Unidentified Object
You float an island that high and there's not even a shadow underneath it?
Ran out of steam halfway through, huh.
A moment later, the OP added one more comment.
I swallowed the water I'd been holding in my mouth.
More photos kept coming. A shot taken at a crosswalk. A shot pressed flat against an office window. A video of a dog hauling on its leash mid-walk while its owner pointed the camera at nothing but the sky. The compositions differed and the locations differed, but in one corner of every sky sat the same thing: a dark underside and a rim that rose in a gentle curve. When a cloud passed in front of it, it vanished for a moment and then showed itself again—and it did not drift with the clouds.
Scrolling through shot after shot, I got a feel for just how large it looked from the ground. Even in careless phone snapshots it came out that way. Hard to miss, if you actually looked up.
Even my team lead has come up.
He just phoned the department head and told him to look at the sky.
Zoom in on a phone and it just turns to mush. Can't make out a thing.
Somebody get a shot of what's on top of it.
I glanced out the window once, then called for Athena.
"This isn't going to fall, right?"
"Buoyancy is holding steady. Nothing at present poses any threat to the Garden."
"What if someone tries something?"
"Any impact applied from the outside is intercepted before it can reach the residential zone. This is not something that need concern you, Administrator."
Athena raised a brief status window in front of me.
Everything read normal. When I drew my gaze away from it, she folded the window shut.
"Nor can the interior, or your whereabouts, be made out from outside, Administrator."
"Then we're good."
I picked my spoon back up. That feature was the whole reason I'd chosen this place in the first place.
Athena's gaze followed my hand down.
"Will you be continuing your meal?"
"Yeah. The soup's gone cold."
She studied me for a moment, then moved a hand toward the table. A faint glow turned beneath the soup bowl.
"That is a problem I can resolve."
I ladled up a spoonful and found it back at the temperature of the very first bite.
"Thanks. I get to eat it warm after all."
"Please focus on your meal. I will turn the pages for you."
Athena spread the gallery from my phone out wide before me, and I nodded along, spoon still in hand.
Somewhere in all that, the gallery had reassigned my home's identity about three times over. First it had been a Photoshop fake. Then a giant balloon. Now it was the aliens' turn.
Why do they keep insisting it isn't?
An unidentified object floating in the sky is a UFO. That's just what the word means.
We'd probably look like ants to them, no?
Until a few hours ago, I would have been writing comments exactly like those myself. Now I was sitting inside the very "inside" those comments spoke of. It was a strange feeling.
That was when a news link went up at the top of the page.
I tapped it and found a broadcaster's live channel. A variety show was on, its cast in the middle of a game, and beneath the laughter and sound effects a red banner crawled past—one that had nothing to do with the mood.
I waited for the banner to crawl by one more time. On screen, a cast member threw a hand up and shouted something, and before the result could even be announced, the sound cut out.
An anchor appeared shortly after.
"We have breaking news for our viewers. Regarding the large unidentified structure discovered over domestic airspace—"
A photograph of the island filled the space behind the anchor.
I paused my spoon for a moment. They even cut off the variety show.
"The object's exact size and altitude are being verified. Military authorities are monitoring the situation, and no damage has been confirmed as of this hour."
The feed cut to the field. People had gathered behind the reporter; between the forest of raised phones, police officers gestured for the crowd to step back from the roadway.
"The object you can see behind me has held the same position since it was first reported. Our crew is verifying it with the naked eye as well, and in person it is far more—"
The reporter turned around. For a moment, his words simply stopped.
The camera tilted skyward, and the island came into frame along with the surrounding scenery. As the picture zoomed in, the island's underside was revealed.
"Its outline is discernible to the naked eye. It is not at the level of a mere dot or point of light."
A clenched fist would have been enough to cover it—yet it was no dot tucked away in a corner of the sky, either. I lowered my hand and returned to the field feed. Even while the next question was being asked, the reporter kept letting his eyes drift toward the sky.
