In the late 1970s a glowing orb appeared in the sky. Every day at about 5:00 Greenwich standard time, the orb would go somewhere new, shoot out something similar to a laser, and kill one person. Every day, always at the same time, always exactly one person.
The person killed by the orb seemed completely random, with almost fifty years of studying it we've been able to find no rhythm or reason to who it kills. It kills the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the urban, the rural, anyone. Every human on earth seems to have an equal chance of being killed by the orb. It's a headline the few times someone of note is killed by the orb: Britain famously lost a Parliament member to the orb, Brazil to this day remains the only country where a head of state was killed by the orb while in office, there was a short lived sitcom in the 1990s called Friends that ended halfway through its first season due to the orb killing one of the main actors on set. However, these are outliers, on any given day the person who dies via orb is very likely to be someone you never heard of. There are billions of people on earth, and only one is killed by the orb every day. In almost fifty years only a little over 18000 have died because of the orb, which is nothing in the face of the sheer amount of humans that exist.
When the orb first appeared people were horrified. Both the US and USSR thought it was a weapon from the other side. Almost every religion made some claim of it being proof of their beliefs, oftentimes claiming it was divine punishment. Atheists claimed it was proof no loving God could exist. People were so very apocalyptic and horrified by it, they thought of it as part of the end times, because when it was new that's really how it looked.
However, it's been long enough so that's changed. Most people have lived their entire lives in a world where the orb exists. The orb isn't that scary a concept. People know their odds of being killed by it are low and that it's not going to end the world or anything. The orb has become normal, and we've accepted that the orb is just something that kills people the same way cancer, or heart attacks, or natrual disasters, or car crashes kill people. In the nineteen eighties there were efforts to find a way to stop the orb, but it's since proven to be extremely difficult, and it's as distant and nebulous as finding a cure for cancer. When a community is struck by the orb you'll see that community in mourning, but it's not a global thing anymore.
So people grow up learning about the orb, as part of science, like anything else. A lot of gen z remembers learning about the orb from Magic School Bus. It's just something normal. There are a few people with an orb hyperfixation, and a few cults that give the orb importance but it's not most people's concern. The orb is how we first confirmed that interdimensional objects existed and are possible. A lot of people theorize dimensional studies wouldn't exist without it, meaning without the orb we might not have thermitizers or grand drives, we might not even have a moon base without the orb. Some have even rather tastelessly claimed that the orb has saved more lives at this point than its taken with all the knowledge it's given us.
Which is why I regret to inform you, that just last week, without warning, the orb killed two people in one day. And for the past seven days it's been killing two people instead of just one. Nobody knows why.
Some more fun facts about the orb and it's impact on society:
The biggest orb research stations are in Asia, as it has the largest population of any landmass and thus is where the orb is most likely to strike. India has more orb research then any other country in the world, and most orb researchers will study there at least once in their life. Japan, Brazil, China, The United States of America, and Pakistan are all also major orb research hubs for similar regions.
The orb takes ten hours to make a complete trip around the world, though because it moves for efficiency it will only ever make a trip of five hours or less. After a death is confirmed orb researchers in the local area will rush miles to get to it, knowing it might be as little as nineteen hours until it's somewhere else, possibly too far away for them to get to. Orb deaths in major cities tend to be selected for research, as they have more nearby researchers. Now that the orb is killing two people a day it's even harder, as the orb could kill someone, and fly for another five hours to kill a second target, giving scientists a mere fourteen hour minimum.
One of the first major orb deaths of a notable person was in December of 1988, when New York real-estate mogul Donald Trump was killed by the orb in one of the orb's brutal public displays of death. He's legacy lives on in the Trump family foundation for orb victims, that provides relief for the families of those killed by the orb.
It's a myth that the orb flies high in the air all the time. It's only up in the sky when it's traveling. After killing someone, it hovers at a mere two to four feet above their head hight until it's ready to kill again. The hight that the orb hovers is tied to the person's height, but still has some random variations.
The orb isn't from the type of dimension most people think it is. Unlike a lot of the deliberately contacted entities it isn't sapient, or even sentient, and seems to be from a dimension that we still can't contact.
In 2005 the orb killed a soldier in active combat agaisnt U.S. troops in Afghanistan. After that much of the American right semi jokingly praised the orb as an American ally. Though for many this was only a joke, for a lot of American evangelicals, who already had strange ideas about the orb's nature, this was further proof that the orb was a source of divine punishment sent to destroy sinners. Since 2005 evangelical obsession with the orb has only increased. As recently as the 2020s, President Ted Cruz not so subtly referenced the "blinding light of God" in a speech about American troops, as an obvious dog whistle.
You cannot touch the orb. It travels by anti gravity, and if you get close enough to touch it, it merely pushes you away. It feels like falling, but you're being sent sideways instead of downwards. Though the experience of being pushed away from the orb isn't dangerous most of the time, everyone whose experienced it has described it as very unpleasant to experience.
There is an orb fetish on the internet, becoming a meme of sorts around 2017 and quietly sticking around for awhile. The orb currently has 481 images of it on rule34, most of them being from the late 2010s. How much of this is ironic will never be truly known to humanity.
