Project Kaukauna

Project Kaukauna
Written by Rick Pomalaza

The day that it was discovered, scientists across the globe were both awestruck and alarmed. Images from the James Webb Telescope provided irrefutable proof that a massive space rock was hurtling toward Earth, its impact imminent, its devastation absolute. And yet, in the recesses of their minds, these men and women of science clung to a fragile hope—that perhaps there had been an error, a miscalculation, a flaw in the data. But after months of exhaustive analysis, cross-referencing composites from nearly seven hundred asteroid-monitoring satellites in orbit, the conclusion remained unchanged. Kaukauna was coming. And it had no intention of sparing the planet. Thousands of years of technological advancement had given humanity the power to see the bullet with its name on it—a cosmic harbinger of extinction, a planet-killer, likely from beyond the solar system. And yet, it was that same progress that now offered one last, improbable chance to alter its course.

Dr. Youngblood watched the screen inside the mission control room with an outward calm demeanor, but inside, his nerves told a different story. His heart thumped quicker and the urge to tap his fingers remained strong even after many attempts at trying to keep himself distracted. The STAR-87 satellite had launched more than a decade ago in a path leading it to the now infamous asteroid. His team sat dutifully in front of their desks awaiting the first update in a long line of data transmissions that would tell NASA whether or not their little space probe had indeed reached its intended target. The display on his right was filled with charts and graphs and other analytical readouts from a piece of software that NASA had specifically designed for this mission. He imagined that for someone looking at it without his background or education, it would appear very much like the code in The Matrix, just a bunch of gibberish unable to be read or deciphered. Thankfully, he had become used to translating the numbers and coordinates into certain visuals in his head. Much like in The Matrix, he could see terrain, atmosphere, and shapes in the code, simply by doing the math.

The blank terminal screen to his left offered little in the way of entertainment. A lone cursor blinked patiently, waiting for his input. Any moment now, the first data burst from the probe would appear on the massive control room display. That would be his cue—to take command of the probe’s telemetry module which housed all of the sensors for monitoring atmospheric levels, spatial coordinates, and a wealth of other environmental data. He knew the commands by heart; after all, the system ran on a custom language he had helped develop. Once, in what felt like another lifetime, he had been a university professor teaching computer science to a room of disinterested students. He had enjoyed those days back when life was simpler and the world hadn't yet received an expiration date. But now, here he sat poised at a console, ready to issue commands to humanity’s first asteroid deflector, in the hopes of saving everyone on the planet. It was an honor—a privilege, even. And yet, in this moment of anticipation, he couldn’t deny the simple truth: he was bored out of his mind.

The waiting was the worst part of it. To pass the time, he often found himself drifting into memories of lectures given and questions debated over coffee in the university's dimly lit cafeteria. But reminiscing could only take him so far before the present clawed its way back into his consciousness. He glanced at the clock—still no data burst. The monitors hummed softly in the sterile chill of the control room, a stark contrast to the palpable tension that gripped his colleagues, each one scattered at their respective stations, eyes glued to their screens.

Suddenly, the large display in the control room flickered to life with the grayscale image of a rocky surface and what appeared to be the shadow of its robotic arms just underneath the camera lens. Above it, where Youngblood’s instincts expected to see a sky, there was nothing but darkness. It was space. Cold, starless space. Cheers erupted from behind him as the other mission control specialists realized what this abrupt slideshow meant. STAR-87 had sent back its first transmission, indicating success. Dr. Youngblood smirked, as he couldn’t deny his excitement, but he wasn’t about to jump out of his chair like the others. He was a bit more reserved than that. Now began the hard scrutinizing work of focusing on the readouts on his telemetry screen and typing in the correct commands in the terminal window.

SHOW COORDINATES;

He entered the first command into the terminal and glanced at his wristwatch. It would be about forty minutes before the signal carrying the probe’s response made its way back to the computer. Time for coffee, he thought, pushing back his chair and grabbing his mug.

The break room was lively, clusters of people gathered around the water dispenser, their voices carrying over the hum of machines. He walked past them, heading straight for the coffee maker, setting his mug on the warming plate. Snippets of conversation drifted his way—mostly speculation about the mission’s success and, more urgently, what failure would mean.

