Below the buried ruins of the Vatican Necropolis, there’s an intricate hive-system of tunnels and bunkers that was constructed for archiving purposes and shelter in the likelihood of nuclear war.

I was employed in the security unit underneath St. Peter’s Basilica and had access to Vatican secrets. The secrets ranged from the skeletal remains of non-humanoid extraterrestrial life, to the Third Secret of Fatima, to the Church’s very own Black Book, to ancient and advanced technologies.

One of the secrets involved a machine said to be built in the 1950’s. It was created by a team led by a man named Father Ernetti. He was an Italian physicist, a respected historian and a Benedictine monk.

With the help of ten other scientists, Father Ernetti built the Chronovisor with the ability to see into the past and potentially… the future.

Stories came out about how Ernetti and his team had used the machine and witnessed the last days of Christ, including the last supper and crucifixion. That they’d witnessed, firsthand, speeches by Napoleon in the early 1800’s and Cicero to the Roman senate in 63 BC.

But images from the Chronovisor were leaked and the conspiracy was easily debunked.

What people don’t know is that the Chronovisor was a fabrication planted by the Vatican and spread to the public to misdirect attention away from any potential real leaks in the future of what they’d actually built.

And the Church’s plan worked perfectly. As did the real invention.

It was called The Tiresias Device, and could receive audio recordings of the future.

It had a series of antennas and sensors that were able to pick up frequencies and wavelengths of every kind.

What I understood, was that it identified and decoded electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events. It was then programmed to use that information to assemble and predict future events. The data received is interpreted into sounds that were recorded at varying lengths.

Similar to tuning a radio, you could twist a special knob that would focus the antennae into better clarity… or even to the device’s version of “other stations.” Which some scientists claimed were different dimensions.

In security footage, I’d seen the device used by Priests and scientists many times over. I’d learned how to turn it on, charge it up, and pinpoint the targeted location.

In all my years working there, I managed to sneak into the Tiresias room and use the device three times. And each time, I went thirty years further into the future. But at the same location. Which was Warsaw, where I was born.

All three recordings I heard were different. And they were the types of futures only conceivable in nightmares.

The first recording was just over three minutes in length.

It started slow. Then came into clarity. It was early morning. I could hear cars. Buses. Horns. Factories. People. It was downtown Warsaw during morning rush hour.

Thunder began to roll in.

Then… a single tornado siren erupted in the city. Followed by more. And more. Sirens and alarms began to pierce out from the downtown core. There was confused yelling and shouting from people.

In the distance, the deep hum and heavy rumble of gargantuan machines began to approach. A horrifying mechanical horn blared out. The confused yelling from people turned to screams of panic and horror.

Explosions and gunfire were erupting from what sounded like fighter jets and aircrafts tearing across the sky towards the machines.

A battle had commenced. It was chaotic. At least on the human side. Our attacks were uncoordinated and sporadic, and they weren’t stopping the machines.

The sounds of the machines approaching continued. Four-legged. One after the other. Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Never breaking pace. Never slowing. Never backward. Not fast. But unstoppable.

The battle against them raged as the machines got to the city. An impossibly loud sonic boom erupted. I assumed it was an EMP because everything on the human side went quiet, except for the humans. They continued to yell and scream as the machine’s rolled over the city, destroying it completely.

Then the screaming and yelling stopped. And there were only the machines.

The machines continued onto the next city, their horrendous sounds getting quieter as they disappeared over mountains.

It was the scariest thing I’d experienced in my life at that moment. Hearing those large, mechanical horns blaring from miles away before they even got to the city. They weren’t trying for a surprise attack. It didn’t matter if they gave away their approach. You had all the time in the world to get up and leave before they got to your city.

Eventually, you needed to stop. And they would catch up because they don’t stop and they definitely don’t go back. They were methodical and impossible to unbalance. It was like trying to argue with a metronome.

In the end, I couldn’t tell if it was an Alien race with large, advanced technologies in the form of heavily engineered machines. Or if it was a self-aware AI system that had decided to give the human race its last dinner cheque.

Both possibilities filled me with terror.

The next time I used the Tiresias Device was six months later and I targeted for sixty years ahead this time. I hoped to hear the sounds of civilization back.

But I didn’t. And it was even more frightening than the first.

The recording lasted just over four minutes. There was a consistent, deep drone. Almost like the hum of the Earth. Then there were other sounds. Distinct and frightening but irregular and warped by some form of compression.

I enhanced the recording and passed it through several filters and discovered the sounds were distorted because they were underwater.

Warsaw was underwater. A LOT of water.

The sounds were analyzed and notified me of some frightening information. They were compressed by water, and based on the pounds per square inch calculated, the audio was at the bottom of a newly formed trench, with over ten thousand feet of water above it in the now expanded Baltic Sea.

Which Warsaw was at the bottom of.

The strange sounds amidst the water were projected out in waves of awful, guttural pulses from what was calculated to be massive, obscene creatures. Some new forms of aquatic organisms.

After the audio had been cleaned… what I heard was the nightmarish version of a humpback or great blue’s beautiful melodic tones.

Amidst the loud and frightening pulses were a myriad of high pitched whistles. It sounded like the creatures were screaming at each other.

The sounds got closer and erupted in all out violence. There was thrashing and whistling and shrieking. All from disturbing versions of powerful underwater larynx’s, vocal cords and air sacs.

Then it got quiet. And the stillness of the ocean depths resumed. The recording ended.

It was a full year before I brought myself back to the Tiresias Device for a third listen.

I inputted the details for 90 years ahead, and hoped for a better future this time.

What I got was something worse. This recording was over five minutes long and had a perfect connection to the time and place I’d targeted.

But there was nothing to hear.

No drone. No static. No atmosphere of any kind. None of the haunting crackling of the planet’s magnetic field. There was nothing to clean up or run through filters. No pops or clicks to decipher. Though I did all of that anyway. But received nothing back.

The recording carried something more frightening than the bottom of the ocean.

It carried the empty sound of space. The vast, dark areas between stars and planets filled with nothing. My filters couldn’t detect the hum of stars or planets nearby.

It appeared there was nothing at all. Everything was gone.

It was a terrifying thought - That there was a point in not only our future, but likely the entire universe, where it would all end. There would be nothing. Not a void or an abyss.

Just nothing.