A mystery of the night sky

Chapter 1:

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. My grandmother repeated this phrase to me many times and throughout my life I believed in the truth of this statement. I never looked up at the sky, never wondered what was beyond what I could see, or even imagined if there was anyone beyond us, because even if there was, who could hear it?

My name is Owen, and I am what others consider, an attempt. An attempt at a son, an attempt at a companion, and an attempt at a human. Feeling integrated on planet earth was not a feeling I experienced on many occasions. Despite this, I lived for a long time conforming to my surroundings, living a home life and going to school every day. From school I always refer to my science teacher: "Don't forget dear Owen to achieve anything, first we have to dream it" He would tell me.

It was 1984 or 85; I don't remember well. Some important gentlemen who did important things went to school, the truth is, now that I think about it, they wouldn't be so important if I can't remember what they did, don't you think?

Anyway, at that time they managed to impress us all and they told us something that sounded like:

-You must do impressive things if you want to impress people.

-And why would we want that? - someone asked.

-So that you will never be forgotten.

But if humans live so little and are so forgetful, who would remember us?

I always looked carefully around me and everything looked very similar, there was diversity because no one was the same, but it was almost impossible to get any emotional similarity with someone.

Living here was simple, doing normal activities of normal people, like eating, sleeping and going to school. And everything was quiet until one day I was never the same again. From that contact my life changed completely, and that was the day you arrived.

I, Owen San Miguel, experienced what is called a close encounter of the fourth kind.

It was not yet dawn when I was on my way to the barren field. Everything looked normal around me, everything indicated that it would be a day like any other. When suddenly, I found you, you were a prostrate body on the ground amidst the darkness of the minimal moonlight, which was almost gone because of the early entrance of the sun. It was 5 o'clock in the morning when I found you, and it was 5 o'clock in the morning when I didn't know what to do with you.

I thought I'd leave you there, you weren't my problem. Then I put myself in your shoes, and I thought: I would like a little help in this situation. And that's how our story began.

I'm sure that, if you had told me then everything we were going to go through together, I wouldn't have believed it.

Even without detailing you, I ran out to get blankets and took you to a comfortable place. You were sound asleep and very cold, because of fear I couldn't get close enough to feel your breathing very well, but after leaving fear aside, I decided to get closer to you, and that's when I saw you. Your skin was white, your hair was shiny and shimmering with a coppery color, and your face was full of delicate brown dots all over your cheeks.

I'm not lying to you, seeing you in that situation scared me, because I thought someone had hurt you. I started to look for clues or some sign that would tell me who you were, but the only thing I found was a badge with a number: 347. Your report looked worn, it was torn by burns, and it had a logo that I had never seen in my life, it had the following initials: MWPS.

After many hours waiting for you to wake up, my mother prepared an infusion that would wake up even the dead, and you managed to wake up. At that moment, I was able to see your eyes.

Your recovery was slow but complete, in a few days you were able to speak perfectly. But we didn't know your name, we didn't know where you came from, no one was looking for you and you weren't looking for someone, or so I thought.

At first we thought you didn't remember your name, but your lucidity and your silence indicated that you didn't know what we were referring to. You always said your badge number, 347, but that meant nothing to us.

You quickly adapted to our habits, we spoke the same language, but we could not communicate with you to solve the doubts we had. We began to suspect that you had studied us, as if everything was planned by you to enter the family, but the doubts dissipated when we saw you so helpless.

We called you Max, affectionately. We bought you clothes and included you in the family. My parents started a fact-finding mission to find out about your relatives, and although they advertised in local and other county newspapers, no one called.

Even though you couldn't express yourself very well with words, your eyes spoke volumes. One night looking up at the stars your eyes shone brightly, your look of longing and your tears of sadness told me that you had something to do with space.

You had no name, no family, no medical or school history. But you did have a fixation with space and the stars. Maybe Max, our Max, was an alien?

But how? If we had the same number of limbs, eyes and heads. You didn't have a face behind your neck or an eye in your forehead, nor was your body a vibrant color or your hair dominated by snakes. Actually, you were a lot like me. Obviously, Max was not an alien.

It was all very suspicious, my parents never came back for Max's parents and I was the only person to whom this all smelled fishy. I was never a child to look at the stars, but this time I had to do it in the name of normalcy.

