Frank Martin wasn't built for science. At fourteen, his mind hummed with comic books, Beatles tunes, and the impossible calculation of how to ask Linda Michaels from math class if she wanted to see "The Graduate" at the drive-in. But in '67, when even a boy's normal life felt like it was tilting off its axis.

It started as just another rumor whispered through his brother Mike’s after-work chatter. Mike worked the evening shift at WLVN radio and came home smelling of static and cigarettes. “They hit something out in Nevada,” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter, a half-eaten sandwich dangling from his hand. "A mining crew drilling for uranium. They say it’s… shiny.”

Mike shrugged. “Silver, but colder. He said they tried to drill into it, and—” He lowered his voice conspiratorially, glancing towards their mom at the stove. "It moved."

Frank didn't think much of it. Until the next night when he caught the late news with Dad. The grainy black-and-white images showed a metallic sphere, smooth as a marble but larger than a beach ball, sitting in a dusty mine pit. Even through the static, it gleamed like liquid mercury. The reporter's voice was tight, almost disbelieving: "Weighing nearly one hundred kilograms… yet its dimensions defy conventional physics." Dad stood behind Frank, arms crossed and silent, something unusual for him. “They’re calling in the UN,” he said finally, his voice low. “Something about... foreign tech.”

Frank heard the name then – Brian Johnson. The lead UN scientist, a man with eyes that seemed to bore through the screen. He described the sphere as "of extraterrestrial origin," but everyone dismissed it. Even Dad chuckled dismissively. But Frank felt a prickle on his skin—not fear exactly, more like… anticipation. As the camera zoomed in, he traced the sphere's flawless surface with his eyes, imagining running his hand over its coolness.

Days blurred into a loop of news reports and whispered theories. The media dubbed it “The Nevada Sphere.” Some said it was a meteorite, others a secret project from Area 51—the kind Mike liked to speculate about after too much coffee at the station. Mom kept switching channels, muttering about communists and Cold War paranoia. But Frank couldn’t look away. He filled his notebook with sketches, obsessing over how to capture its impossible smoothness, its perfect symmetry.

Frank sat cross-legged on the living room floor that Tuesday, remote in hand. The news showed a team in hazmat suits surrounding the sphere. A high-speed titanium drill whirred, throwing sparks as it touched the surface. The lead technician had been told it was “a non-threatening anomaly.” But when the bit made contact…

A split second of white noise followed by a scream that echoed in Frank’s ears. He scrambled to adjust the volume, but only found more static. The camera shook violently as a man stumbled back from the sphere, his face ghostly pale. “It’s... it's moving!” he yelled over the rising hum.

The sphere began to spin—not gently, but with dizzying speed. It looked less like metal and more like liquid light. The drill shattered, sending shards of titanium scattering across the pit. Then, without warning, the sphere lifted off the ground, hovering inches above the dirt. A crowd of miners and scientists scrambled back, faces contorted in terror. Johnson’s voice crackled through the speakers, strained but controlled: “Do not approach! It’s—”

The light exploded outward, blindingly bright. Frank instinctively threw his arm over his eyes, fumbling for the remote. But even with the TV off, the afterimage burned on his retinas.

The next morning, the world learned that the sphere hadn’t just levitated—it had accelerated to seventeen Gs, disappearing into space before anyone could react. The crater remained as the only evidence of its passage. A stunned planet fell silent.

School was a fever dream of rumors and jokes. His classmates speculated about alien invasions and Soviet tricks. Teachers dismissed it all with vague lectures on cosmic phenomena. But Frank couldn’t shake the image of that spinning sphere, now imprinted behind his eyelids. He devoured every article he could find—from the *National Geographic* to dusty physics textbooks in the library. He searched for mentions of mercury-titanium alloys, quantum structures, anything that might explain what he'd seen.

Nothing made sense. Not to the UN. Not to the scientists. Not even Brian Johnson, who weeks later gave a press conference with eyes hollowed by exhaustion. “We were not prepared,” he said, his voice raspy. “This object wasn’t here to be studied. It was… waiting.”

Frank never saw the sphere again. But on clear nights, he still lay in the backyard, staring at the stars. He imagined it hurtling through space, a silver shard against the velvet darkness. Did it reach another galaxy? Was it accelerating endlessly into oblivion? Or had someone—something—been watching all along?

He thought back to that drill operator’s scream and the way the sphere moved before it left. It wasn't just acceleration; there was an *intent* in its departure, a sense of deliberate escape. He wondered if this wasn't a message or a threat, but something else entirely—a test.

They called me reckless. A traitor, maybe. Some whispered "madwoman" behind their hands, but their names meant nothing now. The labels had stopped stinging years ago—after I’d sacrificed everything for a glimpse beyond the known.

