Story
Fifty years ago, bright lights appeared in the sky.
A farmer found something in his field beyond his comprehension. He took it to the scientists at the University of Waterloo, who realized:
We are not alone.
For decades, the scientists performed experiments in secret, but they could not understand the strange message—or was it a warning?
Now the lights have returned, and with them the questions:
Who are they?
Where did they come from?
Can we figure out what they want from us—before it is too late?
Prologue
When you were a kid, you loved to look at the stars.
You couldn’t see many of them from Toronto, but your grandma had a cottage up north, and every summer you’d spend two or three weeks there, fishing off the dock and roasting marshmallows and playing checkers when it rained. At night, your dad would fill a thermos up with hot chocolate and your mom would roll up a big wool blanket and all of you would walk through the woods to a large, bare expanse of limestone. “This is part of the Canadian Shield,” your dad would say the first time you went there each summer, and then he would deliver an impromptu lecture about geography or geology or the Indigenous people who lived here long before the first European settlers arrived.
Eventually, however, he’d go quiet, and you’d all lie on your backs stretched out on the big blanket and just stare out at the endless expanse of inky blackness lit up with twinkling points of light surrounded by the glowing dust of faraway galaxies. Sometimes your mom would recite poetry, by Walt Whitman or John Keats. Eventually, a shooting star would streak across the sky, and you would all gasp in unison. “Make a wish!” Grandma would whisper, and you always made the same wish: to become an astronaut someday.
Unfortunately, just before you started high school, you were diagnosed with an eye condition that disqualified you from becoming a pilot – let alone flying a spaceship – and you were fitted with a thick pair of glasses. So instead, you started spending all your free time reading about perilous journeys and new discoveries, both real and imaginary.
Before you knew it, you grew up. Your grandma got old, and she sold the cottage a few years ago. Other than the occasional trip to the observatory on campus with your best friend Alex, you don’t spend much time looking up. You’re too busy: working co-op jobs, studying for your classes in Biology and History, playing board games with your friends.
You don’t realize, of course, that all these years, the stars have also been looking at you.
Part 1
Less than one week before the day when you make first contact with alien life, you are sitting in the SLC picking at the remnants of a shawarma bowl and wondering whether it is actually humanly possible to pass organic chemistry. You squint at the diagram in front of you for the tenth time, hoping that this time the correct sequence will become clear. “Hexane, nonane, decane,” you mutter under your breath.
“That’s a weird spell,” says a voice. You look up to see Alex grinning at you, a smoothie in one hand and a laptop in the other. With their mop of curly hair, round tortoiseshell glasses, and collection of vintage wool blazers, they always look like they took a wrong turn in 1955 and wound up here by mistake.
You sigh and lean back in your chair, massaging the tense muscles of your neck with your fingers. “Please say you’ve come over here to tell me that the world is ending in the next thirty minutes and I won’t have to take this quiz this Friday.”
“Sorry,” Alex says, plopping down in the chair next to you and placing their laptop on the table in front of you. “Best I can do is a distraction.”
You and Alex are always making puzzles and games for each other; you first met at a game of Blood on the Clocktower your first year and have been inseparable ever since. Lately, however, you haven’t had much time to hang out; your coursework has been kicking your ass, and Alex has been busy with an undergraduate research assistantship for a hotshot professor in the Astronomy department. “When did you even have time to make this?” you ask, looking at the screen.
“Let’s just say that my work has left me inspired.”
Part 2
You’re sitting in an anthropology lecture, half paying attention as the professor talks about the history of games.
“The first primitive dice games appear as early as 9,000 B.C.,” he says, “though that’s mostly speculation. We don’t know how they were played, or even if the ancients had the same conception of games that we do. Later, of course, we’d see board games, puzzles, fortune-telling games that are the predecessors of the cootie catchers you might have made in school. Cards are a relatively late addition, first appearing in China around 1200 years ago. Games are so ubiquitous around the world, in fact, that some anthropologists argue that it is not intelligence or tool use, but our persistent love for games, that truly makes us human.”
None of this is new information for you, but it gives you an idea. The perfect response to the puzzle that Alex showed you yesterday.
You find them in the library an hour later and drop a piece of paper in their lap. “Made you something,” you grin.
“What is it?” they ask, narrowing their eyes.
“Why, an ambidextrous hexatetraflexagon, of course.”
Part 3
When you look back on everything that happened, it’s hard to pinpoint a beginning, or a moment where you could have turned aside. Everything feels out of order. Did it begin when you were a kid? When you learned their names, understood their warning? Or did it begin that day when Alex called you – called you – and breathlessly told you to meet them in the Physics building late one night?
You’re already in your pajamas, and grumpy about being disturbed halfway through your second episode of old school Doctor Who. “Can’t you just tell me about it over the phone?” you grumble.
