They Shouldn't Have Come Here

They shouldn’t have come here, but they did. On the third day of June in the year 2032 aliens invaded Earth. I know this sounds like the beginning of a cliché Sci-Fi novel. You’re probably thinking something along the lines of, “Great, another War of the Worlds clone.” This is not that story.

The invasion was silent and swift. Not because of some overwhelmingly dominant extraterrestrial civilization, but because only a single lifeform appeared on our planet. I’m writing this because someone else, anyone else, needs to understand what happened. The cataclysm that resulted from the alien’s presence on Earth was not his fault – it was mine. The burden, the guilt, is mine, and mine alone, to bear.

I am a time traveler. I wasn’t back then, but I am now. I’m hoping either this audio log or the transcript of it fall into the right hands. This is the story of how Earth became Aeterra. Yeah, I think the name is dumb too, but some scholar decided that it would be cool to combine the latin words “aeternus” and “terra” – meaning “eternal” and “land” respectively.

Anyway, I feel that I’m getting a bit sidetracked from the original topic. I don’t want to go into the history of Aeterra and how civilization redeveloped into the thriving abundance that it is today. Nothing really changed. It’s different, yes, but not so much that it’s worth my time to explain the similarities and differences.

Let’s go back to June 3, 2032. It was a hot summer day. The air was thick and filled with the sound of laughter and the scent of backyard barbecues. I remember it so vividly not because I was there, but because I can travel there as often as I want. In fact, I am recording this log while sitting on the back porch of my old home watching myself grill burgers while my wife and two children splash around in our in-ground swimming pool.

You might be wondering why they haven’t noticed a stranger sitting on the porch swing. Well, I’ve learned that there are a bunch of different methods to time travel. The one I use is termed chronoparallax. Chronoparallax is a form of temporal superposition where the traveler is not merely an objective observer but can interact with people and objects if they choose.

The “parallaxer,” as we’re colloquially named, exists both within and tangential to any single moment. It’s kind of like having a camera lens with a lite version of built-in editing software. A snapshot of time can be altered in small ways, but the observer has to be very careful not to create paradoxes in doing so. For instance, a person could not go back in time and end the life of one of their ancestors during childhood because the temporal divergence would result in the parallaxer never being born, thus never having the ability to travel through time. Honestly, time travel is a huge headache, and it’s a lot more difficult to explain than it is to understand once you’ve done it a few times. Forgive me, though, if I confuse verb tenses during my story though. It’s a bit confusing to have lived through something and simultaneously experiencing it from the third person in both the past and present tenses.

From this point forward, I will be speaking as if I were my past self in the moment.

I got sidetracked again. Apologies for that, but it’s important for you to know how and why I’m recording this. After my family’s backyard barbecue, they went inside to get ready for school the next morning. My wife was a teacher at the kids’ school, so they all had early bedtimes. I spend my free time in the evenings developing software to pay for our lifestyle. I cleaned the grill and picked up the pool toys and towels that had been left strewn about the patio. The evening light grew dim as the sun dipped below the horizon.

A sudden flash of light bathed the backyard in blue. I turned around, my heart beating fast as I squinted against the flash. In the back corner near the shed stood a short, humanoid figure with huge eyes sprouting from stalks on top of its head. Its skin was smooth and translucent, almost allowing its organs to be seen. Its legs were short, but its arms nearly reached the ground due to the extra joint in them.

“Uh, hello,” I said hesitantly as its eyestalks blinked separately, “wh-what are you?”

The creature just stood there with a confused look on its face. It reached up to the collar that it was wearing and pressed a button. It began speaking, “Apologies, human, my translator was not turned on. My name translated into your language would be Squee. I am from a planet that your people have designated Veda-11.”

“So, uh, are aliens invading our planet?” I asked hesitantly.

Squee let out a high-pitched gasping sound that I could only imagine to be laughter. “No, we are a peaceful species. I arrived here due to an experiment in quantum transportation, but it seems that I miscalculated by approximately zero-point-zero-zero-three-four.”

“Zero-point-zero-zero-four-three what, exactly?” I asked, curious what the numbers meant.

