1 Prologue

He ignored the blaring alarms and the blinking lights from the many machines around the room. He kept his eyes on the sizeable ceiling-to-floor screen setup, displaying the skyline of a large metropolitan city.

The door behind him would occasionally open with a soft hiss, and another person would quietly join him. Some stood, while others sat down in their seats until the room filled with all 13 of them.

He never turned to look at them, and neither did they say a word as they joined him in watching the screens. "This is getting out of hand; we must do something," one of the figures shrouded in shadows said, her voice female but giving no further hint of her identity.

He slowly nodded in agreement, and he imagined many of the others did the same. "Indeed, we will have to act this time," he said calmly after a short pause.

"We will have to be careful with what we do, lest we invite greater problems our way," another shadow spoke up, this voice muffled by something to make it impossible to recognize it. The words caused a low murmur to spread around the room as others either agreed with the owner of the voice or gently disagreed.

The first person in the room took a moment to glance around the room before speaking. "We have to show a certain level of strength, yet not too much. At the same time, we have to ensure those not meant to see, remains ignorant.," he said, to the approval of the rest of them.

They might fight over many different things in their normal day-to-day dealings, such is to be expected from an organization their size. Yet when things were dire, they would put their differences aside and deal with the issues quickly before going back to fighting over resources and their visions.

He moved his hand around in front of him as if tapping on an invisible keyboard, and small windows popped up on the screen. "I have already moved extra personnel over, including some of our more elite mobile task forces," he said before a female voice interrupted him.

"Some of which are under my command, O5-1; I would prefer that you didn't order my forces around like that," the woman said as she turned to look at him with an angry glare. Others also joined in with much the same, criticizing him for taking command of their forces like that.

He raised his hands as if to apologize, but before he could say anything, a profound change happened on the large screen, and bright red alarm lights illuminated the otherwise dim room as loud alarms blared inside the room.

On the screen, a vast pitch-black rift had opened up, showing the darkness of the universe in daylight before tiny objects started to fly through the rift. "Not good!" he shouted and turned his focus onto the screens again.

"Damn, this is far too large an event to ignore!" another voice shouted.

"We must act at once and with extreme force to deal with this," another stern voice said.

He nodded his head and moved his hands again. "I call for a vote to block off the city, no signals going in or coming out. A full lockdown."

"O5-2 in agreement."

"O5-3 in agreement."

"O5-4 in agreement."

"O5-5 in agreement."

"O5-6 in agreement."

"O5-7 in agreement."

"O5-8 in agreement."

"O5-9 in agreement."

"O5-10 in agreement."

"O5-11 in agreement."

"O5-12 in agreement."

"O5-13 in agreement."

"Vote passed, New York is going dark," O5-1 said, and with a push of an invisible button, the whole of New York City went into total electronic isolation. At this point, most people in the city hadn't even noticed the massive portal above their heads or the alien invasion happening right now. However, they quickly noticed their phones, televisions, radios, and computers stopped working simultaneously.

This caused widespread chaos as all communication died; calls for help, 911, or other official lines to the military went dead. The EMP burst was unforgiving, lives would be lost due to it, but it was a sacrifice worth making.

At once, the entire world was forced into complete ignorance of the fact that an alien invasion was happening in one of the biggest and busiest cities in the world.

Even organizations that might have been able to help, such as the US military or S.H.I.E.L.D., were now blind. Even satellites refused to show anything from the blocked-off area.

They all stood there, looking on in silence for a few moments. Yet it didn't take long before pop-ups started flooding in from their agents around the world, who had now been alerted to what was happening.

"We will have to employ amnestics on everyone in the city; that will take a good bite out of our current reserves," the voice of O5-8 sounded out.

Everyone quickly agreed on this. He also knew how much it would take to affect a city of this size, so he quickly spoke up. "Indeed, we must deal with this whole affair as quickly as possible to limit the amount of memories we need to deal with," he said as he already ran the calculations in his head for how long they had before they would have to go to more extreme lengths to stop the spread of information.

He quickly shared his plan of action with them, letting them know what the objectives were and how to best achieve them quickly, including his plan for the aftermath, which really just boiled down to blaming others for the destruction and employing a few objects from containment to clean up the invaders and their tech.

As time was of the essence here, he was able to quickly force the others to agree to his plan of action and gave the green light to the agents sitting ready. The plan was ready, the objective clear: to secure, contain, protect.