Jack wandered into a field.
He had been driving home when he had seen something fall from the sky, not unlike a meteorite. Curious, he drove towards it - it had appeared to be extremely close.
And close it was. His car was only a five minute walk away, and already he could see a small crater. He peeked over the edge and saw...
...not a rock? What was it?
Carefully picking the cooler spots, Jack stepped down to it. It looked like some kind of container. A tool box? Confused, he opened it, like any human would.
Inside was a voice recorder. It said 'IASA' on the side, and on the bottom it said 'JC.' His initials. Was it meant for him? Had it been aiming for him? Maybe it fell from an IASA satellite?
DK had told him about the 'conversation' he had with John five or six years ago, but that thought never entered his mind as he picked up the oddly cool device and flicked it to 'play'.
"Hey, Dad," it called. He stared at it.
"It worked. DK's and my theory. It actually worked."
What? John?
"Sort of," the voice admitted.
"John?" Jack asked softly.
"Look, I know this is crazy, I mean, you're never gonna get this message, but I just... wanted to let you know that I'm alive."
'Never gonna get this message'? 'Alive'? Jack sat on the edge of the crater.
There were some odd squeaking noises. "Ooh, hold still, hold still," John said distractedly on the recorder. Jack let out a breath.
"Don't know where I am," he continued, "Technically, I don't know how I got here, but..."
John could be alive? Jack realized that there... might have been a slight possibility of John's survival. But why hadn't they seen him after the wave, if he survived?
"...I'm not gonna stop trying to get home."
Jack blinked. There was a layer of a deeper feeling in that statement. Like maybe John thought there was no way he could get home from wherever he was.
He heard some more squeaking noises over the recorder. "See, you're fixed," John said to them. "Go play."
What was John talking to?
Then there was a grunting noise or something. "Hey, what the hell are you doing?" John said to someone.
Jack heard... not gibberish, but something that sounded almost like a foreign language, in a rough voice.
"My equipment," John explained to someone. "It's mine."
More foreign language.
John's voice paused for a while. Jack held the recorder closer - whether or not this was a joke, which he imagined would be hard to do, he had to hear his son's voice.
"And there's life out here, Dad," he finally said. "Weird, amazing, psychotic life."
"What?" John asked aloud. Had his son really met... alien life? Now he knew it was a prank, but he held the recorder close anyway.
"And, uh... in Technicolor."
Only his son would choose those words.
"Hey, Dad, you know those rattlers in the stomach we talked about?"
He gasped quietly. It couldn't be a prank. No one knew about that conversation, and everyone but him seemed to call it 'butterflies,' not rattlers.
"Well, I got 'em now."
The recorder clicked off, and Jack pressed 'stop'. Could that have been his son?
What other explanations were there?
Suddenly he had to visit DK.