Lighthouse Horror Podcast - My Job Is To Monitor Potential Apocalyptic Scenarios. Earth Just Dodged A Bullet | Scary Stories

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

You are very, very lucky...        Story from Head of Spectre Make sure to check out more of their work at u/HeadOfSpectre   Cover Art from Ninerio                      Original Post: My Organization Monitors Potential Apocalyptic Scenarios So You Dumbasses Can Avoid Them and Live Another Day : r/nosleep  Original YouTube link: My Job Is To Monitor Potential Apocalyptic Scenarios. Earth Just Dodged A Bullet           For more stories like this one, check out my YouTube channel: Lighthouse Horror | YouTube  Patreon: Lighthouse Horror | Patreon Merch: lighthousehorror.com  Sound Effects: Freesound Zapsplat  Music: Lucas King - YouTube Myuu - YouTube  Incompetech  Thank you for listening to this scary story! If you enjoyed this new creepypasta story, please check out some of my other horror stories. We'll be uploading new episodes every week, featuring ghost stories, haunted encounters, mysteries, true stories, creepypasta, and anything supernatural and paranormal. Don't miss out on the thrill and suspense that await you in each episode!

You know how every morning you wake up in a nice, warm, cozy bed, and not in an alien slave camp where they're going to work you to death until it's time to chop you up for meat. Yeah, you're welcome. My name's Bill, and I've probably got the most thankless job in the world. Sure, on paper it doesn't sound like much. I sit at a desk all day and look at data on a computer. But I'm the one who keeps the world turning, and I am damn good at my job. Whenever the dreaded end of days draws near, I'm the one who sees it coming and makes sure

it doesn't. Maybe I'm not the guy they send out into the field to do the dirty work, but those guys only do what I tell him to do. Without me, society as you know it would not exist, and I'm trying to remain as humble as humanly possible when I say that. Now, I'll give credit words due. I'm not the one who invented the future probe technology. That was done by a guy named Dr. Johann Pinter back in the 70s. I won't get into the technical details of it, but simply put, Pinter figured out time travel. He also figured out that time travel was a mess. Sci-fi nerds will understand. Through his experiments, Pinter figured out that

you can't really alter the past. You can go back in time, sure, and you can create a new future. But your original future will still exist. Let's say that you had a bad day, got drunk, and ran over a pedestrian, then decided to go back in time to steal your keys that night to prevent it. When you went back to the future, the pedestrian would still be dead, and you'd still be a murderer. However, you would have created an alternate timeline, where you didn't run over a pedestrian. Theoretically, you can go and live in the timeline where you didn't murder a pedestrian. It would be weird, and you'd have to figure out how to handle the other version of you,

but you wouldn't have technically changed anything. Furthermore, Pinter determined that the present has multiple branching possible futures, some of which are messier than others. So, with all this in mind, Pinter figured that the best thing to do, was instead of going back and trying to fix some great injustices in the world, he instead decided to focus on improving the future. That is why he founded foresight. Now, officially, foresight is classified as a research company, and we legitimately do offer some of that. I'm not really involved in that end of things, but I know that some large companies,

and even some arms of the U.S. government, consult with us, looking for data, to help them predict shit like economic growth and depression, effects of certain actions on the world's stage, and other shit like that. As a rule, we don't really do the time travel thing for them unless we have to. We don't really advertise that, because it's best not to leave time travel in careless hands. We don't actually know what happens if you screw with time too much, and we really don't want to find out. The research is just the front, though. The real goal behind Foresight was always the future probe program. C. Pinter figured out pretty early on that sending people into the future was not a good idea. First off, people can die. Second off, people can be intrusive and screw things

up, so he decided a less invasive approach was necessary. So he started using probes. They're less impressive than they sound. The probes are just mobile cameras, not that different from the Mars rover. The design has changed a bit over the years. The first ones looked more like RC cars. Then they went with a sort of metal spider look. Now they're drones. They record what they see, and they bring it back to us. Back when the program started, we literally needed to watch through whatever they'd recorded.

But nowadays, we can get it broadcast back to us in what's more or less real time, so to speak. Now, obviously, the logistics of sending drones into air, every possible future is a little over the top. So, Pinter developed a machine that basically analyzes possible futures. Do not ask me how it works. That's above my pay grade. Anyways, potential apocalyptic scenarios show up as data that gets transmitted to us, or more specifically, to me.

