Ulrich von Lichtenstein had learned early on that making decisions was not about knowing.
It was about listening, filtering, and choosing despite uncertainty.
In the Swiss Armed Forces, this was not a secondary skill. It lay at the very heart of doctrine. Neutrality did not mean naïveté—quite the opposite. It demanded constant, almost obsessive attention to the real intentions behind official statements, to the subtle movements that always precede open crises.
Perhaps that was why Ulrich noticed the first anomalies long before they became public.
In the autumn of 2025, as the war in Ukraine continued to sink into a slow war of attrition, he found himself spending more and more time reading reports that were never meant to land on his desk—documents that had nothing to do with terrestrial conflicts or known threats. Technical notes. Marginal analyses. Exchanges between civilian researchers and military observers. Nothing alarming when taken individually. But together, they formed an incoherent web, like a puzzle whose pieces stubbornly refused to fit.
It was not yet about extraterrestrials.
The word appeared nowhere. At that stage, no serious person used it.
Instead, they spoke of transient objects. Poorly characterized orbital anomalies. Luminous signatures inconsistent with known catalogs. Alternative explanations were plentiful: debris, reflections, sensor errors, undeclared experimental tests. Each was sufficient to calm concerns. Each was reassuring.
Ulrich, however, felt no reassurance.
He knew the mechanics of collective denial too well. He had seen them at work during lesser crises, when states preferred to cling to convenient hypotheses rather than admit the existence of a structural or institutional problem. The reflex was always the same: fragment the information, dilute it in a flood of technical details, and wait for public attention to drift elsewhere.
But this time, something did not add up.
The trajectories matched nothing known. The reported accelerations— even when allowing for generous margins of error—far exceeded what human technology could plausibly achieve. And above all, the objects appeared to accelerate. Not dramatically. Not yet. But enough to rule out randomness.
Ulrich remembered the precise moment when the thought imposed itself upon him—not as a conclusion, but as an unpleasant certainty:
If this data is accurate, then we are not alone.
He did not share this intuition immediately. Experience had taught him that voicing a radical hypothesis too early produced only one outcome: rejection. Institutions do not listen to those who skip steps. They listen to those who speak their language, who follow their procedures—even when those procedures have become inadequate.
So he observed.
He observed the scientists involved. Some were genuinely perplexed. Others visibly uncomfortable. There were also those who, without denying the anomalies, worked relentlessly to normalize them, as if acknowledging their strangeness constituted a professional failure.
He observed the general staffs as well. There, too, caution prevailed. No country wished to be the first to articulate a hypothesis with such far-reaching consequences. In a world already fragmented and divided, admitting a common external threat would have required a level of cooperation no one dared to hope for anymore.
Ulrich harbored no illusions about human nature. Recent conflicts had demonstrated how deeply states remained trapped by their immediate interests. Even in the face of global crises, the temptation to seek strategic advantage persisted. Why would this time be any different?
The question haunted him.
It was not fear—at least not in the usual sense. Ulrich had learned long ago how to coexist with fear. What troubled him more deeply was the absence of preparation. The persistent sense that if the darkest hypothesis proved true, the world would be caught completely off guard.
And this time, not out of ignorance, but by choice.
As the year drew to a close, exchanges multiplied. Always unofficial. Always fragmented. Ulrich reached out to former colleagues, analysts, and a handful of civilian scientists he knew were unafraid to think beyond established frameworks. He did not speak of extraterrestrials. He asked simpler, almost mundane questions.
What if these anomalies were not human?
What if they were not meant to be seen?
What if we were wrong about the scale of the problem?
The answers varied. Some deflected. Others admitted, in half-words, that the data was troubling. Very few went further—not for lack of intelligence, but out of instinct for self-preservation. To acknowledge the unthinkable was to accept a responsibility no one wanted to bear.
Ulrich understood then a fundamental truth: the danger would not come solely from whatever was approaching the solar system.
It would come from how humanity chose to respond.
When, in early January 2026, discussions in certain restricted circles grew slightly more serious, he knew the era of hypotheses was nearing its end. The data was accumulating. The inconsistencies were becoming too numerous to ignore indefinitely. And yet, no official structure emerged. No global plan took shape.
At best, there was talk of observing more.
Of waiting.
Of avoiding unnecessary panic.
Ulrich found this caution dangerous.
Waiting, in a context of total asymmetry, was not a strategy.
It was capitulation disguised as prudence.
He still remembered a late-night conversation with a foreign officer he respected deeply. When the question was finally asked outright—what if it isn't human?—the silence that followed spoke louder than any answer. No one wanted to be the one to say aloud what many were beginning to suspect. But Ulrich also saw, in that officer's eyes, the certainty that if the worst came to pass, he would fight until his last breath.
That night, Ulrich understood that no existing institution would take the initiative.
Not in time.
This was not a question of individual courage. It was structural. States were designed to respond to known crises, to negotiate with identifiable adversaries, to deter rational enemies. Nothing in their doctrines accounted for the arrival of an external intelligence—one potentially indifferent to the very concepts upon which the international order was built.
If such an entity existed, it would not negotiate by our rules.
It would not respect our borders, our balances, or our red lines.
And yet, humanity persisted in debating procedures.
It was at that moment that Ulrich stopped merely observing.
He had no solution yet. No detailed plan. But he now knew what was missing most: a clear will—free of diplomatic illusions—ready to contemplate the worst without surrendering to it.
Something had to be built.
Not a state.
Not an army.
