A message from a scientist who worked on the nuclear tests of 1998 warning us about something his team discovered at the test site.
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A Certain Doom

I am a scientist, and I worked on the nuclear tests in 1998.

The Pokhran-II tests were a series of five nuclear bomb test explosions conducted by India at the Indian Army's Pokhran Test Range in May 1998. It was the second instance of nuclear testing conducted by India; the first test, code-named Smiling Buddha, was run in May 1974.

The tests achieved their centre objective of giving India the capability to build fission and thermonuclear weapons with yields up to 200 kilotons.

Pokhran-II consisted of five detonations. The first was a fusion bomb, and the remaining four were fission bombs. The tests were initiated on May 11, 1998, under the assigned code name Operation Shakti, with the detonation of one fusion and two fission bombs. On May 13, 1998, two additional fission devices were detonated. The Indian government, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, shortly convened a press conference to declare India a full-fledged nuclear state. The tests resulted in several sanctions against India by several big states, including Japan and the United States.

Many names have been assigned to these tests; originally, these were collectively called Operation Shakti–98

The five nuclear bombs were designated Shakti-I through to Shakti-V. More recently, the operation, as a whole, has come to be known as Pokhran II, and the 1974 explosion as Pokhran-I.

I am writing this because I need to get this off my chest. Those tests were a success, but something else happened there. After the tests, my team of six scientists stayed there to study the aftermath of the explosions. We were assigned our individual tasks, yet we needed to work together. Everything was exactly the same as it was supposed to be until one morning in January 1999.

I had gone out to take the readings. My task was to study the long-term effects of the radiation caused by the tests. I had one assistant with me. It was a quiet, chilled, foggy morning; the sun hadn't come out yet. My assistant and I were just doing our thing when my device started receiving strange, new radiation. I knew the nuclear radiation couldn't rise after such a long time post-explosion. So, it was either a new thing or something that we managed to miss for eight months straight. My heart both panicked and got excited. I called out to my assistant.

“Hey, are you seeing this?”

There was no answer. I turned around just in time to see my assistant disappearing into the thick foggy air. It seemed to me as if the man was sucked into nothingness. My heart dropped a few beats. I ran back towards the camp as fast as I could. Within an hour, my whole team was looking for my partner with a military squad and an aerial search vehicle.

We arrived back at the spot where he had disappeared. We felt a presence. There seemed to be a doorway or a portal to maybe another world. We couldn't see it with our eyes, but the anomaly was there. I threw a rock at it, and it disappeared just like my assistant.

We set up a perimeter around it. Within days, it was a high-security military research centre. They got scientists from all over the country to figure out this anomaly.

What we learned scared the shit out of all of us. The lead scientist stated that it could be one of those micro black holes that Stephen Hawking had predicted. We weren’t sure, though. We had to keep an eye on it because we couldn’t do anything about it.

They kept studying it for months, performing experiments and collecting data. The most riveting thing was that we couldn't see it with our eyes. And, the frightening thing about it was the fact that we didn't know its origin. We had no clue if it was created during the tests or was already there.

Things were under control until June of 2003. One day, I get to the facility, and there's so much commotion. I had never seen so many troops together. They were all positioned outside the perimeter, waiting for something. I looked for my colleagues so that I could ask what was happening. There were no other scientists except me. Fear set in my heart. I hesitatingly asked the captain, and what I heard shook me to my very soul.

The thing had grown in size and devoured my whole team along with the containment zone. I could not think, but one thing was sure. It was no micro black hole because those don't randomly grow in size. But—my heart sank with a feeling. What if it was growing at a steady rate? I knew that these things accelerate as they increase in size. They follow more of a logarithmic curve. If it was true, we all had a very concerning problem. It was going to devour the whole planet, but it didn't.

For the next few weeks, it stayed the same size. They didn't remove the troops, though. I didn't know what they would do in case it grows again. If anything, they will serve as more food to it. The research was halted. It was way dangerous to even go near it. I was put on sabbatical until further notice.

On August 15, 2017, our independence day, I was released from my service to the government. I believe something happened, or maybe it didn’t. It’s been years, and I have kept it all in. I’m more than sixty years old, and I don’t know how long I’ll live. So, I had to tell somebody. This is the only way I can at least warn people that there is a certain doom in the form of that...whatever the hell that thing is. It will eat our whole planet, and there's not much we can do about it, but, at least, we'll know what is coming at us. I can not die with this secret buried in my chest. I am not worried if they'll find out. I have to do what I have to do.

If there's anyone out there reading this who knows anything about it. If you could do something about it, please, this is the time. We need your help.

To the rest of us, I’ll say, there's a fair chance that when you wake up tomorrow, half of the world will have gone, and you will be the next. So, resolve your issues, say your goodbyes, make peace with your life choices. Live your life like there’s no tomorrow because honestly, there isn't.