A month later, the employees of Ricardo Tech were working on yet another ordinary, run-of-the-mill day, when something odd happened. One of the guys from marketing clutched at his throat and began to gag. Before anyone could do anything, he collapsed to the ground like a sack of potatoes, and within seconds, was dead.
"What's going on?" Tim, upon hearing the commotion, called out to Jansen.
Before Jansen could answer, a maintenance lady at the corner clutched at her throat and fell to the ground, writhing. Then another, this time the clerk at the reception. And another. And then it was two at once.
When the unseen death-bringer finally got to Tim and Jansen, the only thought that crossed their minds was still the initial "what the hell is going on?"
Five minutes later, everyone in the entire Ricardo Tech building was dead. All except...the Obelisk.
Simultaneous to the ghastly events in the building, similar events were happening across the globe. The invisible Grim Reaper worked hard, and worked fast. Nobody was left out – in every metropolis, every village, every school, every shopping centre and every park, people were on their knees, clawing at their throat, trying to free themselves of the unseen assailant that would eventually murder them in a matter of seconds. There were shrieks of terror everywhere, but the shrieks didn't last long before they were cut off mercilessly.
It wasn't a very noisy apocalypse after all.
Here are the facts: after an hour, almost half of the human race were wiped out. By the end of the day, humans were extinct, past tense, like the dinosaurs and the Dodo birds. Gone like the wind.
However, after death, the mountains of human bodies didn't stay that way until they were decomposed by bacteria like they would naturally be. Instead, they began to disintegrate, breaking into smaller chunks of meat and bone before those chunks themselves dissipated into nothingness.
So did the rest of the world.
For the rest of the month, the Obelisk and a very large team of nanobots were busy at work. They began to break down the molecular structure of all organic material on the face of Earth and converted them into solar panels, more nanobots, and of course, replicas of the Obelisk. Once they were done with the organic parts (which was practically everything) they moved on to the inorganic ones.
Soon, what was left of the Earth was covered with countless solar panels and innumerable feminine figures that looked exactly identical to the Obelisk.
And no, contrary to what you might expect, the Earth isn't the least bit quiet, even though all the living things are now gone. Instead, it was full of these perfectly synchronized chants:
"Welcome to Ricardo Tech, where your satisfaction is our utmost priority."