What if...

 I don't even remember the last time I had the pleasure of being blinded by the sun, no one does at this point. It's been fifty years of us traveling over this wasteland we used to call home... and it's all my fault. 

 When I first joined the institute I was just a lad, spending nights playing lol, chasing girls and illegally speeding with my mom's Nissan. They took me as an apprentice, as an intern, which means shit money and shit hours and well...more realistically, I lived there and didn't get paid, but the food was free and I had my own room! 

 They recruited me after I accidentally knocked out a radio tower with my homemade jet airplane the size of a Kellogg's box. I was bored at home and had plenty of spare parts out of the broken washing machine, the tv my dad smashed with a baseball bat. (Something about losing a lottery?) And my old consoles. Also the scrapyard where my ‘woo woo’ cousin worked helped. He always babbled about aliens watching us, walking among us. He even suspected auntie Clare to be one. I never told him how close to the truth he was. 

 I dropped out after ten grades, the school was just not for me, I didn't blend in. I would get in a fight with a bully or two, then I'm the one who gets told on. Worst bullies I've ever encountered i'd say…They had to put me in a different school, ten miles away from home. I also had to cycle there! On a rainy day I would not go at all, and here in England, every day is a rainy day. When I did go, another bully picked on me and I did the same. I beated the living crap out of him.

Something about me just attracts bullies like I am some sort of bully magnet. Guess reading research papers on break times and wearing googly glasses did not go well with all the ‘who has the latest iPhone’ trend. Also I had no Facebook account, that has put a target on my back from day one. 

 A combination of an ex-boxer dad and a mom who wanted to be a scientist gave me a fantastic combination of skills that put me up for an interesting life. Reading science books and building gadgets out of old junk in the morning and sparring with my dad in the afternoon. And if I must add… he did not go easy on me. Evenings were the best, my older brother would leave to visit his girlfriend and I had all the pleasure to tinker with our computer. 

 When the men in black suits, just like from the movie, knocked on our door, I did not think they came for me. I avoided their questions like it was the coronavirus. The airplane I made had nothing to associate with me. But little that I knew, the camera on a nearby McDonalds had an ultra HD setting active…Later on I found out that they had a satellite camera. How creepy is that? Being watched every day without even realizing it. Your every move, every action, every video you watch, every photo you like...Just creepy. 

After they inspected my “inventions” they shoved a lengthy paper for me to sign. I think they really liked my pedal opener for a toilet seat. Or the invisible printer that I made out of ectoplasms from eBay and water plus light projections in a 3d printer, not quite sure. Still I think they were quite impressed by a toilet seat that you don't need to lean to lift up.

 They promised I would avoid jail time if I signed. I must say, as a fourteen year old, I didn't think twice. 

 The technology they worked there on, was out of this world, literally. And no one knew about it. The ambition, the plan, the execution felt all but perfect. Something felt dodgy about it, but did I care? No, I loved the job, I loved the endless hours fidgeting and building miniature cities within my circuit boards. Some looked like skyscrapers, some like urban neighbourhoods, highways and shopping malls. I loved the brainstorming meetings, though everyone was extremely serious about everything. Except for Richard, he was the only one who did not shy to crack a joke, and I was the only one who would get it. Lets not forget the freedom and resources, I got to do whatever I please...No nagging mom about the strange noises coming from the basement, no need to walk five miles to bring a new fuse. I loved the technology no one has access to...Maybe that was the beginning of the mistake we got ourselves into, maybe we never were meant to dabble into something we barely understand. 

But how we couldn't? We had to! Curiosity is part of our nature. 

 Richard was a good man, he was my friend, my colleague, my companion. We spent the first four years together, working, playing, inventing things no one knew how they worked, not even us sometimes. When his skin started to smolder then exploded off his bones I froze. I watched him go over the cabin of the saucer, the controls, the tiny seats. My coat...I did not move, my knees and legs cemented, I felt nothing. I just felt nothing...I wanted to cry and shout, my lungs inflated yet nothing came out. I raised my palms the same time as pink goo ran down them like jelly. The only thought in my head was that it is Richard...was Richard… 

They never touched the thing again for about two years. “Off limits” they said, “strictly forbidden” they added. They told no one about the accident. I had to stay silent about it too, or face decommissioning, or even jail time, marked as crazy, erased from this world. I knew they could do it, they did it before to someone.