“Absolutely not,” they whisper. “You have to come see this for yourself.”
The building is dim and echoey when you arrive, illuminated by the red glow of the emergency lights, and the occasional glow spilling out from under a closed lab door. Finally, you get to the office that Alex shares with three other student researchers, and with a furtive glance back and forth they pull you inside.
“Calm down, James Bond,” you quip, but Alex is serious. “I don’t know who’s watching,” they say. “So I’m erring on the side of caution.”
Once you’ve taken your coat off and sat down, they fill you in. They’ve been spending most of their research assistantship so far this term helping their supervisor go through old files: cabinet after cabinet of old lab notes, quizzes, and attendance sheets. They had just finished emptying out a dented brown metal filing cabinet, but they couldn’t get the bottom drawer to close. Finally, they found the culprit: an ancient spiral bound notebook with yellowing pages that had fallen behind the drawer and gotten stuck.
“It’s not just boring physics notes or whatever,” Alex whispers. “It’s some kind of journal. Of something weird.”
On the inside cover, in spidery handwriting, the owner has written “Property of Dr. Ellen Valentina. Confidential.”
You flip open the notebook at random.
October 9, 1975
I haven’t dared to tell anyone about the voice in my head; the voice that I somehow know is their voice. They don’t take me seriously enough as it is.
Sometimes, it’s just sounds: clicking, or distant music. Sometimes there are words, but the words feel all tangled and wrong, like talking to my aunt Mary after she had her stroke. Sometimes, like today, they just sent me a set of images.
I copied them down immediately, and have recreated my drawings below. I have no idea what to make of them.
Why did they choose me for this task?
Part 4
“What the hell is this?” you ask Alex, putting down the notebook.
“I don’t know! That’s why I called you!”
“Is it some kind of prank?”
“I don’t think so,” Alex says. “I looked through the records for our lab, and Ellen Valentina was a real person – a post-doc in Physics and Astronomy. She seems pretty normal – she’s a co-author on some papers about particle physics – and then suddenly she just disappears.”
“What, she dropped out?”
“No, I mean, like, she disappears. I went on the Archives website and pulled up old newspaper articles and there are notices asking for any information regarding her whereabouts.” They show you a scan of an old newspaper clipping, featuring a faded photograph of a young woman with long red hair and a serious, faraway expression.
“Whoa, creepy.”
“I did some googling, and she never turned up,” Alex says. “She completely disappears from the university records. But her name appears from time to time on conspiracy theory sites, UFO discussion boards, stuff like that.” They click over to a tab open to r/UnsolvedMysteries. “February 13, 2026 will mark fifty years since Dr. Ellen Valentina disappeared,” the headline reads. “Is the Canadian government covering up what really happened to her?”
“It’s mostly just paranoid raving,” Alex says, saving you the effort of reading the wall of text. “Combined with the basic facts of the case. Though they do mention some unusual astronomical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in the months before, which I thought was pretty interesting.”
You grin. “Of course you’d think that was the most notable part.”
“Okay, but there’s one more weird thing, Alex says. “Because right after I called you – like less than a minute after – someone slipped this manilla envelope full of polaroids under the door. I ran out into the hallway but I couldn’t see anyone.” With a magician’s flourish for the dramatic, they produce the envelope from under a messy stack of papers. On the outside, in small block letters, someone has written: WE ARE WATCHING YOU WITH INTEREST.
Part 5
As you flip through Dr. Valentina’s journal, the shape of events becomes gradually clearer. It’s difficult, because she was taking notes for herself, not writing for posterity. She goes on tangents, leaves out details, refers to people and places by initials or nicknames. And there are many pages that are completely inscrutable, filled with codes and diagrams you don’t understand at all.
But eventually, you piece things together. Fifty years ago, neon lights appeared in the sky over the region, growing brighter every night, flashing in sequences that did not seem to follow any known pattern. This was long before the internet or social media, but the town was buzzing with speculation: every student paper, every coffee shop conversation, mentioned the lights. What were they? Weather equipment? Soviet satellites?
Dr. Valentina had theories of her own. No recognizable reference to existing programming languages, she writes early on, but lights might make more sense in base 8??
She writes about the visible spectrum of light for different animals, and documents similar reports in tabloids and historical records. Interspersed with these research notes are her frustrations about the mundane happenings of daily life. She is constantly overlooked for grants and research opportunities in favour of her male colleagues. An experiment isn’t working the way she wants it to. Someone overhears her accent at the grocery store – Dr. Valentina was born in Romania – and calls her a “dirty commie.”
Suddenly, the research and speculation shift to action. A senior researcher in her lab has come down with an unexplained illness, and she is asked to replace him. She is nervous, but ecstatic. The university has received a strange report from a local farmer. There is an emergency meeting. She has been chosen as part of the response team. I will report back as soon as I can, she scrawls hastily before she leaves.