“Well, humans refer to it as a Planck length. It’s approximately one-point-six-one-six times ten to the power of negative thirty-five. Zero-point-zero-zero-four-three of that number.”

I pondered his words for a moment before responding, “That is a surprisingly miniscule number. I thought a Planck length was the smallest possible scale in the observable universe.”

“It is the end of the observable universe and the beginning of the theoretical universe. However, in the mathematics of teleportation and time travel, it is a very important number. Space and time don’t exist, at least the way you perceive them, at a scale smaller than one Planck length. Due to a concept that you may know as loop quantum gravity, space and time become distorted beyond the Planck scale.”

I stood there, my mouth agape, attempting to process this information. I considered myself somewhat of a physics buff, but this little alien was casually confirming theories that quantum physicists spent their entire lives trying to figure out. My unresponsive silence prompted Squee to continue his long-winded explanation:

“My species is experimenting with quantum teleportation. We have created a machine that reduces our own atomized structure subducts ourselves beneath the Planck boundary. Theoretically, a being can travel to any predetermined destination in less than a moment due to the atoms swimming through the quantum foam. Once the target location is reached, the remote activated signal causes our atoms are supraducted above the Planck boundary and they reassemble. It took a long time to perfect that process, and we lost a lot of good test subjects in the process. I was supposed to appear on a planet called Melelelle in the Relamar system. However, due to a slight miscalculation, I ended up here. I am afraid that I am stuck here now with no way to reach my destination – or return home. Unless your species has attained time travel or a similar method of quantum transportation.”

“Uh, no, Squee, we’re regrettably not that advanced,” I replied solemnly.

Squee slumped, its posture portraying sadness – or something akin to sadness. “I figured as much. I will have no choice but to build a temporal transference conductor. I will then prevent the mistake that landed me here.”

“I’m not sure we will have the raw materials you need for that,” I reply in unison with my past self. Man, how I wish I had been correct.

“I will make a list,” Squee said gleefully.

We spent the next six weeks procuring materials and assembling the machine. Squee lived in the shed in our backyard in the meantime. It quickly became part of our family. It ate dinner with us, played with the kids in the backyard, and even helped with chores to show its gratitude for my help in its quest to return home. Everything was fine, until it wasn’t.

I noticed a black van parked across the street from the house. At this point we were just a few days away from finishing the temporal transference conductor – as Squee had called it. The antenna was finished, but Squee was still working on building the transcription implant that would soon be affixed to its body. Honestly, the technology was way beyond me at the time, and it still is.

We didn’t pay much attention to the black van until the day of the first test. My wife had taken the kids to visit their grandparents. Squee implanted the device into his body beneath the translucent skin of his elongated arm. Once it was implanted, I operated the user interface. The goal was to send Squee a few minutes into the future, and we succeeded in doing so. A blinding light bathed the backyard and the surrounding neighborhood in a sickening yellow glow.

Squee was gone. I checked my watch, waiting as the seconds ticked away. Squee re-appeared exactly four minutes later in the same spot it had been standing previously. The experiment was a success. We cheered and high-fived in celebration. The happy moment did not last long. A knock came at the door.

Squee’s eyes seemed to widen. “Go hide,” I whispered. It did as it was told and ran to the backyard. The sound of wood splintering echoed throughout the house as the front door was kicked in. Two men in black suits rushed into the house with pistols drawn. I rushed out the back door as bullets tore through the nearby drywall. Squee motioned for me to run to the shed.

Once inside I latched the door knowing that the thin wooden walls would not protect us from a hail of gunfire. Squee was in the corner doing something I had not expected. It was attempting to tear the implant from its arm. It succeeded but it lost a lot of blood in the process.

Squee loaded the implant into the same device it had used before. Squee turned to me and jabbed me with the device, embedding the implant into my forearm. The pain was instant, yet ephemeral. I grabbed at the implant and looked at Squee with confusion and a sense of betrayal on my face.

“We only have one, Paul, I want you to survive,” Squee said solemnly. “I’ll be okay. I wasn’t supposed to return from this expedition anyway.” It began punching numbers into the handheld user interface, “I’m sending you to my planet to learn how to travel without a device like this one.”