The sphere sat in the center of the Kosmos Project lab, an impossible droplet of liquid mercury frozen mid-fall under the sterile white light. It hadn't been "discovered" so much as unearthed beneath the Carpathian Mountains by miners who thought they'd hit paydirt, only to find this anomaly. Now, it was locked away here, a secret the Serbian government clung to with fear and paranoia. We—my team—recognized its echo immediately: the Nevada sphere of 1967, reborn.

I hadn’t chased recognition; I’d chased answers. As a child in Belgrade, while others collected football cards, I devoured books on quantum physics, relativity, string theory—anything that chipped away at the universe's mysteries. By thirty-five, leading Kosmos Project wasn't about ambition, it was about a compulsion to understand what lay beyond our reach. The project, funded by layers of bureaucratic red tape and government oversight, demanded silence above all else. But this sphere…it pulsed with an urgency that resonated within my own bones.

We’d dubbed it the "quantum go fast"—a glib term for something so profound. It was a perfect replica of its predecessor: 0.97 meters in diameter, weighing 91 kilograms, crafted from an alloy of mercury and titanium that defied every test we threw at it. We bombarded it with lasers, pulsed magnetic fields across it, even tried to map its interior with high-energy X-rays—only to trigger a reaction.

The moment the X-ray beam touched its surface, the lab's lights flickered erratically. The air grew thick and heavy, charged like static before a lightning strike. I was beside Dr. Marko Vuković, our lead physicist, when the sphere began to hum—not an audible sound, but a vibration that throbbed in my teeth. The scanner’s readouts spiraled into chaos: zero mass, infinite density… quantum entanglement with nowhere?

“Shut it down!” I shouted, but Marko was paralyzed, his gaze locked on the sphere as it pulsed with a faint blue light. Then, without warning, it moved—not by thrust or propulsion, but by simply *slipping* out of gravity's hold, hovering inches above the table.

Before my mind could catch up, it accelerated. The lab’s walls groaned under a force akin to a thousand hurricanes ripping through steel. My ears popped, vision blurred, and for an instant, I felt weightless—as if the very Earth had forgotten me. Then, in 0.3 seconds, it was gone.

The only trace left was a shimmering distortion in the air where it had been. Two hours later, the UN detected its trajectory, charting its course away from Earth at exactly 17 Gs. The numbers were impossible. No known propulsion system could sustain that acceleration, let alone navigate with such precision. And yet, there it was—another echo of the unknown hurtling into a void we couldn't define.

The Serbian government’s response was swift and brutal. They demanded I bury the data, dismantle the lab, erase every trace before the UN descended. But I refused. Not out of defiance, but because I had seen something more than an object. Something…ancient. Alien. And the world deserved to know.

I held a press conference that afternoon. The Belgrade Science Institute’s hall overflowed with reporters from every continent, their lenses hungry for truth or scandal—likely both. Standing at the podium, my hands steady despite the tremor in my chest, I faced them with a stack of our logs, scans, and failures laid out like a tombstone.

“We call it a ‘quantum go fast’,” I began, my voice cutting through the murmur. “But you may recognize it as identical to the sphere discovered decades ago in Nevada.”

The room erupted. Cameras flashed, questions volleyed over each other. A CNN reporter demanded if it was alien technology; a Russian scientist accused us of weaponizing space. I let them clamor for answers while raising a hand for silence.

“This object is not ours,” I said firmly. “It’s not from Earth. It's either a message, a warning—perhaps both. We don’t know, but we do know it left at exactly 17 Gs, mirroring the first sphere in 1967. And like its predecessor, it's heading away from our galaxy.”

I looked down at the papers—the years we’d dedicated, the sacrifices made. “Because the truth isn’t property,” I said softly. "It belongs to everyone."

The fallout was instantaneous. The UN issued arrest warrants; conspiracy theorists hailed me as a prophet; scientists debated its origins. And I? I became a symbol—a reluctant icon of my own defiance. But the real question gnawed at me: two spheres, separated by decades. Why now?

The first left in 1967, during an age defined by Cold War paranoia and nascent cosmic exploration. The second in 2030, as our world teetered on the brink of climate collapse and surrendered to artificial intelligence. Were they harbingers? Escapees? Or something else entirely?

I don’t have answers. But sometimes, when I gaze at the night sky, I imagine them—those tiny, silent vessels accelerating into infinity. And I wonder if they weren't fleeing us… but watching over us, waiting for a future we can barely fathom.

Moscow smelled of rust and rot, a scent that clung to my throat every morning as I walked through cracked streets littered with broken glass. Each step crunched on debris—the ghosts of a world that had given up. The smog wasn’t just in the air; it felt like a second skin, heavy and stale. Above me, the sky wasn't gray from clouds but from the perpetual haze of neglected factories. People moved as if weighted down by invisible burdens, eyes fixed on the ground, avoiding any reminder of what was lost.

