“The cannons roared and the ships hummed through the air. A mix of chaos, metal, and blood stood between the final end or a new beginning; the latter seeming to lose its grasp of reality the further we descended into hell.”

- General Sarah Aluri

The faint, white light reflected off of my face as it blinked on the monitor screen, illuminating my darkened, harsh features and a fraction of the blackened, dirt-covered walls.

“The year is 2175 and everything has changed. It all started with this.” I held up the strange, metal box that I found the previous year. It was still unopened and no amount of fiddling with it or attempting to pry open one of the sides was successful or even left a single scratch. It was flawless in design, whatever nature that may be. I looked at the cube, then at the monitor, and back at the cube. It was beautiful. I couldn’t take my gaze off its form. My fingers caressed the edges and markings, the gentle, cool touch on my skin.

My voice was quiet and focused. “This box…it’s the key to everything. The key to the end. It all began with the lights. After I brought the box home, strange things took place. It made the light flicker and pulse as if an unknown energy was flowing through these very walls. Initially, I thought it was the storms, but then I soon realized that the storms had also changed. They no longer pounded against the walls like furious waves against the rocks. The storms now went around the walls, circumventing them as if this box provided an invisible shield of protection. Tranquility replaced chaos.

Every day I went out searching for the red light in the sky, while each night I fell asleep, dreaming and wondering what it may be, and whether other survivors existed beyond my solitude, that perhaps I wasn’t alone after all. But I never found anything.

Then, one day, it came to me.

Stolen novel; please report.

Determined to find more answers, I decided to bring the cube along with me to scavenge and see if I could find others like it, other materials not made by human hands. I tried desperately to find the exact spot where I had discovered it earlier that year, but the landscape is an ever-changing beast that never shows its face twice.

Defeated, I knelt in the dirt and pulled out the cube from my scavenging pack, and cradled it in my hand. As my fingers tightened around it, the world seemed to dissolve and instantly spin until the lights became a single blur and everything faded. My mind was taken back to a time and place outside of Earth. I witnessed what I thought to be another world, another race, a history that no one else knew. I no longer felt like I was inside of my own body and mind, but instead, I was one with another, melding with a different consciousness. I saw shadows of strange figures, beings I did not understand, birth and death alike, one almost indistinguishable from the other.

And then, the light abruptly came back to me, my mind returning to my body in an instant flash, and I awoke where I was just a brief moment before. My breath caught and I struggled to regain my composure. It felt as if I had witnessed an entire lifetime in a brief, mind-altering moment. Whose existence had I witnessed? What unfathomable things had I experienced?

My gaze lifted and looked towards the eastern sky, where another red light burst through the air.

It was calling me. Someone, something was calling me. But who? And then it hit me.

I wasn’t alone.”

Leaning back in my chair, my face hidden in the shadows, the monitor light still blinking, I fell into a prolonged silence.

“This is the last time you’ll hear from me. I have made one thousand and seven recordings over the years, and this will be my final one. May someone discover these and know what happened to me, to know that they aren’t alone. Within this computer lies everything I am, and everything I know; the final remnants of mankind. May it serve to reshape humanity if it still exists.”

I kissed my fingers, pressing them gently to the camera. “May this desolate land become a mere shadow of what it once was, and may the Earth find its way back to who it is.”

The camera’s light continued to blink as if waving goodbye as it watched me wrap my face with my covering, sling my pack over my shoulder, and close the heavy door behind me, the cube held tightly in my hands.