They Didn't See it Coming

[ This is not a sex story, however if it happened, there would be lots more sex on the planet. This is science-fiction. I hope you enjoy it. Your comments and votes are encouraged. ]

*

Mohammed stepped out of his small home and began the half hour walk to the business he ran with two of his brothers near the center of Baghdad. In the first two blocks he saw twelve American soldiers and ten Iraqis carrying weapons. He kept his head down, walking slowly enough not to be noticed and fast enough to get where he wanted to be. By the time he arrived at his business he had, like most mornings, lost count of the weapons he saw. He counted weapons because they scared him. When he was younger a cousin was standing beside him and was killed by a burst from an AK-47 that was five feet away from both of them.

The brothers opened their business and by the end of the day he had smiled a few times. Over twenty customers had bought things from them. They made a profit for the day. On his walk home he bought two pounds of lamb for his wife to cook.

Every day he took a slightly different route to and from his home and business. Every day he left home at a different time and arrived home at a different time. It would not be good to be too visible or look too prosperous. His wife and children had not been to his shop in five years. They and he were too afraid to have them go.

In the kitchen of their home, his wife had put a calendar on the wall. It was a calendar with a fold in the middle, a picture on the top half and the month on the lower half. In the squares they made notes about things they needed to do on which dates. Every morning when he went into the kitchen he looked at the calendar. On the most important day of Mohammed's life he looked at the calendar, changed the page to show the new month, May, and noted that the square was empty. Nothing scheduled. The picture was of a cruise ship and although no one in the family could read the words on the page he knew the name of the ship anyway, "Fantasy."

With half an hour until the sun would be fully up he walked out of the house and turned right. As he passed the first corner he had to wait as three U.S. military vehicles rumbled by. He counted twelve people in the vehicles and thirteen weapons. The roof mounted machine gun was the extra weapon.

They made him uncomfortable. They weren't Muslims. They spoke a language that he didn't understand. They didn't look like the millions of people he had grown up seeing. They were mostly pale or very dark. Some had hair that was like gold or orange. Everything about them was like they weren't from Earth. And, they all were armed.

Three blocks from home he turned east and saw something he had never seen before. At the corner of the building on the next street corner was a black pillar. It wasn't there a week ago, the last time he had passed that way. There were no signs of construction. It was round, a meter in diameter by his estimate and three meters tall. As he approached he saw his own reflection on the stone surface. He stopped. Everywhere he looked in his world dust touched, covered or sometimes obscured every surface. This thing, this pillar, was clean and shiny. There was no dust on it.

The sun was up. The temperature was already over thirty degrees C (86 F). Mohammed put the flat of his palm against the pillar. It was cool to the touch. Perhaps as cool as fifteen degrees C. and when he pulled his hand back there was no condensation or hand print on the pillar. Mohammed shook his head in wonder, dismissed the puzzle as unsolvable and continued to work.

Fifteen minutes later three men from that neighborhood stood at the pillar. The sun was up high enough that it directly hit the shiny black surface of the pillar. The air was now over forty degrees C. (110 F). One of the three men put his hand on the surface and discovered it was cool. He said it was cool and the other two men touched it.

Their discussion of how it could be cool when everything else was hot and how it could be clean when dust covered everything else was loud and got nowhere.

A big U.S. truck pulled up and stopped. An interpreter asked the three men, "What is this and why is it here?"

They explained it wasn't there yesterday and they had no idea what it was. They also told of the coolness and the lack of dust. A big soldier got out of the truck and leaned down to the ground. He gathered a handful of the dusty street and threw it against the pillar. It hit and made a cloud of dust. The soldiers and the three men watched as the dust fell to the ground and none of it stuck to the pillar. The soldier stepped up and ran his hand over the place where he had thrown the dirt. His hand didn't leave a mark and didn't bring away any new dust.

Three minutes later, after he had called in his report, a captain, a gunnery sergeant and two civilians arrived. Half an hour later they had twenty troops in the area creating a perimeter. More civilians and more soldiers kept arriving. No one had any idea what they were looking at, touching, or talking about.

