The aliens have landed and they want our planet… told from the point of view of Sheldon Cooper, the Caltech physicist who tries desperately to save his friends and unite humanity during its darkest hour…. Inspired by Reparata's story "Against the fall of Night" and my love of HG Wells =))
Disclaimer: I don't own the Big Bang Theory, or it's character neither do I own War of the Worlds or Battle: Los Angeles of which I based this story!
Chapter one: The Eve of the War:
No one would have believed in the first few years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than our own but yet as mortal as any other; that as the daily routine continued as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were being scrutinised and studied, perhaps in the very same way as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures which swarm and multiply in a drop of water. No one even gave a second thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as highly improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those now departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied the thought that there might be other life upon the many billions of planets within our own galaxy, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the vacuum of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours with intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded our Earth with envious eyes and surely and slowly they drew their plans against us…
We now know that the invaders came from a planet not that dissimilar from the planet Mars, which inhabits our own solar system. If the nebular hypothesis is to have any truth, then the invaders home world is much older than our own, and long before this Earth even began to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence. The secular cooling which must one day overtake our own planet has already gone far indeed with our invaders. Its physical condition still remains much a mystery but we now know that, even in its equatorial region, the mid-day temperature barely reaches that of our coldest winter. The oceans have shrunk into an almost non-existence. The last stages of exhaustion have become quite a problem for the inhabitants. The daily struggle has darkened their hearts and they finally realised that they have no choice but to search for another world in which to relocate to ensure the survival of their species.
And we homosapien, the creatures who inhabit this Earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as my roommate, Leonard Hofstadter is to me! But before we judge them too harshly, their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded with only what they regard as inferior life forms; present company exempted obviously! To carry warfare Earthward is indeed, their only escape from the destruction that their dying star has sealed for them.
During the summer month of August a great light was seen in the night sky; I remember being been immensely excited about this strange green flare and rushed up to the roof top of our apartment block, along with Howard Wolowitz, Raj Koothrapali and Leonard. In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly, one of the curses of having an eidetic memory. Howard moved about, invisible but audible. And looking through the telescope, one observed the planet Mars: it seemed such a little thing, so bright and small but still, faintly marked with transverse stripes. As I watched, I noticed three faint green coloured points of light; all around it was the darkness of empty space. You know: the type of blackness that you get on a frosty starlight night. It looked almost like a jet of gas, flying through the night sky. What I was unaware of at the time was that this was the first of the invaders ships which would bring so much death and calamity to Earth. I never dreamed of it then, it was only the stuff of the sci-fi programmes I have watched my entire life. That night, there was another jet of gas followed by another, and that is how it was for the next twelve nights. Howard was fascinated; he had only recently returned from space and informed us all that he had never seen anything like it, even from the windows of his space station. He was full of speculation and we all scoffed at the awesome idea of it being the inhabitants of a distant world who were signalling us. I did however point out to them all that the chances of anything coming from another world in such a manner were bordering on being a million to one!
One night, when the first of the invader's ships could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles from Earth, I went for an evening walk with my neighbour and good friend Penny. She was attempting to explain the signs of the zodiac to me and she must have realised that I was about to give her my usual reply of what a load of hokum it all is when she pointed out that the bright dot of light in the night sky was the planet Mars. I have to hand it to my neighbour; she really knows her sky at night. We could hear the sound of shunting trains coming from the nearby marshalling yard; Penny pointed out how bright the red, yellow and green signals looked hanging in the framework of the large signal gantry which stretched across all 12 tracks, and I explained the principles behind railway signalling systems. I doubt she was interested but it was much better than discussing how your life is all mapped out for you depending on the location of various stars in the sky!
One thing I do recall about that night was how much everything that night, seemed so safe and tranquil.