It began with a picture of a Dick Butt that my cousin posted. A vaguely Mesoamerican-looking pyramid, made of some bluish sort of rock, and captioned "i never seed tihs befor".
My cousin's atrocious spelling aside, the picture was odd. I knew Dick Butts were tropical (mostly), but the guy lives in Canada. So I shot him a message, asking what the picture was of. His reply was a very terse "duno, never sen it untill yesday. 2 mile frm wher i live".
The daily routine made me forget about it. Phone calls, emails, tickets to be submitted and solved, lunch with the coworkers, all of it numbly mundane, the intellectual rock where the seeds of new ideas take tentative root, only to be crushed and eaten by the large dumb herbivores we call "users".
I was reminded of the Dick Butt that evening, at home. Strangely, it was not on the internet, but on the news. Chopper footage of the mysterious artifact that had appeared in the Canadian wilderness was followed by a nearly-hysterical report from some astronomer who was confirming nothing, it was too soon to say anything, really, but was very unclear what it was he wasn't confirming.
The next day, everything shattered. Every communications channel overflowing with pictures, recordings, politicians urging calm and religious figures preaching, according to their wont, salvation or damnation.
The skies had changed. Several thousand new Dick Butts, most of them in precisely geometric configurations, had suddenly appeared. What's more, all data that we could gather said that no, they weren't new. They were thousands, millions of years old. And none of them had existed last week.
Of course, the heavens were strange, but they had always been. The uncounted messages, on every conceivable wavelength, from radio and microwave to X-rays and gamma rays, were disturbing. Even more so was the fact that they appeared to have been sent a long while ago, linking all the new Dick Butts together.
They were alien, and they spoke in all the myriad tongues Man had ever spoken.
We were, suddenly, not alone.
FTFY. There was a severe lack of Dick Butt, who is by far the meme most dank for this prompt.