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Coccyx, Illinois, 1945

“Turn my window toward the sun,” John Board said to the empty room, the walls, the ceiling. He was sixty-two years old and he dwelt alone in this house at the suburban surf’s edge of the great city Coccyx, where he had lived in his boyhood—when it had still been called Chicago, before the Guests had come.

Board put out a hand to steady himself against the slight inward curve of the cool, glossy white wall. His house was fifteen years old, and around the age of twenty they tended to die. The older houses and buildings did, anyway; naturally, technology was improving all the time in grasshopper leaps and bounds, and the new living structures that were being rapidly grown in situ were promised to have life-spans in the decades if not centuries. These hosts would outlive their parasitic inhabitants, it was said.

But Board’s house, an older model, was aging, and where once it would have rotated its entire body smoothly, now it moved in irregular jerks that sometimes made the windows rattle in frames cut into the walls of chitin, and Board had almost tumbled over one time when the great insect gave a particularly violent lurch. Now he made sure to prepare himself before giving a command such as this.

The huge, mindless animal he lived inside dutifully repositioned itself until the window he stood at did indeed face toward the morning sun. Board gazed out. He was on the second story; his house, his creature, loomed upward as if the insect aspired to become bipedal. Its upper pair of legs was folded to its shell-like sides, the two lower pairs spread out at wide angles to support the animal and to enable it to turn in its shallow socket of a foundation. At the summit of the house, the insect’s head was tiny, eyeless, all but brainless, but its immense feelers helped with radio reception. For TV and computer feeds, of course, Board was linked up to an underground, living worm cable entering through his house’s anus, through which his water and sewerage were also conveyed via inorganic plumbing. For electricity, the insect possessed a battery-like organ up in the attic, close to the posterior portion of its head. Its white armor absorbed sunlight and converted it to energy stored in this organ. But although Board owned this house, and his house was self-sufficient, he still had to pay the town for the sunlight.

Unsatisfied or bored with his view of the dawn—or because he sometimes liked to tease the house, as if to assert his mastery over it—Board commanded it to move again. “Face toward the city,” he said loudly. As the house aged, it heard him less well; where once he need only have whispered, now he had to practically shout. But other times Board might pat the wall sympathetically. This creature had not asked to be born, or to be born in such a form. To be born a slave. No more than a pig asked to be made into bacon. And both of them were aging together.

The house shifted again until the same window gave Board a view toward the heart of Coccyx.

Not all the buildings were organic. About a third of the tallest buildings were still comprised of stone and metal. But the expanse extending before Board’s gaze glistened as the rising sun sparked reflections off a frozen sea of chitin. Exoskeletons of obsidian black, ash gray, and bone white. The domes of gigantic beetles perched atop older, more traditional buildings of concrete or mortared brick. Vaster domed beetles, resting on street level. Skyscraper minarets that were losing their resemblance to insects, their hundreds of legs as useless as the vestigial heads, these myriad limbs half-fused against the flanks until they were little more than a decorative trim between the many rows of glass windows pocked in their soaring, vaguely segmented bodies.

There was an ever-present shimmer of summer sound, even in winter. The sound of grasshoppers. The occasional rising buzz-saw of cicada noise. Even at night, but one grew accustomed to it, forgot to hear it. The near-brainless structures still communicating, interacting in their zombie-like way—for reasons that Board was certain the city’s multitudes didn’t fully understand. Weren’t meant to.

A small plane hummed over the glittering cityscape like a dragonfly, but Board knew it wasn’t one. No insect of that size could beat its wings sufficiently to keep itself aloft. But one day, despite the laws of nature, he had little doubt it would be done, regardless. Humans would be borne along inside those bodies. Maybe there would be ships made from titanic pill-bugs with their fringe of legs fluttering in the water. But he had never been much of a visionary. Progress outdistanced his imaginings. For decades, he had dully, fatalistically watched the future race past his eyes at a speed that felt unnatural in the very cells of his bones.

There was a dull silvery haze over the city, as if Lake Michigan’s cold waters were reflected on the bottom of the clouds. It was pollution from vehicles and from the methane exhalations of the buildings, small and large. Living factories, organic mills. Exhaust fumes from barely sentient abattoirs where pig-sized beetles were herded to slaughter to feed the masses.

Food was cheap; no one really went hungry (at least no one starved). The sunlight, though taxed, was affordable. Everyone seemed to have a place to live. Some columnists enthused that Coccyx was the model American city—the height of progress and efficiency, they gushed. Others held a violently opposing view. Not that their opposition mattered a bit. Other cities here and abroad would continue to emulate it as they grew. In a purely functional sense, Coccyx was as close to a Utopia as human history could lay claim to.

“Turn 180 degrees,” Board said loudly, as if to some senile grandfather.

The house grated in its crater foundation until, at last, the window faced away from the sun. Away from the city.

Still dissatisfied, Board turned his back on the lens-like glass and his view of the world.