1.
I woke up hearing the rumble from far off, towards where downtown Denver used to be. I got up off the grass and placed my hands over my forehead to shield my eyes from the sharp early sunlight. For a moment I could visualize all of downtown as it used to be, the jutting skyscrapers that always made the city seem deceptively larger than it was. I dropped my arms, realizing I wasn’t hallucinating. The skyscrapers were there again—there and taller than before. In fact they were being constructed right in front of me.
Did I die? Is this heaven? The Pi had treated me as a ghost for so long it was easy to think I might be dead.
I did the most dangerous thing. I broke into a run straight toward those towers. My safety perimeter ended at my yard. Beyond that the Pi massed, their numbers growing by the hour. The throng of their bodies was so dense that navigating among them was like trying to ride a bicycle through an impenetrable forest. To run among them was close to suicide, for they never acknowledged me nor gave way if I blocked their movements. Their bulk easily brushed me aside or knocked me down. I had fallen once and only just managed to avoid being trampled to death by unconcerned feet. Moving among the Pi was like being thrown in the path of charging buffalo and expecting them to part for you. You had to navigate using patient strategy, moving with their flow, seizing small openings here and there while always jostling for a bit of space to the left and right.
But that morning, I just ran.
I charged forward like a linebacker, easy evidence of incipient insanity. Even the smallest alien outweighed me by a substantial margin, and I’d lost an unhealthy fifteen pounds since I last saw Scott. I ran toward the towers thinking of him, certain he had made it to the mountains to formulate a last stand with the rest of humanity’s survivors. I thought that somehow he could see me running and know my spirit was not broken. The new skyscrapers in the distance, even if they were alien, seemed a beacon that I associated with Scott. He stood taller than those buildings in my mind, and if I could cross the distance to reach them, then someday I could cross even greater distances to reach him. The towers waited for me. Scott waited for me. Push on. Step by step I did, twisting and sliding through the silent, loitering alien masses.
I was bruised and battered by the time I reached the construction. The skyscrapers were going up very fast, almost with the ease of a child stacking blocks. New machines, similar in size to the dozers but clearly designed to erect rather than demolish, were creating a new city right in front of me. The tons of rubble from the previous civilization were gone—hauled away or converted into new material—and replaced with strange prefabricated housing constructs that seemed to stack and snap into place. Legoland, I thought.
I am living in Legoland.
The buildings up close had a cheapness about them, a phoniness that belied an otherwise incredible feat of engineering. The machines worked in threes, one placing a floor as another placed walls. There were no girders, no support structure of any kind that I could see. Each wall locked into place with the faintest of clicks. There were no discernible seams and the walls stood in place straight and sturdy. Once all four walls were in place, the first two machines moved away and the third came forward. The third machine had a crane arm that, like the dozers with their wrecking balls, employed some kind of powerful magnetic field. With astonishing speed, the crane arm levitated smaller pieces and placed them within the four walls, partitions that created interior rooms. Three partitions were added, all of them clicking into place. At that point, the third machine moved away and the first returned to place a flat roof over the structure. The roof served as the floor for the next level of identical cubicles.
Story after story rose in this fashion. The labor, like the product, continued in uniform succession and each unit took less than ten minutes to complete. Upon completion, twenty Pi would enter through the one doorless opening and not come out from what was evidently their assigned home.
Watching the Pi build was like observing an ant colony or beehive through glass. The uniformity of the design depressed me. They laid thirty box units in a square, each unit approximately fifteen feet tall and containing about six hundred square feet. When the thirtieth unit was done, the machines returned to their original corner and added the walls, interior, and ceiling for the next course. There were no ladders, no walkways, and no elevators that I could detect, but somehow more Pi reached and inhabited the next story of cubicles. I saw one standing in the opening, staring at the sky like a self-satisfied man in a country cabin. How did the alien get up there? How would it get down? I figured the center of the thirty-unit block must be hollow, creating a courtyard that let them move around behind the scenes. I crossed my arms at the chest and watched the towers rise and rise. The magnetic fields in play allowed the machines to move materials with perfect precision even half a mile into the air. I wondered how high these towers would eventually reach. I thought of the Tower of Babel. The Pi seemed intent on building hundreds of them, and God—as if I needed more proof—did not care.
I walked on, finding new fascination with the exactness of Pi construction abilities. I found more machines working everywhere. I could make out the basics of a grid and the spaces that must have been designated for streets. Everywhere else the perfect towers rose with the same uniformity, the same inevitability, and the endless walls rose higher and higher until the sun was eclipsed and I got dizzy if I craned my head back to follow their reach into the heavens.