Before I could protest, Squee pressed the red button. I could have sworn that I saw tears in its eyestalks as the world turned black and I was ripped away from my home. On Squee’s home planet of Swee, I learned so many things. The planet existed outside the flow of time due to the temporal phase adjuster that their civilization had built in the center of the planet. I learned about time travel, relativity, new types of mathematics, and so much more. One of their doctors removed my crude implant with a look of disappointment.

I was retrofitted with new implants throughout my body that would allow me to slip between the seams of time and space without destroying my cellular structure. This civilization had advanced so far beyond my own that teaching me about quantum foam calculations was akin to teaching a toddler Calculus. Still, I learned. I still have no idea how many eons I spent there in the span of a mere moment.

Once I was ready, I began my new life as a traveler. Life is different when you can view it in six dimensions rather than three. Their leader, Kudulu, was gracious enough to send me back to Earth once it was satisfied that I had learned all that I needed to. Being on their planet for so long had changed me, though. I was used to existing outside the flow of time. My body aged in both directions for what felt like months. The Swee-ites had reassured me that once my body stabilized with the flow of time on Earth that I would be able to choose my age.

The next thing I did was visit my family a few days after the incident with Squee. I explained everything, but my wife believed I had gone insane. She did not recognize Squee’s name or my decription of him. I attempted to show her my implants, but she looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. She left, and she took the kids with her. I was mostly unaffected at the time because I had a mission to fulfill. I had to save Squee. Maybe it could help me fix this mess.

I’ve been trying to save Squee ever since. It seems like he gets captured no matter what I try to change about the scenario. Sometimes I think the agents can see me somehow. They seem to adapt to my changes, but I don’t think they can interact with me. I swear they look at me sometimes while I’m adjusting things in the moments leading up to Squee’s capture.

One time – just one time – I followed Squee as they loaded it into the black van and drove away. The men drove to a secured facility in Arkansas. It was a long drive from South Carolina, but it only seemed like a moment passed for me. They unloaded the crate containing Squee and carted it to an elevator in the basement that only had a single down button.

The facility below was a crisp, clean laboratory. They strapped Squee’s unconscious body to a table and left. Squee was terrified when it awoke. It lurched and pulled against the restraints. It cried out, but no one answered. Days passed in the blink of an eye. A scientist entered the laboratory with a fully equipped medical team. I’ll leave the gruesome details to your imagination, but they did so many cruel, inhumane tests on Squee before eventually dissecting it fully.

I watched helplessly with tears streaming down my face. I sat with Squee’s lifeless body for the rest of the day. I repeated its final moments until I had memorized every minute detail. I will never go back there. I will never experience that again. Most importantly, I will never be able to forget the look on Squee’s normally happy face as they sliced, burned, and cut into him. Its face bore an expression of bewilderment and betrayal. Its species simply couldn’t comprehend this level of objective cruelty.

Curiosity got the better of me. I had to see what came next. I had to see if our experiment had impacted the world in any way. I was not prepared for what I witnessed. In a series of unfortunate events caused directly by Squee’s appearance in my backyard that hot summer evening, the entire world was thrown into chaos.

After capturing Squee and seizing the temporal transference conductor, government scientists attempted to replicate the experiment. Unbeknownst to them, they were missing the vital piece that I had taken with me. The catastrophe that followed was a near-extinction level event, leaving only about 0.0001 percent of the population alive. The malfunction of the temporal transference conductor distorted space-time worldwide.

Oceans flooded the sky. Plants overtook cities, towns, and infrastructure in a matter of moments. Volcanoes erupted as the planet cracked apart in fragments, spreading magma between them like a web of bridges. The fragments stayed held in proximal stasis. Those who endured evolved into a slightly new species that would eventually give rise to Aeterra and its new civilization.

Fortunately, I have all the time in the world to save Squee. It only experienced its capture and systematic dismantling one time. Knowing this brought me slight comfort given how many times I had watched it happen. Still, every time they load Squee into that van I drop to my knees and weep. I know where it’s going. I know what’s going to happen to it. I’m hopeful that I will eventually be able to prevent its capture. I am even more hopeful that I can prevent Squee from coming to Earth in the first place. I just have to solve the unbelievably complex conundrum of building a quantum teleportation engine.

Squee shouldn’t have come here.