Indians used to know how to operate these wild mechanical beasts of burden. Apart from the fact that, absolutely noiselessly, the machines could hover up to 2 miles in the sky, they seemed deceptively simple and looked like wheelless trucks – there was a base that simply hovered and on the base was a cabin and in the cabin there was a comfortable chair, and in front of that – a controller. And if you weren’t indian or you weren’t chosen, you weren’t flying.

Understanding the underlying physics would open a myriad of new technological venues to humanity so, naturally, the temptation to reverse engineer the machinery was stronger than fear of punishment. Some came away with their hands fried off and others ended up as vegetables. While the common trait between the former was the membership of the handsfree club, the case with the latter was more intricate – drooling and rocking back and forth, they all hummed the same sad 8 note melody. Gathering several of these catatonic patients together would make them sync their melodies up. It had done something very specific to their brains.

People eventually gave up on tampering and switched over to less intrusive approach of observation. After subjecting it to all kinds of spectral analysers, they found that the machines emitted very short and barely perceivable radio transmissions. At first there was a question if it was a transmission at all or maybe it was just the result of the mechanical movement in the controller, just like striking two rocks could produce a spark without any intelligent design in the rocks themselves. But the pattern did not seem to be random enough for it to be natural. In the end they were forced to deem the transmissions to be non-deterministic – performing same action over and over again on the controller would not send the same signal, the message varying both in content and length. The conclusion was simple – the communication was helplessly encrypted.

As far as the divers went, there was some weird synergy between the machines and who it allowed to be controlled by. As the diver would sit down and grab the controller, their pulse would go up and they would instantly cease all communication until they released the controller. The scientists observed a change in their brain patterns but there was no explanation as to what was causing it.

The peculiarity of the machines preferring indians over everyone else was a boggling one, too – why would aliens drop a few dozen thousand of these hovering trucks on earth to then grant exclusivity to just one nation.

The best hypothesis the scientists could come with albeit not verify at all was the theory of microtremors, where each movement of the diver was sending out some kind of morse-like unlocking code. The assumption was hinging on the seed theory which ventured that that the aliens, most likely, were indians too.