Good evening. Thank you for letting me tell my story. I'm eighty-six years old. I don't expect I'll see eighty-seven. That's not self-pity, that's just the math. Doctor gave me the numbers last month and I've made my peace with it. But there's something I haven't made peace with. Something I did. And I figure if I'm going to tell anyone, it ought to be now. While I still can. My daughter thinks I should let it go. She's been telling me that for years. Says I'll feel better if I just stop thinking about it. But she doesn't know what it is. Nobody does. I signed papers back in sixty-two that said I'd never speak of it, and I never have. Sixty-three years I've kept my mouth shut. And it's been eating me alive the whole time, if you can believe that.
November of sixty-two. I was working for a contractor out of Albuquerque. Officially we did land surveys. Unofficially, we did whatever the government needed done quiet. I'd been on a few recoveries before. Downed weather balloons, experimental aircraft that weren't supposed to exist. Hush-hush stuff. I was good at it. Knew how to keep my head down and my mouth shut. The call came around two in the morning. They only sent me. Just me. I was the only one they trusted for this kind of thing, if you can believe that. No partner, no backup. Just coordinates and a time window. Get there before dawn, secure whatever I found, wait for the transport. I remember thinking it was strange they'd send one man for a recovery. Usually it was teams of three, four guys. But orders were orders. I loaded up the truck and headed north.
The coordinates put me out past Willow Creek, up in the hills where there's nothing but scrub and silence. Took me three hours on dirt roads to get there. No moon that night. Just my headlights cutting through the dark. I smelled it before I saw it. This sharp, chemical smell. Like ozone mixed with something sweet. Made my eyes water. I had to pull my shirt up over my nose just to breathe. Then my headlights caught the edge of it. The craft. If that's what you want to call it. It wasn't big. Maybe twenty feet across. Shaped like a teardrop, sort of. The front end was crumpled into the hillside, and there was this dark fluid leaking out of the cracks. Not oil. Not fuel. Something thicker. It caught the light wrong. Looked almost purple in certain angles.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]