric pattern. A star map.

But not a map of the stars above Earth.

A map of the stars as they appeared one million years ago.

Someone—something—had been on Earth before. Long before humans. And they’d left a message, hidden in places we’d never look, waiting for us to find it.

Waiting for us to remember.

The question was: remember what?

And more importantly—did we want to?

To be continued in Chapter 3…