Youngblood never liked dwelling on failure; he preferred to focus on action. But even he couldn’t ignore the weight of this moment. There was a lot of responsibility on their shoulders. If they didn’t manage to divert the asteroid, then mankind needed to come with a backup plan, and fast. They had already put decades of work and manpower into this project, using several million dollars in government funding for all of it. To start again somewhere else and with a new strategy would be no easy feat. Not to mention, they were all on a tight deadline—one set not by bureaucracy or budgets, but by the relentless trajectory of Kaukauna.

A quiet voice behind him snapped him out of his reverie. “Hey Donald.”

He turned around and saw his colleague, Dr. Beaumont, holding a pile of textbooks with both hands. They were of different colors and covers and seemed thick enough to require several weeks of reading.

“Hey Amy,” he answered. “What are those?”

“Just about everything we have in the library on orbital mechanics, impact mitigation strategies, and asteroid operations from the last thirty years,” she said, shifting the weight of the books in her arms. “Figured I’d brush up on a few things while we wait.”

Dr. Youngblood raised an eyebrow. “Light reading, huh?”

She smirked. “You know me.”

“So you need help carrying those?”

“Yes, please. My joints are screaming at me.”

He hadn’t been much for chivalry outside of work, but this was another colleague. Someone who he considered to be intellectually at the same level as him. It made him appreciate her more for some reason, even though he knew that might sound snobbish and arrogant if spoken aloud. It was the truth and he couldn't deny it.

“Sure,” Youngblood replied, grabbing a couple of the textbooks off the pile. He had to do a balancing act to carry his mug on his free hand, but it all worked out in the end. They both exited the break room and returned to the control room. Instinctively, he turned to look at the image on the widescreen. The image had remained the same, with the rocky terrain below the camera at around the same altitude as it had been before.

"Where's your station?" he asked, scanning the rows of desks.

Dr. Beaumont smiled and walked past him, leading him a few rows behind his own station. They stopped at a large white table outfitted with multiple monitors, mirroring his own setup. Most of the screens were dark, except for the one in the center, which displayed an open Microsoft Word document. The heading read: Project Kaukauna.

"This is it," Dr. Beaumont said, setting her books down on the desk.

Dr. Youngblood leaned in, placing his own stack beside hers. His eyes flicked to the screen, hoping to glean some insight into what she had been working on. The document was unfinished, the last line trailing off mid-thought: We must remember that there is a non-zero chance that Kaukauna could be of artificial origin.

The phrase surprised him, but not entirely. He had heard the speculations from other scientists who had analyzed Kaukauna at observatories in Chile and Hawaii. Some of them had pointed out unusual aspects of its trajectory such as how its speed was slightly off from what standard models predicted for a natural asteroid of its size and composition. Others noted its highly reflective surface, which seemed to suggest the presence of metals in higher concentrations than typical for Near-Earth Objects. But none of that was definitive.

Youngblood narrowed his eyes slightly as he glanced back at Beaumont, who was already sitting down and opening one of her textbooks. “You actually think there’s something to that theory?” he asked.

Dr. Beaumont hesitated before answering. “I think we need to keep our minds open to all possibilities.”

She flipped through the book in front of her, stopping at a page filled with equations and orbital patterns. “Kaukauna doesn’t behave exactly like a natural asteroid should. The eccentricity of its orbit, the way it reflects light. There are anomalies. Nothing that screams artificial, but enough to warrant further study.”

Youngblood exhaled, rubbing his temple with two fingers. “You know how this’ll sound to the higher-ups, right? They don’t want to hear ‘potentially artificial.’ They want hard facts.”

Beaumont nodded. “Which is why I didn’t put it in the executive summary. Yet.”

He glanced at the stack of books again. One of them, Theoretical Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Megastructures, stood out among the others. She had also grabbed a copy of Kinetic Impacts and Planetary Defense, which was at least directly relevant to their mission. But that first book, in particular, was a wildcard. “You’re covering all your bases, I see,” he said, tapping the top of the stack.

Beaumont smirked. “Just in case.”

Youngblood ran a hand through his short hair. He wasn’t sure what bothered him more—that some of their colleagues were seriously entertaining the idea that Kaukauna might not be a normal asteroid, or that part of him wasn’t dismissing it outright. The data was strange. No other interstellar object, asteroid or otherwise, had managed to change its trajectory and speed without help from an external force.

He looked up at the main screen again. The rocky surface of Kaukauna remained unchanged—jagged, lifeless, utterly still. The silence in the control room only made it more unsettling. The asteroid had been drifting through the void for millennia, unbothered and undisturbed, and now, it was mere months away from colliding with Earth.