After that, there is a gap of several days – the longest she has gone without writing since the beginning of the journal. Then, in an entry dated September 27, 1975, she writes a long report of what they found in that farmer’s field. It begins, in emphatic capital letters:
EVERYTHING I USED TO BELIEVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE HAS BEEN PROVEN WRONG. WE ARE NOT ALONE.
Part 6
You’re not sure how long you and Alex stay up in the lab excitedly flipping through Dr. Valentina’s journal and taking notes on its contents, but the next thing you know you’re blinking awake, head on your arms, your sleeve wet with drool. Eugh. “Dude, have we been here all night?” you mutter, looking over at Alex, who is curled up in a chair, rumpled but still awake.
“Pretty much,” they say. Their eyes are still bright with discovery. “There’s still so much to figure out.”
Under the harsh fluorescent lights, last night feels like a surreal dream. “I mean, we can’t stay here indefinitely, can we?” you ask. “Like, I have classes to go to. That big OChem quiz to study for!”
Alex actually rolls their eyes. “I can’t believe we’re dealing with an actual mystery that took place here on campus, with the most delicious real-life puzzle I’ve ever encountered, and you’re worrying about homework. When is that quiz, anyway?”
You double check your phone. “Uh, the 30th. Friday.”
“See, you’ve got loads of time. We get to the bottom of this in the next couple of days, you cram all your proteins or whatever the night before, and badda-bing, badda-boom, you’re good.”
“Okay, okay, let’s say I do that,” you say, throwing up your hands. You have to admit, this is way more interesting than proteins. “We still can’t stay here the whole time, right? Like, you have office mates who will be coming in soon.”
“Fair enough,” they say. They check their watch – they wear an actual analog ticking watch, because of course they do – and wince. “Actually, I have a couple classes I really shouldn’t skip either. Let’s shower, eat, go to class I guess, then meet up again at, like, five to work on this?”
“Works for me,” you say. You stand up and stretch, put on your coat, absentmindedly check your phone. “Huh, that’s weird,” you say.
“What is?” Alex is instantly by your side, attentive.
“Oh, probably just spam,” you say, as you open the text from an unknown number.
“That doesn’t look like any spam text I’ve ever received before,” Alex murmurs.
It seems that Alex isn’t the only one receiving mysterious messages.
Part 7
You’ve often wondered, when watching horror movies, why the characters are so resistant to actually saying “zombie” or “vampire” or whatever. They’re always making up weird nicknames instead of saying the obvious out loud.
You get it now, though. Even as you read through the entries from Dr. Valentina’s journal – even when it’s obvious what she’s talking about – the word “aliens” still feels clunky and artificial on your tongue. At first, she calls them simply “the visitors,” or “the travelers.” Then, in an entry from October 11, 1975, they get an official nickname: “The Spinners.” Because of the ship they found in the woods, you infer, neon-colored and playful as a light-up top.
Even now, you find yourself saying “Spinners” whenever you can instead of stating the obvious.
“Did you believe in – you know – before this?” you ask Alex that evening.
“I mean, as a possibility, maybe? Like, panspermia? Not little green men in UFOs.”
You vaguely remember learning about panspermia – the theory that early life was seeded on earth and other planets by a common source – but it hasn’t been a big focus of your biology degree. Even that theory felt fringe, before.
Now nothing seems as certain. Ellen Valentina was a respected scientist, accomplished, committed to the scientific method. And yet here she is writing about making contact with Spinners, receiving secret communications from them that only she can understand, decoding the messages they send to her.
It would sound crazy, except that you’ve been receiving strange messages too. Is this a prank? A coincidence?
Or the beginning of something much, much bigger?
Part 8
“Do you think maybe we should ask someone else for help?” you ask. You’re huddled in a corner of the library, trying to make sense of a page of Dr. Valentina’ s journal that’s entirely in code.
Alex looks up from the cloth-bound volume about wartime codebreaking that they had been studying. “What, like a faculty member?” Alex says. “No way. They’re part of, like, the system.”
You sigh. “Okay, not a faculty member. I was thinking maybe someone like Samantha.” You’ve never met someone as good at puzzles as Samantha Li, the president of the board game club where you met as first years. These days, she’s a PhD student at MIT, doing some kind of advanced robotics research you can’t even begin to understand.
“I thought of that,” Alex says, “so I looked her up. Turns out she’s on a research sabbatical until, like, April 15.”
“Oh.”
“In Antarctica.”
“Oh.”
“So that’s a no.”
“Well, shit,” you say, turning your attention back to the page in front of you. “I guess it’s up to us, then.”
Part 9
The journal ends abruptly with a cryptic, paranoid entry.