Rounding the corner, I caught a glimpse of static on a flickering screen in a shop window—a news broadcast struggling to stay alive. A hollow-cheeked anchor’s voice rasped through the speakers: “…pulses detected… ‘quantum go fast’ objects… Scientists say it's... something.” He trailed off, uncertainty hanging in the air.

I scoffed and turned away. "Something." That was all anyone said these days—something, maybe, perhaps. The government had stopped trying to explain; just shrugs and that empty word. They might as well have been talking about dust bunnies.

I'm Alisa Petrova, sixteen years old. Home is a crumbling apartment block, once a symbol of the Soviet Union’s ambition, now just concrete and fractured memories. My father died in the food riots of '63, and my mother left for St. Petersburg last year. "To find work," she said, but I haven't heard from her since.

They talk about “the Forty Years” – until the spheres return. The ones that left in '67 and '30, vanishing into nothingness. People whisper about them at the market, behind closed doors. The government assures us there's no need to panic—"Forty years. We’ll figure it out." But how do you prepare for a threat you can’t understand?

My grandfather used to tell stories of the first sphere in '67. He called it a miracle, beautiful beyond words. Then he’d shudder and say, “The scientists were terrified. They didn't know *what* they were looking at.” That fear stuck with me.

When I was twelve, I found a forgotten book in my mother’s closet: "The Nevada Sphere: A History of the Unknown." It was dense, technical, most of it above my head, but I devoured it. The sphere had accelerated to seventeen Gs—a number so precise, it felt deliberate. Like something commanding it forward.

And then there was the 'quantum go fast' in Serbia. My history teacher mentioned it once, dismissing it as a failed experiment. But her voice faltered when she said it. I saw fear behind her eyes. She didn’t want us to ask questions.

Now, Moscow is dying not from bombs or plague, but from indifference. No new buildings rise; no one dreams of futures beyond tomorrow. The labs that once studied the spheres are silent, overgrown with weeds and dust. Even the United Nations feels like a hollow echo—leaders more concerned with their power than the approaching unknown.

I've felt the pulses myself—faint but deliberate waves, like someone tapping on an old door. Misha says it’s cosmic noise; he doesn’t want to believe anything is coming. But I know better. The patterns aren’t random. They're too regular, too… insistent.

I think about their departures—so fast, so silent. They didn’t destroy us; just vanished. Maybe they weren't here to harm us. Or maybe… something else altogether. But I can’t afford to wait and find out.

Each evening, I climb to the roof of our building and scan the sky. The stars are cold pinpricks in the darkness. Are they watching us too?

I don't know what awaits in 2130. Maybe destruction, maybe salvation. Or maybe just… nothing. But I won’t sit here passively.

I've started collecting data—tracking the pulses, trying to decode their message. It’s risky; my school thinks it’s a waste of time, but I can’t ignore this feeling. The world is built on lies, and I refuse to be swallowed by them.

Someone will ask what happened when this all comes crashing down. And when they do, I want to have answers, even if no one else cares.

The sky above Berlin wasn’t a canvas of smoke anymore—it was empty, an aching void that swallowed the city’s muted glow.

I stand on the Max Planck Institute’s observation deck, my breath misting in the frigid air. The latest data from our orbital telescopes just came through: four objects, each the size of Mars and polished smooth like obsidian shards, hang at the solar system's edge. They haven’t approached Earth—not a single kilometer closer. After three days of silent observation, they turned and vanished into interstellar darkness.

My fingers tighten around my data tablet, the screen casting a blue glow on my weathered face. I’ve devoted my life to believing humanity's first contact would be a moment of revelation, not... this. My obsession began with the 1967 sphere and spiraled through decades studying the Serbian ‘quantum go fast' sphere that emerged in 2030. Every log, every failed analysis—I know them all. And now, they are here, or rather, they’ve been here, passed judgment, and moved on.

Since 2070, the world has anticipated this reckoning for forty years. The constant pulse from those quantum spheres—a steady thrum underlying human existence—has become an ignored heartbeat in a failing body. Scientists theorized; governments bickered over protocols. Ordinary people, numbed by crisis after crisis, simply stopped listening.

I didn’t. I spent my career at the European Space Agency, advocating for a unified response to the unknown. Dialogue, I believed, was possible. Those spheres weren’t necessarily hostile—perhaps they were testing humanity, gauging our worthiness.

The 2070s saw collapse accelerate. Climate disasters transformed continents into dustbowls; governments fractured under the strain of resource scarcity and unchecked nationalism. The United Nations became a hollow shell, replaced by the fragmented "Earth Alliance"—a patchwork of defunct treaties and broken promises.