"Alright," he muttered, shaking his head as if to break free from the weight of his thoughts. "I'm going to head back."

"Fingers crossed," Beaumont replied, offering a small, hopeful smile. "Hope we get good news."

"Me too."

Youngblood turned and began making his way back to his station, his footsteps nearly lost in the clicks and clacks of the rest of the crew typing away at their computers. His mind drifted as he walked. If everything went according to plan, STAR-87 would soon be relaying its next batch of data, confirming whether their asteroid deflection strategy had any chance of succeeding. The waiting was always the hardest part—forty minutes felt like an eternity when the fate of the planet hung in the balance.

But just as he reached his chair, he could feel something had altered the overall mood in the room. The quiet murmurs of his colleagues, once subdued and scattered, grew into more focused whispers—then into rapid, urgent chattering. He frowned, glancing around. A change in tone like that usually meant one of two things: either something had gone terribly wrong, or they had just made a groundbreaking discovery.

Turning back toward the main screen, Youngblood immediately noticed it.

The image had changed.

The once static, barren landscape of Kaukauna was no longer the same. At first glance, it was subtle—so easy to miss that someone not paying attention might have overlooked it entirely. But there, in the upper right corner of the screen, a dark shape had appeared. A shadow.

It wasn’t a trick of the light. It wasn’t a software glitch. Something had entered STAR-87’s field of view.

His breath caught.

The probe’s camera had been fixed on this exact patch of rock for hours, and until now, nothing had moved. The asteroid itself had no atmosphere, no geological activity, no reason for anything to shift on its own.

And yet, there it was.

Faint but unmistakable.

Something else was there.

“What the hell is that?” someone muttered behind him.

Youngblood didn’t answer. He typed a new command into the terminal.

ENHANCE IMAGE SECTOR 4A;

As he took a sip of his coffee, data from the first command he had inputted (SHOW COORDINATES) started to roll in. The numbers populated across the screen in rapid succession, raw data streaming into his terminal console. Youngblood’s eyes flicked over the values, his mind instantly parsing the coordinates, velocity readouts, and positional markers.

Something was off.

He leaned in closer, forehead creasing as he ran the numbers again in his head. Kaukauna’s projected orbit had been carefully calculated months ago, but these readings—these weren’t matching expectations. The asteroid’s position was slightly off course. Not by much, but enough to be concerning.

A shift.

Beaumont had gotten up from her desk and walked to this side of the control room to get a better view of the transmitted images. She was now standing behind him, looking at the wide screen, shocked as the others. Youngblood exhaled. “The coordinates. They’re… wrong.”

Beaumont frowned, stepping closer to look over his shoulder. “How wrong?”

“Point-zero-two degrees off the expected trajectory,” he said, pointing at the delta value highlighted in red. “It shouldn’t have deviated this much, not without an external force acting on it.”

Beaumont’s brows furrowed. “Gravitational anomaly? Could it have been perturbed by an unseen mass?”

Youngblood shook his head. “We accounted for all known gravitational influences. If there was an unknown mass affecting it, we would’ve seen signs of it long before now.” He leaned back in his chair, glancing at the screen that held the image of Kaukauna’s surface.

The control room was abuzz with activity, engineers and scientists speaking in hushed but urgent tones. A few were already trying to download the feed from the probe to their stations.

Then a new line of data scrolled across his screen—an automated telemetry update from STAR-87’s onboard instruments.

Youngblood stared at it. His blood ran cold.

EXTERNAL FORCE DETECTED. UNKNOWN SOURCE. VELOCITY ALTERATION: +2.3 M/S²

“Amy,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Beaumont read the line of data and paled.

“Something pushed it,” she muttered.

It took another forty minutes before the probe sent back the enhanced image requested by his second command. When it did, the room’s wide screen showed both his enhanced image on one side and the newly received transmitted image from the probe on the other. The room fell silent as every eye locked onto the displays. The static had cleared, and the new images were sharp, detailed—undeniable.

On the left side of the screen, Youngblood’s enhanced image displayed a geometric anomaly on Kaukauna’s surface. The structure—if it could be called that—was smoother than the surrounding terrain, its edges too precise to be a natural formation. But it was the new image on the right that scared him.

There was more movement.

