July 7th, 1947
Roswell, New Mexico
Dr. Johnathan George Orwell refused to blink.
The desert wind sliced across the sand, hurling grit against the metallic hull half-buried in the arroyo. The craft defied classification—neither disk nor plane, neither elegant nor crude. It appeared complete—as if it hadn't crashed but simply arrived and abandoned its relationship with gravity.
Orwell maintained his stance, hands locked behind his back, his posture flawless despite the suffocating heat. His reflection distorted across the ship's surface, stretched and twisted as though the metal itself contested his very form.
"Sir," an orderly gasped, stumbling up behind him, clutching a clipboard to his chest. "U.S. Army advance units will arrive in four hours."
"Then we have three," Orwell replied icily without turning.
Behind him, technicians moved with barely contained panic. Geiger counters clicked ominously. Sample cases slammed shut. Instruments whirred as they absorbed readings for which humanity lacked vocabulary. The ship emanated a subtle vibration—felt in the marrow rather than the ears—like a predator's suspended breath.
A junior scientist approached, his voice cracking. "Dr. Orwell, the extracted plasma drive—where should we..." He faltered under Orwell's cold stare.
"Cryogenic containment. Portable," Orwell cut him off. "I want it off-site within the hour. Not later. Am I clear?"
"Crystal clear, sir," the scientist retreated, visibly shaken.
"Security stands ready to breach the hatch," interrupted Colonel Hayes, stepping forward with undisguised contempt. "Unless you'd prefer more time with your measurements while we risk court-martial?"
Orwell merely nodded once, ignoring the provocation.
The hatch resisted conventional methods. Tools failed. Heat proved useless. Finally, a focused harmonic pulse—one of Orwell's controversial inventions—caused the seam to unravel like a forgotten memory.
Light erupted outward.
Green. Not merely luminous—sentient.
The first security officer advanced, against Hayes' sudden command to halt.
A bolt of emerald energy struck faster than thought. No scream escaped him. No struggle ensued. One moment the man existed; the next, he dissolved into a spreading puddle of viscous green matter that sizzled against the desert floor.
The desert fell deathly silent.
"Jesus Christ," whispered Hayes, his face ashen.
"Bring the prototype," Orwell commanded.
His voice never rose. Never wavered. He spoke as casually as someone requesting coffee.
The staff scattered immediately. Experience had taught them—through painful lessons—that hesitation under Dr. Orwell's authority invited disaster. Survival demanded compliance—not because Orwell craved loyalty, but because reality seemed to bend more favorably toward those who acted on his words.
As the team frantically prepared the cryogenic handheld charge, Orwell stepped toward the hatch.
He recalled his childhood in Arlington, Texas. An isolated existence. A silent house. A mother who aged a decade whenever radio broadcasts mentioned Europe or the Pacific.
Staff Sergeant George Orwell perished overseas before Johnathan could properly learn to hate him for his absence. The war claimed the father and burdened the son with questions that lingered in the silence of empty rooms, questions no one around him could adequately address.
Why did nations sacrifice fathers on distant battlefields? Why did human progress demand blood as its currency? Why did people continue to worship systems that consumed them without remorse?
Johnathan discovered early in life that sentiment was inefficient, a luxury he couldn't afford in a world that had already taken so much from him.
By grade school, while other children formed friendships on playgrounds, he had found more reliable companions: Nikola Tesla's cryptic notebooks with their marginalia of genius, half-burned conspiracy tracts salvaged from forgotten places, detailed maps of mythical cities rumored to exist beneath dense jungle canopies and vast expanses of polar ice. He devoured ideas with a voracious hunger, the way other children consumed sugar—desperately, completely, seeking something essential.
By high school, his slender fingers were building devices that powered radios without wires, his mind racing ahead of textbooks that seemed painfully outdated to him.
By university, twelve patents bore his name, each one a stepping stone toward something greater than himself.
By twenty-five, with eyes perpetually shadowed from sleepless nights, he had corrected fundamental errors in solar energy theory—errors that men twice his age, with their academic reputations at stake, stubbornly refused to acknowledge. His work transformed Charles Fritts' primitive solar cell concepts into something revolutionary—technology that could capture energy, hold it captive, discipline it to his will, and delay entropy itself. The achievement burned bright within him, a private sun.
He sold that technology years later in a quiet transaction that left him wealthy but anonymous. Bell Labs would proudly announce the breakthrough in 1955, claiming it as their own. Orwell's name would not appear in any headlines, any scientific journals, any history books.
It never needed to. He had already moved beyond such trivial concerns.
The cryogenic charge lay ready, gleaming with deadly potential in the uncertain light.
One of the security-scientists—his hands trembling uncontrollably, sweat beading on his forehead—threw it into the hatch with a prayer on his lips.
The sound that followed defied classification. It was not human, not animal, not mechanical. It was layered with too many frequencies converging at once—pain translated into the cold language of physics, a scream that existed across multiple dimensions.
The charge detonated with crystalline precision, flooding the interior with cascading frost. Whatever had been moving inside the craft suddenly ceased all motion.
Silence returned, heavy and expectant.
Orwell stepped forward despite his security team's instinctive protests, their arms reaching to hold him back. He peered down into the frozen interior, his eyes alight not with fear but with profound recognition. Something in that alien architecture spoke to him, confirmed theories he had harbored since childhood.
He smiled, a rare expression that transformed his austere features.
When the U.S. Army finally arrived with their protocols and clipboards, they found only wreckage, confusion, and incomplete answers scattered like breadcrumbs.
They did not find the plasma drive.
Orwell had deliberately left the ship behind. The craft itself, though impressive, represented finite technology. What he carried away in a specially designed case, however, would rewrite humanity's future.
Within years, the first plasma prototype was announced to the world—not as salvaged alien technology, but as inevitable human progress. Clean. Efficient. Revolutionary. And behind it all, unseen but ever-present, stood Orwell, watching as his vision unfolded.
Orwell's fingerprints appeared everywhere and nowhere.
The atomic bomb. The hydrogen bomb. The plasma bomb.
He never stood at the podium. Never played the hero. Never became the villain society could identify.
He regarded people with disappointment rather than cruelty. America, in his eyes, had grown complacent. It worshiped comfort while masquerading sacrifice. It resisted change unless cloaked in patriotic rhetoric.
He was not a traitor.
But his love for the country lacked the fervor needed to shield it from its self-destructive tendencies.
During the 1960s, his influence briefly emerged in academic circles. He guided Stanley Milgram through the obedience experiments at Yale, captivated not by human cruelty, but by how effortlessly authority reconfigured moral boundaries.
Then came the November Revolution—plasma energy threatening to eradicate the fossil fuel industry before it reached its zenith. Economic futures silently crumbled.
Androids followed. Weapons. Infrastructure that citizens never recalled approving.
By the time the first explosions devastated the landscape decades later, the Orwell Company had already dissolved.
No headquarters remained.
No board existed.
No records survived.
Only technology persisted—everywhere. Like ancient bones buried beneath fertile soil.
Some murmured that Dr. Orwell defied aging.
Photographs spanning from the 1940s to the 2000s revealed an identical man. The same penetrating eyes. The same rigid posture. The same distant, calculating patience.
Officially, authorities presumed his death during the bombings. No bunker records contained his name. Yet unofficially, the world continued operating on his innovations.
And deep beneath the surface—below bunkers like Thirteen, underneath plasma gates and forbidden thresholds—his legacy waited.
Not finished.
Merely dormant.