At the same time that Mohammed was discovering the pillar in Baghdad a teenager in East Los Angeles was on his way between parties. It was somewhere around midnight and he was at the corner of Cesar Chavez Boulevard and Evergreen, headed south. He had made the same trek in both daylight and darkness and knew the area well. He was cutting across the edge of two gang's turf. He thought it worth the risk. At school that day Maria Sanchez had hinted she was ready to let him have her at the party he was headed towards. He ducked behind a panel truck and waited as a car went by, then turned and went around a corner. He didn't see the pillar. He slammed face first into it, breaking his nose and cutting his lip in the process.

"Fuck!" He yelled as the blood dripped on his best shirt. Suddenly a 1974 Chevy Impala stopped beside him and a guy leaned out of the passenger window. An older guy, maybe twenty, khaki pants, Sir Guy shirt buttoned all the way up and a bandana around his head.

"Aren't you a long ways from home?"

"Yeah."

"You don't belong here. This is our street."

"I'm lost."

"A mistake you won't ever make again." The arm came out of the car with a 9mm pistol in it. The trigger was pulled and one round flew from the barrel to Jesse's chest. It hit him half an inch down from his collarbone and went right through. Jesse screamed and fell.

The driver hit the gas and the Chevy tore away from the scene. The shooter yelled, "My gun is gone! We gotta go back!"

The driver swore at the shooter all the way back. They couldn't find the gun. One of the guys who had been in the back got out and walked to Jesse, still on the ground and making lots of noise.

"Look at me, pendejo!" He pointed his gun at Jesse. Jesse looked at him in terror and kept crying. He felt as if his chest was on fire. "Shut the fuck up!"

Jesse didn't stop crying. The fourteen year old pulled the trigger and Jesse stopped crying. The 9mm round entered his right cheek and exited the back of Jesse's head by traveling through his brain. Hours later the CSI people would find the bullet an inch and a half into the ground. The fourteen year old killer made the identical movement of his finger to pull the trigger again and nothing happened. He looked at his gun hand and the gun was gone.

"What the fuck?" He yelled, "My gun just disappeared!"

The driver turned and looked at his younger brother. "You idiot! Guns don't disappear. Look around. Find it and find Juan's."

The fourteen year old bent to look at the ground and started moving around. A few seconds later he ran into the same black object Jesse had slammed into. He hit it hard enough to hurt. He swore.

They heard a siren and the sounds of a copter. Nothing was said, they jumped into the Impala and got out of the area. The police in the helicopter saw Jesse and saw the gray Impala. They directed the police in cars to the Impala and called for the EMT's for Jesse.

After five hours of investigation at both locations the same result was true. The Iraqis and Americans in Baghdad and the police and gang bangers in East L.A. had no clue what the big black pillars were or how they got where they were.

A week later they were joined by authorities in other cities of the world who found identical pillars in their cities. All the pillars were one meter in diameter, all were three meters tall, black, shiny, clean and solid. No one had connected the missing guns to the pillar. No one in L.A. could understand how Jesse's lip and nose got broken. There was no blood on the pillar.

In Munich a man reported being on his way home from having a drink and suddenly there was a pillar in front of him that hadn't been there earlier in the evening. The city dispatched a crew and a truck to bring the pillar in for inspection. The crane they sent couldn't lift it. In fact, they couldn't move it at all.

Night after night pillars kept showing up all over the world. Intelligence agencies from almost every nation were looking into the implications and possible explanations. None of them had any explanations. They had lots of questions.

On the night of the tenth of May, ten nights after Mohammed found the first pillar, thirty eight of them showed up in greater New York. The same night sixty-four arrived in Washington D.C.. In every city the pillars were no closer to each other than three kilometers. None of them obstructed traffic. By the fifteenth of May every country on the planet had some pillars. On the sixteenth someone watched an event in Indonesia that gave their best hint as to what the pillars did.