February 13, 1976
There is nothing left for me here – nothing but dismissals and denials, ignorance and boredom. I am a fly caught in a web, a fox with its leg in a trap.
I can’t stand by anymore and let this happen without saying something. They don’t belong here, and neither do I.
I have deciphered their final message, and decided it is time to leap. I will enter the light, or be lost in darkness, but I will not turn from my path. I am concealing this journal where I hope it will remain safe until I return – or until it is found by someone who can carry on this work.
I must save them, so that they can save us.
After that entry, there’s some random detritus stuffed in the back of the book – a grocery list, dry cleaning receipt, a few used bingo cards – but nothing important. Surely it can’t just end right here?
Part 10
You’re standing in the DC atrium, looking up at the strange winged contraption dangling above your head. Is it a kite? The sails of a ship? You think about journeys, about strangers, about traveling beyond the limits of your knowledge into the great unknown. A tap on your shoulder breaks your reverie. It’s Alex, finally free from their last class of the day. “Hey!” they say. “How’s it going?”
“You know, Da Vinci had designs for a flying machine in his notebooks,” you muse aloud. “Based on the movements of birds, dragonflies, maple keys. None of them worked, of course. It was more than 300 years before the Wright Brothers finally built a successful airplane in 1903.”
Alex rolls their eyes. “I mean how’s it going with you?”
“I just told you,” you shrug. “Thinking about flight.”
“Right.” Alex zips up their coat, and the two of you walk out of the building, instinctively bending your bodies to cut through the wind. “What do you think happened to Dr. Valentina?” they ask, as soon as you’re out of earshot of the other students.
“I don’t know,” you say, honestly. “Maybe she died. Maybe it was an enormous trap, and the Spinners tortured or killed her. Maybe she went insane, and went off the grid, and is still out there somewhere wearing a tin foil helmet and scribbling on the walls.” You gesture at the photocopied page of her journal you’ve been trying to decipher while you waited for Alex to get out of class. “I mean, these don’t necessarily seem like the writings of a reasonable, scientifically-minded person.”
“You don’t really think that, though, do you?” they ask, with a sad look on their face.
“I’m not sure what to think,” you say, wrapping your arms around yourself. It’s already getting dark out, and the first few stars are appearing above you. “But I want to believe she’s still out there, somewhere. Having adventures. Traveling far beyond our solar system.”
Part 11
It was Alex’s idea, of course, to stake out in the field. You’re not even sure if it’s the right field – it’s not like Dr. Valentina had GPS coordinates she could write down – but you figure it’s as good a candidate as any. You’re sitting in a pair of borrowed lawn chairs, bundled against the cold, working on another cryptic passage from Dr. Valentina’s journal while you wait.
Last night, while looking for more information about the mysterious lights, Alex had found a scan of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Observer’s Handbook from the year the lights first appeared. “Obviously it was published at the beginning of the year so it’s not going to have any actual data about what happened, but I figured it still might be interesting.” As it turns out, their hunch was right. Several celestial bodies were in similar positions on the night the lights first appeared – August 19, 1975 – as they are this week.
Sitting in the dark, now, in your lawn chair, you shiver. You’re not sure if it’s from the cold or from excitement. “Pass me the thermos,” you whisper, and as Alex does, you’re instantly taken back to those nights at your grandma’s cottage. Staring up at the sky. Waiting for something to happen.
You don’t have to wait for long.
You’re not sure what you expected – a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mirage, or a glimpse of something at the corner of your eye – but that is not what happens.
One moment, the night is dark and quiet, and then suddenly, without any warning, they are here. Hovering, in the center of the clearing, shining as brightly as if it were in full daylight, is a…what? A sculpture? An object? A vessel? Its exterior surface is smooth, iridescent, dancing with neon colours that shift constantly before your eyes, like the shimmering surface of a soap bubble. Like a small child glimpsing something beautiful, you want to reach out and touch it, but you are afraid it will burst and disappear into nothingness again.
You dare not look away, but you can sense Alex beside you, know instinctively that their face bears the same expression of intermingled awe and terror as your own.
And then, a series of sounds like music on a scale unfamiliar to your ears, and a weird, otherworldly woman’s voice, that seems to come from inside your head and all around you at the same time:
FINALLY, YOU HAVE COME. WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU.
Part 12
The next few hours pass in a blur, like a distant memory or a night of heavy drinking. You don’t remember what happened so much as you remember how you felt: overwhelmed, incredulous, thrilled.
Before you know it, you’re back on campus, with instructions to carry on as you have been and await further instructions. WE MUST BE CAREFUL, the voice had said. IT IS NOT YET TIME.
“This is so surreal,” Alex says, shaking their head. “Like, we didn’t imagine that, right? We saw a UFO last night? Like an honest-to-goodness alien spaceship? And now we’re just…sitting in my office again?”