A distinct shift in the probe’s perspective had captured something new. A dark silhouette in the shape of a disc near the edge of the lens, a shape that hadn’t been there in the previous frame. It wasn’t another rock formation or a shadow cast by the asteroid’s uneven terrain. It was a solid object.

“Tell me that’s a sensor glitch,” someone muttered in the control room.

Before inputting a third command, Youngblood took another sip of his coffee and looked at Beaumont. “We need to tell Ed,” he said.

Beaumont nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Right now.”

Youngblood set his mug down with a quiet clink against the desk and pushed himself up from his chair. They both walked to the upper level of the space agency through the stairwell just outside the control room. Once they reached the office door of the NASA director, they knocked. It took a moment for the door to open, but when it did, the director seemed pleased to see them. “Everything going well, I take it?” he asked, leaning against the doorframe with a casual smile. That smile faded almost instantly when he saw their faces.

Beaumont was gripping her tablet tightly, her knuckles white. Youngblood’s expression was tense, his posture stiff. Wilmington, a man who had spent decades navigating bureaucratic crises and high-stakes missions, knew that look all too well. “What is it?” he asked, stepping aside to let them in.

Youngblood wasted no time. “We have an issue with Kaukauna.”

Wilmington frowned as he closed the door behind them. “Define ‘issue.’”

Beaumont took a deep breath and turned her tablet toward him, swiping to the first image. “STAR-87’s latest telemetry shows a deviation in Kaukauna’s course. It’s small but significant—enough to put its impact prediction off by a few degrees.”

“Isn’t that what we wanted?”

“We didn’t do it.” Beaumont’s answer was clinical and straight to the point. “It wasn’t us. It deviated on its own, pushed by some other force.”

Wilmington seemed utterly confused. “What? How is that possible?”

“We don’t know yet,” Youngblood admitted. “But I enhanced one of the images that we received, and well…”

He turned to look at Beaumont who quickly understood what he was stalling for. She swiped again on the tablet. The next image filled the screen—the enhanced version of the anomaly on Kaukauna’s surface. Smooth. Geometric. Artificial. She turned it around for the director to see.

Wilmington’s eyes narrowed. “What am I looking at?”

“Something that isn’t supposed to be there. It’s not a natural rock formation.”

Wilmington’s mouth tightened. He was about to respond when Beaumont swiped once more, revealing the final image—the dark, disc-like silhouette near the asteroid’s horizon.

Silence filled the room.

Youngblood could hear the ticking of the analog clock on the wall. The hum of the fluorescent lights with the word “NASA Mission Control Center” on the wall.

Wilmington’s eyes lingered on the image for a long moment before he spoke. “Is this a sensor malfunction?” he asked, though his tone suggested he already knew the answer.

“No,” Beaumont said, shaking her head. “This is not a malfunction. It’s evidence.”

“Evidence? Of what?”

Youngblood met his gaze. “Evidence that Kaukauna is not just a regular asteroid. And we need to act now before the next transmission happens, which will be in,” he stopped to look at his watch, then back to Wilmington. “Less than thirty minutes.”

The director exhaled sharply and ran a hand through his graying hair. “Alright, this is classified,” Wilmington finally said, his voice low. “From this moment on, no one outside of Mission Control gets wind of this until we understand what we’re dealing with.”

Beaumont swallowed hard. “And if we can’t figure it out?”

Wilmington locked eyes with her. “Then we escalate.” His gaze shifted to Youngblood. “I need a full report within the hour. And I want STAR-87’s feed prioritized—copy everything that it transmits into the cloud. I want everything on the secure servers backed up.”

Youngblood nodded. “Understood.”

The director glanced back at the image one more time before muttering under his breath. “God help us if this isn’t just an asteroid.”

When Youngblood and Beaumont returned to the control room, the loud banter of the other scientists had all but died down. The excitement and speculation that had rippled through the team earlier had been replaced by quiet urgency. Now, the only sounds filling the space were the rhythmic clatter of keyboards. Some of them were typing up reports or analyzing the images sent by the probe with different software tools. As Youngblood sat down, he pulled up the latest telemetry updates from STAR-87. The recorded shift was still there, undeniable, and he began making his report with details on what had occurred. When he was done, he saved it inside a folder along with the probe’s images on the secure cloud server.

Thirty minutes passed.

Then, another transmission arrived.

