Chapter three

Published: Apr 21, 2026 by

Bring, bring, bring rang the old brass bell on the wall.

Lily almost choked on her coffee in surprise, spitting half a mouthful back into her coffee cup so she could breathe once more. In ten years of working for the National Organisation for Space and Extraterrestrial Exploration (or NOSEE for short) she had never heard that noise before.

Putting the coffee cup down onto her desk, finding the only small space that wasn’t currently covered by pieces of paper, she looked up at her array of three computer screens mounted above the large desk before her.

She searched the screens for alerts, looking from screen to screen one after the other, but everything seemed normal. Nothing flashing red. No messages on any of the various messaging apps they had to use to communicate with the multitude of government departments. Heaven forbid they agree to use the same system to communicate between different departments.

“Jake, what does that bell mean?” Lily asked her colleague, confusion and stress showing in her voice.

Jake sat in the next desk along to Lily, the surface covered in an equal amount of paper reports and diagrams as Lily’s desk. He sat looking at his three screens, ignoring her. He was wearing his dark grey X Files hoodie, a pair of blue jeans and some old worn out trainers. His outfit was a complete contrast to the smart office wear that Lily always wore, varying between smart dresses and the dark trouser suit that she was wearing today.

“Jake!” Lily shouted at him. He still didn’t answer. Seeing he had his headphones on, oblivious to the noise from the ringing bell and Lily’s questions, she punched him gently on his right arm.

“Ouch!” Jake exclaimed, turning to look at Lily. He removed his noise cancelling headphones from his ears, the loud prog rock he was listening to now spilling out into the room, rubbing his right arm with his left hand on the spot where she had punched him. Not that he was hurt, but he was just making a point that he didn’t like to be touched.

“What’s that bell?” Jake asked, hearing it ringing for the first time. He pressed the pause button on his mobile phone and the prog rock music emerging from his headphones ceased immediately.

“That was what I was asking you!” Lily said, now regretting the punch, but not wanting to admit it. She added another sentence to try and justify her actions. “You need to turn down your music! How many times have I told you!”

“Yeah, sorry boss. It just helps me concentrate on the job.” Jake replied.

Jake had started at NOSEE a couple of months before Lily. There was some kind of falling out between the previous team members which meant that they all left around about the same time. The old team had left a lot of documentation covering the systems that were in place, but it seemed that there were several ‘projects’ where the documentation had mysteriously vanished. They were still in the process of organising the chaos that had been left for them, hence the scattered paper all over their desks, but over the years they had focused on updating and computerising the major systems. There was obviously another system they had yet to get to and modernise.

Lily stood up and walked over to the ringing bell on the wall behind their desks. On previous inspections, she had imagined that it was some kind of antique fire alarm. Their office was a small room buried deep in the University campus. The creators of NOSEE decided that no one would imagine such a secretive organisation would be hidden in such a public place. Hidden in plain sight, rather than being based in the middle of the desert, miles away from civilization. That didn’t mean security was lapse though, the office requiring swipe cards and retinal scans to enter, as well as top level security clearance. Not that anything ever really happened in the time they had both been there.

They had a few rooms that branched off of the central office space, most of them filled with archive boxes, filled with yellowing papers of diagrams with hand written notes and physics equations dotted around the edges, as well as old analogue equipment from the cold war era.

The bell had a wire coming from down from underneath it. Lily traced the wire down the wall to a few inches above the floor. It then disappeared into a hole in the wall. She opened the door nearest to the hole and turned the light on in the small room. The room was full of boxes, stacked haphazardly, covered in dust.

She moved a couple of boxes out of the entrance of the room and into their office so she could get deeper inside. She could now follow the wire from where it entered the room, then along the wall on her right, before it disappeared into a hole in yet another wall. She moved another couple of boxes to get closer to where the wire disappeared from view.

Jake was standing in the doorway watching Lily move boxes. He walked into the room and started to help with the reorganisation, sneezing as the years of settled dust was disturbed from the movement.

Finally she was able to see more of the wall she had just exposed, the dust outlines from the boxes that had been leaning against it still visible, the old wallpaper had yellowed from age. The wire disappeared into yet another hole in this wall. There was a small crack where the wallpaper was joined along a vertical seam. She used her hands to feel the surface of the wall and pressed her finger into the crack. The wall moved slightly to the left, the small crack widening ever so slightly.

“What are you doing?” Jake asked.

“The wire disappears behind this wall here and this crack seems to be some kind of opening. Can you give me a hand?” Lily asked.

“Ok.” Jake agreed, unsure what was happening.

They both inserted their fingers into the crack which was now about half an inch wide.

“Let’s try and force this open.” Lily suggested. They both pulled with their fingertips, the gap opening up slightly more.

“Look, there is a light on in there!” Jake said in excitement, seeing a beam of light emerging from the growing crack.

They pushed again, forcing the gap open to about two inches now. Then all of a sudden the walls slid open by themselves, revealing a secret room.

The small room was six feet deep by three feet wide, lit up by an old fashioned Edison style bulb, emitting a yellow light not seen now in this era of bright LED lighting. Along the left hand wall there were three antique CRT TV screens mounted on a meta rack, with some kind of computer systems below them. Various lights were flashing on the computer system but nothing was displaying on the screens. As the lights flickered on and off, a faint smell of burning dust was being emitted as the electronics warmed up.

The wire they had followed led to a circular brass bell on the right hand wall, the source of the ringing noise. At the far end of the room was some kind of machine with a supply of paper being fed into it, a bit like an old dot matrix printer. It was vigorously feeding the stream of paper through the machine, with a scribe denoting waves onto the paper as it moved back and forth. It reminded Lily of an old TV program she once watched about earthquakes and seismology.

Before they could understand what was going on, the machine stopped what it was doing, the paper stopped being fed in and the bell stopped ringing.

“What the hell is this?” Jake asked, whilst looking around the small room and the various pieces of equipment that were in there. He pressed his pointer finger onto the computer system under the screens and got a small electric shock. All the lights on the system turned off. At the pain from the shock he let out an “Ouch!”

“I don’t know? I can’t remember there being any notes about this? Best not touch anything for now” Lily answered as she too looked around the machines for any clues as to what it might be for. They had obviously been there for a very long time. There was nothing digital in sight, everything looked analogue.

“Yeah, thanks for the warning about not touching anything. Bit late, but nevermind. Well, at least that bell has stopped ringing. I guess it’s nothing to worry about.” Jake started walking back to his desk to continue with his work, leaving Lily on her own in the small room.

She saw an A5 sized piece of paper sticking out from underneath the machine that had been drawing waves on the paper. She pulled on the corner of the A5 paper, dislodging decades worth of dust that had gathered on it, causing her to sneeze in the confined space.

Once the dust had settled, and she had finished sneezing, she had a habit of sneezing three times for some reason, Lily read the top line of the typewritten memo on the piece of paper.

‘If the bell rings, Earth has been attacked’

Lily stood there with the paper in her hand, trying to process what she had just read.

“Umm… Jake! I need you!” Lily shouted into the main office, but there was no reply.