“It’s so weird,” you agree. “I know exactly how Ellen felt.” You’re not sure exactly when you started calling her “Ellen” in your head, but it feels right. Like she’s your friend. Like you’re in this together.
I feel like I am going to come apart at the seams, she writes on November 12, 1975. The most momentous discovery in human history is happening, and yet around me no one has any idea. How am I supposed to care about campus gossip or the price of gasoline when this is happening? How much longer can this carry on before everything comes to light? How can everyone be so blind?
As if to illustrate her point, she has tucked a yellowed copy of that day’s student paper between the pages.
Part 13
“I can’t stop thinking about the Voyager record,” you say to Alex a little later, staring up at the ceiling. You remember lying on the carpet of your living room, staring up at the ceiling just like that as your dad gave one of his impromptu lectures.
“It was plated with gold,” he said, “and engraved with the inscription To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.” He held up his own simple vinyl copy, then placed it on the turntable with a flourish. “But other than the fact that it was launched into deep space in 1977, and I bought this copy last week on eBay, the contents are exactly the same.”
“What about it?” Alex asks, bringing you back to the present.
“Just the optimism of it, I guess,” you say. “It was an era with so many wars and so much division, so much fear about the future, but they decided that the message they wanted to send to the universe about humanity was a beautiful, hopeful one.” You remember feeling the carpet rough beneath your bare knees as the hiss of the needle on the record transformed into greetings in several languages, then a delicate violin piece by J. S. Bach. “We wanted them to know who we were, so we sent them music.”
“Yeah, and as it turns out,” Alex says with a dramatic sigh, “They sent us puzzles.”
Part 14
“It kind of freaks me out how much faster they’re moving this time,” Alex says. You’re still sitting in their office – they’re working on the most recent puzzle, and you’re half-heartedly trying to study for your big OChem quiz tomorrow.
“Like, Dr. Valentina was receiving coded messages and puzzles from them for more than four months, whereas we got the first message when?”
You glance at the NASA calendar pinned to the corkboard on the wall. “Uh, Sunday night. The 25th.”
“Exactly. It hasn’t even been a week.”
“What do you think it means?” you ask.
“I don’t know,” they said. “But it feels more urgent. Like they’re running out of time.”
You shudder. “I don’t like the sound of that,” you say, then try to return to your chemistry notes. Your attention keeps drifting over to the small leatherbound volume that had appeared without fanfare on Alex’s desk while you had stepped out for coffee earlier that day. It was dusty, covered in cobwebs, and at first you had wrinkled your nose. Where had they been keeping this thing that it had gotten so decrepit?
But now, looking closer, you begin to laugh. “What’s so funny?” Alex asks suspiciously.
“Webs!” you say between snorts. “It’s covered in webs!”
“And…?”
“It’s been right in front of us the whole time!” you say, grabbing Ellen’s journal and waving it in front of Alex’s face. “Don’t you see? She didn’t call them Spinners because of the rotation of their ship! She called them Spinners because they’re, well, spiders!”
Part 15
Things move quickly now. Sleeping, eating, the dreaded OChem quiz, they all pass in a haze. Before you know it, you’ve received a text from the same unknown number, with another puzzle, and instructions to come back to the field where you first saw the ship as soon as you have found the solution.
This time, as you park the car and lock up, you make out a slight shimmer in the air where the ship was before. When it abruptly dissolves into the brightness of the iridescent ship, you grin. “Jumping spiders make little ‘pup tents’ out of spun silk to protect and disguise them when they’re away from home,” you tell Alex. “I wonder if this is something similar.”
“Since when are you a spider expert?” they whisper.
“Uh, biology nerd?” You whisper back. “But also I’ve been reading a lot of Wikipedia this week.”
Suddenly, there’s a hiss of air, and the ship that previously looked like one seamless object splits into two pieces: the dome lifting up and backwards, like a helmet on a hinge. You forget to breathe as you see them emerge from the shadowy interior: first the legs, then the eyes – so many of each – resolving into two enormous purple spider-like creatures. Spider-like, except they’re the size of St. Bernards, with huge, whirling eyes that shimmer like nebulas.
“No one is ever going to believe this,” Alex whispers.
Without warning, the woman’s all-consuming voice returns. WE ARE HERE, she says, WITH A WARNING. The voice does not actually seem to be coming from the spiders, or from the ship. It comes from – everywhere. OUR PLANET WAS ONCE LIKE YOURS. FULL OF LIFE. FULL OF MUSIC. A PERFECT WEB. BUT WE DID NOT TAKE CARE. WE ATE AND ATE AND ATE TILL WE BURST WITH EATING. WE CARED ONLY FOR ONE, NOT THE EIGHT. NO. THAT’S NOT HOW YOU WOULD SAY. NOT THE ALL.