Not yet.
A core. To protect humanity.
And this time, Ulrich was ready to lay the first stone.
He did not believe in sudden revelations. Real crises never unfold like popular narratives suggest—through a single, undeniable event that instantly sweeps doubt away. They settle in slowly, insidiously, through an accumulation of weak signals that people prefer to ignore until it is too late to respond with anything other than panic.
That was exactly what happened in the weeks that followed.
As observations multiplied, explanations became paradoxically more confused. Civilian agencies spoke of instrument recalibration. The military hinted, cautiously, at foreign experimental tests. Some political figures even suggested disinformation campaigns orchestrated by rival powers.
Ulrich listened to these hypotheses with methodical attention—not because he believed them, but because he sought to understand what they revealed about those who proposed them.
None truly held.
The observed trajectories did not match ballistic vehicles. The reported speeds far exceeded the capabilities of known chemical or ionic propulsion systems. More troubling still, some objects appeared to alter their course without any detectable propulsion phase. No thermal signature. No plume. Nothing.
That technological silence unsettled Ulrich far more than any display of force.
He had studied military doctrine long enough to know that the most dangerous superiority is the one you do not understand. A visible weapon provokes a response. An incomprehensible capability paralyzes.
He began compiling his own files.
Nothing official. Nothing centralized. A disparate collection of reports, emails, and confidential notes gathered through cautious conversations. He violated no laws—at least not explicitly. He simply exploited what existing structures let slip through negligence or excessive compartmentalization.
A pattern soon emerged.
The anomalies were not isolated. They followed precise corridors—recurring transit zones, as if something were moving through space toward Earth according to a logic he had yet to grasp. It was not a stealthy approach, but their objectives remained unclear.
Ulrich caught himself entertaining an idea that would have made him smile only months earlier:
What if they were already observing us?
The thought did not provoke panic. It triggered something colder. More methodical. A cascade of questions no one, so far, seemed willing to answer.
Why now?
Why these specific trajectories?
Why this relative discretion?
He raised these questions during informal meetings, under the guise of theoretical exercises. He spoke of extreme scenarios, of strategic anticipation. He framed them as academic hypotheses, stripped of urgency. Yet he could see, in some of the glances exchanged, just how deeply the idea unsettled his interlocutors.
They did not always reject it on its merits.
They rejected it because it implied responsibility.
To admit that these objects might be of non-human origin meant accepting that familiar frameworks—deterrence, diplomacy, balance of power—were becoming obsolete. It also meant acknowledging that no one had the slightest idea what should be done next.
Ulrich noted bitterly how little reactions varied from one country to another. Despite rhetoric about international cooperation, each state remained trapped by its instincts. Data circulated slowly, filtered, sometimes deliberately distorted. No one wished to be accused of triggering a global crisis based on information that was still imperfect.
And yet, that information was improving.
Models evolved. Error margins shrank. What had initially been dismissed as anomalies gradually became coherent objects—objects obeying a foreign logic, but undeniably intentional.
One evening, Ulrich gained access to a simulation that left a lasting impression. It projected the probable evolution of one object over several weeks, extrapolated from available data. The trajectory crossed no useful orbit. It targeted no satellite. It did not resemble any human reconnaissance mission.
It simply passed close to planets and headed straight toward Earth.
As if Earth were the target.
He stood for a long time before the screen, arms crossed, watching that cold, unbroken line silently cut through the inner solar system. He wondered what it truly meant. Were we being observed out of curiosity? Out of caution? Out of indifference?
None of those possibilities reassured him.
It was during this period that he became fully aware of another problem—more insidious than the threat itself: humanity's inability to think long-term in the face of the unprecedented. Discussions went in circles. Meetings produced reports. Reports fed more meetings. And meanwhile, nothing concrete took shape.
There was talk of protocols.
Of study committees.
Of working groups.
Ulrich knew the value of these tools under normal circumstances. But he also recognized when they became mechanisms of delay—an elegant way to postpone decisions no one wanted to own.
He began to wonder how much time remained.
Not before an attack. Not before official contact. But before inertia became irreversible. Before humanity, by default, committed itself to a path it would never have chosen with full awareness.
For he already saw two extreme responses taking shape—both deeply unsatisfying.
The first was prolonged denial: continue to minimize, to stall, to observe without acting, until reality imposed itself brutally. A strategy that had failed humanity countless times before.
The second was premature capitulation. The idea—still marginal, but increasingly voiced in certain circles—that in the face of a technologically superior intelligence, resistance would be futile. That humanity should seek to understand its intentions, to adapt, to negotiate—even at the cost of fundamental concessions.
Ulrich rejected both.
The first led to chaos.
The second, to erasure.
What he sought—though he could not yet fully articulate it—was a third path. An approach grounded neither in blindness nor submission. A lucid preparation, stripped of illusions, but also of fatalism.
He knew this path would be unpopular. That it would demand difficult choices. That it would require acting before the world was ready to hear certain truths.
But the more he analyzed the data, the more a chilling conviction imposed itself with absolute clarity: a moment would come when humanity would have to decide whether it wished to fade away—or to persist, even with all odds stacked against it.
And when that moment arrived, it would be far too late to improvise.
Ulrich closed his file that evening with a new resolve. He had no detailed plan yet. He did not know who would be willing to listen. He did not even know whether it would be possible to act without being immediately marginalized or silenced.
But he knew one thing with certainty.
Continuing to wait was already a choice.
And he was not prepared to make it.