This is installment #2 of a sci-fi serial. Installment #1 was posted 1/23/21; appropriately a numerically-ordered palindrome. Follow the links forward from the last sentence and backward from the first sentence of each post.

It has been just over four weeks since my last observation and so much has happened. Sixteen days ago, in a coordinated effort, we unobtrusively secured 82% of your world’s known nuclear weapons. We were in position to have at least some influence on the powers controlling the remaining 18% and we had operatives continuing to search for hidden stockpiles and still others continuing to infiltrate terrorist organizations deemed as potential nuclear threats. We did this as previously stated by dropping hundreds of thousands into millions of our scientists and trained operatives (and often their families) into your 1970’s and 1980’s. These experts in turn trained the next generation of extraterrestrial experts and many of these individuals, two generations worth, have been able to work their way into key positions of influence surrounding dangerous thought and circumstance. In addition, amongst these millions of extraterrestrials there were experts in the development of the technologies necessary to avert the (so far unavoidable) 2060 disaster.

So why didn’t we do the same thing with politicians and diplomats? In an effort to simply control all the nations? And bring about a more peaceful solution? We considered this but look at your history; our history. The masses in your TimePlace are far too fickle and unpredictable. It would take only a handful of charismatic fascist or populist terrestrial leaders to subvert and circumvent our efforts. Success on this front would be too uncertain. Additionally, our thinkers were uncertain how individual power might corrupt our own after being immersed in your civilization for 40 or 50 years. (With one or two exceptions) we felt it better to remain in the background and come forward only now; as one.

Twenty-four. Maybe twenty-five. That is the number of nuclear bombs unleashed in the past two weeks; all of them smaller, between 15 and 20 kilotons. We don’t believe the damage to be irreversible but the literal and metaphorical fallout will be felt for decades. Our intelligence tells us that there are an additional 8 to 10 hotspots that could still erupt. If the threat becomes palpable, we will (as we have already done) strike preemptively. Seven of the twenty-four (or twenty-five) nuclear weapons (so far) were ours. Millions, billions of stories. Seemingly unnecessary loss and devastation; from where you sit. From our perspective? Consequential sacrifice. So at this point, two weeks after our first strike, though we have been successful and feel somewhat secure in our initial efforts, we have concerns.

It is surprising the number of scary clowns in the upper echelons of power in so many nations that are some form of a working democracy in which the people could have chosen more wisely. Of all the pain and loss and devastation in this two weeks, it is this fact, this inability to see beyond the moment, this debilitating lack of imagination, this incontrovertible fundamental stupidity, that have our thinkers making new predictions about the coming span of TimePlace from now to 2060. We had initially believed and hoped that once subdued and faced with logic, you would at the least allow us the opportunity to provide and comfort (which we have made clear is our intention), and we had initially believed and hoped that you would ultimately (yet in fairly short order) understand and see the wisdom of cooperation. But even now, in this moment, surrounded by an overwhelming force of advanced technology, many of you, perhaps a large majority of you, are nowhere but in this moment; still focusing on your facts of divisiveness; still living in your reality of us / them; still making the same mistakes. We now believe we will need to divert much effort from the task at hand, (saving Humanity from itself), to managing your desire for autonomy that will (ironically) manifest as unruly mob violence, perhaps on a nuclear level. To incite herd behavior in the interest of individual freedom, we now believe, will become an occupation, a pastime, a hobby, a game, a calling, that may grow to pandemic proportions. Reassessing your nature, our thinkers now put the odds of surviving the 2060 potential for obliterative decimation at around 45%. Three weeks ago that number was 77%.

We still believe that creating more opportunity for productive, beneficial, compassionate individual thought will ultimately lead to the understanding, compassion and empathy necessary for long term survival, but we now question if we will attain the level of cooperation necessary for surviving the short term beyond 2060. This question is further substantiated by our consistent observations that even those leaders willing to cooperate, lack urgency. For the first time in the history of Humanity, you are literally face-to-face with your future, yet you still refuse to see beyond today. In this CalendarTime, 2022, this ignorance may or may not lead to your individual death, but it has led to today’s carnage, and it very well could lead to our death; and like it or not, we are you and you are us.

To complicate matters, we have lost contact with our future. We are uncertain if there was a breakdown in the cusp, or if simply by taking the actions we have in the past two weeks, we have perhaps created a divergence that has carried past 2030 where all three possibility tracks have already been traversed, thus either eliminating or changing a track which in turn has eliminated our ships in the nether in-between? This is the first journey in which we are preceding a time where the outer two possibility tracks have already diverged from the one in the center, so we simply do not know what will happen. So far, we have waited the equivalent CalendarTime between each TimePlace journey partially to confirm (as best we could) that the possibility track divergence had corrected itself before 2042 and/or that those first explorers were safely off of their own accord. But we still are uncertain about the predominance of one possibility track over another, so if we have created a divergence that becomes or supersedes a predominant track, we may have eliminated our future selves. And now our scientists and thinkers have expressed the fear we had all felt; that by tripping over time as we have done, instead of simply widening a sheath and weakening its walls, we may have ripped it apart creating an irrecoverable (fourth?) renegade possibility track. We had thought that there was a small chance that the actions we have taken in the past two weeks might result in our future seeing an instantaneous alteration of reality (which of course we are uncertain our 2275 selves will even see) and reporting back to us a future thriving, inhabited Earth. We had believed though that this invasion alone would not be enough to change possibilities that far ahead. We knew, we know, there is still a lot of work to be done, but in this momentary TimePlace, we do not know if our future (as we remember it) is still there, is in a diverged TimePlace, or no longer exists at all. Sheath flexibility and the possibility of a third divergence are the unknowns. We do not understand why each cusp houses only three possibility tracks and we do not know if a divergence will always, in some unknown future CalendarTime depending upon its sequential preponderance, reverge with the other two. Or, as already said, perhaps rip open the sheath and create an alternate reality.

So perhaps there are no longer extraterrestrials. Perhaps we are now singly, exclusively and truly you. Regardless, we have a lot of work to do to repair our current trajectory leading to 2060. Regardless, we can still speak, with confidence, as your future. Regardless, we must find productive, beneficial, compassionate individual thought that can come together not only as a connection, but as an overlapping; an intertwining; an entanglement; a fusion. If we are not able to do this, our world is in danger.