This is the third story in my sci fi series that I have started writing on read.cash

#1 Alien Contagion (Link)

#2 The Venusian Sky (Link)

Alien Moon

As a kid I was always fascinated with the moon and admired it from my Dad's car window as I gazed upon it running along side the car in an adolescence's innocent wonderment.

Those days are far gone and as a middle aged man I have lost the sense of wonder and awe that only children are blessed with, but I am still mesmerized by the moon and all it glory.

Perhaps that is why I was selected to be on the moon team of the secret government organization that conducts various experiments on the moon.

I was hired by a company that takes up government contracts on supplying skilled technicians for various projects. I majored in physics as my subject with an average score, nothing too great much not bad either. The pay is decent but not to make me rich, let's just say I am not going to starve but by the end of the month I am crunching numbers to make the various bills.

The work we do as government contract workers is supposed to be secretive and we aren't suppose to be informing our own company about the kind of work we do on the job.

It makes you wonder why doesn't the government just hire us directly without a middleman? Perhaps politicians need to get some money into the pockets of these companies, who knows.

Anyway, As I am writing this I am afraid that it will be found by my employers and I could be imprisoned. But I have to get this out even if just to rant out my worries and frustrations. All I am worried about is my family, my two daughters and my parents. Can't carry less for my ex-wife who left me and doesn't want to even visit our daughters.

To describe my job as simple as possible I can as that I work on the Moon, not 'on the Moon' like studying it from a far or read data from some instrument, but actually "on the Moon" like me and my colleagues walk into our office in the morning and head to the teleporters that instantly zaps us on to the surface of the moon.

I know that sounds crazy but it is the truth, I walk into the building that is the front for our operations and there were get a full body sanitization and shower in salinated water. After which I put on astronauts' spacesuit and pressurize it before walking into an airlock at that time I check out people's suit as they check mine for a second round of precautions. With the go ahead from everyone in the party the operator steals the airlock and sucks out all the air from the chamber, at this point the journey to the Moon is as simple as it gets. The door on the other side opens to reveal a large room with teleport cylinder arranged in semicircular alter, the room is in complete vacuum to prevent anything else other than intended materials to be teleported.

Next we just simply turn on the machine manually from from the control panel and buzz to life with blue lightening like ions jumping around like plasma and we just simply walk in and are immediately zapped to the simply machine on the Moon.

First thing that greats you as you arrive on Moon is the weightlessness and many of the people become disoriented in their initial trips, but as the time goes on and you become more experienced you get use to it.

As you may already know it is hard to walk on Moon because of the low gravity and you have to do what people may call a hop.

Our job was to mostly keep the facility working as technicians and tech support, whereas many of the scientist deployed their were carrying out some kind of experiments that we weren't allowed to know about.

Everything was going well and I was somewhat satisfied with my job, sure the pay could have been better and the hours were long. I could use more pay, not for myself but to put into the college fund for my girls.

Otherwise, I liked my job and being on the moon did have its own excitement. Sure after a few days the awe of it all fades but you can't deny that being on the moon and sometimes able to leave the building and walk on the actual surface of the white sand of the Moon has its charm.

The trouble began when aliens took our moon and replaced it with an replica. I don't know how or why they did it, but I am absolutely sure that it happened.

It all happened on one night on my leave when I took my girls to the local county fair as a reward for them getting good grades in school. As we were sitting on the bench eating cotton candy I casually gazed up at the sky to admire the moon as I wished I could tell my girls that daddy works on the Moon and walk to the surface up there everyday, I saw the moon glitch out for a fraction of a second as it disappeared and appeared again instantly. I was shocked to say the least at first I thought it was just an optical illusion or my mind playing tricks on me.

I tried to forget it but something about it kept nudging at me and I just couldn't forget it.

The very next day I was slightly worried as I walked into the teleporter about what I might see or where I might end up at.

To my surprise and relieve I was teleported to the familiar moon base and got back to work but that same image kept nudging me even more and more and I started to feel uneasily as the place that earlier made me felt safe had my guts twisting in anticipation of danger. Everything was the same as I last saw it from all the equipment, furniture to small things like the smudges on the wall to the footprints outside on the surface.

I even tried to match them to the best of my memory but couldn't find anything that would be different, I don't claim to have photographic memory but I do have a good memory and to best of my ability everything was as it should be. Still I don't know why something kept itching at me like a growing fever that something was very wrong.

I tried to ignore it all and focus on my work but the sense of danger was still there lurking within me like so warning signal from a primitive part of my mind.