An analyst, working for the NSA sitting in his cubical near Baltimore watched a riot in Jakarta on his television. On his desk he had a listing only four hours old that said that Jakarta had forty-nine pillars. He could see one of them in the median strip going down the center of the big six lanes in each direction highway where the riot was taking place. A man ran out of the crowd and threw a burning bottle of something at the police. One of the police aimed at the man and fired. As the man fell the analyst saw the gun disappear. The police officer looked around and couldn't see the gun. A minute or less later another officer fired into the crowd and the analyst saw his gun disappear as well. The analyst, as always, was taping the broadcast. He ejected the tape and put in a fresh one.

He walked to the other side of the building and spoke to a supervisor. That man gathered four other people into a conference room and all of them watched the tape. They all saw what happened and all had trouble believing what they saw.

The senior man in the conference room said, "We can test this. Any of you authorized to carry?"

Pete Thompson smiled and raised his hand. He was sent to sign out a weapon. He came right back. "If, this works, I have to pay for a gun that will be gone. I can carry it. I can legally fire it, but I'm not signing it out."

His boss signed it out. They took two minivans to the nearest pillar. They parked a hundred yards from the pillar and Pete asked, "What do you want me to shoot?"

"The tree near the pillar. We can recover the bullet and no one gets hurt."

Pete chambered a round and aimed at the tree. He was the only one looking at the tree. All the agency people were watching the gun. One even had a video camera looking at the gun. Pete slowly squeezed off a round. He felt the recoil and then it was gone. His hand closed on itself. He looked around and the gun was gone!

Eight people had watched the gun disappear. He didn't drop it. He was standing in a parking lot that on Sunday would hold three hundred cars and there were three minivans twenty yards away from him. If the gun was in the parking lot they could have easily seen it. It wasn't there.

On the way back to their offices they talked. Part of the conversation was about how they were going to present what they did so no one ended up buying a gun that didn't exist. Then Pete said, "If the pillars can disappear any gun fired near them then every firearm on the planet has one shot left."

Marty said, "Maybe it only happens with hand guns."

Pete looked at him and said, "I'll call some friends I have in the Marines. We need a bigger experiment."

That night a pillar showed up on the front lawn of the headquarters building of Camp Pendelton, USMC, San Diego, California. All their efforts at moving or removing it failed. Word got back to NSA and to Pete Thompson and it was decided that was the pillar that would be used for the next experiment. A few phone calls were made and somehow they were invited to be guests of the USMC for a weapons demonstration. The Marines made preparations for the demonstration. The headquarters building was protected with hundreds of sandbags. Pete and four others from the first experiment were on hand along with a hundred or so Marines of various ranks.

A Hum-vee mounted fifty caliber machine gun was rolled up within fifty yards of the pillar. A gunner stood in the Hum-vee and a driver sat at the wheel. The Captain in charge gave a signal and the gunner pulled the trigger. One round flew from the weapon and hit the sandbags. The gunner fell to the ground as did the driver. The Hum-vee was gone.

A stunned silence and fifty frozen faces looked at the two Marines on the ground. They scrambled up and looked around. When the shock wore off enough the Captain used his cell phone and made a call. Two minutes later an M1A1 Abrams tank rumbled into view. Sixty-three tons of tank. Forty 120mm rounds, three machine guns and 500 gallons of fuel. It was easily a mile away when it stopped on a hill and it's turret turned. The Captain had everyone move farther away from the pillar and spoke into his phone again.

"Target the pillar. Fire one round when ready, and don't miss!"

Most of the military men watched the tank. Pete and the others from NSA watched the pillar. Those watching the tank saw it rock and saw the puff of smoke from the barrel. Pete saw the explosion when the round hit the pillar. There were a few seconds where the noise blanked out all other sounds and then Pete heard, "Shit!"

It was the Captain's voice. Pete looked at the man and saw that he was looking at the hill a mile away with binoculars. The tank crew were in a jumble on the ground. The tank was gone! Sixty-three tons of armor and steel had just disappeared! Pete looked at the pillar. As the smoke and dust cleared the pillar was untouched. An armor piercing 120mm round fired from a mile away had not scratched the pillar!

All the people who had watched stood around talking. They talked about what this meant. Millions of dollars worth of tanks were parked on the base. Each was able to fire one shot. Every Marine stationed anywhere in the world had a weapon and it was good for one round.

