t was the winter of ’86, maybe ’87—I was stationed along the East German border. Back then, it was razor wire, watchtowers, the cold breath of the Soviets just over the tree line. We weren’t just guarding democracy—we were babysitting doomsday. Tucked deep in bunkers below our feet were the quiet monsters: mini-nukes, tactical warheads, the kind they don’t put on recruiting posters.
One night, while on perimeter duty under a sky so black it felt like you could fall into it, something happened. No lights, no sound—just this orb. About the size of a beach ball, but glowing like a moonbeam dipped in mercury. No heat, no hum. It just hovered, maybe twenty yards out, between me and the frost-covered pines.
And then—it spoke.
Not with sound. With thought.
I don’t know how else to put it. It was like someone leaned into my skull and whispered straight into my neurons. Calm. Clear. But distant, like it was translating across dimensions.
“You do not understand the energy you hold. It will unmake you. The path of the atom is the path of forgetting.”
That’s what I remember. The rest of it? Fuzzy, like a half-erased dream. I tried to focus on the message, but it felt like trying to catch smoke in a snowstorm. Emotionally? It hit me hard. Sadness. Not theirs—ours. Like whatever this intelligence was, it pitied us. Knew where we were headed. Knew what was buried under our boots and behind our bluster.
And just like that—gone. No flash. No zip. Just not there anymore. My radio crackled to life like nothing had happened.
But I knew. I know.
I saw something not meant for human eyes. Heard something not meant for ears.
I kept my mouth shut for years. You don’t file a report on a telepathic orb while guarding atomic death eggs near the Fulda Gap. They’d have shipped me back in a straitjacket.
But I’ve come to believe this: we were being warned. Not attacked. Not observed. Warned.
Maybe we still are.