Youngblood’s gaze snapped to his monitor as the latest image from STAR-87 rendered on the screen. The once-mysterious silhouette in the distance was gone. The structure—if that’s what it had been—had also vanished.

He frowned, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. He knew the others would be focused on the missing objects, attempting to determine if they had been a trick of light or movement from the probe itself. But something else had caught his attention.

A blinking notification had appeared in the corner of his terminal window.

A new message.

But it hadn't come from the probe.

Youngblood’s pulse quickened as he clicked into the terminal. The text was simple, unassuming, and yet it sent a chill down his spine:

DO NOT ATTEMPT DEVIATION. DO NOT ATTEMPT DEVIATION.

The words stared back at him, stark against the screen’s glow. His first instinct was to check the sender. A systems glitch? A relay error? Maybe one of the engineers playing a prank? God knows they had enough internal message boards filled with jokes and cryptic lines of code meant to spook the new guys.

He glanced over his shoulder. The hum of conversation in the control room hadn’t changed. Wilmington was still locked in quiet discussion with the project lead, and no one seemed to be reacting as if they had just sent him a secret message.

Maybe it was an automatic failsafe? A pre-programmed command from the probe itself? That didn’t make sense—protocol dictated that all onboard commands had to be logged, and he’d seen nothing of the sort in the last system check.

Youngblood hesitated, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. He considered flagging the message to IT, maybe even asking around to see if anyone else had received something similar.

But then another thought crept in.

What if this wasn't from someone in the office?

A cold knot formed in his stomach.

His hand trembled slightly as he ran a diagnostic. No anomalies. No signatures from internal comms. The message had entered his terminal through a direct, isolated link—one that should have only been accessible to the probe and mission control.

And yet…

DO NOT ATTEMPT DEVIATION.

A deep, unsettling realization settled over him. The probe had received no such instruction. No transmission from Earth, no pre-written command sequences. This message had come from somewhere else.

His breath hitched.

First contact.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard, his pulse hammering in his ears. The phrase had been repeated twice, as if to emphasize its importance. Someone or something out there had noticed their efforts and was now warning them. He swallowed hard, glancing around the room. Everyone was too busy analyzing data to notice his hesitation.

He took a steady breath and typed:

WHO ARE YOU?

The response came forty minutes later.

YOU ARE INTERFERING. DO NOT ATTEMPT DEVIATION.

Youngblood clenched his jaw. His hands were damp against the keyboard, but he forced himself to think.

Minutes later, he finally found the right words and began typing them:

HOW ARE WE INTERFERING?

A pause. And even after forty minutes, the response hadn't arrived.

Then, at last, new words appeared on his screen.

TARGET DESIGNATED. CANNOT BE CHANGED. DO NOT INTERFERE.

Youngblood sighed and rubbed his temples. More questions than answers.

It clearly understood him, but it wasn't relaying enough information.

He typed fast, fingers flying across the keys.

WHAT IS THE TARGET?

The answer came at the forty-minute mark.

YOUR PLANET.

Youngblood felt a jolt of dread as he read the response, immediately threatened by it. His mind raced as he tried to rationalize what was happening. Then it finally dawned on him. Kaukauna’s trajectory shift wasn’t some natural gravitational anomaly or a random deflection.

It was intentional.

He felt the weight of what that meant settle in his stomach like a lead brick. If this intelligence—whoever or whatever it was—had the ability to shift an asteroid’s path and it was intending for Kaukauna to slam Earth, then humanity wasn’t just dealing with a natural disaster.

They were dealing with an act of war.

He sat there for what must have been several minutes, though it felt like an eternity. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, his mind torn between the overwhelming urge to escalate this to Wilmington immediately and the nagging instinct that he needed more information—right now. He swallowed hard, forcing himself to stay calm. The thought came to him that the slight shift must be them auto-correcting so that Kaukauna would stay on target. Any slight alteration in its path and it would miss by millions of kilometers. They were making sure it stayed on track.

He typed his next message carefully.

WHO DESIGNATED THE TARGET?

After that question was transmitted, forty minutes came and went, but nothing showed up on his screen. Then, fifty minutes. Sixty. For a moment, he thought maybe the connection had been severed, that the intelligence on Kaukauna had decided to cut communication entirely. His screen remained still, the blinking cursor waiting.

Then—

DESIGNATION IS ENFORCED BY THEM. PROTOCOL MUST BE FOLLOWED.

