BACK FROM THE FUTURE
The last thing I remember is a flash of white light.
A bit of a backstory: Hillsy, and I were living in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Buffalo, New York. On one late spring evening in April of 2021, Hillsy came into the bedroom where I was writing and asked to borrow something of mine for the green-energy device he had been working on for years.
To my surprise, he held up a double-pointed, clear blue crystal. One that found me at a small Tibetan crystal shop in St. Augustine years ago. I was looking around the store when the kind woman in the shop took one glance at me and pulled this beautiful blue crystal from her collection. She handed it to me with a warm smile in her eyes, as if she knew intuitively, it was what I needed. I bought it without hesitation. I didn’t know it at the moment, but this trip to Florida would be the last time I got to visit my grandparents before they passed, so it meant a lot to me. As Hillsy held up my favorite crystal, I saw in his eyes the same thing the woman in the crystal shop might have seen in me. He needed it, so I let him use it.
What happened next changed the course of our lives forever.
Hillsy had the device nearly complete and was ready to test it out a few hours later on the early-morning of April 3rd, 2021. To this day, we aren’t sure how it happened or what went wrong. It’s something Hillsy hasn’t figured out the science behind yet – but it generated a seemingly-impossible, unintended outcome.
Hillsy, our dog Marshall, and I were transported to another world completely.
I must have fallen unconscious after the flash of light, because I have no recollection of how we teleported from our apartment to this unfamiliar realm.
When I woke up, I was having trouble seeing anything immediately and my throat was bone-dry. I couldn’t speak. It felt like I was in one of those nightmares where you try to scream out for help, but you can’t make a sound. I tried flashing my eyes open and closed again. This time, I started to see something emerging from the darkness around me. I couldn’t make out what it was. A pink light? I kept my eyes open and stared into this warm, glowing light. The longer I stared, the brighter it got, until I felt a sharp pain in the front of my head and lost focus.
Moments later, a dark silhouette of a man entered my field of view. He appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat. His figure blocked the pink light that streamed from behind him. Everything was blurry still. As the man got closer, I tried to observe his face in my disoriented state but I couldn’t fill in any details.
Help – I tried to speak up.
Nothing came out.
“Now… How did you all end up in this way?” A deep, raspy voice questions and pauses for a moment before saying, “Don’t worry, you’ll be just fine.”
I didn’t know where we were or who this person was at the time, but in that moment, I felt a wave of warmth and comfort wash over me and I knew, somehow, we would be okay.
I would later find out that this man’s name is Jack, and as much as he looks like a man, he’s not from this time-period or even this galaxy, for that matter.
Jack was the first humanoid being, or Etarthan, we met on planet Etartha in the Andromeda galaxy. We somehow ended up in a field with the now-broken-device and some random tools scattered around. Jack, on a walk near his place, discovered us lying there in need of serious help. He took us into the comfort of his own home and gave us medical attention. When we were fully conscious, he introduced himself and began asking us a series of questions. Jack was the one who broke the news to us that we weren’t in Western New York anymore.
Although we were in shock, it didn’t take very long before we realized Jack was one-hundred-percent telling the truth about our wild situation. Hillsy’s device must have opened up some sort of wormhole in our spare-bedroom and teleported us to an alien planet. We ended up on Etartha during a time-period they referred to as The Blisstance. The year was 3033.
Overall, we got extremely lucky, not only that Jack found us, but that he was willing to help complete strangers. Jack quickly became one of the kindest souls we’ve ever met, and all three of us (especially Marshall) consider him a wonderful friend to this day.
While Jack offered to help us get home from the start, he also presented us the unique opportunity to see more of the world he lives in. Me, being a writer and Hillsy, an inventor and artist, we couldn’t pass up this once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore an alien society. After meeting some other incredible beings, we were asked to sign aboard a project where we would spend the next three years training and traveling throughout different time-periods and between three major galaxies, or the Local Group, as we know them: Andromeda, the Triangulum and the Milky Way.
After our training, we were given the choice from a collection of futuristic spaceships with a range of sizes and styles to select from. We were told to pick a ship to travel back home with. The ship we chose, called the Starling 33, is on the smaller side, but the features are something out of a sci-fi movie. With that, we were each assigned tasks to complete upon our return, including our collective goal of building the moon base.
While many details of our adventure remain classified by certain organizations, Hillsy and I are eager to share what we’ve seen with the people of Earth. In order to remain compliant and still reveal as much as we can, we have created our channel Going the Blisstance as an outlet to post the few real photos and documents we are permitted to share, along with artistic recreations and retellings of our experience on our archive: The Wanderbook. All news and updates will be posted here on our blog: The Bliss Board.
After years of being back home and beginning construction on the moon base, we are stoked to finally be bringing you in on this mission with us as we declassify everything we can about our otherworldly experience.
Thanks for reading, and we’re glad to have you here for the journey.
It’s only just begun.