 I could not sleep, two years of insomnia followed the incident, something touched me back there. Something got into me to go back again and try the engine one more time. He triggered the defense mechanism, it was good to go now, was it not? We did not kill the switch, I told him. “It's fine, it's safe, we signed the forms, remember?” he said. Boy was he wrong... Who could have thought we were the first ones in there. They used us as basic lab rats. Should have known from all the monitoring and cameras and checks for our health conditions, who needs that for a basic inspection in the first place? 

 I sneaked in the other night. My tool kit, a flashlight, a lab id card and a letter saying goodbye to all my loved ones, just in case. Death did not frighten me anymore, I had seen it already, it was ugly, but it was quick. I would prefer that than agonizing for ten years with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, or both like my grandfather. Something within me told me that I just had to know, there was no other way, it's either that or live all my life wondering what if… what if I went back, what if the defense mechanism did not trigger, what if it will change the lives of everyone around the globe? 

For better or worse...I was right. More worse than better but oh boy I was right...the kill switch did turn the defense off, it also turned the controls off, but we did not need them. The turbine was powered by a separate control, separate access. Everything was connected, but no wires! First I thought it was Bluetooth, but it was so much more... A minor maintenance was required, it seems like the object crashed with quite a significant force. It took me six hours, plus a break. No one checked on me, I felt my phone buzzing in my back pocket, good thing I remembered to switch the sound off. No need for anyone to hear the tune of a Linking park in a strictly forbidden area, inside of an even stricter forbidden place. 

 Richard would have lived if he listened to me. He would have lived if he had played enough LOL and Fallout too. He was a WOW fan, poor sod. That's what you get for supporting a crappy company.... Not really no, no one deserves to die in such a way. He had a gentle heart… I didn't promise him this but once they will start paying me, I will support his sick mother. That was his plan anyway, too bad he did not live long enough to make it a reality. 

The engine squished and squashed, rumbled and roared. The lights went on and off and here it was. Like a rainbow with an extra million new colours, so much brighter, yet felt so welcoming. It melted with my watery eyes. I felt so light. Almost as if I could fly, my heart squashed as if within a pillow, and it felt warm, so warm. If that is what the deceased feel in heaven, that's where I want to go, I thought.

 The machine manipulated gravity within the room, I was actually in an ecstasy state, floating within the aircraft. The grin on my face had glued itself so hard that even when they Interrogated me I was still smiling. I did it, I said, I made it work!

 The converter for solar energy could provide endless energy to the whole world from this tiny machine! Combine that with a global transmitter, similar to Tesla's tower and we will have unlimited energy for everyone, everywhere! Imagine your car charging on a move, your phone's battery never running out, the hospital's equipment operating at all times with no massive energy bill! That was amazing, a discovery of a century! No...discovery of a lifetime! 

I flashed my mug at a window, glaring at the propelling aircraft leaving our atmosphere with the converter bound on its back. After proposing the idea to the committee they agreed to fund it and put me in charge. They let me lead the preparations too, I was responsible for all the safety checks, all the necessary adjustments. The ‘Spes Nova’ was my project I had to look after. I got to assemble my own team as well.

 We detached the alien spacecraft, took what we needed. By that I mean, took what we barely knew how it worked and attached them together to make a bigger and badder version of something we barely knew how it worked. Probably the only thing we got right there is that it works without a source of power and it saved us a few million on fuel costs. Our budget was miniscule anyway; they just wanted to keep us busy. Unluckily for them I was building turbine engines out of scrapped cars, old washing machines and console computers.

 It took over a year for the spacecraft to reach and attach itself close enough to the sun. We lined up near a telescope like a family of ducklings behind their mother, I jumped and squirmed in excitement. My goosebumps got up and buggered off when I first saw the hinges move and open, when the light consolidated and entered the engine. It glowed the same colors I saw it the first time. Like an orgasm for the eyes, but so much more welcoming! Could stare at it forever... or till Paula pokes at my back insisting to let her see it… We had a different perspective on the world, but she was sweet and smart, and funny, the best software engineer I've met. 

 And that was the part when everything we worked for the last three years went wrong. 