They still left the churches and synagogues and mosques and Christian Science Reading Rooms, and all the other places they had not destroyed before. These old buildings were now wedged into the crevices of the Pi’s skyscrapers, fitting so well that I could not slide a piece of paper between our architecture and theirs. I entered into the cool dark of a chapel and stared at the empty pews and the cross high above the altar. The cross was life-sized, and a model of the crucified Christ stared skyward in agony, as if to show him asking God why he has been forsaken. I’d never seen the Crucifixion so rendered. Most showed Christ’s head hanging low in exhaustion, his glorious task accomplished. What church ever focused on the uncomfortable moment of Christ’s doubt? I fell into a pew and my gaze lingered on that face. Christ too had the stare of an alien, the ability to look at and through surfaces. He might have been staring at the ceiling, but his eyes watched the falling rockets carrying creatures who had not heard of him, and for whose sins he had not died.
Or had he?
“Don’t forgive them,” I whispered, and bowed my head.
2.
I stayed in the church for two days, resigned to die there. Hunger pangs struck sharp for several hours and then magically subsided, and I knew my body had begun to consume itself. When I woke up on the third day, I found a brown bag containing a water bottle and bread and peanut butter on the end of my pew. I hunched over it, ripping the bag open and taking pieces of bread to dip into the jar. The chunks were smeared so thick with peanut butter that I could barely swallow them. Each bite revitalized me, but with that satisfaction came a throat-closing guilt. I looked at Christ again and felt I was taking the devil’s communion. Almost vomiting, I ran outside, knowing I was not being chased but feeling something on my heels. Smears of peanut butter remained on my hands like a stain.
I thought it was twilight at first until I noticed the sky. I had to look almost straight up to see the ribbon of blue the Pi’s towers threatened. I realized that from now on the only sunlight I might ever see would be at noon, when the sun was directly overhead. Resigned, I stepped away from the church and risked joining the alien throng again. The Pi moved here and there with no seeming direction in mind, their footsteps as muted as the clicks of their erected buildings. They did not look at me and I began the old dance of dodging and weaving to avoid being trampled. I knew they wanted me gone. Trying their patience was my only reason to live. I imagined millions celebrating as soon as I was dead and this game of theirs could end. But until then they waited—and fed me.
I fought my way through miles of their hordes. It was much harder than before, the towers forcing me to keep to the streets of this new city. I battled suffocation and claustrophobia on every step and countered it with memories of the mountains. I thought of Pike’s Peak. Was it still there, or had the dozers triumphed there as well?
My legs cramped. I stumbled against the side of a tower and panted from pain. At once about forty Pi pressed closer to me, ruthless in working their weight to grind my spine against the wall. I pressed myself flat, squirming, crying out as their nonchalant brutality threatened my rib cage. I wriggled, punching at them as best I could. I was moving. All at once the wall ended and I fell through the unit’s one opening, landing on my back inside the unit itself.
The interior had the same uniform color as the outside, a dull orange that made it hard to tell where walls ended and began. I picked myself up and squinted, trying to forge some sense of boundaries and difference. Instead I became dizzy, swooned, and hit up against another wall I hadn’t known existed. I edged along the wall until I found myself falling into another room. Several Pi were there and I wedged myself into a corner with the same burst of fear I’d have felt stumbling into a lion’s den. But the aliens showed no reaction even now. Three of them paced to and fro as if in the middle of some great and silent philosophical dilemma. Four more were lounged on the floor. One had its ears folded over its eyes while the others stared blankly at the ceiling or the wall. Not even their breathing made a sound.
I became more curious than fearful and began to explore. There were four identical partitions, devoid of any function except being filled. There was no bathroom, no kitchen. I realized by all rights the rooms should have been pitch black because there were no light bulbs and no windows, no openings at all except the entrance. But the ceiling glowed with an orange light that rendered the aliens clearly visible amid the hazy colored sameness of the room and its illumination.
Two of the Pi began to fuck on the floor next to the others, who paid no attention.
If I could cry, I would have shed tears in pity for them. They had traveled so far in their cramped, identical rockets. They must have suffered greatly on their mission to invade this beautiful, spacious world. And now that they were its masters they limited themselves to life in these little identical, featureless boxes. They were like birds mesmerized by their nest, content to peer at the sky but never try it. If they were still playing the game only on my account, why did they not kill me? They had no ethical qualms about destroying our cities; why should the outright murder of a single person give them pause? But I stood among them, these new owners of Earth, and did not feel in the least threatened. They had made me a shadow on the wall.