Truth Now! by Danny Halpin

These people are driving me crazy. I’m being harassed by an army of keyboard warriors who are intent on destroying my reputation because I won’t agree with their insane ideas. They want me to come out and say yes, I took a picture of an alien spacecraft, you were right, look at how smart you are. Well, that’s not going to happen. I’ve told them the truth, but they won’t believe me because it’s not the truth they want to hear.

They’ve worked themselves up into a frenzy of paranoid speculation, rallying together on ufo_truth_now.com as they ‘stand ready to risk life and property by shining a light on the secrets of the global elite.’ Though interestingly, most of the posts are made anonymously, as if the police are going to kick down the doors of anyone who talks about government conspiracies and alien visitations. If that were the case then every prison in the country would be full of science fiction writers.

I’m going to tell this story one last time and make it absolutely clear what really happened up there because frankly, I’m getting bored of having to explain myself over and over again to an online forum of conspiracy theorists. I want to turn my attention away from them now and reach any sensible, rational human beings out there who are willing to back me up so that my picture and my life aren’t made to bend to the whims of slanderous fools.

I’m guessing most of you have heard of the Icarus Hotel, though I doubt many of you can afford to stay there. Well I can, and I did, along with my pal Jenson. We were out drinking one night and chatting about what would be the ultimate trip when Jenson made a suggestion. Fly to Ecuador, spend a weekend in Quito, and then head up to the Icarus via the space elevator which is in the mountains just north of the city.

For those of you that don’t know, both the elevator and the hotel are run by the same American corporation that has been launching satellites into orbit for decades. DePerrio Aeros they’re called. I’m sure if they had their way, the bottom of the elevator would be somewhere in California so they wouldn’t have to keep paying a hefty share of the profits to the Ecuadorian government. Still, it’s cheaper then paying millions of dollars in rocket fuel every time you want to shuttle guests to the front door.

In order to avoid ripping apart the elevator and creating a mass of very expensive space debris as it orbits around the Earth, the Icarus has to orbit at an altitude of 22,236 miles so it matches the speed of the Earth’s rotation exactly. This allows it to remain directly above the same geographical position on the ground at all times and keep the elevator shaft in one piece. The only catch is that the base of the elevator must be somewhere on the equator to make this possible.

It’s quite easy to understand why Deperrio Areos chose Ecuador of all places when you consider the fact that most other countries on the equator are either covered in jungle or in the midst of genocidal civil war which, needless to say, is bad for business. The mountains of Ecuador provide a more secure location, and they also saved Deperrio Areos a load of money on materials since the high altitude makes the base of the elevator closer to space. Plus, with Quito being only a 4 1/2 hour flight from Miami, it’s an easier sell to the multi-millionaire Americans that make up the majority of the Hotel’s client base.

Jenson and I must have been talking about our potential space adventure for quite a while judging by the amount of empty pint glasses that sat on our table. Feeling very spontaneous from the booze I got out my phone and booked two tickets from London Heathrow to Mariscal Sucre International Airport.

There’s been so many thousands of photographs taken of Earth from space now that it’s kind of lost its novelty. The vast majority however have all been taken from the International Space Station, which compared to the Icarus is barely even in space. Granted, you can see the surface of the Earth in breathtaking detail, but you can only see one small segment at a time. From the Icarus, the view is far wider, and, in my opinion, far grander too since it’s over 20,000 miles higher than the ISS. The only problem is that because of its geostationary position over Ecuador, the Western hemisphere is all that’s visible. Some of the less humble and self-aware Americans bask in the splendour of their shining country, and I have to pretend I don’t want to kill them when they’re shouting and whooping and beating their chests. But, they’re the money-makers for the Hotel owners, so they get away with whatever they want and everyone else has to endure their loathsome arrogance.

You’ll be hard pressed to find many pictures taken from a geostationary orbit (apart from a few weather satellites that have taken photos in near-infrared) because most of the hotel’s clientele tend to be quite private and they’re not the sharing-things-with-the-rest-of-the-world type, even if they could be bothered to take any pictures. That’s why I decided to take my camera with me and capture a whole bunch of photos to share online when I got back, and I was thinking I could even make some money by selling the best ones to a magazine.

All anybody was remotely interested in though was just one photograph, which must have been grouped in with the others because I didn’t even mean to upload it. I wasn’t aiming my camera at the Earth in that shot, but at the ‘unEarthly shaped flying craft’ that was unoriginally labelled as a UFO by the conspiracy theorists after the picture went viral. I had emails and phone calls from tabloid newspapers asking me questions such as ‘did you know what the object was?’ And ‘did you photograph it on purpose?’ To which my answer was always yes. Sensible journalists very quickly realised there was no story once they had spoken to me and so never bothered to print what actually happened. Perhaps this lack of media coverage failed to provide answers for a lot of people, who then felt it necessary to fill the vacuum with ideas of their own.

It was after I stumbled across the website ufo_truth_now.com and saw all the crazy theories that I decided to speak out properly. Some of the posts I saw on there described how the Icarus Hotel is really a place where the global elites gather to discuss how they will continue to maintain their merciless control over the populations of the world, whilst selling out certain individuals of the common class to aliens who kidnap them and wear their skin so they are then able to walk among human beings undetected. HA! 10 points for imagination but let me tell you, the rich and powerful elites of the world couldn’t give a damn about the common people, especially whilst they’re getting stoned out of their minds in a hotel in space.

I posted comments on the forum myself, trying to explain to people who I was and how actually, they were kind of right about the mysterious object being an alien, minus all the weird skin wearer stuff obviously, but they just thought I was making fun of them. You see, it was an alien, of sorts; a life form born and bred on the Icarus that is. I know this because I was the one who threw it out of the airlock after Jenson bet me £1,000 that a plant would freeze in space.

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Danny Halpin is a young musician living in London, England. Whilst fairly new to writing short stories, he has been a keen writer of songs and an enthusiast of the science fiction genre for a number of years.