Earth, 2023

Earth, 2023.

It was a normal day on Earth, people were going to work, some were coming home and some were just wandering, living their lives. Suddenly the sky turned dark purple. People stopped in their tracks and looked up towards the anomaly but after a while everything turned blurry. It was as if the entire population was turning blind. People were walking into the road, cars crashing into each other and planes falling out of the sky. Panicking, many threw themselves on the ground, not being able to see but only hear hundreds dying around them. The carnage continued for hours, resulting in the loss of over a million human lives. After it stopped people tried to gather their thoughts, wondering what had happened. The sky, still purple, was getting brighter, letting some sunshine through but the world was still dim and people were frightened.

Scrambling to get a handle on the situation, leaders all around the world mobilised military units, law enforcement and paramedics alike. Everything was chaos for several days before a video went viral of a pillar of smoke towering towards the sky, a purple pillar with something in the middle, a human shadow. Soon thereafter four more were discovered around the world, Europe, North America, Africa, China and Australia, all with something human at the bottom. Eventually, military personnel were sent to each pillar, keeping civilians away. After a couple of days, men and women in protective gear walked around the base of the pillars, trying to figure out what they were and was inside of them.

Several months went by until one day when the sky finally turned blue again. As it did, so did the pillars, revealing the people inside. They all opened their eyes simultaneously, all of them giving off a bright amber glow, captured by the cameras set up around each pillar. This frightened the members of the newly founded international cosmic anomaly initiative, the ICAI. They contemplated what to do for a while. The men and women sitting at the bottom of each pillar had not moved for weeks, their eyes still glowing. No one knew what to do, everyone was still shaken by what had happened not four months earlier. One day the US military identified the woman inside the pillar located in Arizona. She was identified as Vanessa Hughes, a corporal in the US Marines. They flew her captain, Captain Miller, in to attempt to speak to her.

After the captain arrived he was told to walk up a walkway they had placed, leading up to the edge of the pillar, a chain preventing him from getting close enough to touch it. As he reached the edge of the walkway he was unsure of what to do. He stood there for a minute, observing the distorted wall of air before him until finally opening his mouth. As he did so, he heard something behind him.

> "Sir," a female voice said. The captain turned around to see a familiar face. Soldiers came running to surround the woman but the captain told them to stop.

> "Stand down!" Miller turned back and forth between the pillar and the woman standing behind him, "ho- how?" he stuttered, the two women were the same.

> "Not to worry," she gave him a faint smile before turning to the soldiers surrounding them, "I am not actually here," she said to them with her hands raised. "I'm still in there, this is just a projection," she pointed towards herself, sitting behind the wall, immobile.

> "What's going on?" the captain said with an unsteady voice, trying to wrap his head around what was happening.

> "It's complicated," she let out a sigh, "we would appreciate it if you left us alone, however. We are quite overwhelmed and overworked keeping your planet alive and having your people firing high pitched frequencies at us is not helping," she pointed towards the antennas and machines all pointed towards the pillar.

> "I can't do that," he corrected his posture, now looking more authoritative, "those are there to find out what is happening with the world and the pillars... and your," he corrected himself "part in it all."