Back in the studio, a video link was opened with a professor of aerospace engineering. His name and affiliation glowed at the bottom of the screen while he enlarged the field footage on his own monitor.
"There's speculation that this could be some kind of large airship."
"An airship requires the internal volume to carry enough lifting gas to support its own weight. In the footage so far, however, I see no envelope clearly performing that role."
The zoomed image caught the island's underside—tiers that narrowed as they descended. The professor pointed in turn at the rim, then at the lower surface.
"That it resembles stone does not mean we can confirm it is rock. If we begin by calculating weight, without knowing the material or the internal structure, the conclusion can veer wildly off course."
"Then what should be verified first?"
"Whether it is truly stationary relative to the ground, and at what altitude it sits. The higher the altitude, the thinner the air, and the more difficult the measurement becomes. For now, we need to synchronize footage from confirmed camera locations to the same moment in time."
Beside the anchor, two clips from different regions appeared side by side. In one, the island hung directly above the buildings; in the other, it floated far off beyond a mountain ridge.
"If we derive the bearing to the object from these separate positions, we can narrow down its approximate location and size. Only with those results in hand can we judge whether this is an airship—or whether we should be considering something else entirely."
I looked back and forth between the two screens. In the shot taken from afar, it seemed much smaller. I thought I understood now why the news wouldn't declare its size off a handful of photographs.
Before long, the source of the zoomed footage turned up on the gallery.
📎 [Photo attached]
People asked what equipment I use, so I've written it below.
What you can see in the photo is the underside and the outer rim.
The top doesn't show from here.
I zoomed into the photo.
"The outside comes out nicely. If they could shoot from above, wouldn't the garden show?"
"The outer wall is visible, but the scenery inside the boundary is concealed. From outside, only sky continues beyond it."
Athena raised a small model into the air between us. The moment the viewpoint crossed outside the boundary, the lake and the residential tower vanished. The island's outer structure stayed exactly as it was, and above it there was nothing but sky.
"The same applies to the naked eye and to recording equipment alike."
I swung the model's viewpoint upward. The residential tower that had stood within it was nowhere to be seen. Even knowing precisely where the building was, I could hardly find the line where structure ended and sky began.
"So from inside, you can see out?"
"Yes. Only the view from outside looking in is blocked."
"Then I'll never need curtains."
I closed the model. Every issue I had fretted over when choosing this place had been properly resolved. I no longer needed to worry about who pointed how large a telescope at me.
Out in the world, things were speeding up. Foreign broadcasters had begun taking the domestic footage and airing it, and an article went up reporting that Professor Adrian Keller, the world-famous astrophysicist, was preparing joint observations with a team of Korean researchers. Attached to the article, in place of an interview, was a notice canceling a lecture. The public lecture had been scheduled under the title What Are We Looking for in the Universe?
Comments followed beneath it.
I closed the article. While researchers abroad went hunting for plane tickets, back home some people had already settled on a culprit.
They send balloons; they could send something bigger too.
What's the military even doing right now?
After that, a different question pushed ahead of who had built it.
Fine, it's been spotted now.
So why isn't there a single clip of it on its way in?
I set down my water glass. This one, I was a little curious about myself. On my end, all that had appeared was a single line saying the installation was complete. I had never seen how it looked from the outside.
"Athena. The Garden didn't fly in from somewhere when it was installed, did it?"
"It deployed directly at the designated coordinates. It passed through no other region."
Just as I thought. The chicken hadn't been carried in by any deliveryman, either. But could the people down there ever work that out?
When I refreshed the page, one post's upvotes were rocketing upward. It claimed someone had filmed the installation itself.
I was stopped at a red light when it suddenly appeared.
Thought it was a reflection on the glass and rolled the window down—it was real.
🎥 [Video attached]
I pressed play. Cars stood waiting at the stop line, and the top of the frame held nothing but streetlights and a washed-out sky. Someone laughed on the radio.
The next instant, something occupied one corner of that sky. There was no sign of anything flying in—a blurry outline seemed to condense out of nothing, and then the island was simply there.
