Nine-year-old Bassel Ayo looked around his home apartment. Everything using electric current was turned off, including the lights. The only person he lived with, his mother, came out of her bedroom. She tidied the recently-made empty floor space just a little more. They locked eyes and smiled, sitting down together on the open floor.

Mother and child linked hands and looked up. Just above their heads where they sat, a disk of light appeared. Both carefully raised their free hand up to touch it.

The sensation of transport felt like being pulled upward, though it was difficult to focus on any part of the body. One seemed there and not there, inside the light. Then like a mist, the brightness dissipated, and they were standing deposited inside a comfortably-sized curved chamber.

Once they felt collected, they exited through a walkway that bent to one side, so the next room was obscured. Beyond was a space where they found the other human arrivals. All seemed more or less like they were already familiar with each other.

“We were all calm, and we were also ready. Because we knew. We knew that it was time for all of this to happen now,” read a page of the journal that he later began.