 Last month, some friends of mine and I got together for a big sleepover party. You know the deal. Eat junk food, play games, watch cheesy movies, promise to be quiet at 3am when your dad comes down the stairs and glares at you, stay up all night and crash the next day. Standard stuff. There were eight of us. All at Jeremy's house because he had the best setup and the biggest house. Our grades were all good and our extracurriculars taken care of, so we had some leeway, you know? I guess you don't know that sort of the point. We were having a great time. There's a horror movie on the TV, some monster thing. I don't even know what doesn't matter. It was mainly on for background noise. We're all playing cards, making fun of each other, just generally horsing around and having fun pacing ourselves. You know, it's early and we're looking to go all night. First one to sleep is probably getting drawn on. We all know the rules. And then Matthew goes, hey, what time is it? Is that clock right? We all look at the wall clock and then check our watches and they all say the same thing. It's almost midnight, but the TV is still showing that monster movie and it's only like halfway through. It's clearly not going to wrap up until one in the morning. But the test pattern should have been on more than an hour ago. Jeremy grabs the remote and sure enough, this is a current broadcast, not a recording or anything. And we're all kind of freaking out, because maybe this is some sort of pirate broadcast and we're going to get in trouble for watching it. But he starts flipping channels and every single channel is still on the air. And there's a ton of them, like hundreds. So this is no surprise to you, obviously. You're like, who's this weird kid who still expects there to be test patterns? Because they stopped being a thing like three decades ago, right? But not where I'm from. And the thing is, I'm from here. Just not this here. None of us are. My friends who were at the party, I mean, somehow we ended up elsewhere. I don't know what happened. There was a flash of light, no rumbling, no nothing. Things just aren't the same anymore. And it's huge stuff. It's not just the TV broadcast. You guys have commercially available cell phones. You still have internal combustion cars. You have the internet. Do you even know what that's like discovering that? This place is terrifying. You guys are all nuts to have made this thing and then to just use it like it's a good idea and a safe place. It's not. You're crazy. I get the allure, though. We all found out about the internet the next day and man, did I say some stupid stuff before I found I could just search for things? It started when my dad came to pick me up. He rolled up in this car and it was loud. I could hear the engine from inside the house and I went outside and he's there by this bright red car. Just this totally unreasonable color. I knew things were different. We'd had all night to figure that out and there was plenty different inside the house. But still it caught me by surprise dad. I said, what's with the car? He immediately ran around to my side and started examining it. What? Did someone hit it? He asked. That was when I realized that it must be a totally fine thing to have a restricted color gas powered vehicle here. So I covered for it told him it must have just been a weird reflection and that everything was fine. He bought it because why wouldn't he? What's he gonna do? Assume his son is somehow slipped through from another dimension and doesn't know what cars look like. If I hadn't had the other guys at the sleepover, even I would have assumed I was crazy. But we all agreed on how things should have been. We had a lot of quietly panicked calls back and forth those next few days. But yeah, so the internet that was an absolute bone scary though it was. I searched for all kinds of stuff got caught up on what was different, which was basically everything. And it all stems from one thing. You guys don't have the monitors. The monitors showed up in 1947. They showed up in their ship one day and they said they were from the future and they were beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Four of them, everyone looking like humanity perfected, tall, graceful, elegant. Everyone stood six foot two or six foot three, and they were slender and draped in flowing fabric and just well looking perfect. I know I said that before, but there's just not another word for them. Their speech is melodious, their movements fluid, their behavior gracious. They came to help us to put us on a better path. They took over from there. Or arrived, everyone so perfect, it would make you cry. And they joined with the governments to help. They only gave suggestions, but their suggestions were always taken. And they slowly took over every part of our lives. This never felt like a bad thing. We were divided before angry and frightened at people who weren't like us. And they fixed all that. Their regulations provided order, peace, stability. Your version of things is more advanced in a lot of ways, but you're also on the brink of war of starvation of seven kinds of self made destruction. It's a high cost for freedom. But here's the thing. Here's why I'm writing this. I don't think you've got the freedom you think you do. See, there were eight of us at that party. And obviously, we've spent a lot of time together since then, figuring things out, and trying to sort out how to look normal. Except after the first week, Matthew stopped showing up. In what we called his house, the number was disconnected. I went by there and there's a first sale sign in the yard. Matthew had told us that he'd been talking to people online, trying to figure out if this had happened to anyone else. If there was a way we could get back, he'd mentioned the monitors in an effort to clarify where we were from. And then he was gone. And then just last week, Chuck vanished. Same thing. He's gone. Family's gone. Teachers at school don't seem to care. And since then, there's been another of us gone every day. Terry, Nick, Adam, Andrew and Jeremy, all gone now. And no one seems to find it weird. Even my parents, I pointed this out to them a couple days ago, showed them that half of the guys I'd been to the party with had moved, vanished. Well, it's the economy. My dad said, as if that explained anything. And my mom just nodded. The rest of them are gone now. And it's just me. It's not hard to figure out that I'm not going to be here much longer. So, before I'm taken, let me tell you what things look like to me, to an outsider. The monitors are here, not in force and in the open, like they are in my world, but in hiding. I think our two worlds might be two parts of the same experiment. One steered to peace. One steered towards war. They're watching. They're guiding. They're controlling. Their goals are not yours. Your fights, your internal squabbles, they're causing these for their own purposes. Don't keep turning on each other. Find them. Fight them. I'm glad I got to experience the semblance of freedom. I hope someday you get the real thing.