The State Department wouldn't pay any attention to me, NASA even less. I knew I would have to do this alone, and that's when I decided to return to the scene. For days I scoured the countryside for clues, but without finding anything that would tell me the origin of Max I returned home every day, defeated and with an unknown guest.

I didn't know if his plan was to harm my parents, destroy humanity or conquer this planet. I lived in terror knowing that I myself had brought doom to my home, until one day while living in the stars we were abducted.

In that moment, in that instant, in that second our true story began.

The last thing I remember is a blurry image of a very bright light coming towards us, when I turned to look at Max she was smiling while I was living the greatest terror in the world. We woke up on the frozen floor of some sort of airplane, it was clear that it was not an airplane. Everywhere on that unknown aerial vehicle were the mysterious initials of Max's uniform, MWPS.

They called 347 over a loudspeaker, all the technology on the ship was too sophisticated. And I just happened to have seen a television.

Are we going to the moon? I asked myself. No one in town had ever been. Maybe no one had ever gone. And I remembered what the big shots were saying at school, so maybe I could be the first to go to the moon. For the first time in my life I would do impressive things.

Surely going to the moon was not so complicated, because once I saw on television, through a window (because at home we didn't have television), that a boy managed to fly on a bicycle, if he could do it on a bicycle then I would do it on this ship. And I would come back to tell everyone about it and so I would stop being the childish attempt that I always was.

But things were not as I thought. After Max's numbers were called, a hologram appeared explaining the Milky Way Protection Squad (MWPS).

The birth of the MWPS marked a before and after in the history of the Milky Way, just after the big explosion all the stars, bodies and life forms we know today began to form, but for the inhabitants of planet Earth today, a large part of the cosmos is still a great enigma to be deciphered, and the presence of the MWPS has prevented more than one catastrophe in the Milky Way and has allowed the history of life on Earth to take the course it has, without anyone really on the carbon- and oxygen-dependent blue planet knowing about it. The MWPS was formed when a great threat stalked this portion of the Universe, the approach of many types of unknown space probes alerted the existing species at that time and is that a large body of colossal dimensions devouring galaxies was approaching and none of the then known species of life could cope alone.

The MWPS then formed by all species of life with a sufficient degree of technological advancement and intelligence, except those primitive forms of the blue planet was founded, in order to face this great unknown threat, where the only viable alternative to avoid being consumed by that great evil body was to completely hide the galaxy, as incredible or impossible as this may sound.

Eclipses are known on planet Earth, but what was not known in some of those days of eclipse on Earth, is that with a gigantic effort the Milky Way was covered by cosmic light canceling material, so that the galaxy was hidden in its corner of the cosmos, while the great devouring body continued on its way without deviating its trajectory to devour the galaxy, indicating that the mass production and distribution of the black material, which required a great collaboration in terms of logistics and resources gave its expected result, and this was the beginning of one of many days for the MWPS to protect the species of the galaxy, all united with the same purpose, to protect their small portion of the universe.

The development of the technology as a whole for the MWPS surpasses the known limits for carbon beings, for as you can guess, facing cosmic threats and challenges requires employing elements that go far beyond the Periodic Table of 118 elements, aeronautical and naval engineering calculations, training superior to that of the largest armies and elite squadrons, and only those with a genuinely committed and noble heart to defend all equally, could face the challenges of belonging to the MWPS.

If I didn't understand anything before, with that video I understood even less. They were looking for engineers, geniuses and military men, and I Owen was none of those things. By any chance I had learned mathematics in school, how was it possible that I was in that place? although something inside me told me that it was not a coincidence that they had contacted me, because, with so much technology, with so many years existing, the chances that they had been wrong looking for the "right guy" were practically equal to zero, so, I motivated myself to learn what I had to learn from this experience, because ultimately, not every day comes to look for probably the most impressive squadron that exists in the eyes of this planet, a galactic squadron responsible for preserving peace and balance in this part of the known universe.

The integration of the inhabitants of planet Earth to the MWPS was not immediate, the species agreed that this pretty little blue planet had a lot of potential resources and talent, but that interfering in the evolution and advancement of the development of the species was going to alter the outcome they expected, so, the first civilizations were formed and advanced under the distant surveillance of the MWPS, until the moment arrived that they considered as opportune, where the technological advance would allow them to understand complex things such as programmed and automated systems, the advanced handling of electromagnetic radiation, the use of vehicles that exceed the natural limits of the species. Thus, once the main leaders of the MWPS were in agreement and satisfied with the progress of the blue planet, it was decided to make the first contact to integrate members to the squadron.

