The Disk

When in 2043 the first "disk" was found on the ground of the Swiss-based Great Aletsch Glacier during routine measuring of the shrinking ice shield, it was no more than a local sensation, known to a few insiders only. The reason it remained low profile was mostly due to the fact that the object looked so simple and could have been anything of no real value that nobody really had an urgent need or the money nor the technology to dig through 500 meters of solid ice and then to bring this most probably several-tons-weighting "UFO"-shaped object up to the surface and then - as a local blog has described - down to the nearby Valais valley's former Swiss-Hyperloop caverns for investigations.

Although the "disk" was detected by radar due to its unconventional, contrasting shape to the ground, it was not even known for its material and over the next years got forgotten again.

Only when Balthasar, working for the Thule research team then, on a holiday trip visiting the "Top of Europe" nicknamed Jungfraujoch tourist mountain, among dozens of other local stories framed and forgotten behind blind glasses in the waiting hall of the world-famous 3,454 meter high railway station, did this old newspaper article about the "2043 sensation" get his full attention, remembering a similar object found in Greenland below 2,500 meters of ice then, which in 2080 might have been still 1,000 meters strong. But here, maybe 50?

He, being traditional Swiss and using his Swiss-army-contacts and local connections, then silently founded the Top of Europe Institute for the Research of Climate Change - TöI in short - to buy the Sphinx Observatory at the Jungfrau peak, looking down on the south side to the Great Aletsch Glacier and on the other side to the lights of northern Switzerland at night.

And after he had purged all news about this "disk" from social media and, of course, gotten the framed article in the train-station destroyed, he started glacier-drilling for the disk in the name and disguise of environmental research.

And what he has found knocked him off his shoes: an elliptical, totally symmetrical disk of unknown material and an - as it seems - undestroyable metallic crystalline, absolutely polished surface that does not react with anything.

As mind-blowing as this sensation has been, as eager Balthasar was to keep the secret for himself, making sure that workers never got the whole picture about the robot-dominated excavation project or any sight of the object.

And so it came to be that when the disk finally got in one of the many bunkers the Swiss military has dug deep into the mountain for rent, Balthasar, for many years, has become the only person who has finally seen the "drawing" that somehow got activated and became visible when the "disk's" surface was touched by his human hand.

The "drawing" looked like an uncompleted mandala: the borders and middle seemed complete, but several white areas looked like they were kept empty purposely, waiting to be completed with something.

What was that, and where did it come from? Aliens? or an ancient culture? Or just a joke of some ahead-of-its-time scientist enjoying some post-mortem fun?

Driven by curiosity, Balthasar then launched a media site about graffiti, mandalas, and other forms of graphical ornaments, where he then mingled some parts of the disk's "drawings," without giving either the whole picture to the public or anything about the source - hoping that some fractions might be enough to get somebody's attention who might know.

And when "The Swarm" got hooked on this new website and started to fill it up with the united tattoos, mandalas, and graffiti of this world and finally made it the largest online collection for idiomatic art, Balthasar feared that HIS pieces would diminish among the millions of competing art pieces.

However, when "The Swarm" started to classify and sort the "graffiti" for their cultural and religious meaning, date and location of origins, artists, usage, and tribes behind them, the "disk"-pieces suddenly stood out in the "wonderful" category and soon were prominently taking the lead when people felt incredibly "touched" and "attached" to them.

And when the first copies appeared on T-shirts, screensavers, and TV shows, Balthasar strongly believed, that finally somebody might come up with something substantial: an idea for its origin or a relation to a cult or culture or similarities with other objects found somewhere else.

But there was none. Instead, the "disk"-pieces got a cult on their own, and with that came the attention that has brought a force to life that, with enormous amounts of money and socio-/political influence, has started aggressively looking for the source.

Balthasar got nervous and bought all the massive Jungfrau-Joch mountain, including the railway to its top, the observatory, and the vast, many hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and caverns the Swiss military has drilled into the mountain.

And because these facilities were used as nuke-safe data silos for Swiss banks and research facilities for nearby CERN and the Swiss Lab , it was an easy one to make the security around the "disk" and everything related to its investigation an impenetrable fortress, which, to the public, Balthasar claimed to be a nuclear test facility.

However, the published "disk-pieces" have broken free independently and have gotten the attention of the world, with many new guru groups claiming them as their logo and many wearing them on and under their skin.

Whether this phenomenal spread of the "disk"-pieces came just accidentally or their stickiness and attraction are something built in purposefully was up to speculation till the next disks were found with similar effects.