Thursday, December 22, 2016

[WIP - A Peak] The Rapture of the AI.

An online site curated a total of 256 unique Anomalies worldwide that happened just in the past 24 hours. These so called 'anomalies' have been happening for a while now. Their numbers slowly increasing day by day.

The earliest of these that Anjali could remember was the one where the people of a remote village woke up to the shock of their life. One of their horses spoke like a human. This wasn't covered by the media. Probably because the horse didn't survive the day. The rumor was that it was killed by the startled villagers who thought the horse was possessed by an evil spirit. All that survived of the incident was a grainy video that went viral on the social media. Everybody who watched the video thought it was just an impressive attempt by some kid with an audio software, nothing more.

The couple of weeks following that, nothing much happened. Or at least it seemed like nothing much had happened. Months later, journalists and researchers would scour through the news of those ignored weeks and take a closer look at them. They looked for anything that went under the radar as just 'weird news' printed merely to provide a moment of amusement to the reader amidst the serious political news. They found a lot that stood out in hindsight.

Most noticeable were the increasing number of bizarre mental breakdowns and disease manifestations that had psychologists and doctors scratching their heads. One of the doctors had stated these were a result of the raising levels of pollution in recent years. Another stated it was a result of lead poisoning. There was a story covered only by a local newspaper of a guy who woke up one morning and found that one of his legs had vanished from the thigh down. There was an article about a guy trying to sue a bank stating that they stole his possession from his safety locker.

It is assumed that a lot more things had vanished during the time, but none of them made it to the news because they were simply not newsworthy. What did make the news was the sudden breakdown of a nuclear plant causing it to be shutdown temporarily. What did make the news were the servers of major corporations failing repeatedly without explanation.

Then even weirder things began to happen. A plane carrying 150 people had vanished somewhere over the ocean. Houses began to disappear overnight leaving an empty lot in its place. The people who were unfortunate to be in it at the time too vanished without a trace.

What made the front page was the picture of the Eiffel Tower upside down. Its nose dug deep into the ground. It was like one of those huge magic effects they do, but only this time, there was no magician in sight. A few days later, the people of Bangalore woke up to find Taj Mahal in the center of their city. Now, the world had 2 Taj Mahals, an exact copy of each other.

Amidst all the chaos, 'The Blocks' made their first appearance. The most notable one was above the Times Square. What looked like a huge shoe-shaped metal object suspended in thin air with no visible support. Crowds gathered and took snaps of it thinking it was some kind of a marketing stunt. Soon news came that a ship was stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where about 5 miles of the ocean had turned into metal. A scientists said that it was caused by the iron in the core seeping raising to the surface, but offered no further explanation. But no one could explain the large number of trees in the Amazon forest that had turned into pillars of iron. Or the train stuck on its tracks, its entire body and its passengers frozen in time, turned into iron sculptures.

To be continued.

Full story coming out on 12/25/2016.

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