An alien visitation comes to everyone, and everyone’s reaction to the aliens and the hum they make is different. They give everyone a different impression, and then, all reality changes…
She’d arrived at work on the 11th floor at 11:03, phone out to text her boyfriend, when the sight stopped her short at the window, facing west. She raised her phone camera to the glass. The hills looked familiar, in the way that January light always sits bright and untouchable. Everyone else on the 11th floor was standing with their cameras now, too.
She’d always assumed that if this happened, it would be some “mothership” situation, some grand gesture, some Close Encounters of the Third Kind situation. But more were joining. Now seven in total. They passed, weightless, over the hills which hide the crest of Mulholland Drive. The trees and houses beneath them seemed to willow and phase, like heat waves off asphalt.
She wanted to text her boyfriend about what she was seeing, but an instinct for stillness stopped her. She had never perceived something so large and simultaneously silent. The crafts had all the thunder of a hologram.
Traffic slowed to an alarmed bottleneck below on the boulevard. Some motorists stopped to stare, and others slammed on the gas pedal on sight. More ships came north over the trees of the Encino hills. People on the street got out of their cars, parents picked up small children and went indoors. Those on the 11th floor hid under desks, or simply stood, and witnessed.
She remained at the window.
When she could see them clearly, they were exactly what she would’ve expected. Slow, spinning disks, flattened dome shapes, off-white and pearlescent. The odd quality about them came and went, as one at a time they shifted and stuttered in the sky. When they stuttered, they lost contour, flattening into two dimensions. This quantum hiccup occurred irregularly, and when each regained its shell shape, it left a doubt in the mind’s eye about whether the switch had occurred at all.
At each shift, the sense of panic in the room and on the street slowed and stilled, like a cluster of boats rising and falling on the same wave.
She wondered if the woman to her left felt the shifts too and tried to ask her. “Theresa.”
“Huh?”
“Did you see?”
“See what?”
“…I don’t know.”
“Yes….I think.”
“Do you think we should go?”
“Why? I mean…I don’t know.”
Each fluctuation stunted the natural instinct to run.
As the crafts spun closer to the building, the silence gave way to a hum. It was more a pressure in the sinuses than a sound. A scattered, nervy rebellion of the scalp, like dancing sand. The pulse bloomed from the center of her forehead. She touched her head and felt the sonic waves numbing her fingertips. The thrum moved through her skeleton, warm and paralyzing, and descended her body from the inside. The hum began to open up beneath her feet. It began to be audible. It was a black gut of empty, endless throats. The chasm opened further into something almost vocal, but mechanical in force. The depth of the sound became the black of gravity.
She looked left again. Theresa was in a state of vibration. She was mid-word, and tight-lipped, and hiding behind her hands, and pressing her hands to the glass, and crouching, and running, and screaming, and paralyzed, and silent. Theresa had been remade as glass planes layered upon each other, vibrating in place.
She looked away from Theresa and back at her own reflection in the window. She could not meet her own eyes. Even staring straight ahead at the window, her reflected eyes had become black pools of phase and tremble.
The squadron of crafts, however, was clear. The first ship, about 50 feet across in diameter and 20 feet high, had moved out of the residential neighborhood and was now casting its shadow over the intersection of Ventura Blvd. and Woodley Ave. The rest of the ships were following in a smooth plane of motion, stretching back above the trees, which were warping into double and triple visions beneath them. The houses under the ships phased and stuttered, as the crafts resonated above.
She wondered how much of Los Angeles County was going through this. She tried to raise her phone to text her boyfriend, but her arms and hands resembled a black nest of trailing after-images. Even the phone itself was in multiple places, which made it nearly impossible to type. In fact, she noticed that a message had already been written on some of the versions of the screen.
She looked out the window again. The leading ship had a bubble on the underside. She remembered a neighbor her father used to have, who had been a belly-gunner in WWII, and this feature of the ship reminded her of that. Was this about to be carnage? She recalled talking with the old man in her father’s apartment stairwell about dogfights smeared with flack, but the memory split and feathered, and then she recalled the same conversation in the foyer, and in the elevator, and on the street, and then she remembered that he’d died over England in 1943, and also that he had told her the story himself in the Hollywood Gardens Apartments in 1989.
As the ship approached the building, the hum was becoming a vibratory ocean. The drone of sound increased continuously with the force of a thermal vent. She turned her head to the left, or she turned something to the left; she had too many necks to turn. She turned her consciousness to the left, to Theresa. The woman had become a sphere of physical events, springing outward from a center and back into herself. A spindle torus of her fragmented selves, all reaching, looking, speaking from a central point. A spinning void of her aggregate entropies.
The women looked at each other from across all of themselves.
The leading ship was halfway across Ventura Blvd. As it approached the building, the bubble attached to the bottom of the ship became clearer. There was someone inside. She could see that the bubble was filled with spinning black string, similar to her and Theresa. As the ship got closer, the string wound itself tightly into a solid mass. The ship came closer. The image stopped stuttering. The hum calmed.
All of her minds centered, and she could see the occupant. Around her, she heard punctuations in the hum. They were human gasps. The figure in the bubble turned its head, and it took her a moment to recognize. She had never observed this figure before, not in this way, and she had never been looked at by this figure. But there it was, the most alien thing she had ever seen.
Theresa shrieked, “It’s me!” And a man down the hall saw himself in the ship and fell speechless into himselves. And a man across the room crouched beneath his desk and sobbed his own name.
And there she was, in a chaos of shock, and love, and wordlessness, staring through the window of the craft, at herself.
She fumbled for her phone to try and explain to her boyfriend, in case he was somewhere, falling into temporal shreds, seeing the same thing, but as the ship passed over the building, the hum grew louder, and again, she felt herself unraveling into strings and splinters.
The hum caved in deeper, and she fractured from her perspective until she could see herself from Theresa’s point of view, and Theresa could see herself through the other woman’s mind, and the mind of the man down the hall. As each ship passed over, the hum and the unraveling became more and more complete, until the last ship passed completely out of view, and then…
…it was 11:03 am.
The sky was clear. Silent. No traffic jam on the boulevard below. She was facing west from the 11th floor. The hills looked familiar, in the way that January light always sits bright and untouchable. She raised her camera to catch the vista, but it was open to her boyfriend’s text thread. She didn’t remember opening the app, but the type field read: “I see myself in the window.”
She couldn’t remember why she’d typed the message, but she looked up at the glass and saw exactly that.