I remember watching their initial image flood newsfeeds, then confirming its authenticity with the Atacama Array. That was the moment I knew. This isn’t a visitation; it’s an evaluation.

I scan the data on my tablet: those spheres moved at impossible speeds, their trajectory a perfect arc back into the void. No exhaust plumes, no energy signatures—just four absences in space, as if the universe itself had exhaled and held its breath.

I recall the 1967 sphere, lost to tracking systems within years of its departure. I think of the Serbian scientists who chased it across continents, only to find themselves chasing shadows. And I remember those who ignored the warning signs, clinging to power while Earth withered around them.

They saw the smoke-choked skies, the dying forests, the poisoned oceans. They witnessed endless wars fueled by greed and lies. And in our brokenness, found us unworthy of intervention.

A hollow ache settles in my chest. I dedicated my life to humanity's potential for good—our capacity to transcend self-destruction. This feels like a cosmic indictment.

I picture the children born into this dying world, inheriting only poisoned soil and fractured skies. Cities crumbling under their own weight, monuments to our negligence. The quantum spheres—I wonder if they were heralds of some inevitable fate? A final exam we’ve flunked?

The world won’t grasp what’s lost. They’ll dismiss it as cosmic indifference—a random event in an uncaring universe. Life will go on: overpriced synthetic coffee, holographic distractions masking the decay around them.

I close my eyes, a silent prayer forming on my lips. It’s not for salvation—I doubt there’s any left to seek. It’s an apology. A lament.

Then I turn from the window and walk back into the Institute's dim corridors, where the last embers of civilization flicker in the face of oblivion. The stars have spoken. And humanity has run out of words.

The wind bit through my coat like teeth, each gust whipping snow into my face as I trudged toward the old radio tower north of Anchorage. The skeletal remains of buildings clawed at the gray sky, their black silhouettes smeared with ash that tasted metallic on my tongue—a familiar burn in my throat whenever I breathed too deep. It had been weeks since the sun broke through; weeks of this perpetual twilight and the smell of burnt plastic.

I hadn’t seen a tree stand for longer than three decades now, not one that wasn't charred or hollowed out. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could almost remember the scent of pine from old holovids—a ghost memory. 32 years old, and those images felt like ancient history.

My boots crunched over frozen debris as a flicker in the distance caught my eye. Not a fire, but something glinting near the tower’s base. Maybe salvageable parts? The bunker's power generator was sputtering again; Old Man Hemlock said we had days before it died completely.

Three years since the spheres left… They came in 2130—four planet-sized shadows against the stars, glowing like inverse black holes. I remember everyone stopping, looking up, hoping for answers. Instead, they just… departed. No warning, no explanation. Just a silent departure that ripped away the last shard of hope we had left.

I tightened my grip on the salvaged rifle slung across my shoulder. It hadn’t been fired in months, but it was still heavy with the promise of protection. I remember 2032—or maybe ’31, the years blurred into one long nightmare of sirens and falling ash. The first bombs over Fairbanks weren't aimed at us, just a power station in the Yukon. But fallout doesn’t discriminate. My mother had started coughing then, her lungs turning to dust before my eyes.

That was when people stopped being neighbors and became shadows vying for scraps. I saw men with rifles bartering for water, women willing to trade anything—anything—for a single can of peaches. The memory still felt like shards in my chest.

The bunker near the Arctic Circle… “the last safe place,” Hemlock called it. Ten souls crammed into concrete and desperation. The food was moldy, the water barely potable, but at least it wasn’t out here in the open.

I bent over a patch of snow-covered rock near the tower. Strange symbols carved into the stone—circles within triangles. I hadn't seen these before. They looked… ancient? Like something predating even the bombs. Were they here before us? Or did someone else come after? The spheres had left, but maybe there were others out there, watching.

I shivered, not from the cold, but from a prickling unease on the back of my neck. Had I imagined those symbols? The isolation was getting to me.

Hemlock used to say we deserved this—that our greed and shortsightedness had poisoned the earth. He wasn’t wrong. We burned through resources, fought over scraps, and now… nothing but ash.

As I approached the tower's base, I spotted it: a dented metal canister half-buried in the snow. Not power generator parts, but something else. Old rations? Maybe even clean water. Hope flickered—a dangerous thing in this world.

The wind howled again, and above me, a plane passed too high to make out details, just a dark speck against the gray sky. I didn't look up. There was nothing left to watch except what lay at my feet—the silent promise of survival, or another disappointment in a world that had forgotten how to hope.

Go Fast

Go Fast - Chapter 1

Go Fast - Chapter 2

Go Fast - Chapter 3

Go Fast - Chapter 4

Go Fast - Chapter 5