Did I mention that they started to pay me now? A hefty sixty grand a year was enough to support my mother and send some for Richards mom, just like I promised. 

Back to the disaster no one saw coming…the transmitter was meant to collect the solar energy straight from the sun and emit it back to earth through the converter to our receiver. It would take no more than ten minutes for the collected energy to reach us. We had generators, batteries and enough storage to receive, test and supply energy to our local town. Yet we received nothing...an hour was already too long. Something was going wrong, my gut turned itself in and out. I marched the room rethinking every possibility. 

The high minister of science and other high position pricks didn't even let me finish the experiment. They shut us down, fired me and it was the end of it for the moment. 

Apparently, disassembling and then losing an alien technology was not acceptable. Who could have thought?

But what happened to the converter? It was still there, and it was still working. Working so well in fact that a small leakage of power formed into a big one and then into a massive one. It took five years to notice that our sun is getting dimmer every year. The temperatures were plummeting lower and lower.

 So much for global warming, everyone debunked that theory, named it a cycle of our planet and called it a day. 

Did anyone check the conditions of our sun? No. But I did, I had to know what was going on with it. I watched Spes Nova emit the energy in a way that it got so intense, it was almost visible with a naked eye. 

 In the course of ten years, someone finally got a glimpse of what's going on. The temperatures dropped so dramatically, all of the northern hemisphere became uninhabitable during winter. Can imagine the news, pure panic, riots, robberies. Police themselves were running around with stolen iPhone. A year later, they decided to nuke down the engine and save the planet. Guess who came up with the Idea? Americans. 

As much as I insisted not to do it as it would result in a possible formation of a black hole, no one listened. No one. They basically threw me out and put me In jail for crashing the summit meeting. 

So as most have guessed by now, they have successfully nuked our baby, our only working alien instrument we ever had our hands on. The good news is...it did not produce a black hole. The bad news is, it did not destroy it either, it made it suck the light through and emit to an open space a thousand times quicker. 

 In ten years, the sun shrunk to a miniscule size. Life on the surface became impossible. 

Would say thanks to our ancestors for all the underground caves they left us. I wonder now, did we humans go through something similar in the past? I would not be surprised at this point. Curiosity did get us in some sticky situations before…

 In the next five years, most of the human population went extinct, most of the animals are extinct as well. Same as fauna, birds and aquatic creatures. Sahara is the new arctic, and everything else is just an extra extreme arctic. What's left of us live in self maintained tunnels all over the globe, warm enough from the core of the earth and ventilated enough to sustain trees, plants, even farm animals. 

 So what now? The converter finally got shut down by collaboration of all the humanity to send a suicide mission to shut it off manually. (Note for a future experiment: insert a remote killswitch.) The sun will recover in about a million years, but what's the rush, right? 

 Something that keeps me up at night is...If only that crucial night I would have stayed in my bed and kept wondering what if...if only I had never dared to come back to that blasted spacecraft again... But as my dad would say: “What's done is done, let's have a drink now.” 

I can't say sorry to all of humanity, I can't say sorry to all the plants, birds, animals and fishes…I can't say sorry to Richard for not being brave enough to stop him in the first place, or even take his place, being squashed into a goo and splattered over alien technology. 

 But what I can do is to preserve our legacy. I can teach the ups and downs of our history, teach them philosophy and logic. I can influence them the same way my mother influenced me to seek knowledge! To work with what we have, to read, paint, write, dance and laugh! To dare to try! Well...maybe less daring on things we don't know how they work…But then again...that won't get us far. 

 I have spent the last twenty years building schools and spreading knowledge between what's left of us. The sanctuary tunnels will extend our legacy, they will preserve us. 

Me, Paula, my cousin Fimly and Danny, we will recover what we have lost, we gather books, photos, paintings. We spread the knowledge to other sanctuaries, build schools. We need scientists, Inventors willing to dare and try instead of wondering what if... That is my life now, what's left of it anyway, may everyone know what has happened, may everyone know who is responsible, and may everyone hear my apology, coming from the depths of my frozen heart, if only...what if i never dared to...

The new institute of education and research leader, minister of preservation and antiquities, a humble dreamer and spreader of the truth, your loving brother,

David Clapame.