My job is to filter out the less likely scenarios. There are a lot of them, and only really, focus on the ones that have a real, almost certain risk of causing the end of the world? The more potential futures feature that apocalypse, the more severe the risk. Thankfully, if we know that the world is ending, and we know why, we can also figure out how to prevent it. I can use the probes to look at futures where the world didn't end and figure out why and how, to make sure we steer ourselves towards that future. Usually, we get a few years fair warning before an apocalyptic event, so there's plenty of time to make adjustments. And so far, I'd say that we've done a pretty damn

good job. Pinter died back in the 90s, a few years before I joined up with the organization, but I'd like to think he'd be happy with the fact that most of the world's population isn't either dead or worse, and I'm going to be honest. I'm pretty proud of the work I've done with Forsyte, which leads me to why I'm sharing this. You can probably guess that we're not supposed to openly talk about the future probe program. I'm technically violating my contract and opening myself up to a whole host of legal hot water just by sharing this. But hey, I figure it's not going to matter soon. So what the hell, right? You guys. just dodged a bullet. I don't think there's a single person on this planet who knows how lucky

they are right now, and they've all got me to thank. Now, obviously this isn't my first time saving the world, but I'd say it is the most noteworthy. I'll explain why in a little bit. See, it all started a couple of weeks ago. I mentioned before that when an apocalyptic scenario pops up, we've usually got a few years notice. The circumstances that will lead to the end of civilization as we know it don't just pop up overnight. There's usually years of buildup. But every now and then, we get an exception, and exceptions scare the living shit out of me. Needless to say, when I got an alert telling me that 65% of the possible futures that our program

surveyed, involved an apocalyptic scenario within the next four days, I couldn't help but panic a little. Naturally, I flagged it as a DefCon 1 and immediately sent it off to the higher-ups, as protocol dictates. Then, I started sending out the probes. Now, usually, when we get a high-priority scenario like that, it's because some group of nut jobs is about to do something drastic in service of whatever screwed-up agenda they believe in.

You may not think that a bunch of lunatics could bring about the end of the war, world. But if there's one lesson that history has shown again and again, it is that you should never underestimate the power of very stupid people left unattended in a large group. Needless to say, scary as these scenarios are, these idiots are usually not that hard to deal with. Once we've got the alert, we either notify the proper people that some assholes are trying to make a move, or get our own guys to handle it. Usually, said assholes aren't smart enough to bumble their way into the apocalypse in most future timelines, thus reducing the likelihood of our world ending to a much lower,

more acceptable percentage. With that in mind, when I sent out the probes and started reviewing the footage, I was expecting to find the usual suspects of an apocalyptic future, and I wasn't entirely disappointed. A lot of what the probe sent back was footage of empty streets, and signs of carnage, smears of blood on the pavement, mangled corpses in the streets. I'd seen things like this before. In timelines where a sudden event caused the rapid collapse of society, you'd usually see signs of violence in the streets, but this wasn't really like that. See, that kind of violence tends to be caused by sudden riots. People go crazy once society breaks down. You'll see

shit on fire. Storefronts smashed. Vehicles tipped over, shit like that. Well, storefronts were smashed. Vehicles were tipped over. There was clearly some violence, but this didn't look like it had been caused by a riot. For starters, rioters don't pry cars open like tin cans. Rioters don't rip into people the way the bodies in the street had been torn into. Riders also don't seem to only be going in one direction. There was something about the way the bodies were spaced out. They weren't scattered around. They looked like they'd been moving.

Running. From what exactly? I didn't know. With no obvious signs of what had caused the carnage, I decided to try something new. I tuned the probes to start scanning the local. local radio stations. Usually, in an emergency event, there's some sort of broadcast. One thing that's just about constant is that they're usually on the same frequencies, so it didn't take me long to find it. Through the static, I could clearly make out a voice I recognized

as the President of the United States. It took a little bit of work to make the message come through clearly, but this is what it said. To those of you who are left, we're fighting as hard as we can. The situation on the West Coast has continued to deteriorate. The incident in Reno a few days ago has spread throughout Nevada, into California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Oklahoma. The bugs have also been confirmed. To have crossed the borders into Canada and Mexico, and reports indicate that the situation is dire.

To those of you still alive in the affected states, I urge you to remain in your homes, remain indoors away from the outside. We'll send help if we can. But until then, you must survive as long as you can. To those of you in the East, where the infestation continues to spread, do not panic, but do not assume that this infestation will not continue its advance. We have continued our efforts to evacuate the areas that will inevitably be hit by the bugs. If you live in one of these areas, we ask that you do not fight to remain in your home. It will be overrun. And you and your loved ones will be in danger. The only promise of safety lies farther east.

If your community has not yet been evacuated, then I urge you to begin preparing to leave now. Take only what you need to survive. Food, water, and medicine. As we evacuate, we are actively looking into strategies to repel this threat. Your soldiers continue to fight valiantly for your protection against the oncoming horde, and they will triumph. But victory will come at a cost. The speech went on for some time, even after that. But by that point, I'd stopped listening.