Considering that human beings as an intelligent life form, when making contact with species they call "aliens" or "extraterrestrials" could generate all kinds of reactions, in the first instance the contact was achieved with their most innocent and open to change, children and young people. To decipher the human languages, because yes, humans have diverse languages in their speech and writing, it was required that a computational computer took at least 2 days to process all the expressions that were collected by unknown ships traveling around the planet, intercepting as many communications, and although they went as unknown ships, the final reports indicate that some people could notice their presence, but could not attribute it to any phenomenon known to them.

When interacting then with the smaller humans, and seeing how the older ones could only say that the stories told by the small ones were dreams, imagination or even hallucinations, made the mission of making contact more complicated and here we see the negative point of not having made a previous contact, the other species belonging to the MWPS are anomalous and strange presences for them, so it is always necessary to proceed with caution. The first humans who grew up and voluntarily and secretly decided to join the MWPS suffered many challenges to be able to share spaces with other species, because they all have different body and energy requirements, so the adequacy of spaces for terrestrial beings was one of the first changes that suffered the headquarters of the MWPS since its founding.

Likewise, through the use of MWPS medical technology, limits not reached by humans on the planet were explored, so that the humans who are part of the squadron received the best preventive medicine they could have ever dreamed of having, although they could not pilot the existing vehicles due to the conditions of pressure and temperature that the human body must maintain, and which must be said to be quite specific, and the variations had a direct impact on the state of health and mental health of the pilots, so, working together, the tools and vehicles were developed for the human race that is part of the MWPS, and vital contributions were made in the handling of space physics and chemistry, because although the planet Earth was always under constant observation, not all details were known.

Returning to the ship, I was not the only abducted earthling, in the same place where Max and I were, there was an army of men and women. They were 350 earthlings, chosen for their professions, but above all for their commitment and heart. Studied by the MWPS each one was visited by a robot companion, who was integrated into the daily routine and provided information to the group's database.

While all this was going on, all I could think about was Max. The unprotected child taken in by my family was nothing more and nothing less than a robot. I had never been so disappointed before, 347, it looked so real, it felt so real. There were even tears in those robots.

At that moment I understood, that it was not a game, nothing of what I was living was a game, they needed our help to continue knowing the planet earth and the galaxy as it was and I could not disappoint anyone. The mission proposed by Milky Way Protection Squad contained perpetration, investigation, insurrection and fight. It would not be easy, we would have the technology, strategies and team experience.

Thinking about what is to come, what our life will be like from now on, makes me wonder: What will the future hold for us? To travel the galaxy, to know new planets. We will live new experiences, maybe we will discover more life, more intelligence and more technology never before thought of by human minds. Will time travel exist? Teleporters? Flying cars? I also wondered if life on other planets will have more time than 80 years?

Going into hindsight, of what my life would be like now, I think of my parents and grandmother. What will their life be like now? I left abruptly, with a robot girl. Will they wonder about me? Will they be looking for me worried?

I thought worried if in all this time doing amazing things so that others won't forget me, will my family forget about me? Maybe the solution is to send them a message, with that they can be at ease. But on second thought, will they be able to believe every detail of this story? I don't think so.

While my family invaded my mind I remembered my grandmother's phrase: No one can hear a scream in the emptiness of space, or so they say. I never thought I had experienced it firsthand, I hope whoever coined the phrase didn't really live it, because the feeling is certainly terrifying. I can scream as loud as I can, I can have the most advanced and sophisticated technology at my disposal, but my family will never be able to receive the message. I think the author of the phrase was speaking from the importance of knowing that no one would listen, but also from how insufficient any effort to send the message feels.

My name is Owen, and after this I will never be an attempt again, because this time I will do everything in my power to change the course of my destiny. My mission into the unknown begins in a nearby galaxy named after a milk product, with a close encounter of the fourth kind and the melancholy of the uncertainty that my family must be feeling, yet I am deeply convinced that I will find my gift to help save the galaxy, and I will see them again.