Promptly Written: The Return

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This story is based on a prompt from Reddit again, specifically this one. This is actually the third Reddit prompt I’ve done; you’ll see the second next week! Enjoy!

“Good evening.”

The newscaster took a beat and continued. It had been a very long two weeks and this was an important broadcast.

“It’s been 15 days now since an event that has, to many, come to be known as The Return, when a being or beings of unknown origin appeared suddenly and without warning above several major cities and sacred religious sites across the globe. We’ve been able to confirm now that the being or beings spoke simultaneously and without ambiguity, delivering a single message in unison. I will now read an unaltered transcript of the message as it was heard by English-speaking people worldwide.”

Closed eyes. A deep breath. An important broadcast? This is the important broadcast. This is the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, a thousand times over. She knew, somewhere in the quiet back part of her mind, that footage of this broadcast would be played in history classes. Something this monumental would not normally be left up to national news, but the President had been sent into hiding immediately following The Return. She opened her eyes after only a moment and continued reading her lines form the prompter, though this part was burned into her memory.

“Hello. I apologize for startling all of you. I am the creator of this universe, my grandest experiment. Many of you worship me as Lord, God, Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, and so on. I am all of these, yet none of them. This form I present before you is a small portion of my essence. I appear to you in a way that is meant to comfort you. My true presence is beyond the ken of four-dimensional beings such as yourselves.

I created this place to examine the nature of four-dimensional life. I have come to you to say that I have been watching this universe, your planet especially. I wish to let you know that, in all of the vast expanse of your knowable space, yours is the only planet to have performed outside of my expectations. On each other planet which met the conditions necessary for the random generation of life, sentient beings similar to you humans eventually evolved from those first basic proteins. These sentient beings, unlike humans, quickly grew out of their aggression and hatred. They formed galaxy-wide societies of peace and discovery, creating art and learning about the world. Some of them even found ways to contact my plane of existence, a feat I had not considered before beginning the experiment.

Human earthlings have had nearly two hundred thousand solar cycles to accomplish greatness, and yet I find your planet mired in war, illness, greed, and oppression. I find many of you speculating on the existence of a creator, a being like me. You commit fouls acts against one another so that your own group would have the right to name me and to state my will. You do not know my name. You do not know my will. I come to you now because you have reached the point of no return, where your destruction of Earth cannot be averted nor escaped, not by any means.

I will be extracting the relevant fourth-dimensional, third-dimensional, and second-dimensional resources from this sector of your universe, then eliminating it. You are nothing more than a statistical anomaly in a vast data pool, but I felt it would be best to provide at least this small bit of closure prior to your eradication. Goodbye.”

There were tears running down her face. She had not felt them come. Her voice did not waver through the entire segment, yet there were the tears. Inexplicable. She took a long moment to gather herself, then continued with the broadcast.

“That was all we had heard, broadcast around the world, somehow heard by each listener in their own native tongue. That was the final communication, until today. For the past several hours, people worldwide have been reporting disappearances, accompanied by sightings of… strange light flashes. The flashes appear as long strands of intensely glowing white light. The light does not seem to give off any heat, but the strands have not been lingering long enough for any study. The lights appear, and when they are gone, anything they touched is gone, leaving no trace. Many believe that this could be the elimination threatened during The Return, just fifteen days ago. Some have even come to referring to the lights as “angels”, celebrating the disappearances as holy acts. Though reports are limited, we”

Then, a flash of light as the TV turns to static.

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