Reno, that was where this had originated. Naturally, the next step was to study Reno and start looking for a potential source of the problem. The president had said something about bugs. I'd seen some things involving bugs before, sure, but never anything on this scale. I supposed I'd find out for sure soon enough. The higher-ups had sent me an email asking for a status update, so I sent them the radio transmission I'd gotten along with the footage. I noted that I'd be looking into Reno next. I recalled all previous probes and requested 28 probes be sent into different times in the next week.

Each probe would appear within the city of Reno over the next 168 hours, one appearing every six hours. This was a fairly standard procedure. The basic idea is that once you found ground zero for the apocalypse, you monitor it as heavily as possible until you find the moment it starts. Then, you go back and you study that moment from every possible angle and you trace it back to its source. It's basically just the process of elimination, only using time travel. Now, the nice thing about the six-hour model is that it makes it relatively easy to figure out an overall timeline of events. For example, most of the

probes from the tail end of that 168-hour window all picked up a blood-stained disaster that used to be the city of Reno. And it wasn't pretty. There were bodies in the streets, cars torn open, the same shit I'd seen before. Only now, I was getting a better look at just what was behind it. Some of the probes recorded footage of massive flies. They didn't seem to hurt people at least. They mostly just seemed to be feeding on the remains. Looking back farther though, I could see video footage of massive creatures that sort of resembled a praying mantis.

Only they had a physical texture, more like tree bark. A couple of those mantis things took out the damn drones. But at least I got a good look at them. The drones I'd left kept sending me more footage of the violence following the apocalypse. Giant spider-like creatures crawled through Reno, stalking, fleeing prey, spiky things like grasshoppers leapt around, feeding on whoever they could catch. There were so many, all of them flooding out of Reno, as if someone had opened up the gates to an insectophobe's personal, Hell. Crabbs, pillbugs, centipedes, dragonflies, moths, some of them didn't seem dangerous.

Others were more than happy to kill. I must have spent an hour or so reviewing the footage of the bugs. Perplexed before I started going back further. These things were fascinating. I'd never seen them in any potential future before. Where the hell had they even come from? Some sort of genetic experiment gone wrong, maybe? But we would have had more warning if that were the case, wouldn't we? Sabotage, perhaps. I looked at the footage from the drones earlier in the timeline. Looking at the dates, the inciting incident in question seemed to happen in four days' time from when I was currently. The drone stopped picking up footage of the bugs around Thursday morning. It had to be sometime around then. I spent the better part of the day analyzing the footage I got

from the drones. I redirected several of them to focus on what went on Wednesday and Thursday. I listened to radio broadcast, swept the sewers, and looked for evidence of what was to come. Some time early in the afternoon on Thursday, I picked up radio chatter on some police channels about a car being found torn open by a water treatment plant outside of town. So I directed the drones there. Sure enough, I got some decent footage of the attack. One of those spider things came out of the woods and tore into the car. It was a little fascinating to watch.

moved so fast, grabbing it and wrapping its legs around it. The damn thing was massive. I watched as it used its fangs to tear through the metal, before digesting the poor people inside alive and slurping up the gooey mess. Ugly way to die. I sent some drones back about a half hour before the attack to keep an eye out for the spider. It took a bit of searching, But I eventually found it moving through the woods, coming from the water treatment plant. Interesting. I left one drone to keep an eye on it, while I sent some of the others back again, this time to explore the plant itself, an hour before the attack.

I sent two of them in through a pipe that I figured the spider had come out of. Sure enough, I found the spider there. In a giant web, I made sure to keep the drones away from it. Moving through the interior of the plant, I wasn't that surprised to find more of the bugs waiting there. From the looks of it, they'd been causing one hell of a mess. I could see the bodies of dead men, mostly eaten, along with evidence of the bugs preying on each other, but no obvious indicator as to where they were coming from.

Not at first, anyways. I sent the drones back in time again. One went back to the day before. only went back two hours. One day ago, the water treatment plant looked normal. No corpses, no horde of bug creatures ready to destroy America, just a normal water treatment plant. Two hours ago, on the other hand, the water treatment plant had been a lot less crowded. Most of the staff looked to be dead, and those that weren't were in the middle of being eaten alive by all sorts of nasty things. Where they were coming from still wasn't obvious, but I only needed to sit

and wait to find out. It didn't take that long. I could see shapes bubbling up from some of the pools of treated water. The machines had been shut down, and all sorts of horrors pulled themselves out of the rotten depths. Those mantis things, flies, mosquitoes. They all came to life, confused and hungry. Shambling around, looking for food. They all came from the water. I brought my drone closer, trying to see what was in there. That was a mistake. One of the mantis things grabbed it, mistaking it for dinner.

Well, back to my other drone. I used the one I'd sent back one day and sent it to a point in time three hours before I'd lost my other drone to the mantis, five hours before first contact. I could see a few of the bugs there. I could see new ones, smaller ones coming out of the stagnant water. And I could see a man. He was standing on a balcony, looking down at the pools of untreated water with a stony expression. Yeah, this was the guy behind all this.

