The Call

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. That was the old belief, space has no air, sound is air vibrations, therefore no air means no sound, no sound means no screams. This belief was held for decades, that is until we heard heard hundreds of thousands of screams coming from space all at once. October 17, 2022, the day Earth heard The Call.

It's well known that there were entire outposts of government agencies dedicated to monitoring space for any signs of intelligent life. The official report says that one of these sites picked up what was thought to be a single transmission. That is until it picked up another, and another, until 1 hour later, when that site and others around America were picking up hundreds of thousands of these "signals". It took us a few days to determine it was a death wail from Jupiter. You might be thinking, "Isn't Jupiter just a Gas Giant?", and you'd be right... mostly. Turns out at the very center there was a small but dense core, relatively the size of Earth's moon.

When these "signals" were released to the public we learned that sounds, if loud enough, could be heard across space. If you're in space you can't hear sounds because of the lack of air, however, this doesn't mean the force from those sounds doesn't travel, and if they reach air they can still be heard. Three of the signals we received were actual transmissions repeating "RUN" and "FLEE" over and over again. We think whatever lifeforms that were on Jupiter had some kind of Auto-translation device. The rest of the signals were actual screams of the lifeforms on Jupiter, presumably crying out in pain as they were killed.

The next indication we got that something was wrong was Jupiter disappeared. Scientists that were looking in Jupiter's direction described it as the gentlest explosion they had ever witnessed. They said that the gases that surrounded Jupiter's core just kept expanding until they were indistinguishable from the rest of space. This caused a rush of world leaders trying to figure out what to do, whatever it was could we fight it, should we run, we would need a lot of advancements to be able to run and survive for any meaningful amount of time in space. Scientists started working on ships, the military started working on defenses, everyone was doing something.

Unfortunately, it wasn't fast enough. They landed in Australia first. Speculators think its because of the flatness and spread out population of the continent. The aliens could, and did, land right in the middle of Australia, and set up bases of operations. We lost Australia within 3 months. The fact that they had made the other side of the planet their point of attack gave America the time it needed to get as many people onto a new ship that could sustain life and leave Earth. Several other countries were able to do the same. This didn't stop the aliens from getting to our front doorsteps before we did though. They managed to ravage their way across half of Europe and into the southern states of America before we left. As we were launching we sent a message out, open to all channels we knew of, the message read "RUN, FLEE". We've been on this ship for about 5 years now, we still send out our warning signal every day to warn others of the impending threat. We don't know if they followed us, or if they're even going to this side of the galaxy, we may be warning life forms for no reason, but we don't want to be the indirect cause of their deaths either.

I am submitting this as suggestion for a new signal, to tell people exactly what happens.

For those that hear the call... be ready.