“If BLORP’s got you on the edge of your seat, you’re one of us now. Show your support by picking up $5 of BLORPCOIN — link pinned at the top. Every coin helps keep the story alive. BLORP thanks you. Genuinely.”
“BLORP, honey. I can’t say much and I don’t have long. What I’m about to tell you is going to sound impossible but I need you to trust me.”
A pause.
“The company that sent you to the moon — they didn’t send you there for geological samples. They sent you there because of what’s already up there. What’s been up there. The President knows. I found out three days ago and that’s why they’ve been monitoring our calls.”
But not scared Linda. Not the fragmented panicked Linda from the voicemails on his phone. This was calm Linda. Measured Linda. The voice she used when she needed him to really listen.
BLORP pressed play.
The voicemail hissed with static at first — the same interference from the solar flares bleeding into whatever signal this strange device ran on. Then it cleared. And what came through made BLORP press himself flat against the cave wall.
His name. On a phone that wasn’t his. Left by something that had walked across the moon and into his cave while he was climbing a cliff trying to call his wife.
He hovered his thumb over the play button.
Outside, something moved across the lunar surface again. He doesn’t notice the creature that has been watching him since he been home outside the cave.
There was one thing on the screen.
A voicemail.
No number. No contact name. Just a duration — 47 seconds — and a single word where the caller ID should have been.
BLORP.
BLORP didn’t move for a full thirty seconds.
He just sat there, eyes scanning the cave slowly, methodically, the way you look around a dark parking lot when something feels wrong but you can’t name why yet.
Everything looked the same at first. His sleeping pack. His equipment cases. His food rations stacked neatly against the far wall.
Then he saw it.
Sitting in the center of the cave floor, placed with a deliberateness that made his skin crawl, was a single object.
A phone.
Not his phone — his was in his hand. This one was older. Scratched and dusty and clearly not from any manufacturer he recognized. The screen was cracked down the middle but glowing faintly with a pale blue light that had no business working in the cold of a moon cave.
BLORP knelt down slowly and picked it up.
He reached the cave entrance and ducked inside, setting the solar unit back against the wall out of habit. The cave felt smaller than he remembered. Darker.
He sat down on his pack and stared at the phone in his hand.
Then he noticed something that made his stomach drop.
The unknown tracks in the lunar dust outside his cave — the ones that had been leading toward the entrance —
now led away from it.
Something had been inside while he was gone.
After standing there in disbelief, and trying to call his wife and the president back. BLORP headed back to his cave. I wonder what Linda was trying to tell me.
BLORP’s thumb was already hovering over Linda’s name when he saw it.
At first it looked like a shimmer. A ripple along the edge of the sun — the kind of thing you’d dismiss as eye strain back on Earth. But up here, with no atmosphere to soften anything, it was unmistakable.
Solar flares. And not small ones.
BLORP had read enough about space weather to know what that meant for Earth. Communications knocked out. Satellites scrambled. Phone networks going dark across entire continents. Whatever fragile signal connected his phone to Linda’s was about to get swallowed whole.
He had maybe minutes. Maybe less.
He jammed call on Linda’s name. The line crackled and hissed — already struggling, already fighting through the interference beginning to ripple across the sky.
It rang once.
It rang twice.
“BLORP—” Her voice cut in and out like a bad dream. “—can you hear me — they’re saying the—”
The line dissolved into static.
BLORP stood on the edge of the cliff, 200 feet above his lonely little cave, Earth glowing above him, solar flares blooming silently across the sun’s surface like flowers made of fire.
He’d climbed all the way up here. Charged the phone. Got the signal.
And the sun itself had cut him off.
BLORP was relieved when he reached the top of the ridge, chest heaving inside his suit. His arms burned. His fingers, even through the gloves, felt like dead weight.
But the unit was up. He’d made it.
He propped the solar charger against a flat rock, angled it toward the sun, and plugged the phone in. The screen flickered immediately. That little red battery bar appeared — but this time it felt like a victory flag.
He sat back and looked out.
From up here the moon stretched out in every direction like a grey ocean frozen mid-wave. The cave below looked impossibly small. Earth hung in the black sky above him, blue and swirling and heartbreakingly beautiful.
Linda was on that marble. Whatever was happening was happening on that marble.
The phone buzzed.
5%. Then 6%.
BLORP didn’t move. Didn’t want to risk touching anything. Just sat in the silence of the moon and watched the percentage climb, one agonizing tick at a time.
At 12% the voicemails unlocked.
He raised the phone to his helmet with a shaking hand, pressed play, and finally — finally — heard his wife’s voice clearly.
What she said made him look up slowly at the Earth hanging in the sky.
Then down at the unknown tracks in the dust below. Leading toward his cave.
BLORP realizes his solar unit has been stuck in shadow and isn’t charging. He spots full sunlight hitting the cliff above and decides to haul the unit up 200 feet of jagged lunar rock — despite being alone, he is still aware that something unknown has been leaving tracks nearby. He doesn’t have answers, but he has a mission. He grabs his gear and heads out.