It had to be. Nobody stares at a giant mantis crawling out of a pool of wastewater without screaming and running away like a little bitch. unless they expect a giant mantis to crawl out of that pool of wastewater. This was the guy. I moved my drone towards him, ready to get a good look at this asshole's face, and then, well, I got exactly that. Only the asshole wasn't just some asshole.

The asshole was me. For a moment, I sat in my chair. Looking at this man who looked exactly like me, calmly watching the bug apocalypse crawl out of the city of Reno's collective wastewater. And as I sat there in utter disbelief, the man turned his head to look right at the drone. And he smiled. Then, without missing a beat, he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and showed it to the camera.

In big bold writing, I could see what I recognized as a radio station. He, I, was sending me a message. My palms suddenly felt sweaty. My heart was racing a little too fast. Should I even listen to what this guy had to say? Whatever it was, it was crazy. Right? Even if he was, though, I should still hear what he had to say.

I still should document it. Maybe it would explain why, right? If it were anyone else, that's exactly what I would have done. But it wasn't anyone else. It was me. What should I have to say to myself something that would make me do this? That was crazy, right? It had to be crazy.

Right? I thought it over, sitting in silence. The man on the screen, me, just went back. to studying the creatures coming out of the wastewater before walking away towards the offices. I made the drone follow him for every step. He didn't seem to mind. He kept looking back at the camera, smiling every now and then as he kept walking. He walked through the door to the offices and locked it behind him, then sat in the chair of a cubicle. He took one last look at the camera, his smile fading slightly. Then he took out a gun. He set the paper,

paper on the desk before he put it to his head. I watched him pull the trigger. I watched myself die. It was... I don't know how to describe it. For a moment, I just sat there in silence. My hand over my mouth as I tried to process what I'd just seen. Then my eyes were drawn to the paper he'd set down. The radio station. His last words. My last words. I had to know. I tuned to the station and started cutting through the static. This was what I got. Hey, Bill. I know you're probably pretty confused by all this. Trust me. I was too. But you and I both know that I wouldn't be doing this if it didn't make sense. Use your drones. Take a good, hard look into the future of these timelines, not the immediate future.

Give it a hundred, two hundred years. Just look. That's all I'm asking you. Look. The message paused there. I opened the settings of the drone. I had nothing to lose by looking right. So I sent it forward.

First by 100 years, then by 200, then by 300, and I saw it all. A new world. A united world on the other side of the generations of hardship wrought by the bugs. Technology taking one step back, followed by one incredible leap forward. A new renaissance. One I can't even begin to destroy. I looked through the centuries with awe wanting to explore the paradise I saw before me. God, I could have lost hours looking into the future. But what I saw was enough. I tried looking

for the same results in other futures, but they weren't there. Humanity wouldn't thrive the way it would after the hardship of the bugs, not under any other circumstances. Nothing would change. We would remain the same miserable species for the rest of our tragic existence. Nothing would change unless we let it. The more I looked, the more I understood, and almost as if on cue the message on the radio began again. Of course it was on cue. Future me would have known what past me would do. have seen. Then there's a way forward.

There's a man, Dr. Jean Peddery. You'll find what you need there. They grow best in water, so you'll figure it out. You know what has to be done. If I'm right, most versions of you will do it. Some of you will even succeed. Others will of course fail. But that's okay.

You and I both know we can't save every future. But we'll save enough of them. Isn't that worth it? It was. It is. That leaves me here. Like I said before, you've all just dodged a bullet. I'm not going to prevent what's coming.

Not this time. My job is to save the world and that's just what I intend to do. I've found the path to a better future. I've found the world humanity deserves. I'm going to break us out of the endless stagnation of our existence. The road will be hard, but it'll be worth it. Nobody ever made an omelette without breaking a few eggs. I realize that my former employers aren't going to see it that way, though.

I fabricated some updates and bogus reports to throw them off my trail for a little while, But chances are they'll catch on soon if they haven't already. I'm on borrowed time, as it were. But I'm not afraid. I already know how this is going to end. So if you're reading this, then one of two things is going to happen. One, my former employers will kill me and stop me from doing what I have to do. And the world you know won't change.

Life will just continue as it was. And if you're living in that world, I am sorry. I can't save every future. You'll be fine. Probably live a nice life and all that, but when the future comes, your grandchildren will never have it any better than you did. Life will stagnate until it finally ends. Two.

I'll succeed. And if I do, I'm sorry. You're probably going to die because of what I've done. But I don't regret it. Not one bit. What's its stake here is worth it. The future is worth it, and I can't pretend it isn't. Some people are going to call me a monster.

That's fine. I don't care. But I've seen what's coming. And it's worth the price we'll pay. It's worth it. Thank you.