Epoch is an open source multimedia world building project that aims to create a collection of media based off a single short story The Event which you can read below. Epoch is set in a modern day alternate timeline. It doesn't have to be though. The project is structured so anyone can make changes to it or fork it and make it their own.
The Event

Semantic Satiation is the psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

It, that is what we called it. Who was It? Where did It come from? Was It friendly? Should we be worried about It? Can someone explain It to me? Was It a weapon? Was It Chinese? It was just someone's art piece or maybe a prank. It wasn't.

I will tell you what It looked like. It looked like a pine cone and not a very big one at that. Not to say that the pine cones we have on earth are very big. It was a pine cone that came from space. A space pine cone if you would. I just looked it up, and you can write pine cone with a space or without one. Since the pinecone came from space it is appropriate we use the former form.

Even though no one knew what It was everyone was an expert on It. Scientists said It was probably just some space junk, a hunk of metal from a comet, or perhaps an asteroid. Conspiracy theorists said it was a weapon or a spy satellite developed by their government or someone else's. Religious fanatics said it was Jesus or Muhammad returning to bring about the end of time. This one I thought was especially silly. If Jesus were to return he would be piloting a saucer in the shape of a Eucharist wafer. Muhammad would be flying a Kaaba, not a pine cone. No religious texts that I've read have ever mentioned pine cones, so we could definitely rule that out.

The pine cone entered into Earth's orbit around April and stayed there for eight months. By the second week mass hysteria had set in. With the open web it didn't take long for It to blow up. I mean that in the literal and the figurative sense. By the fourth week 17 different nations had tried to destroy It after it refused to comply with the United Nations joint order to leave the Earth's atmosphere. Every natural disaster at that time was blamed on It. If there was an earthquake in Malaysia or a wildfire in California it was the pine cone's fault. It really couldn't catch a break. During the election that year It even won 10% of the vote.

Sometime in December It collided with an asteroid which sent it hurtling towards Earth. It landed on a Bedouin family's camp killing 3 children and their father. They would be the first victims of the event. The impact of the pine cone with the Earth's surface was enough to cause it to crack open, revealing the traveler inside.

It was eight feet tall, gray, burly, and half machine. It was dead, in fact It had been dead for the last year according to the Jordanian government. It brought three gifts to the people of Earth. The first was the engine of the ship. A kind of fusion reactor that seemed to generate an unlimited supply of energy for the pine cone. The second was the ships main computer. A quantum thingamajig that had more processing power than all the devices on earth. Finally, the disease that was contracted by the Bedouin shepherds that had first discovered It.

An inebriated man in a pine cone fell to the earth and seeded it with power, knowledge, and death.