Tinfoil-Tim: I recorded this audio transmission in response to the assistance requests I’ve received. We need help, as much as we wouldn’t like to admit it. Some might think it extreme, but I think it’s utilitarian. Here’s the transcript:
My name is Tim. I am human, as far as you’re concerned. I don’t know if you’ll understand any of this, but I thought I’d give it a try. I’m on the beach. I live nearby in a disused lighthouse, a few miles from a small town on the coast of England, facing out to the North Sea. It is 1753 hours on the 23rd day of the 4th month, in the Earth year 2024. I spend most of my time listening to your transmissions and analysing them for my subreddit. I understand that many of you seek refuge here. Unfortunately, ‘refuge’ will not be possible. You will not find welcome here.
[pause]
It is April. The tourist season is just starting here. They arrive on pleasure boats and peer up at my lighthouse, windswept and stupefied. It's dead quiet from October through March (half of one solar rotation). Amongst other things that washed up this winter were sewage, 500 kilos of cocaine, a solitary deer - and of course, your messages of desperation, occasionally hope, or bemusement. I still wonder about the deer. Did he know what he was doing? What on Earth must he think has happened to the rest of his herd? Maybe he thinks he’s the last deer on the planet — an endling. I’m babbling.
I have contacted you because this world is irredeemable. It is not fit for refuge. It is populated by irrational beings who harm each other and themselves. Suffering seems ubiquitous, boring, and at worst, manufactured. We are deadened by the death itself. I do not recognise what we have become, and it seems I might be the last one left with any decency. More and more people live in overpopulated and polluted cities, and I dream of the day they are abandoned and overgrown, with all the windows in all the skyscrapers smashed to let some air blow through. The only thing people hate more than those the same as them is those who are different. You will not find welcome here.
Each morning I listen to my radio and stare out at the big blue ocean: one day it will swallow this, all of it. We are suffering the same environmental consequences that affect many of you. Like you, we consume endlessly, and now the planet consumes us in return. Like you, no one here does anything about it. Some are holding out for God to come back and sort it all out. The closest thing to a God is you - so I request your assistance. While refuge will not be possible, invasion might be - I request that you invade us. I request that you save us from ourselves.
[pause]
I found the deer on a Sunday evening in January. He must have swum from the mainland, quite some distance, in moderate to rough waters - he was so young he had no antlers. I fetched a warm towel from the lighthouse. I tucked it around his shivering body and left him there. It was then that I realised it had been a long time since I had touched something alive. The things around me are well-worn and dead. The table. The bed. Even my phone, whirring and warm with activity. When I wrapped up that small deer in a towel, I felt his little heart beating. His lungs inflate with air. I feel like a ghost. He had disappeared by the next morning.
What I’m saying is that we are dead already. Save us.
This message has been sent from Earth, a terrestrial planet in a solar system orbiting an ordinary main-sequence star we call the Sun. We are located in a galaxy we call the Milky Way, a barred spiral galaxy with a D25 isophotal diameter (~26.8 kiloparsecs, or 87,400 lightyears, whichever you prefer). Our galaxy revolves around a supermassive black hole.
Do not show mercy when you arrive. We have not learnt it yet.