WE TRIED BEFORE TO ASK FOR HELP. YOU DID NOT HEAR US. WE TRY AGAIN. THERE IS NOT MUCH TIME. WE WILL ALL DIE BY – HOW WOULD YOU SPIN IT – 2030. SO WE ARE HERE AGAIN ASKING FOR YOUR HELP. YOU HELP US. AND WE HELP YOU. WORK TOGETHER.
Throughout this entire message, the spiders have stayed in one place, swaying back and forth, rubbing their front legs together rhythmically. Now they scuttle forward, and it takes all of your self-control to not flinch backwards.
The creatures – the Spinners, you suppose – come to a stop a good distance in front of you. They bend their legs, as if making a bow. And then—they begin to dance.
Part 16
Perhaps someday, decades from now, people will read about your name in textbooks. You’ll give lectures about the day you first translated a completely alien language into human terms. You picture yourself, in 2050, with a futuristic blue haircut and chic collarless blazer, giving a lecture surrounded by glowing holograms.
“While the Spinners’ language bore some superficial resemblances to the mating dances of the family salticidae,” you’ll say, “it obviously contained many complexities that were uniquely their own. Complexities such as—”
You sigh. Such as what? Ever since the Spinners began to dance, the voice has remained stubbornly silent. It feels like a moderator was present to help you communicate, and now she has left the room.
They have danced, and you have gestured, and they have jumped up and down, and you have tried to speak simple English, and you still haven’t made any meaningful progress.
The vision disappears like a puff of smoke. Solving, it turns out, is much harder than dreaming about it.
Part 17
It takes a while, but eventually you learn that the Spinners have tried to contact Earth for help three times before. The first time, when the Soviets sent Sputnik to space in 1957, they did not visit themselves, but sent coded signals. They thought that the advent of the Space Age would mean that we could communicate with them, but we didn’t understand their signals as anything other than cosmic background noise.
The second time, of course, was when the lights appeared above Waterloo, and Dr. Valentina kept her journal.
The third was at the beginning of the Internet Age; again, their messages were lost among the flotsam and jetsam of the World Wide Web. There was simply too much information to notice them.
And now, their fourth and final plea, their Hail Mary, has found an audience – perhaps because they returned to the last place they successfully made contact.
They say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Part 18
You’re sitting outside the Science C&D drinking coffee and flicking through scans of Ellen’s journal on your tablet.
October 23, 1975
Making progress on the Spinners’ language, though the rest of the team says I’m wasting my time. I don’t think they mean us any harm; but everything is a threat, or a potential threat, these days. Violence, and the fear of violence, in every headline and alleyway.
Yesterday a Soviet probe made it to the surface of Venus, and sent pictures home. I saw one on television this morning while I was eating breakfast. Behind that thick cloud of yellow gas, it is a bare and rocky wasteland. There is great excitement in the public, and I know that a few months ago I would be excited too. But what are bare rocks compared to the living creatures we are learning about here?
“It’s so wild that all of this was going on back then and Ellen and her team were the only ones who knew,” you say to Alex as they sit down next to you.
“Yeah, uh, about that,” Alex says, dropping a folded newspaper in your lap. “I don’t think we’re the only ones who know this time.”
Part 19
“Okay, but what does this mean?” you ask Alex, folding your arms in protest. “Have other people been spying on us?”
“I don’t think so,” they say slowly. “We’ve been careful. And anyway, I’m quite certain that no one else has had access to Dr. Valentina’s journal except for us – there’s no record of it anywhere on the internet or in the Archives that I could find.”
“Then what?” you say. You don’t know why, but you feel defensive, bitter; like something pure and wonderful that belonged just to the two of you has been sullied now that it’s out there.
“Well, we’ve been so focused on Dr. Valentina – on the journal, and the puzzles from it, and our contact directly with the Spinners – that we haven’t been paying as much attention to what’s going on around us.” They’re right, of course; you’ve been phoning it in during class if you even bother to attend, neglecting your other friendships, barely taking care of yourself.
“I don’t think that everyone has been working on the same thing,” Alex says. “But I think there were definitely others.” They hold out their phone, open to a January 27 post from the Waterloo subreddit. “Has anyone else been hearing weird music when they’re outside?” the writer asks. There are questions about string theory, discussions of how climate change has affected the region, a request for blueprints of campus buildings. “Maybe this is just students being weird,” they say. “But maybe other people have been given problems to solve too.”
And then something happens you do not expect. You are far from the field, far from the ship, but that disembodied woman’s voice suddenly fills the room.