From inside the video came a short, sharp intake of breath.
"...What is that?"
The sound of a car window rolling down followed. The light turned green, but the car ahead didn't move. A horn blared once from behind. Just once.
I rewound the clip to the beginning. So this was what had been happening down below while I pressed that button.
"It matches the moment of installation."
"It does, doesn't it."
I saved the original file. It was the moment my home came into being. Surely it was fine to keep something like this.
From then on, posts connecting it to the gallery multiplied fast.
🎥 [Video: the chicken box appearing]
🎥 [Video: the floating island appearing]
Both simply appear, with no journey in between.
It hasn't even been that long since the gallery changed—why is this happening again?
He was.
I opened the comment box, then closed it again. There was no need to take attendance.
"Would you like to reply?"
"No. I'm not about to hand out my home address."
What I had wanted was a home no one could come barging into on a whim. Safe as it was, I had no intention of hanging a name tag on it either—and there was no need to delete the posts guessing at its identity. If I removed only the ones that happened to be right, that would be far more suspicious.
I left the posts as they were and closed the input box. The comments kept stacking up whether I answered or not.
Athena didn't press me to reply. Instead, she slid the screens that had filled my view off to one side, and the lake outside the window came back into sight.
I leaned back and played the saved video one more time. Down below, they would be watching this and spinning every theory under the sun, but for me it was simply the moment my home was born. However many times I watched, it was marvelous—and in that, they and I were exactly the same.
Air Force Operations Command Command & Control Center.
On the main screen, a map plotting the unidentified structure's position hung alongside live field footage. Colonel Park Jun-seok, the duty commander, took the materials from Major Lee Hyun-woo, who was handling the situation reports.
Time of the first report. Locations confirmed since. Movements identified so far. One blank remained—the approach path.
"The record of it coming in?"
"We have found no flight trail connecting to the object's current position, sir. We are cross-checking earlier records of the surrounding airspace again."
"So you've confirmed where it is, but there's no trace of how it got there."
"Yes, sir."
Major Lee spread out another set of documents.
"Current analysis estimates the altitude at roughly fifty kilometers. We are checking the margins of error for each observation method."
Colonel Park went over the figure again. This was different from the days when nothing but civilian photos made the rounds. As the observations piled up, the possibility of some small, nearby object was dying off. For it to appear that large from that height, its true scale had to be measured in kilometers.
"No trace of it coming down from the North, either?"
"Not confirmed, sir. There is no data to specify the direction it arrived from."
Colonel Park lowered the papers in his hand.
The thing was unmistakably there now. The only thing missing was the process of it getting there.
Just then, the communications officer came over.
"The original footage has been delivered through the police. The caller reports that the moment of appearance was captured on a car's dashcam."
"Put it up."
The video played. Above the cars waiting at the light, the sky was empty—then, in the next instant, the structure claimed that space.
"Any sign the footage was cut?"
"Analysis of the original has been requested. We are also securing footage from nearby vehicles and roadside cameras. This single file is not enough to reach a conclusion, sir."
Colonel Park nodded.
If the footage had been doctored, they would have to hunt down the approach path the old-fashioned way. If it hadn't, then the path they had been searching for might never have existed at all. Either way, they needed more eyes on it.
"Scramble the standby flight. Identification mission in the designated airspace."
Major Lee turned toward the map. The target's altitude lay far beyond the ceiling any fighter could reach—not something they could fly up beside just because they launched. They could, however, gather imagery from a vantage point unlike the ground's, and check whether the object showed any new movement.
Colonel Park went on.
"Don't force the climb toward the target. Hold your distance, and first confirm whether anything separates from the underside or descends from it."
They didn't yet know whether the thing was a weapon or a facility. Knowing only where it floated was no reason to breathe easy.
"This is not an attack mission. Get the observation results up the chain first."
"Understood, sir."
Takeoff clearance came through. One after the other, two fighters kicked off the runway and climbed.