Yes, hello. I am calling from Russia, so forgive my English. I have practiced this story many times because I want to tell it correctly. This was winter of 1988. January. I was working pipeline inspection in Yamalo-Nenets. You know this region? Far north. Above the Arctic Circle. Nothing but tundra and permafrost and gas pipelines. There were four of us on the crew that day. Myself, Dmitri, Kolya, and our supervisor Sergei. We were checking a section of pipe maybe sixty kilometers from the nearest settlement. The temperature was minus forty-two. At that cold, you do not turn off the engine. Ever. Dmitri stayed with the truck to keep it running. That's the thing about Siberia. You leave a vehicle for ten minutes in that cold, the engine block cracks. The fuel lines freeze. You die. So Dmitri stayed behind. The rest of us walked out to check a junction point near a frozen lake. Lake Kharvuto, the locals called it. Small lake, maybe three hundred meters across. Two meters of ice at least, solid all the way through. You could drive a tank across it.
We saw the sphere before we reached the junction. It was sitting on the ice, maybe one hundred fifty meters from shore. At first I thought it was a storage tank. Some equipment that had been left behind. But there was no reason for equipment to be there. No roads, no facilities, nothing. As we got closer, I could see it was wrong. The shape was too perfect. A sphere, maybe eight meters in diameter. The surface looked like rusted iron. Old iron, pitted and rough, the color of dried blood. But it sat on the ice without breaking through. Something that size, that heavy looking, should have cracked the surface at least. But the ice beneath it was solid. Undisturbed. Sergei wanted to report it. He thought it might be military. Some secret project we weren't supposed to see. But there were no markings. No hatches that I could see. Just this massive rusted ball sitting on the ice like it had been there forever. We stood at the shore, the three of us, trying to decide what to do. And then a section of the sphere opened. Just slid apart, like a mouth opening.
Four of them came out. I don't know what to call them. Creatures. Beings. Machines. They were shaped like cubes. Squat, heavy, maybe one and a half meters on each side. They had legs, four thick columns at the corners, but no arms that I could see. No heads. Just these dense, square bodies. Their skin, if you can call it that, looked like oiled leather. Thick, dark, with a bronze sheen to it. When the light caught it, there was this metallic quality. But it moved like flesh. It stretched and compressed as they walked. And the way they walked. That's the thing I remember most. Every step looked like agony. Like they weighed ten tons each. Their feet sank into the permafrost with every step, twenty, thirty centimeters deep. The ice beneath them groaned. You could hear it cracking under the pressure. Dmitri was standing right next to me, and he grabbed my arm. someone with you in those situations is reassuring - Blake' His face was white. Not from the cold. From fear. They did not look at us. Did not acknowledge us at all. We were nothing to them. Insects. Irrelevant.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]