FOOLISH CHILDREN, the voice says, and you could swear there is a touch of gentleness in it. DID YOU THINK YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONES? DID YOU THINK THAT YOU ALONE COULD SAVE US? COULD SAVE YOURSELVES? IT WILL TAKE MANY KINDS, OF MANY GIFTS, TOGETHER. YOU MUST CONNECT.
Part 20
You hadn’t paid much attention to the first entry in Dr. Valentina’s journal in the past because it didn’t contain any concrete information, just a lot of excitement about beginning a new year of study.
As you recall it now, however, you can’t help but resonate with every line.
August 21, 1975
It is so strange, to be here at the beginning of everything, not knowing what I will discover, or who I will be when this is over. I have only my hopes: the hope that I will do something great and important, the hope that the world will be a better place when I am finished than it was before I began. Soon, the many futures will dissolve into one tangible one; soon, there will be disappointments and regrets. But right now, the horizon is endless, and it is mine for the journeying. And so – onward.
You and Alex are standing at the threshold of the spaceship as it hovers silently in the field. In front of you, the darker purple of the two Spinners gestures insistently: come here, come here.
You look at Alex for a moment, eyebrows raised, and they mirror your expression, then shrug, as if to say, “We’ve come this far, haven’t we?”
“The horizon is endless,” you whisper, and take a step forward towards the ship, and the beginning of everything.
Part 21
As the ship comes to life around you, you feel every muscle freeze in place as if trapped by invisible electric current. There is an immense pressure, then sudden lightness. You almost black out, then blink until your vision begins to clear. When you look out the window, you feel like you have tilted over the precipice at the height of a rollercoaster: the Earth, a glowing blue-and-green marble, is hanging motionless below you. Is this a dream? How could that happen so fast?
The Spinner closer to you waves a leg almost apologetically, then gestures upwards. You look and realize that your small vessel is being drawn smoothly upwards into a far larger vessel that is otherwise the replica of this one. You are too afraid, too excited, to say anything, but silently you grab Alex’s hand and hold on for dear life.
Soon, with a metallic thunk, your ship comes to a halt, and the roof hinges backwards. You are in a vast chamber, filled with swirling golden light. Coming towards you are dozens of Spinners, surrounding a figure whose very familiarity is jarring in its ordinariness: a tall human woman in her late seventies, with chin-length white hair, wearing some kind of shimmering silver robe.
“Welcome,” she says. “I’m sorry about all the theatricality and fuss, but I thought it best for us to meet here, given the circumstances.”
You blink in confusion. You know that voice. It is warmer, and far more human, but it is unmistakeably the woman’s voice that has spoken to you before. And her face – fifty years older, of course, but so well-known to you now. “You’re—” you whisper, but Alex says it first.
“You’re Dr. Ellen Valentina.”
She smiles gently. “But of course. And I’ll be asking for my journal back, soon, if it’s all the same to you. But I have one more task for you first, I’m afraid. One more journey into the labyrinth. And I’m afraid it’s an urgent one.”
She reaches into a fold of her robes, fishes out a single sheet of paper, and gives it to a nearby Spinner, who scuttles over and deposits it in your hand. You stare at it in disbelief. All of this work, this impossible journey, and she’s giving you another puzzle?
“It won’t be long, now,” she says, raising a hand in farewell. “You must go.”
“But wait!” Alex says. “We have so many questions! What happened to you last time? Why did you fail? Where have you been all this time? What are we supposed to do?”
“I feel like I don’t have enough time to get things straight,” you say, half to yourself, half to her.
As the roof on your ship begins to lower over you, she smiles again, gently, and shakes her head. “Don’t worry,” she says, and with the click of the roof closing her voice transforms to the strange inhuman one again. YOU HAVE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED.
The Final Message
Greetings. On behalf of all the Spinners, I give you my warmest congratulations, with our gratitude.
When you have lived as long as I have, and seen so many wonders and horrors in places beyond imagining, few things really surprise you anymore.
But I have been surprised by the ways that you have persisted in helping us, even when it stretched the limits of your comprehension. Oh, I’m sure part of it was out of curiosity, and the sheer joy of discovery – it was true for me too, all those years ago – but I know that you kept going because you cared.
Now that you have passed the last test we set for you, I suppose you deserve some answers.
Back in 1975, when the first crashed ship was recovered, the Spinners tried to reach out to me the way that we have reached out to you. Though they had no inkling of our human languages, back then, they sensed a marginality, and an openness about me, that they hoped would make me receptive to their messages. But they were limited – by the ignorance of our scientists, their damaged equipment, their captivity. So I helped to free them, and I took a leap of faith: joining them on their ship and journeying to their planet.
But one person was not enough. I am not the chosen one, or the hero, or their savior. I was just one. When I agreed to join them on their ship, it was as an ambassador of sorts. We learned each other’s languages and cultures, and together we created a plan: a plan to combine the skills and talents of many to save both of our worlds. I met their scientists, their engineers, their great artists – and shared with them all I knew. And we became something closer than friends – kin – part of the same great web of creatures that spans galaxies.
