Battersea Power Station – London, UK
August 7th, 2025 – 6:00 AM
Hazim’s father, Ameer, took a sip of his orange juice. It was an expensive drink those days; orange groves were particularly susceptible to the new, erratic climate. That morning, the family was enjoying a lovely plate of eggs florentine with a side of grilled tomatoes, but the boys didn’t seem very hungry.
“Drink your juice, Hazim.” He said, glancing at the boy with his steely gaze.
“It tastes yucky.” Hazim grimmaced.
“Stop acting like a baby.” Chided Sabir.
“That’s enough, Sabir—Hazim, it’s good for you. If you would start brushing your teeth after breakfast like I’ve told you it wouldn’t taste so bitter.”
“Boys,” chimed in their mother, “why are you both picking at your plates?”
“Do we have to go school today?” Sabir pleaded.
“Did Thursdays stop being school days?”
“Can’t we stay home and watch it?”
“Watch what?”
“The visitors.” Ameer answered. “Maybe we could turn on the television and you boys could watch it from here? Until it’s time to go to school, that is.”
“Television? At the table?”
Ameer gave her a wistful shrug. “I’m not saying they should stay home, but…”
“Fine.” She sighed. “But you boys better start eating.”
The two boys’ eyes lit up as their father gave them a wink. In a moment he turned on the big television in the living room from his phone, and the boys contorted their necks to best see it from the kitchen table.
It was the only thing on practically every station that wasn’t running infomercials. Wide-shots of Icelandic beaches and of the massive, grey monolith in the ocean. But none of them had a shot of the visitors. None of them even had a shot of the delegation, the names of which had, by then, been leaked to the press.
Southern Shore of Faxa Bay – Reykjavík, Iceland
August 7th, 2025 – 7:30 AM
Melissa found a group of four other SETI researchers who were present on the beach. These were her kind of people, and they spoke at length about the various philosophical and technological implications. Which was challenging at best, as she was the only native English speaker among them.
A few things they had cobbled together, what precious few tidbits of information they had weaved from their own research that wasn’t strictly classified from their respective countries—they were like dishes at a potluck. For instance, they knew the visitors had somehow overcome the limitations of conventional propulsion.
Moving something as large as a city into space or setting it down gently in an ocean, would have required such enormous amounts of energy, and likely would have exhausted enough heat, to boil all the water in the Atlantic if not outright kill everything on the planet’s surface. But they had somehow managed.
They had also managed to travel at superluminal speeds, making the trip from Jupiter’s orbit to Earth’s in only fifteen minutes. And somehow this wasn’t the most astonishing thing about them, at least not to anyone who wasn’t a theoretical physicist.
“How do we know they are going to meet us here? Why wait so many days to make contact?” She asked.
“I can only assume that they’ve been in communication with the visitors.” Said Johann, one of her fellow SETI researchers from Germany.
“Who’s been in communication with them?”
“Likely no one here. None of us know much of anything, they wanted it that way. Except maybe President Arnardóttir.”
She liked Johann, if for no other reason than he was the best English speaker amongst them.
“Places!” Cried a young woman who had spent the last hour hovering around the Icelandic president, as they constantly whispered into each other’s ears. Melissa thought she might have been more than just an aide, a member of cabinet, maybe, but she couldn’t be sure.
All together, they each assumed position over their names which had been printed out and taped to the stage where they ought to stand. That same young woman had pointed out Melissa’s spot to her when she first arrived.
A long, turgid silence fell, leaving only but the sounds of the gently crashing waves and the seagulls above them. Melissa, being shorter than average, lamented her position near the back, but if she leaned at the right angle she could just make out the surf through a small gap in the sea of shoulders.
President Arnardóttir was center stage, naturally, and held in her hand a small, leather-bound book. She didn’t know what it was, but it reminded her of the Bible her mom always kept by her nightstand.
She could hear gasps up front, a collective shock of those who were witnessing history. A slender face with black hair emerged from the ocean, walking out of the waves like a, well, a mermaid was her first thought. It looked like a man. It was a man.
Though, of course, that was a ridiculous notion, she knew that. And yet, there he was, tall and lean, with the rippling muscles of a greek statue. Her memories of human anatomy classes came back to her, anthropology also.
The trapezius and the deltoids, the pectorals and the obliques—it was undeniably human in its physiology. And then there was the unmistakable fact that he was as naked as the day as he was born. She looked down… definitely a “he”, she thought.
“Good God…” She whispered.
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