As I tried to ignore it and focus on m work I started to notice a few peculiarities, like the footprint from the sand that the last people to venture out would have brought in were still perfectly shaped, which should have been blown by the repressurization of the airlock.

The Moon based was kept pressurized at earth atmosphere and everytime we venture out we had to go through the airlock.

Another thing I noticed was the slight change in the regulators that I myself had calibrated, it was off slight measurement but in the Moon's atmosphere of near vacuum it hard to think of any think of anything that could have interfered with the instruments.

There are more such peculiarities that I have noticed but won't bore you with the details, I tried to speak to my colleagues about it but they just laughed it off.

After a few days I tried to push them out of my mind but the feeling of danger kept nudging at my gut.

I tried to focus on my work but it became hard for me to focus and the memory of Moon glitching kept flashing in my mind.

One day I went to the teleporter and before heading straight in I paused for a second and looked to my left out of pure coincidence and saw that one of the man I have known for so long twist his hand upwards in an impossible movement as he worked the control panel before walking in. It was like as if his hand was upside down.

As I appeared on the other side I was sweating in my spacesuit at what I had just saw but I pretended to be ok and move on, I was lucky that we wear spacesuits all days otherwise people would have noticed the grim expressions on my face.

It was then that I realized that the man I just saw was not the original but an imposter. Something else mimicking to be human wearing the outer appearance of a friend that I once knew.

I don't know what happened to him but I hope he is not in pain and if he is no more then at least he would be merciful.

But the imposter that was walking with us everyday was one of the replacement that the aliens did. On the day I saw the moon glitch he was one of the people who were working on the rotational shift and were on the Moon at that time.

So, if something had replaced the moon then the people on the Moon at the time would have been replaced by something else as well.

The very thought sent chills down my spine, to think that a large group of people that I work with everyday are gone and replaced something else, something different, something assuming to be the original but are just an shell of elaborate mimicry.

To think these things wear the face and body of their victims and go to their homes pretend to be them, eating with their families, wear their clothes, play with their children, sleep with their wives, is just to much of a monstrous thought to have. I keep think if I was on Moon at the time an similar imposter would be coming home to my daughters.

I kept observing more and more as the people around me behaved oddly and out of place, everyone of them were on the Moon that time. displaying unusual strength when they thought no one was looking to the weird sizzling sound that sometimes came from their suits when they thought they were alone.

Soon it became apparent that the functionality of the base was declining as the things around the base, that up till then, was always kept in top notch shape started to get deteriorating by the day.

It was as if something was sabotaging the things all round the base. Soon I was getting less tasks assigned to me and less time with a particular set of people that I pinned to be imposters.

One day I creeped around the base and hid in the gaps in and around the various equipment and saw the imposters roaming around, at first it was nothing but once they thought they were all alone they showed their true self. They started to twist and deform in their spacesuits as they what I assume might be stretching from maintaining the disguise for so long. Then they started to talk among themselves but it wasn't any human speech with words but some odd low octave buzzing that they made in response to each other as their bodies hummed the entire spacesuit in inhuman fashion.

That is how I know that what I have witnessed was not from this Earth, furthermore since I had more time on my hand I started to explore more areas of the base that I wasn't suppose to. Normally these areas would be locked and only accessible to authorized personnel only, but due to the disrepair that had came from the regular sabotage I was able to gain access with simple hacks. From these snooping around I came to know that the purpose of the base was to be a stepping stone to interstellar teleportation to explore exoplanets. The government had been making teleportation devices for decades and since to travel via teleporter one needs to place the receiving device at the destination first, it created the challenge to get to the destination by conventional means first. Therefore in order for us to travel to Moon the receiving machine had to be delivered to the base first by rockets in the late 80's that is why humans had not been able to teleport beyond the Moon.

Till now it seems, as I discovered, that one way teleportation was being developed on the Moon base. Through which one could teleport without the need of a receiver over vast distance. With the idea to transfer various parts and afterwards send the first humans to assemble them into a working teleportation sender and receiver to make interstellar a reality.

I don't know what happened but from various files I came to know that the experiment went wrong, just how wrong I have no idea. But I know that things have started to become worse by the day and I have starting to notice that people who weren't on the Moon on the day of the glitch have started to become odd as well, it is possible that the imposters are replacing other people with their kinds.

I could be next any day therefore I have decided to write this and publish it to the world, my hope is that even if the larger public ignore me as a craze lunatic at least someone will hear me out from those who know about the Moon base and investigate. I can't go to my superiors or anyone I work with as I don't know which one of them are the imposters.