He tightened his grip on the edge of the desk, his breathing shallow. He typed again.

WHO ENFORCES THE DESIGNATION?

This time, the answer came faster.

THE WATCHERS.

He wasn’t sure what answer he had been expecting to receive, but that wasn’t it. It occurred to him that whatever this intelligence was, it sounded like it was simply trying to follow orders. Was he speaking to someone like himself? Someone who had been assigned a role with a specific job to do? He typed into the terminal once more:

WHAT ARE THE WATCHERS?

Forty minutes later on the mark, the terminal came alive again.

THEY WILL KNOW. DO NOT ALERT THEM. DO NOT DEVIATE.

Youngblood exhaled sharply. None of those words were comforting. Whoever he was talking to, they were showing blind obedience to some higher power. The Watchers. Whatever or whoever they were, that name alone carried an unsettling weight to it. The thing on the other side was warning them not to cause too much noise—warning them not to draw attention. But how could mankind not attempt to divert the asteroid away from impacting their own planet? That was the whole point of the project. The whole point of this job. He wasn’t about to let the human race die. This was about survival.

No, he had to act now before this intelligence, whatever it was, could stop the STAR-87's thrusters from firing. Youngblood's fingers hovered over the keyboard, indecisive. In all his years of training, he had memorized every command, every line of code designed to control STAR-87. But there was one command he was never supposed to use—not until the probe was in perfect position for the deviation stage. It was the failsafe, the final directive that would set everything into motion.

EXECUTE FINAL SEQUENCE;

Sweat beaded on his brow. He could tell the others and wait for the official confirmation. He could play it safe. Or he could trust his instincts, fire the command now, and hope he was right. Perhaps he should wait, gather more data, and ensure he wasn't making a mistake. If he did, would humanity get another chance to deflect this asteroid?

Youngblood took a deep breath, his mind a battlefield of doubt. If he hesitated too long, the opportunity might be lost forever. If he acted too soon, he could be triggering something far worse than an asteroid impact.

His instincts screamed at him—Do it. Now.

With one last glance at the frozen screen, the ominous words of the unseen intelligence, he made his decision.

EXECUTE FINAL SEQUENCE;

He pressed Enter.

The command was sent.

For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happened.

The room still hummed with the low murmur of analysts poring over data. No alarms, no immediate signs of catastrophe. Then, the telemetry screen flickered; updates rolling in line by line.

Youngblood’s heart pounded as he watched.

STAR-87: IGNITION SEQUENCE ENGAGED.

THRUSTERS FIRING. COURSE CORRECTION IN PROGRESS.

A surge of relief washed over him. It was working.

The gasps of the other analysts were expected. They didn't know that he had just accomplished the mission.

But then—

TRANSMISSION BLOCKED.

ERROR—CONNECTION LOST.

The room around him exploded into chaos.

“Telemetry just cut out!” someone yelled.

“We lost control of the probe!” another engineer called from the back.

“What the hell happened?” Wilmington’s voice boomed across the control room as he rushed in, eyes darting between screens.

Youngblood swallowed hard. His screen still showed the last message before the connection was severed.

YOU HAVE BEEN SEEN.

The words sent an ice-cold shiver down his spine. His hands clenched into fists as he stared at the blinking cursor, waiting, hoping for another response—anything that would indicate what came next.

And then it did.

The screen flickered again, but this time, it wasn’t just text. It was an image.

A new transmission.

The image that appeared was not from STAR-87’s onboard cameras. It wasn’t from their probe at all.

It was an image of Earth.

A live image, taken from space. Not from a satellite they controlled. Not from any source they knew.

Wilmington’s face was pale. “Who—who sent this?”

Youngblood’s terminal beeped one final time, a single line of text appearing on the screen.

T̸͓́̿H̷͙̫͋Ę̴̌ ̵͍̀W̷̢̘̍A̴͎̯͋T̷̲̈́C̶̪͗̄Ȟ̴̦̌E̶̘͂̚Ṟ̴̡̈́̕S̸̘̦͝ ̷͖̻̊͆A̷̧̡͒͛R̴͍̠͆͛E̵͙͓̅̃ ̴̘̮̏C̴͙̼̓̽O̵̯͍͝M̶̦̔̍I̴͕̔N̶͕̊̿G̶̞̈̿.̶̥̈́

Then, the screen went black.