It may disappoint you to know that you were not the only ones on this quest. This was a great lesson we learned when I failed alone; we must look to the many for our salvation. Some of your fellow solvers are en route right now to our planet, to partner with us to save our world. There is no guarantee of salvation; but we have more hope now than we have had in decades.
Your work, however, lies on this beautiful blue-green marble that I used to call home.
A friend of mine recently said that the crisis facing your planet is like a large jigsaw puzzle. No one can solve the whole thing alone; it is too big, and too difficult. But each of you can contribute a few pieces. And that is a noble work, indeed.
You must be brave. This is not the end – it is the beginning. We will meet again.
-E.V.
Epilogue
With a contented sigh, you tamp the last of the dirt down around the base of the sapling and stand up, wiping your hands on the front of your jeans. All around you, people are working on different stages of tree planting: digging holes, carefully placing the slender maples and birches and willows in the ground, surrounding them with compost and soil. Over on your left, Alex is painstakingly wrapping the roots of a tiny oak tree with a gauzy material synthesized from Spinner webs: it’s stretchy and permeable but super-strong, and will help protect the young trees from parasites and erosion.
It's April 22, Earth Day, and you’ve spent the day planting a micro-forest in the old farmers’ field where you first saw the spaceship. You felt a little bad at first for basically taking the Spinners’ parking spot, but when you sent Dr. Valentina a message saying as much, she laughed. “We have a lot of places on Earth we need to visit,” she said. “I think we can find somewhere else to land.”
Soon, the project is finished for the day. You help load the tools and supplies into the back of an Environment professor’s battered old pickup truck, and high-five the biochemistry PhD student who you connected with on Reddit the day after you solved the Spinners’ final puzzle. The web synthesis was his idea, developed in close collaboration with two Spinner botanists.
In every movie you’ve ever seen about aliens, all the major decisions and actions were handled by governments and armies and superheroes. Some of the world’s governments have been excited about working with our friends from another planet, but others are in denial, or even hostile. In doesn’t matter: there is plenty for ordinary folks to do everywhere.
You thought you would miss your extraterrestrial friends – and you do – but you’re surprised at how busy you’ve stayed: studying for exams, volunteering around the city, planning your next big collaboration with all the other people you met through the Spinners, and still finding the time for the occasional puzzle or game of Blood on the Clocktower. Besides, this fall, Dr. Valentina is working on an opportunity for you to earn a linguistics credit studying abroad—on the Spinners’ home world.
Back in the present, Alex runs over to you, panting: “Dude, check your phone,” they say, holding up their screen and gesturing at the email you both just received. It’s from Samantha, your old mentor who recently returned to MIT from her research expedition. “Just got back from Antarctica,” it begins. “Found something really weird there that you should see…”
The Note from the Author
Graphic designer/marketing whiz Elisabetta and I came up with the 1970s alien theme last summer; we were inspired by psychedelic 1970s art and Roswell-type aesthetics, and wanted to do something more bright and fun after the noir-inspired “Watcher” saga from 2025.
At the same time, I read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and watched Arrival, and was thinking a lot about benevolent aliens who want to help instead of harm us. What do the stories we tell about “the other” reveal about our own attitudes towards the strange or unknown? I’ll admit I borrowed a good amount from Star Trek: The Voyage Home for my particular environmentalist message!
Before we went any further, we also decided it would be helpful to sketch out what the aliens were like. I immediately decided I wanted to base them on jumping spiders; both because of their wonderful colours, and because people are often very afraid of spiders despite the fact that they eat pests and most of them won’t harm humans at all. Fun fact: though it never made it into the narrative, I decided that the eventual scientific name for the Spinners would be peregrinus attercoppe – “peregrinus” is Latin for “traveler,” and “attercoppe” is the Old English word for “spider” (unfortunately a very insulting one, if The Hobbit is to be believed).
The other major piece was the meta constraints; as soon as I found out players would need to put all the puzzles in an order separate from that of the storytelling, I needed an excuse to subtly (?) drop in a ton of dates. I always knew I wanted the protagonist to find notes from the aliens’ previous visit; Dr. Ellen Valentina’s journal gave me an easy mechanism for a lot of those dates. Making the main character a history major who constantly thought about the past (and future!) took care of most of the others. From there, it was just a matter of writing characters and a plot that would be relatable to a lot of our players, but specific enough to be interesting—shout outs to my friend and fellow enigmatologist Sammy, who taught me to play Blood on the Clocktower!
P.S. What did Samantha find in Antarctica? Will it be revealed in next year’s puzzle hunt? I guess you’ll have to play and find out!
-Melodie Roschman