A Major had watched the entire thing and said, "What about our airborne weapons?"

Pete said, "I wouldn't want to be flying and shoot at anything and have my airplane disappear."

"My boys will do it, and live to tell about it. I'll call in a helicopter strike and use missiles."

Ten minutes later all those assembled heard the sound of three helicopters off in the distance. Those close to the major heard the lead pilot report.

"Five clicks to target. I'm at three thousand feet and have a lock on target. Permission to fire."

"Fire!" The major said.

Pete watched the small black dots in the sky. A trail of smoke erupted in the air and elongated towards the pillar. It stopped. In the air a trail of smoke almost half a mile long just stopped in the air. At the beginning of the smoke trail they saw four chutes open. Fifty yards to either side of the smoke trails they saw four more chutes open.

All three helicopters were gone.

The major looked stunned. The missile had not made it to the target. Three very expensive pieces of equipment were gone. Totally destroyed from five clicks away.

Quietly the groups of witnesses broke into smaller groups and went their way to wherever people go who discover they are obsolete. While Pete Thompson and his colleagues flew back to Baltimore in almost silence, Captain William Cross and Major Tony Masotta walked to the O Club on base and ordered Jack Daniels. When Pete's plane landed in Baltimore both the Captain and Major were very drunk.

The next morning there were pillars on every military base on the planet. In North Dakota a shift change was scheduled at fifteen missile silos belonging to the United States Air Force. Shift change was scheduled for seven in the morning. When the truck carrying the fresh crew drove up to the gate they discovered a pillar twenty-five feet from the door to the silo. Every crew discovered their own pillar.

As seven in the morning happened all over the globe missile crews discovered pillars had arrived. In China, at a base so secret most of the world's intelligence agencies didn't know it existed, the men, dressed as peasants, came out of their huts and began walking to the cave entrance to the underground base. Deep inside the cave, in a room a kilometer square and three hundred meters tall stood five missiles. They had been in development for three and a half years. This morning the men found a pillar standing in the middle of the room.

People all over the world were calling authorities to ask what was going on. News crews had thousands of pictures of the pillars. The only difference in all the pictures were the backgrounds. The pillars were all identical.

No government did a press conference to tell people about what the pillars were doing. Letting it be known that no guns would fire more than once would frighten most of the people and embolden the rest.

Colt Firearms closed their factory. A pillar stood in front of their buildings. Test fire a gun and the gun was gone. State and federal laws demanded that any gun for sale must have been test fired. Colt closed their doors, as did every other firearms manufacturer, world wide. By the middle of June no guns, firearms, missiles or the projectiles they fired were still being made.

A very quiet summit was called to be held at NSA headquarters near Baltimore. Another quiet summit was called at the headquarters of the Chinese Intelligence agency, the Iranian high command and fifty other nations all isolated themselves to all ask the same questions; Where did these pillars come from and what the hell do we do now.

An American General, who admittedly had scotch for lunch, said, "We could ask Colt to start making crossbows." His humor was not rewarded. He announced his retirement the next day.

None of the summits came to any useful answers to either question. Test were made to discover anything that might help explain the pillars. All the tests led to the same conclusion: they were all identical, looked like granite but were impossible to crack, chip, damage in any way or to be moved.

May first, one year later, Mohammed left for work an hour before dawn. Without realizing it he went the same way he went on May first the year before. He rounded the corner and stopped. At the next corner, where the pillar had been, there was nothing. The pillar was gone. In the spot where it had been the concrete was dusty and showed no sign that a pillar had ever been there. When Mohammed stepped back after examining the spot a post appeared in the spot where the pillar had been.

The post was five meters tall, appeared to be made of chrome and was a foot in diameter. Mohammed tapped it with his hand and it rang almost like it was hollow. He knew what the pillars did. After a year everyone knew what they did. Mohammed wondered what new magic had just been delivered.

The pillar in East L.A. was gone too, replaced by a post just like the one in Baghdad. Unlike the year before the pillars all were gone at the same time and all replaced with the shining posts.